And the award for worst Oscars Party ever goes to ...

... everyone who tried to have a party in the Portland, Maine area! Yes, Mother Nature crashed pretty much all of Portland's Oscars Parties, though I think ours was probably particularly sad.

It all started well enough. We had a friend over to spend the night and join the fun. Food was out, we were watching the Barbara Walters/Red-Carpet stuff, trivia was being asked, ballots were filled, and good times were being had. I never knew that things could get so awful, so fast. Roughly one hour into the ceremony, our ABC station completely shut down. We don't have cable, but our rabbit-ears almost never steer us wrong. As it turned out, a huge snow-storm swept in, causing our local ABC affiliate to lose broadcasting capabilities, meaning the Oscars were nowhere to be seen. Every other station was unaffected.

Not to worry! I wasn't going to let this ruin the night. I was sure that the show would be back on any minute. In the meantime, we resumed trivia and kept up with the award announcements via an online news feed. After an hour or so of no Oscars, we began to worry that the show might not come back on. Panic began to set in, and the fun was running out around the time that the real fun began - we lost all electricity.

There we were in the dark, cursing the weather and wondering what was done to deserve this craptastic party. By the end of the night, Lauren was using her iPhone to announce the winners as we marked our ballots by lantern-light. No, I'm not kidding. We're currently downloading a 4.5 GB bit torrent of the show, so we will at least be able to watch it, which will help a little bit.

Anyway, I was glad for "Slumdog Millionaire" - what a great film! And, from what I saw of the show, Hugh Jackman was a wonderful host. The Academy has picked mostly stand-up comics to host the show over the last decade, but with Hugh Jackman, they picked an all-around entertainer. He sings, he dances, he's a loving, devoted husband and father, and he's "Wolverine." What a cool guy! We look forward to seeing the entire show soon, and hopefully next year we'll be able to watch it all at the same time.

p.s.

As a side-note, Lauren and I did fairly well on our Oscar predictions, scoring 14 and 15, respectively.

Green Tea from Keetsa

Many of you may recall when we purchased our wonderful bed from Keetsa. For those of you who don't, check out this post:
"Our New Bed!"

We created a video and put it up on You Tube to show others what it's like when your very own queen-sized Keetsa mattress comes to your door tightly rolled and vacuum-sealed in a box. The guys at Keetsa in San Fransisco found our video and have featured it on their website: www.keetsa.com.

Last week they contacted us to let us know about a contest they have started requesting other videos from customers who love their Keetsa mattresses. The winners of the contest will receive boxes of Keetsa's delicious Green Tea, and because we were some of the first customers they had to create a "We love our Keetsa mattress!" video, they offered to send us a couple of boxes for free! Mmmmm! Thanks Keetsa!

Happy Valentine's Day!

By the way, we had a lovely Valentine's Day weekend, and we hope you did too!

We had lunch with some good friends from church and with our new friends, Tim and Julie Owen, who will be joining our church in May with Tim as our new Youth Pastor. Hooray! We love Tim and Julie; we hit it off with them right from the start, and we are very excited about the love and fun times they will be bringing to SPCN!

After lunch, I (Lauren) had planned to take Dee on a Story Walk that had been set up by our library at a local farm. Along a trail there were posted excerpts from Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which, as you can tell from the title of our blog, is one of our favorites. Hopefully the pictures give you an idea of how beautiful the landscape was. It was a bright, sunshiny day, and the field and woods were beautiful. What the pictures cannot convey is how bitter cold it was out there on that open field! And, as if the bitter cold weren't enough to keep us from finishing the walk, the warmer temperatures over the past week had thawed the trail so that with every other step we found ourselves down about 2 1/2 feet (see picture below). So, we didn't really complete the walk, but it's the idea that really counted. : )

When we got home, we snuggled up together to warm up, and we watched An Affair to Remember. Then, Dee told me that we were getting dressed up because he was taking me out, and he surprised me with dinner reservations at our old favorite, Macaroni Grill. (For those of you who don't know, Macaroni Grill is where we had our first date way back when... ahh memories!) Then we came back home and had dark chocolate covered strawberries while we ended our evening watching Sleepless in Seattle. I think this is love, don't you?

