My first instinct as I sat down to write this review was to make some kind of comment about how late it was in coming. But, going back through my review archives, I noticed that an annoyingly high proportion of my reviews start that way, and reading them one after another, it just sounds whiny and self-indulgent.

This review is starting off much better, I'm sure.

I think I first heard about Crazy Heart in the lead-up to the Golden Globes, when everyone was talking about Jeff Bridges' chances at winning Best Actor. Of course that piqued my interest, since Bridges is one of my favorite living actors. Then he won the Golden Globe, and then the Oscar, and I put it on my Netflix "saved" list and more or less gave up on seeing it in the theater.

It turned out, though, that it was still playing at the independent theater down the street from my parents' house when we went out there to visit them, and Juliette and I were happy enough to take my mom's offer of babysitting. We actually considered just staying in and going to bed early, but my mom was so eager to spend time with Jason and so insistent that we enjoy ourselves that she practically shoved us out the door. I'm glad she did, though. (Thanks, mom.)

Most of what I'd heard and read about Crazy Heart said it was an adequate but not terribly impressive film that was turned into something more by the strength of Bridges' exquisite performance. But I think that it really had two pillars holding it up—not just Jeff Bridges, but also the music.

There was a time in my life that I described my musical tastes as "everything but country and rap." Since then, though, I've found something to connect with in both genres. I'm still not much for the sort of country-pop that seems to be in vogue these days, but some older stuff—Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, George Strait—does resonate. The music in Crazy Heart hearkens back to those earlier styles of country music, I think, and works well largely because the songs really mean something in the context of the narrative. It also doesn't hurt that Jeff Bridges is a surprisingly good singer.

Of course, I can't write a review of this movie without talking about the performances, especially Jeff Bridges'. And he was brilliant. But that's not much of a surprise—in my opinion, Bridges is one of the most consistent actors currently working. Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall were both also excellent, and Colin Farrell was also surprisingly good.

Still, for all the talk this movie got and continues to get for its performances, what's really stuck with me has been the music. Juliette commented on the way out that she wanted to start listening to country now. I think it very well may come to pass.

Viewed: 2010-03-31 | Released: 2009-12-16 | Score: A-

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Jason managed to drown Juliette's phone this past weekend, but fortunately she was due for an upgrade anyway. One feature of the new phone that she's been enjoying is the ability to record video:

To commemorate the last day of her spring break, we decided to take a trip to the zoo. We have a membership there, which is nice because it means we can just pop in for an hour or two and spend a longer time at just a few exhibits, rather than rushing to try to see the whole park. In any case, we had a good time:

Juliette and I have a nice little system for figuring out our nightly chores. When Juliette cooks, I do the dishes. When I cook, I do the dishes. It works out perfectly because Juliette gets some time to relax in the evening and I get the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the dishwasher has been loaded properly and the dishes have been cleaned to my standards. There is one thing I hate about doing the dishes, though. I hate the utensil caddy.

You may be thinking, "But Mike, why would you hate your utensil caddy? All it does is sit in your silverware drawer and make sure that your salad forks and dinner forks stay separate. Surely you don't hate your utensil caddy. After all, what could it possibly have done to you to inspire such strong emotion?" I do hate it, though. And I'll tell you why: it's because I'm a crazy person.

I hate that my utensil caddy is made out of widely-spaced wire mesh, because it means that every time I open the silverware drawer, the butter knives slide through the spaces in the mesh grid and stick there. I end up either having to unstick them before taking them out to use them or remembering to open the drawer very slowly every single time. Or deal with bent butter knives. People, this is not a choice I should have to make.

As annoying as that is, it's not such a huge problem. After all, I could just go get a new utensil caddy, one with smaller gaps, or which lacks gaps entirely. (I shouldn't have to do this, but it's still an easy enough solution.) What really drives me up the wall about my utensil caddy is something common to every caddy I've ever seen. It is an inherent design flaw.

Imagine that you have finished washing and drying your dishes, and now must set about putting your utensils back where they belong. If your house is anything like my house, you've probably got two or three forks to put away, maybe four, and perhaps six or eight clean ones already in the drawer. So you drop your nice, freshly cleaned forks back into their neat little caddy spaces and go on about your business.

