the strangest thing happened tonight....our family sat down to a home-cooked meal (that part is normal) not around our dining room table, like we have for nearly every single meal for the past...gosh, who knows. tonight we sat down in front of....the television. and don't think it didn't strike us as only strange to US, and not to the majority of what we call Merkins (Americans.) i must admit it felt very strange at first, to be sitting in a comfortable swivel rocker while balancing my plate on my knee with my wine perced on Grandma Hedwig's side table. but as soon as i hit "play" on the remote and our family movie started it felt oddly familiar and downright pleasurable.
(the blue glow)and the fare could not have been more Merkin. meatloaf and mashed potatoes. i swear i did not plan this, it was merely a coincidence.
what movie, you may ask, could pull this faithful 'round-the-table family to park their asses in front of the tube for their first family-movie-with-dinner night? the answer, my friends, is a little movie called Wall-E.
Wall-E was worth it. Call it a Sci-Fi for children. it borrows, like most science fiction does, from A.I. and Blade Runner. its an adorable Pixar-Disney (those bastards finally got my money, damn it and maybe a teeny-tiny ounce of my respect) film about a trash compacting robot left behind on Earth to clean up the toxic waste dump that was once a bustling human city. 700 years before, the people of earth had to bail on a giant space "cruise" ship to escape the poisonous reckage our consumption brought upon the planet. the whole operation was funded by the mega-conglomerate Buy'n'Large who basically over the course of 7 centuries had turned the human race into obese, technological-dependant idiots who never step fat foot off their personal hover-chairs. and how one small sprout can spark the promise and determination of the human spirit which is all but extinct. it is a sobering, albeit comically dramatic, look at the path of our greed and insatiable consumerism if we indeed need to hit rock bottom to turn things around. its a gem, people, a gem.
and obviously why a family-movie night was in order. if there were more movies like this that i could really get behind, then we'd do it more often. but most movies made for children are crap, through my motherly lens, absolute crap.
adding the perfect ending to our night, i wiped my tears and we cleared our plates, contemplating the delicate balance of science, technology and the simplicity LIFE at its core, and blake went to close the chicken coop door. he came back with THIS:
we've had our hens for just under 2 days and already our first egg! we were expecting them to take some time to adjust, but i guess we;ve made at least one of them feel at home!
sometimes all it takes for one to feel connected to "the circle" and inspired to do well for the benefit of humankind and mother nature, is to hold a freshly laid egg straight from a chickens butt. and with that, i bid you goodnight.