Breaking the Status Quo: Confessions of a High School Musical Fan

I haven’t always been an East High enthusiast. Just a few years ago, if you had asked me, “What team?”, I certainly wouldn’t have responded, “Wildcats!” I heard about High School Musical shortly after its release, but I had absolutely no interest in pursuing it further. You see, I knew who the fans were: shrieking junior high girls. The fans of High School Musical wore lip gloss, smelled of fruit-infused lotions, and carried at least one “Hello, Kitty” accessory. They weren’t college graduates, they weren’t aspiring film critics, and above all, they weren’t men.

That was my reality in the Fall of 2006. I invited some guys over for an evening of epic battle board games, while my wife (fiancée at the time) spent the evening in the next room with a friend of ours watching a movie. Little did I know that destiny was taking a hand. The ladies watched High School Musical that night, and every ten minutes or so, I would get up from the game and go into the living room to see what they were laughing about. My fiancée and friend were cackling relentlessly over the cheesy lines and melodramatic dilemmas, and they assured me that I would not enjoy the film. Based on what I saw that night, my assumptions were confirmed. High School Musical and I didn’t have any future together, but unbeknownst to me, the seed had been planted.

More and more of my friends and acquaintances encouraged me to see it, if only to poke fun at the film’s shortcomings. I even found myself on occasion reciting phrases I had heard from the film, like, “Get’cha head in the game” or “This could be the start of something new.” Insiders lit up when I spoke their language and they wanted to discuss the film further, but I couldn’t. I felt like the American who went around Paris asking store clerks, “Ça va, aujourd’hui?” without knowing enough French to continue the conversation. I was a poser in over my head, and I needed to come clean and choose a side. After much thought, I settled on the perfect compromise. There were HSM fans and bashers in equal measures, so I resolved to keep a foot in each world simply by seeing the entire film, from start to finish. I would then be able to intelligently address both groups.

As my wife and I watched the film together, we had fun pointing out all the problems. There were clichés galore, cheesy exchanges, contrived situations, and emotional moments that just rang false. Even as I pointed my finger, I knew that my academic observations were inappropriate. I was only bashing the film because I thought I was supposed to, but I wasn’t ready to admit the deeper, more troubling truth: I was bashing the film to mask my secret admiration. The very traits I had mocked quickly become endearing, and I felt like I was back on the playground, pulling a cute girl’s pigtails. I had thoroughly enjoyed High School Musical, and now I was posing all over again, only this time, from the other side.

Over the following days, I found myself humming the songs, remembering how fun it all was. I knew I was becoming a fan, but I stared long and hard at my film collection: Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather ... as a serious film appreciator, how could I possibly add High School Musical to that shelf? My friends had no idea what was happening to me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them. Coming out would call all of my values into question, but I had to be true to myself. I could no longer take Sharpay’s advice and just “stick with the status quo.” I had to follow Troy Bolton’s lead and get outside my comfort zone. If Troy could be a basketball superstar and sing in a school theater production, I could be a film appreciator with a love for High School Musical.

As it turned out, there were more serious movie buffs on the inside than I could have dreamed. When High School Musical 3 debuted in theaters and critics everywhere were forced to publish their opinions, the majority gave positive reviews. It was nice to know that I wasn’t alone. Why shouldn’t something so wholesome, cheesy, silly, and fun be seen and appreciated as the enjoyable entertainment that it is? I’m sure there are plenty of thirteen-year-old girls who actually think that it’s better than Shakespeare, but most fans that I’ve met understand the situation. We don’t have delusions about what High School Musical really is, but we’re not ashamed to acknowledge how enjoyable it is, either. We wink at each other even as we sing the songs.

I can’t help but wish that my high school had been more like East High. Students constantly build each other up, seeing their differences as strengths, rather than weaknesses. I know there are some (I was once among them) who wish the whole phenomenon had never come to pass, but I’ll always be grateful that something so lighthearted and morally-grounded became so popular. If you’re afraid to come out because of what people will think, know that there is safety in numbers: a whole Wildcat Community ready to welcome you home. If you’re on the other side, though, convinced that it’s not for you and as skeptical as I once was, I encourage you to just give it a chance. Start with a simple viewing in the comfort of your own home - it might just be “the start of something new.”