Long Weekend

     We had a really nice, relaxing Easter weekend. I had decided a week or so ago that it would be a good idea to watch through the complete Lord of the Rings trilogy (in honour of Peter Jackson beginning the filming of The Hobbit). Five of us gathered to watch #1 The Fellowship of the Ring on Friday. It ended up only being Josh and I watching #2 The Two Towers on Saturday. Then I ended up watching #3 The Return of the King on my own on Monday night. That last one stretched on for about 4 hours in total - so it's very long but it is a great story and Jackson did a wonderful job capturing so many of the themes and characters. It kind of inspires me to reread the books but I have so many others on my list already.
      Spent some time on Saturday trying to fix some leaking faucets around the house. This kind of stuff never seems to go smoothly for me. I do like going to One Stop Plumbing with my pieces because they are very knowledgeable and helpful. I was (foolishly) feeling pretty good about things when I came back from the store and installed the new washers and stems. However when I turned the main water back on the tap in the kids' bathroom wouldn't work at all and the laundry room sink still was leaking. So I ended up calling on my friend Steve (who is very used to [and gracious about] my requests for help). He was stumped about the dysfunctional tap upstairs but quickly discovered it was only a plugged aerator. He recommended I change the seeds in the laundry taps and then helped to dismantle the kitchen faucet (which he had installed a few years ago). Everything worked in the end and 4 taps are working properly, but it took longer than originally anticipated (you'd think I'd learn).
       Beth and I had an overnight getaway Sunday to Monday but we didn't go far - just downtown Kitchener, but it was nice to walk around and we visited the Tom Thomson exhibit at The Museum. We hope to get a poster of one of his paintings for our living room (the reds he used would fit nicely we think). We also did some reminiscing as we're preparing to share our faith/life story with our Friday small group this week. It was wonderful to reflect on the many years of grace we've enjoyed together as we looked through pictures and made some notes for sharing.
      Last week we went to see the movie 'Win, Win' at the Princess Cinemas and we both really liked it. It won some Sundance Film award and was very well acted. I've continued with my Bruce Springsteen music study, giving more attention to 'Devils & Dust', 'Magic', and 'Born to Run', along with an initial casual listen to 'The Rising'. I've been working on consolidating my computer backups and this has inspired me to burn some of my digital copies of music - I could free up 40 Gb on my hard drive - so I've also been printing out album covers for inclusion in my music binders.