I was ready for the fact it is a *middle* movie. I was ready for the special effects to be cheesey (primed by Spiderman and DareDevil especially, not to mention the trailers for the move themselves). I was ready for the overlong first half. I was ready for Keanu's bum. What I wasn't ready for, was the level of corn. I didn't hate it. I didn't even dislike it. I thought it was beautiful. I really liked the cinematography. I hated the incidental music. I felt as if a sixth-form-english student wrote the script. Keanu is beautiful. I would have edited it tighter, and assumed a level of intelligence from my audience. Tonight, I finally saw The Matrix: Reloaded. At last - I know - Ms Midnight Session took *this* long to see it. And I want to see it again. But I think I laughed far too much and in all the wrong places.

*note to self* bloooger.com is not what you're looking for. (typo due to two coffees and a V) Marshall is away. Away in America. He phones sometimes to talk to us. He uses one phone. He is One and he has one phone. We talk to him. We are Many. We Many use one phone. We huddle around the talking device, his american accent thinned by the low quality speaker behind the plastic grill. We huddle around the phone like cavemen around a fire. Imagine, if cavemen were us, and the fire was a phone. We huddle around this piece of technology and his voice comes to us milliseconds after its left his mouth 12,000 miles away. Not much like cavemen and fires afterall. More like, Charlie and His Angels. Rosie is Drew Barrymore, because she can't remember the old Charlie's Angels and seems to have a crush on the actress according to the index of her DVD collection. We'll call Drew's character the "Naked Angel" because that's the only part of the movie I can remember. I can remember the original Angels, but choose to be one of the new angels - "Chinese Angel" : Thingi Li. We have three other members of staff - two managers and a receptionist who can be Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett [Majors] (ah.. Sabrina, hm.. ahh.. what the hell were the other names?) (confusing characters with actresses but its all based on a true story so it's okay, right?) (googled... Farrah was Jill Monroe, Kate was Sabrina Duncan, Jaclyn was Kelly Garrett. then you have your Shelly Hacks (Tiffany Wells) and Cheryl Ladds (Kris Monroe) but we had enough "going" where we went and we're NOT going there)

Three Things I Remembered About Myself Today

Nectarines - specifically, their scent, though the eating is good too. I was at Countdown Supermarket tonight, I decided to buy food this week. I normally forget, so this time I made a real effort and even thought about what I needed before I arrived. Walking into the Fruit and Vegetable section, just meaning to pass on through apart from a carrot stop, I was halted - well, more like.. my legs kept going but my nose stopped.. very Warner Bros.. by the wonderful scent from the nectarines. It telescopically transported me back to an time when I lived in a house with a nectarine tree outside the living room window, and I could - but I had to climb up onto the sill because I was too short to just reach - pluck the fruit off the tree without ever leaving the house.

Buttons - don't you see how much fun I have making them *gesturing to the left hand side of the jamjar* i do.. I just love making little buttons. I like making their border=1 and have them shift a pixel on rollover. My buttons give me massive amounts of pleasure.

A Song - "Killing me Softly" by Roberta Flack. I forgot how much I love this song, but I really don't think I've tried to sing it before and by crikey, she's not an easy tune, Bruce. But I was in the car so had a damn good bash at it. It got me thinking about the question people often ask, [not of me, everyone knows I don't listen to music *blankstare*] about favourite songs. So, in my head, I started my list:

• "killing me softly" by Roberta Flack
• "Perfect Drug" by Nine Inch Nails
• ...

and then I got to thinking, even though my list stood at two songs so far, what an odd change of pace from one to the other. then I thought about not worrying about that and added another few songs to my list:

• "Teardrops" by the Proclaimers
• "Loves Changes Everything" by whoever's singing it at the time
• "Break Stuff" by.. chris knows, I always forget. Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park and before you get all up in my face, remember i'm too old and music's starting to sound the same.
• um.. where was I?
• ...

ah well, its a start.

Peaches are delicious. They actually taste like sunshine. And you don't mind so much their juices running down and dripping off your chin except for the fact your tastebuds are missing out on every single drop from their succulent flesh. I like the skins too, fuzzy and so different from their insides. Bottling peaches is so satisfying, and fills the kitchen with lovely warm homey smells. Heating the jars in the water bath in the oven to sterilise them is careful business - glass when that hot can burn like the dickins, and the roasting try full of ungainly jars hard to handle. Spooning the syrupy juice over the poached peaches and sealing them in jars to sit royally on wooden shelves, it's hard to let anyone open and eat them later on. Sometimes I missed the entire point of preserving for days when peaches were out of season, so beautiful they looked on the shelf, like works of art to dust and admire. But that's not what God made peaches for, he made them to dribble their sugary juices down your chin and slurp and grin.