This week's melancholy moment (courtesy Denis Leary):

Life's gonna suck when you grow up, when you grow up, when you grow up.
Life's gonna suck when you grow up, it sucks pretty bad right now.

You're gonna have to mow the lawn, do the dishes, make your bed.
You're gonna have to go to school until you're seventeen.

You might have to go to war, shoot a gun, kill a nun.
You might have to go to war when you get outta school!

You're gonna have to deal with stress, deal with stress, deal with stress.
You're gonna be a giant mess when you get back from the war.

Life's gonna suck when you grow up, when you grow up, when you grow up.
Life's gonna suck when you grow up, it sucks pretty bad right now!

You're gonna wind up smoking crack, on your back, face the fact.
You're gonna wind up hooked on smack, and then you're gonna die!

Jon and I are trying to get the pool ready for swimming. We are painfully learning the Way of Pool Maintenence. First off you have to dump in a buttload of chlorine, which is called "shocking the pool". I'm sure all the little organisms who lived in the pool were quite shocked when we dumped that stuff in. So shocked, they all had heart attacks and died and are now building up sediment layers on the bottom.

Also on the bottom are all the leaves that collected over the winter. We have a special little gadget that sweeps and collects them off the bottom; we also have another special gadget that vacuums up the dead algae, dirt and whatnot that has collected as well. You try vacuuming a pool. It's a pain in the butt. We priced out some of those little robot gadgets that continuously do it; at first we decided $600 wasn't worth it but now I'm thinking that's a bargain.

I also learned how to prime the pool pump, turn it on and off and purge it (that gets rid of all the crap that gets caught in the sand filter).

Then you have to skim off all the floating leaves and insects. Holy cow, the insects! What do I expect from Alabama? I'm sure this Summer will be more fun. I hope I won't have to fish out dead frogs and snakes but I bet I will. Most of the time the pool's filtration system grabs the unlucky creepy crawlies but still I'm not jumping in the damn pool if a 4" dead spider is randomly drifting around the area. I have my limits.

I'm hoping we'll have it clean enough this afternoon so I can float around w/ a beer and a paperback for a while. Bet it will rain.

Last night's stupid movie was S*W*A*T. I remember that series from when I was a kid but the movie had nothing to do with the show except the names of some of the characters. Unlike all of the stupid movies I have been watching recently, this one finally broke my Golden Rule of Movies: Just Don't Bore Me!

What a waste of a perfectly decent cast. I like Samuel L. Jackson, L.L. Cool J and Colin Farrell (he's cute, but does nothing for me. He can act. And he has a pretty good American accent). I put it on my Netflix queue mainly for Michelle Rodriguez but she's wasted here. Hell, she played pretty much the exact same character in Resident Evil (Tough Hispanic Chick in a paramilitary unit) but had 5 times more to do in that movie! Dammit, if she's going to get typecast into the Tough Chick role, at least let her hit someone. Sheesh.

The bad guy was a French mobster. I think. He spoke French. I guess they are bad guys du jour. God forbid we have Arab terrorist bad guys (they don't exist, of course). But the French are good targets. I'm really surprised he wasn't a French Nazi Mobster. I guess there were too many African Americans in the cast to have any of the antagonists display any racism (actually a nice change of pace), so they had to have them display sexism ( a *girl* on a SWAT team! Horrors!). So what does she do? She gets herself shot.

Anyway, the real problem with the movie was that Action movies are supposed to have Action. Right? Bad director! No cookie!