Mushroom clouds in the Toronto sky, riots in Montreal, weather patterns so schizophrenic and unpredictable that they augur doom. It was not the best weekend to go to the cottage, perhaps, but we did it anyway - a narrow ribbon of time sandwiched between job responsibilities and highway shutdowns. But it was nice, y'know? Waking up not knowing you've slept for ten or more hours without noticing. A chill in the air and a bunch of warm blankets will do that to you.

There's an unofficial maxim in the movie-watcher business: if Harry Knowles hates a flick, it is fucking bad. I mean that guy gives positive reviews to pretty much everything. Well, last night Harry Knowles wrote a scathing indictment of The Clone Wars, and this morning... he pulled it off his site. I suspect conspiracy. There's a good tract of it here, and reading the thing last night - talk of racist Ziro the Hutt, and cutesy Stinky, and how terribile that tweener Jedi girl actually is - cemented my complete unwillingness to engage George W. Lucas on any matters Star Wars-related, ever again. It's an amazement to me that The Phantom Menace didn't dim my SW enthusiasm a jot, but a bad Indiana Jones movie is apparently enough to buy back ten years of disappointment and grief. And I tend to be on the "charitable" side of this argument.

I miss the old days.

Everything's funnelling down toward September now, the boxes are stacked ceiling-high at 3QF, my vacation is booked and the prep for 10 days of TIFF is well underway. I do a lot of rushing about. Scraping twenty minutes to read some Y: The Last Man in the rain. Sometimes though I spend a Sunday night watching dumb sweet Juno with my dear one, and afterwards, there's a bit of singing as we're getting ready for bed. And that's enough to get another week underway with.