Lately I have been keeping one of the resolutions I made to myself last year. I think it was last year? I know it was a long time ago for sure. The resolution was to make more me time, especially videogame time. I’ve been pretty good about making time at least every other night to blast the baddies or what not . . . and it feels so good. If I actually had more time I would love to get into online gaming stuff, but I’m afraid I’d just get too addicted and get nothing done. That would be bad!

Meanwhile I’ve also kept up my goal to try and eat better and get back to the gym . . . and the past few I finally started feeling it. The sore muscles! Oh well, no pain no gain!

Finally, I recently indulged in my love for the one and only Wonder Woman and bought a few new figures, as well as this new doll from The Tonner Doll Company. I now have too much Wonder Woman memorabilia to fit on my book shelf in the downstairs guest room lol. I am planning to reorganize it, hanging a lot of the figures up on the walls along with some paintings and pictures I have of Wonder Buns as well. Now if only I could find Wonder Woman bed sheets and a comforter for the bed in there the room would be complete 🙂

I’m trying to adjust and get back into the groove of things and work. I’m still working on the vacation recap slowly and to get more photos up. I realized I never uploaded my photos to my webshots from LAST years cruise. My bad! For some reason I thought I had, but then I remembered that was when I was in the midst of computer troubles and dealing with HP to get my laptop fixed.

Slowly getting the house cleaned up bit by bit each day. The chore of course will be to KEEP it clean and straightened up once I get it there. One day I will tackle the hell hole that has become the basement, but not this day or year. The BF meanwhile is planning to re-wallpaper the bathroom, and possibly do something more in there, I don’t know. It does need to be redone . . . badly.

The lack of anything on TV lately is getting to me and is not helped by the lack of anything to rent at the video store! Big Brother 9 starts soon and will probably take over my television viewing habits once again. I just hope there is a more entertaining crew this time, not filled with people I just loath.

I wish I had something more thrilling or exciting to blog about, but I don’t. Oh for those who missed the New Years Eve cam craziness, this Friday as well as next Thursday might be a bit insane 😛

Long before Harry Potter, Dragonlance was the first serious of fantasy books I really got hooked on. I loved them dearly, and Weiss and Hickman are still to this day churning out new books in the series. Currently they are taking a look back at the “War of the Lance” volumes from the evil doers perspective, filling in many of the stories.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight is the first in the series, and has just been released as an animated movie. It is about how the heroes of the lance came together to essentially battle the dragon highlords and save their world of Krynn from the evil queen Tahkisses. It stars the voice talents of Lucy Lawless, Michael Rosenbaum and Kiefer Sutherland. The voice acting was superb, as was the score. The animation however I felt fell a little flat. The dragons were all computer generated and imposed on the traditional cell animation for the rest of the characters. The cell animation is where I found fault, as it didn’t seem sharp at all. At times it was blurry and even appeared to suffer from ghost images. It was almost as if they took an animated movie, captured it onto their computer at a lower quality and then put that onto the DVD.

All in all though I enjoyed it. At 14 bucks, one can’t complain too much. If you are a fan of the books you’ll probably enjoy seeing the book brought to life. I’m just hoping that it does well enough that they will release more in the series.

I’ve been starting some pre-spring cleaning to get ready for company. Next week Emily is coming over for a fun night, then in two weeks Shannan and Nica come for a few days. I’m trying to get the house somewhat picked up for their arrival so it doesn’t look too much like a disaster zone. Basically this means finding places to put the little piles of “crap” that have built up here and there over the past year or two. None are mine of course 🙂 Eventually I will do a major vacuuming and dusting of the house, but not till it gets closer to their arrival.

Since returning from vacation I’ve been watching what I eat and counting my calories. It’s time to get back into shape. Today I also hit the gym. The ship we were on happen to be hosting an Atlantis gay cruise the next week, so the bartenders were telling us all about it, how much fun it is, how they love it. My BF is determined we do one next year. I definitely want to be in shape then for sure! I also just want to be in shape for myself. Every year I say I will get into better shape, I never do. Maybe this will be the year . . . but it’s not a resolution . . . cause those always get broken.

Tonight we went out to dinner and then hit the theater to finally see “Sweeney Todd.” A very, um, interesting movie? Violent and twisted for sure! I can see why it didn’t last long on Broadway back in 79 when it opened. For those who don’t know the story, it’s about a barber who is wrongly imprisoned by a judge so the judge could get to his wife and child. The barber returns for revenge and starts killing people, and the woman he hooks up with bakes them into her meat pies! It was an interesting movie, one of the more twisted and darker musicals I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if it’s something I’d feel the need to see again though.

The show had a reprise a few years ago and I actually wanted to see it but didn’t. The original Broadway production though has been put on DVD, so you can go back in time and watch the role Angela Lansbury won a Tony award for (I think one of many actually). I could also hint that if your searched on YouTube you could also find someone has posted the whole DVD/show there as well, but that would be wrong of me! I’m in the process of watching it now to see how it compares to the new movie.

Speaking of the movie, I wanted to play a little Sweeney Todd myself with the three teens sitting behind us who wouldn’t SHUT THE HELL UP. What made it all the worse is they were clearly dragged there by their parents, who were probably the ones who wanted to see the film. The parents did NOT sit with the kids and I was tempted to yell at the parents after the movie, telling them if they insisted on dragging their children to movies with them then at least sit with them so they could be bothered by their talking.