Some time in the not too distant future, you will need a fork again, of course, so back to the caddy you'll go. And most likely you'll take the fork from the top of the little pile in the fork space. But, people, that is one of the forks that you just put back in there. What about those six or eight forks sitting on the bottom of the pile? Odds are, you won't get down to them at all unless you have company over, which at my house, anyway, happens no more than twice a week and usually a lot less. This means that a small minority of your forks is being used at least 2.5 times more than the rest, and is thus accumulating that much more wear than the rest.

Of course I recognize that you can easily avoid this problem by either always taking the fork from the bottom or by always putting away the clean forks on the bottom of the pile. But that is completely unsatisfying, because either way it means you have to take out all of the forks to get to the spot you want and then put them all back every single time. And that's just unacceptably inefficient.

Look, I already told you that I'm a crazy person.

Like most crazy people, I'd like to blame it on my parents. I know that's kind of a cliché, but in my case I think it's probably true, since this particular sort of crazy seems to run in my family. Trust me, if you've ever seen the look on my aunt's face when someone says that they may have accidentally spilled a drop of spaghetti sauce into the crack between her stove and counter, you'll know that I'm not making this up.

I'm convinced, though, that it's not just me and my mom's family who are crazy like this. Somebody else out there has gotten worked up about stuff just as ridiculous as a utensil caddy. So tell me: what's your bit of crazy?

Juliette, Jason, and I were in Virginia this past week, visiting my mom and stepdad. Now, I could go ahead and tell you all the details of what we did, where we went, and what we ate. (I swear I gained five pounds on this trip.) I'm told, though, that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that this one nicely sums up the whole experience:

What I love about this photo is the unbridled joy on Jason's face. It's a sight that I got to see a lot over the past week, which was a wonderful thing. But as I look at it now, I can't help but feel a little sad as well.

I had been a bit anxious leading up to this trip about how Jason would react to his grandparents. After all, he'd only met my mom a few times, and my stepdad only once, when he was just a few weeks old. Of course, he's a pretty outgoing little guy and very adaptible, and Juliette and I would be there to give him an anchor, but still, we were going to be in a strange place, seeing people that he mostly didn't know. I wondered what I'd do if he couldn't sleep at their house, or if he decided he didn't like being there, never really coming up with any answers.

It turns out I needn't have worried. Jason took to my parents and their house right away. He fussed, of course, but mostly because we wouldn't let him climb up and down the stairs as much as he wanted. By the third night, he was asking for "Gamma" to read him his bedtime story, something he normally wants Juliette to do. And on the plane ride home, he repeated over and over, "Gappa, Ay-go. Gappa, Ay-go." (For those of you who don't speak toddler, that's "Grandpa, San Diego.")

And that gets to the reason for my present bittersweet feelings. It's always nice to come home and to resume the familiar routines of my life. I know that Jason will respond well to being back on his regular schedule. But it broke my heart a little to hear Juliette trying to explain to him that, no, Grandma and Grandpa live in Virginia, not San Diego. He never seemed to quite grasp the idea that they'd be far away, but I'm not sure whether that makes it better or worse. Jason is, like all small children, a creature of the moment, and things don't have to be out of sight for long for him to be onto the next.

This is something I've struggled with a lot over the past couple of years. San Diego is where our life is now. Our careers and wonderful friends are here, and we've begun to put down some real roots. But the closest of Jason's grandparents, aunts, and uncles lives 450 miles away—the ones we just left are on the other side of the country. It's important to me that he have a relationship with his family, but with everyone so far away, it's hard to see how that can happen, at least not in the same way that I had when I was young. Juliette keeps reassuring me that the distance might make things different, but not necessarily worse—after all, she grew up 3000 miles away from her grandparents and still managed to have a very close relationship with them. I still can't help but feel sad, not so much for Jason, but for the rest of the family for not being able to see him as often as we'd like. In the end, he'll hardly remember this part of his life, if at all, and what will stay with him will be times that come later. But I know that now is a time that will always be special in my memories, and I'm sorry that so many of the people that are important to me won't get the same time with him as I do.

While I was visiting, I helped my mom pick out and set up a new computer, and got her a Skype account while I was at it. I'm hoping that regular video chat sessions will help keep Gamma and Gappa fresh in Jason's mind. It's not the same as a trip to see them, but it's what I can do for now. My question for you is this: if you've raised kids far from your family, or if you grew up far from your parents' families, how did you deal with it? Were you able to overcome the distance?

