Arg!

Rough couple of days at work. It feels like I can come up for air for a little bit, though.

Monday night Jon and I went out for dinner. I had blackened catfish, a salad, and steamed veggies, but I still ate more than I had wanted to. Tasty, though.

Tuesday I weighed in at 131.6. Went to the gym, blah blah blah, ate okay, blah blah blah.

Today I weighed in at 130. I'm also starting to experience those really annoying cravings I was talking about. Why?

Is it because of the stress? That could be.
Is it because I am pre-menstrual? Very well could be.
Is it because I'm in the middle of week 4 and I'm a weenie-head when it comes to willpower? Erm, most likely, yes.

It's going to be a long day.

Speaking of long, we watched A Bridge Too Far, a war movie about the ill-fated invasion of Holland in 1944. Quickly, the Allied commanders wanted to figure out a way to end the war before Christmas to they dropped just about everything airborne qualified into Nazi-occupied Holland along this one road that included a bunch of bridges. Each Airborne division was supposed to capture and protect a specific set of bridges. The British had to try to capture and hold the furthest bridge, in Arnhem, which lead over the Rhine. To make a long story short, the British dropped 10,000 and only 2000 came back. The rest were killed or captured.

The movie was pretty tough on the English; I was surprised that Richard Attenborough directed it. For most of its three-hour length I was captivated but it kind of dragged at the end. Interesting cast, including the Usual Suspects: Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Dirk Bogarde, Maximillian Schell, Lawrence Master! Thespian! Olivier, Elliot Gould, James Caan, Sean Connery, etc etc etc.

I was impressed with the special effects; the drop scenes intrigued me - did they get a bunch of airborne troops to actually drop or was some sort of effect used? Pre-CGI movies can be so cool. I thought it was plotted well enough to be able to tell what was happening and to whom. I'd rank this with The Great Escape as the best war movie I've seen lately.

I also saw the first 10 minutes of Dawn of the Dead, the remake. USA was kind enough to show it during Final Destination which I didn't bother to watch.

There's a lot of word wars going on about DoD and its remake; I was not interested about any remake of perhaps the finest flesh-eating zombie movie in existence. I keep hearing decent to good things about the remake, however; and the first 10 minutes I saw pretty much sealed my decision to go see it.

The new version's scriptwriter changed some rules (was he influenced by 28 Days Later..? I don't care). The zombies, at least the freshly animated ones, are fast. They also reanimate not too soon after death. Some people bitched about the changes, I think they're neat. The first 10 minutes introduces us to a nurse who goes home one evening to her husband and wakes up to a really messed-up world. First a reanimated next-door-neighbor's kid shows up in their house and takes a chunk out of her husband's neck. He bleeds to death while the nurse desperately tries to get through to 911 services. He pops up maybe a minute after biting it and tries to bite her. She manages to escape outside and gets in her car and sees all kinds of messed up crap going on outside.

I had that delighted* sense of dread and terror I only get with certain horror movies, so I have high hopes for the rest of the film. Oh! I also had a nightmare about it last night. Too cool. I never get nightmares from movies except those about flesh-eating zombies.

*As opposed to that suck-assed sense of dread and terror that happens when you are about to be in a car accident or a really big crazy guy starts picking on you or you throw out your pilot chute and nothing happens or the current is too strong for your swimming skills or...