As I write this we are watching A Wizard of Earthsea on the Sci Fi channel, and it is, quite surprisingly, not too bad. The dialogue is a little choppy and contrived at times, and I think I really want to smack the main character upside the head, but apparently that was the way he was in the books too. I read the entire series, years ago, back when I was junior high, most likely, and all that I recall about them is that they were ever so slightly depressing. I read the series, in fact, several times. Do I remember a single thing about the plot at all? Of course not.

As in most cases like this, however, as soon as Richard said he wanted to watch the miniseries I decided to hold off on rereading the books until after the series has ended. I did this for the Lord of the Rings series and was able to enjoy the films completely without obsessing over anything they might have changed in translating from print to film. Okay, I'll also admit that I didn't exactly want to read those books again because they are very long and very tedious, despite the fact that I liked the story. But it's a good rule to live by. I know my enjoyment of the Harry Potter movies has been seriously marred by how recently I'd read the books. That doesn't stop me from occasionally dragging out the entire five-book series and reading them from beginning to end, non-stop, during a very long afternoon, knowing all the while that I will regret this as yet another Harry Potter film makes its way to the big screen.

The rest of the day has been fairly uneventful. I got up and did not work out because my workout partner (my mom) was in Seattle to go see The Nutcracker with a certainnearly-four-year-old granddaughter and that was as good an excuse as any skip the exercise. Instead Richard and I hunched over our breakfast and wrote up shopping lists, which we divided into two – one for him to take to the Co-op in Davis and one for me to take to the regular grocery store, since the Co-op does not believe in carrying mundane things like fat-free, aspartame sweetened yogurt. While I was there I noticed that our Safeway now carries all three varieties of the No-Pudge brownies, which meant that I had to buy the two we had not yet tried, go home, and immediately mix them up and toss them into the oven. We had plans for something with fish for dinner, but instead we had brownies – raspberry and mint (not in the same brownie, obviously) which, as decadent as that sounds, was actually a very low Points dinner – so much so that I think maybe I might just need one more piece. Possibly now. Hmm.

This has been a Holidailies entry.