I hope to hear from you.

It's almost 1 AM, I'm flying tomorrow, and my laptop has just about run out of batteries, but I've been a total slacker about writing since I've been on vacation and I know you are all dying for an update. I'll give a real update on Wednesday, but until then, here are some photos to tide you over:

Click through to see the rest of the March and April galleries. See you Wednesday!

Juliette has been out of town for the last few days, which meant that Jason and I got to spend the weekend together by ourselves. Mainly in order to keep Jason occupied (and therefore not cranky), we went out a lot.

We went to the carwash:

And the park:

And the La Jolla Cove:

And even the zoo:

A good time was had by all.

The rest of this week's set:

Here I'd like to take a moment and prove that, like the Temptations, I ain't too proud to beg. I know that I don't have a whole lot of readers, but I hope that those of you who do stop by enjoy what I do here. If you do, please consider doing me a small favor. I've included some handy buttons at the bottom of every post that make it easy for you to share any post via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, or Digg, so if you like what you're reading and think other people might, too, why not spread the word? It's easy and just takes a few seconds of your time.

If you love the site and want to help support it, and if you have a few extra bucks that you don't know what to do with and are really burning a hole in your pocket, consider donating via the link in the sidebar. Any amount—50 cents, a buck, five bucks—will be greatly appreciated and will help support my writing and photography, the forum, as well as future projects.

Of course, if you're just kind of so-so about Sakeriver or don't feel like helping out, that's cool too. I'm just glad that you're here at all.

This is the conversation Jason and I had just now, coming back from lunch:

Me: "Boo!"

Jason: "No!"

M: "No?"

J: "No."

M: "Yes."

J: "No!"

M: "Yes!"

J: "Nnnnnnnno!"

M: "Yyyyyes!"

[This continues for another 4 minutes or so.]

J: "No!"

M: "Yes."

J: "NNNNN..."

M: "Yes."

J: "...NNNNNNN..."

M: "Yes."

J: "...NNOOOOOOO!"

M: "Yes."

J: "Hot dog."

The other day it came up in a conversation Juliette and I were having that when I was a kid I would sometimes hollow out dill pickles and drink soda out of them. Usually Vernor's, if memory serves. You might be wondering what sort of conversation we were having that this would be a relevant bit of information to add. Unfortunately, I don't remember. And, of course, the larger and more obvious question would be, "Why did I do that?"

Now, I could try to explain it in a way that made sense, something about the flavors or convenience or something, but we both know that that would be a load of horse puckey. Really, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. For whatever reason, I really liked pickles when I was a kid. And I liked drinking soda. And when I visited my dad's house, he always had plenty of both. I was probably eating a pickle one Saturday afternoon and noticed that I could eat some of the seeds out of the middle of the pickle without breaking the surrounding skin, making a cup-like shape, and from there it probably just didn't seem like much of a leap to see if I could hollow out the whole pickle, and then see if it would hold liquids. It's probably the same sort of impulse that led me to try biting the ends off of a Red Vine and using it as a straw. Or maybe not—I know a lot more people that did the Red Vine straw thing than the pickle soda cup thing. (I suppose it was really more like a pickle shot glass, but this is a silly enough story as it is.)

OK, yes, I did a lot of weird things when I was a kid. But what I think is so great about little stories like this are that everybody has at least one. Everybody can remember themselves or their younger siblings or their friends doing stuff just as weird as drinking ginger ale out of a hollowed-out pickle. Probably weirder. And there's something wonderful about that universality, something that makes me feel a little closer to someone when I hear about their childhood quirks. Or even their present-day quirks, really. I think we could all use a little more of that, or at least a good chuckle.

So, tell me: what's your story?

Jason has always loved bath time. He loves to splash and swish the water around with his feet and arms. He loves to play with his bath toys. He loves blowing bubbles and putting the washcloth on his head, then letting it slide off down his back or over his face.  And, unfortunately, he loves to drink his bath water.

