Tag: Movies (page 3 of 5)

Picking Cotton

Lewis Hine Cotton Picker

Last night while I was doing a few things, I turned on the TV and Places in the Heart was on one of the movie channels. It is just such an outstanding movie! As always, Sally Field is amazing!

Whenever I watch that movie and see them picking cotton it always reminds me of three things: driving to the beach, my fourth grade science teacher and a colleague at my first “real” job. Firstly, it reminds me of that long awaited trip to the beach. When you knew a whole week of fun awaited you. When I grew up in the South, cotton was still a staple. I can remember going to the beach in the Summer and taking the back roads, you would drive by fields of what appeared to be snow covered flats of land, the cotton bolls bursting open revealing the delicate cotton candy fluff that waits inside.

Secondly, I will always associate it with my fourth grade science teacher, Mrs. S.. She told us a story about picking cotton when she was a small girl of 7. We were studying plant life and one thing led to another she shared this story with us. She would stay with her grandparents every year during the later part of Summer. They had a farm and one of their main crops was cotton.

She was fascinated by it and wanted to try her hand at picking. Her grandmother warned her against it. Explaining to her that her little hands were too delicate for the hard cotton boll because it would slice into her fingers like a knife. Still, she persisted. Her grandmother finally relented and made her, her own little cotton picking apron and bag. She rose early and went out to the field with her grandfather. It was fun at first, but it didn’t take long before her fingers got their first deep cut. The cotton boll shaving through her gentle little 7 year old fingers.

By the time her day was done, Mrs. S.’s hands were red raw, gashed here and there and swollen. Her grandmother made her soak them in a hot bowl of water with epsom salts, applied ointment to them and gingerly wrapper her tiny hands in bandages. To this day, her hands still bear the mark of her first and last cotton picking session.

Cotton picking also brings to mind a wonderful woman I used to work with at my first “real” job. I worked in a department store in High School one year to save Christmas money. One of the ladies I worked with was a Southerner through and through. 

Her family hadn’t come from much and her mother picked cotton to earn extra money. Now, they say that you don’t remember things under a certain age. I don’t hold with that philosophy. Neither did my co-worker. She was only 3, but she can remember vividly what it was like to be out in the fields with her mother. 

She was a small child during the 1930’s and at that time the baby of the family. Her mother took her to the fields with her. Her mama would dress in long sleeved blouses and wear a bonnet to keep the sun off of her face. She would dress my co-worker similarly and once in the field she would place her in an old wooden peach crate and would sit it at the end of the row. When she had picked her way through, she would move her to the next row, so she could keep an eye on her as she worked. 

My co-worker would nap, or play with her dolls or watch her mother. She could remember it like it was yesterday. I love how their stories had intertwined. From one generation to the next and the next, cotton still played a part in so many people’s lives. We all bring a different piece of thread to the tapestry to make up the whole.

{Image by Lewis Hine of Callie Campbell, age 11}

Always Alright

We first saw/heard the Alabama Shakes on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny! A New Year’s tradition in our house, if we are at home, we watch it. I liked them. We watched The Silver Linings Playbook this weekend and they are featured on the soundtrack. Now, I can’t get the song out of my head. This is riding in your car with the windows rolled down kinda music, drinking a cold beer at a party kinda music, hanging out on your couch kinda music. It’s just good!

Happy Tuesday!

A Lesson in Welding

Vintage Welder

I am so excited! I get to go on a welding course tonight for school, so I can learn how to use the arc welder and the mig welder! My Dad has already given me a blow-by-blow of how each one works (I don’t know what he doesn’t know!) and I am tres excited to start making some sparks fly.

I think we all know what is coming next, there is only one great welding, dancing, based in the great city of Pittsburgh movie that I know of, cue Flashdance:

Hope you have a very happy Monday, wherever you may be today!

Food for Thought

Mr. Michie is on a school trip this evening to the Globe Theatre, so I was on my own for dinner. I didn’t feel hungry today at work, so I skipped lunch and sat on a bench in the sunshine and read a delicious book.

I love reading and with my traveling too and from work at the moment, I am reading about a book a week. So, my reading pile is getting smaller and smaller, but I have plenty of books on my wish list that I want to get, so I will have more than enough books to keep me occupied.