After we finally got home from our vacation I was worn out! The last day of our cruise I felt my throat getting a little sore. Then we stayed a day in Miami and walked everywhere. This coupled with the fact that I actually didn’t sleep as much as I normally do while on vacation, I was ripe to get sick. So I’ve basically been taking a vacation from my vacation these past few days and been a lazy bum and sleeping a lot. The BF keeps bouncing on me saying “What’s wrong are you sick? Do you have a headache?” Thanks! He did at least put Christmas away. Before we left we didn’t put Christmas away. I hate putting it away, it’s so sad. He took care of most of it, I helped a wee bit.

Anyway, I have to snap out of being lazy, time to get back to work! Of course in about two weeks my friends Shannan and Nica will be here for an extended weekend visit. Along with Emily we are headed to New York for a night to see “Wicked” on Broadway and go to a club or something. I’m sure it will of course be the one weekend we hit below zero, because anytime I go to New York in the winter it always ends up being bitterly cold.

We finally got home today. I am sorry I didn’t post many blog entrees while away. I meant to, but the internet, especially on the ship, was sloooooow and cost a good bit of money. But we are home, the internet isn’t per minute, so I can start doing recaps of the cruise. I figured for now I’d just get a few photos up and give some info on them. I have many more though!

Let’s start with the ship, The Liberty of the Seas. Currently the biggest ship out there, and was this motha huge! Later this year they release the Independence, which will be slightly bigger. Next year they release Genesis of the Seas, which is supposed to be a monster.

They had various theme parties and parades along the royal promenade, the “main street” down the center of the ship. This was from the “Dancin in the Streets” 70s party, complete with Village People. They came down and danced with everyone, and the woman were grabbed their butts. The poor Indian got his loin cloth flipped up a few times (he had on speedos).

The ship itself is beautiful, especially at night when everything is lit up. I mean this sucker is like Vegas, color changing lighting everywhere. It was very nice and romantical.

The first of these two photos is of an old bell tower in Labadie, Haiti. There wasn’t much around to indicate what it was for, common sense would be a church. However the only other nearby structure was actually a buccaneers trading post, or what was left of it. The second photo is of the outside of Rose Hall in Jamaica, which I’ve talked about in the last post.

Finally some photos of us. The photo on the left was the last night of the cruise. We were in this bar where the late night adult sing-a-longs happened. It was led by this guy Matt Yee who was hilarious. If you are ever on a cruise and he’s listed, go see the show! The photo on the right was taken one of the nights we went to one of the fancy restaurants on the ship. These are optional, but the food is worth the 20$ cover charge because on land you’d probably pay a good 100$ or more for these kind of amazing dinners.

Anyway, I’m pooped. We had to fly today for 2 1/2 hours then drive for 3, but we are home. Okay I was asleep for most of the flight and drive, but I’m still tired 🙂

Another quick update, when I have a chance I’ll sit down and type out what we’ve been doing all these days with photos. This one I had to share now though.

Today in Jamaica we went to Rose Hall, which is a famous historic plantation house known best for Annie Palmer, called The White Witch by the people and slaves at the time. You can probably google her and Rose Hall to get the full story. The short version is that she was an English woman who married one Richard Palmer and moved into Rose Hall, which was a house in the Palmer family. Annie was raised with a haitian nanny, who schooled her in voodoo. She tortured her slaves with spells as well as good old fashion be-headings. She also killed her first husband with poison, her second by stabbing and pouring hot oil in his ears and the third she strangled with the help of a free slave lover of hers. She also cast a spell on the lovers lover Millicent, as she was jealous, and killed her. The free slave lover, enraged, killed Annie Palmer at the ripe old age of 29.

Clearly there is a lot of negative energy in this house, and it apparently hasn’t been stayed in since 1963, when the last guests who were brave enough fled in the middle of the night. The told us on the tour that many people capture spirits on their film, and they had examples of many of these photos in the museum area. I snapped the following photo of Annie’s own bed, which many others have captured odd images. If you look on the left of the headboard I at least clearly see three faces. The first is very large and kind of looks like George Washington lol. I showed the BF it on my camera, but he couldn’t see well because of the sun and just said it was probably the light reflecting and knots in the would. Well it could be, but it is a pretty neat effect if it is. To the left of George and at the top I see what looks like a woman’s nose and lips. Below that some kind of evil pair of eyes. You can click on this photo to blow up the original photo.

Annie Palmer and her dead husbands? Believe it or not!

Sorry I’ve been so absent. We are on the ship now. Internet of course is slow. I’ve also been bad about taking pictures of the ship, which is unusual for me. It’s such a huge ship! We are on Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas, de biggest ship in de whurld! (That was a Celine Dion joke). I’ll do my best to get some photos and some write-ups up about what we’ve been doing. We are in Jamaica today and going to Rose Hall, home of the White Witch and her ghostly husbands. WoooOooOOooo. Maybe I’ll get some ghostly photos 🙂

While at MGM I saw the Ewok village (the entrance to the Star Tours ride) then heard some kind of live Star Wars show going on. Alas it was for little kids mostly. However they did have this wonderful photo op that I couldn’t pass up.

More updates and photos as soon as I get a chance. Right now I’m trying to catch up on three hours of soaps I’ve missed.