The trouble is that Jason loves water. I mean, it's great that he loves water, but it has proven more or less impossible thus far to teach him the difference between drinking water and bath water. (Or pool water, or any other type of water, for that matter. It's a lucky thing that he knows he's not allowed to touch the toilets or we might be in real trouble.) And there are just so many things in the tub that he can use to carry the water to his lips. There's an actual cup, which we use to pour water over him when he needs rinsing, but he actually doesn't go for that one much. He drinks out of his hermit crab toy, his linker toys, and his rubber duckies. He even tries to suck the water out of the washcloth. Sometimes he just puts his face down and tries to drink straight from the tub, a feat that he's managing with greater and greater frequency to accomplish without subsequent spluttering and coughing. I'm sure that if he had a fox or a box in there, he'd drink with them, too.

Keeping him from his tasty treat requires constant vigilance on my part. I can't look away for more than a second without him going for it. I'm pretty sure it's become something of a game for him at this point, seeing if he can sneak a sip in when I'm not expecting it. So on any given night at bath time, you'd hear something like this coming from our hall bathroom:

"What is that, Jason? That's right, that's a ducky. Don't drink it. Yes, and those are keys. Can you point to the A, Jason? Good job! Don't drink it. Blech. OK, splashy splashy. Yes. Where's the B? Can you give the B to Daddy? Give the B to Daddy. Don't drink it. Can I have the B, Jason? Where's the B? Good job! Don't drink it. Are you going to blow bubbles now? Good bubbles, Jason! Don't drink it. No, we can watch Elmo tomorrow. Don't drink it. Sit down, please. Thank you. OK, time to get out. Don't drink it."

Even so, and even though I have to get down on my knees to scrub him, and even though it makes my back ache, I like bath time, too. It's one of the only times of the day when Jason is consistently in a good mood, and it's just adorable the way he smiles. Of course I'd like for him to be able to clean himself one of these days, but I know I'm going to miss this when it's over.

"I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time."

That's the first sentence of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's novel The Shadow of the Wind. It calls to mind the opening line of Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece 100 Years of Solitude in the way it manages to be simultaneously simple and yet powerfully evocative of a huge story yet to come. The name "Cemetary of Forgotten Books," of course, immediately brings to mind Jorge Luis Borges. And the spooky undercurrent, the hint of intrigue, can't help but make you think of Umberto Eco. If that one sentence isn't enough to hook you, well, I'm not sure that reading my reviews will be particularly useful to you. It was all it took for me to become totally enraptured by this book.

Following that first sentence, the narrator—young Daniel Sempere, the son of a Barcelona bookseller—finds and is enthralled by a book that few others have heard of, the eponym of the Ruiz Zafón's novel. In fact, Daniel finds that he may have the last copy of any of the author's works, as someone has been determinedly finding and destroying every copy of everything the author—Julian Carax—ever wrote. The story of the book and its author is steadily revealed, layer by layer, and the more Daniel discovers, the more drawn into the events leading up to the disappearance of the other books and Carax, himself.

There's so much to love about this book. To begin with, the writing is just a joy. I'm not kidding when I compare Ruiz Zafón to Borges and Eco and García Márquez—some of my favorite authors. In style, in plot, in the wonderful depiction of the setting—Barcelona in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War—Ruiz Zafón belongs in the same pantheon as those men. The story becomes, at times, so grandly convoluted and so full of passions and revenge and tragedy that in the hands of a lesser writer, it would have been completely over the top. Yet Ruiz Zafón manages, through a combination of exquisite language and precise control over the layers of plot and how they're revealed, to craft a simply marvelous story.

Of course, what I loved most about The Shadow of the Wind were the parts between all the rushing around and tragically doomed love and madness. The parts about Daniel. I've mentioned before what a sucker I am for bildungsroman, and certainly I related to Daniel's journey into manhood. But it's in the quieter moments of the novel that I found something really great. The tenderness of Daniel's father and all he does for his son—and, of course, how little the teenaged narrator appreciates it at the time, and the regret Daniel later feels about that. The friendship between Daniel and the vagrant he takes in, Fermín Romero de Torres. The strain that develops between he and his childhood friend, Tomás. There's a delicacy and a deep understanding of youth and growth and relationships underpinning everything that resonated with me in a way I haven't felt from a book in some time. Between that and the excitement of the main plot, it's no wonder that I ended up staying up until 3 in the morning to finish the last half of the book in one sitting.

I'm not sure what more I can say about The Shadow of the Wind without sounding hyperbolic—in fact, I may have already crossed that line. But if I must sum it up somehow, let me put it this way: this is the best novel I've read in years.

Started: 2010-03-08 | Finished: 2010-03-12

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