I decided to get dinner out, since I was on my own. I ordered my food, found a table downstairs where I could sit and be. I listened to the great music that was blasting out of their speakers, read a couple pages of my book and munched away on my fries and cheeseburger.

I looked around, there were a few other people eating alone, but most people were with a partner or in a group. It’s funny that you seem to adopt a certain attitude when eating alone, you read something (I was, as I was almost at the end of a heart racing chapter in the political thriller, I’m reading), you play with your phone, you stare into space, you just eat and eat and don’t come up for air, only staring at your food. I saw all these things as I observed the people around me.

There is a certain vibe that it isn’t okay to eat alone, that something must be wrong if you are eating dinner alone, somehow you can swing it for breakfast and lunch, but dinner has different connotations. It made me think of Hope Floats, a great Sandra Bullock movie.

There is a scene where Sandra Bullock’s character, who is newly separated from her cheating husband an has moved back home to live with her mama, eats dinner alone at the local diner. Here, she encounters and old flame/friend in Harry Connick Jr., who is also eating alone. He tells her dining alone isn’t for sissies, you have to be made of some pretty stern stuff to do that, and the trick is to remain mysterious, like the choice is yours. And to really throw them off, you should order some dessert.

This scene always makes me smile. I am perfectly happy with me, with my own company. I would never judge someone for eating dinner alone, yet as I sat there tonight, it was interesting to see the looks I was getting for being alone as well as the other loners, we were looked at with a twinge of pity.

In so many ways, in society today, we are alone. Technology is a wonderful thing, but it keeps others at a distance in many respects. Yet, if you play with your phone or your laptop, you look all “official”, you look like you are working, too busy to stop and eat with someone, you are eating and working on the go, and that is okay, but to simply come and sit down, to be alright with you, eat your meal at a moderate pace and just be, there must be something odd about you. Or, at least that is how I felt tonight, it only toughened my resolve to just sit and “be” and gave me, pardon the pun, food for thought!

The Way, Way Back

The Way Way Back Poster

Mr. Michie took me to see a movie this weekend that I have been waiting to see for awhile now: The Way, Way Back.

It gave more than I even expected it too. Not, that I felt at any point either before seeing it or during, that I would walk away and not enjoy it, these coming-of-age tales are close to my heart. I already knew I would love it, the writers (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, two extremely funny and talented guys), the cast, composed of many actors who I truly admire, the soundtrack, the location. I felt as if I was on Duncan’s (the protagonist’s) journey with him.

I never thought that I would think of Steve Carell as an asshole, a part he played well. Maybe it was more real because I could never imagine him having any of those traits outside of this role, so possibly, you could envisage him enjoying playing someone more sinister, he was into the role and you as the voyeur completely believed it. You hung in this disbelief watching this man emotionally torture a 15 year-old kid, when he himself was the one with all the issues.

Steve Carell’s character drives them to his beach house in an old restored station wagon. We used to have a station wagon for a little while when I was growing up and I have to tell you, the way, way back, was my favourite place to sit. You watched the world from a whole different vantage point back there. You also existed in your own world back there, as if there was some kind of magical barrier between you and everyone else in the car.

I felt for Duncan, there was no way that you could watch this movie and not cheer him on, through everything that was thrown at him. You might not have had this particular struggle but everyone has had their own teenage crap they went through, everyone has walked that road into adulthood, some are still on it. We all bring different things to the table.

In the end, I left with a smile on my face. As Owen tells Duncan, “You’ve got to go your own way”. You have to blaze your own trail, that is the only way that you will truly find out who it is that you are meant to be and that is a path that I don’t think stops after your teenage years, you have to keep blazing that trail because our decisions and the way we choose to handle a situation continues to evolve the path that we are on.

If you can, go see The Way, Way Back, it will be worth it, I promise you!

Life Moves Pretty Fast

It’s Wednesday! We have almost made it to the weekend! It is a week for taking a bit of Ferris’s advice:

lifemovesprettyfast

As busy as things get, we must remember to just stop and catch our breath! Wouldn’t it be grand to have a friend like Ferris?  Happy Wednesday!

{image found}

Custard Creams

A cup of tea and a nice biscuit, just go hand in hand in England. It seems wrong to have one without the other.

However, I quite often have one without the other and I drink my tea all wrong as I am mostly a black tea drinker and not a milk or milk and sugar tea drinker.One of the local coffee shops has started creating giant versions of some of England’s best loved biscuits to have with your hot beverage of choice. One of these biscuits being a custard cream. This homemade custard cream is absolutely divine and the perfect thing for a Monday morning breakfast!

I definitely needed a pick-me-up this morning as we have been up since just before 3am with Mr. Michie getting sick and I have left him at home and in bed today. I spent a good hour of early yesterday morning getting rid of ants that had invaded my kitchen over night. We discovered that their nest was in one of the pots by our front door that contained my climbing rose.

Unfortunately the entire pot had to go as the hive was just too large to contain, they started to spill out of the pot and they were inside some of the dead areas of my rose that were clipped down at the bottom. I am always sad to lose plants as I am attached to them. They bring me such happiness. But, there are more flowers by my door now, and that tub will really fill out in a week or so.

I also re-potted my orchids, so hopefully they will be happy with fresh bark and new pots, we will just have to wait and see. We made homemade pizzas last night with crumbled sausage, fennel and sauteed rapini. It was a really nice combination, It was light and tasted of Spring.

Mr. Michie also took me on a Saturday date and we saw “Iron Man 3”. We both really liked it. There is nothing better then watching a good movie, munching on popcorn and holding hands with your sweetie!

So, all in all it was a really good weekend, it just went by in the blink of an eye!

Our Weekend

Well, I was going to share my weekend with you yesterday, but after my day in the cupboard, I just couldn’t.

It was my date night this weekend and I took Mr. Michie to the movies! It was so much FUN! I can’t tell you the last time we went to a movie in the evening, we are usually afternoon movie goers.

We saw OZ. We both really enjoyed it, I thought they did a nice tie in of the elements, the costumes were beautiful and I only wish she was real because the little girl the “wizard” helps save in China Town, I could just take home with me, she was so cute!

We grabbed some breakfast before going grocery shopping on Saturday morning:

Then I spent the rest of Saturday preparing Sunday’s lunch. I made my Nana’s macaroni salad, my dad’s green bean salad and homemade yeast rolls.

On Sunday we baked a ham and I tried a new peach cobbler recipe. It was delicious! I made a few changes, by adding some cinnamon and a little bit if lemon zest to the peaches, like I would do if I was making a pie.

I have been reading a series of books at the moment that take place in the South (The Caster Chronicles) and after reading what Amma has been cooking, I was hankering after a little Southern Home-style dinner myself. There was even sweet tea to boot!

Just Another Manic it Tuesday

This was my calendar page today:

It made me smile! There is still snow on the ground and it is pretty nippy outside. Our cheeks were very rosy by the time we got on the bus this morning.

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and I have a couple things up my sleeve. Mr. Michie is cooking dinner for me and I am making dessert for him. I have no idea what he is making, it is a surprise, so I am going to stick within the realms of something chocolate-y, because you just can’t go wrong with chocolate!

We ran errands on Saturday and then
went to see Wreck It Ralph. It was tremendously cute! The “Sugar Rush” game that he ended up in, was like a car racing version of  “Candy Land”, I loved that game and played it endlessly as a kid.

Being two people who grew up with the novelty of arcade games we found this movie highly entertaining. Mr. Michie knew most of the characters. He played “Street Fighter” a lot when he was little, I was more of a “Mrs. Pac-Man” kind of gal.

Before the movie started we were treated to a Disney short. It was the perfect short for Valentine’s Day and I thought I would share it with you here:
Hope you are having a wonderful Tuesday.

Spring Cleaning

We worked extremely hard yesterday putting away all of our Christmas decorations and giving the house a thorough cleaning.

Next week, I am going to really tear apart our bedroom and get the closets more organized. I know that we will most likely end up with a bag of items for The Salvation Army and a bag of items to be turned into fabric scraps and dust rags.

The house looks so bare now, but it feels clean. I have decorated for Valentine’s Day and left one little tiny tree up, that I have adorned with Valentine hearts. Nothing wrong with a little twinkle and glow.

Our weekend in pictures:

Goodbye Genevieve see you next year!

Mr. Michie took out the garbage and recycling and we saw a double rainbow the complete full arch, that was a nice gift.

Potato Soup for dinner. I kind of followed Paula Deen’s recipe for it, but then went off the rails and made it completely my own. It was warming to the soul and we sat on the couch like vegetables, completely worn out and watched “Two Mules for Sister Sara”. Happiness!