Feeding Your Soul

You decide to take a trip to a far off destination. Let’s say Venice, Italy. You meet a strange and exotic woman on the train from Paris and you immediately become attached to her. You say goodbye to her on the train and expect to never see her again, a chance encounter. When you step off the train, you are surprised to hear the mysterious woman calling your name to join her on her boat to the island and hotel.   You think nothing of it and decide to go because there is something about this woman that you can’t put your finger on but you want to learn more.   From there, all hell breaks loose with bullets flying at you, boat chases in the canal and getting arrested and sold to a Russian who you have never met before. And it all started with one woman.   So sets the scene of Johnny Depp as The Tourist and Angelina Jolie as the mysterious woman whom Depp cannot get away from, even if he wanted to. Depp stares as a math teacher from the states on vacation to Venice by himse...

I thought I would take this time to reflect on my New Year’s Resolutions that I made 5 ½ months ago and see how far I have come. And to make sure I am keeping on track. To remind everyone (and myself) below are my 7 resolutions: 1.    Try and eat at home 5 days a week 2.    Cardio at least 3 times a week for 30 minutes or more 3.    Eat some type of salad at least 3 days a week (can be a salad for lunch, dinner or side salad with dinner) 4.    Limit alcoholic beverages during the week. 5.    Read at least 26 books (1 every 2 weeks) 6.    Blog at least once a week 7.    Keep writing my stories. #1 – Eating at Home.   Over the past 5 ½ months I would say I have done about an 85% on my resolutions. I know that I have not eaten at home 5 days a week every week and that is something that has haltered my weight loss considerably. However, when I do go out I don’t get my usual carbs. I try to go for chicken or...

 Truth, lies, love, loss, words and judgment. Those are just a few things that Isabel Dalhousie ponders and struggles to understand throughout the 5 th book in the Isabel Dalhousie series by Alexander McCall Smith.   The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday follows Isabel through her relationship with her much younger boyfriend Jamie, their son Charlie, her niece Cat and the newest moral and philosophical dilemma of her life – trying to figure out if a well-renowned doctor was really at fault for a patient’s death in his clinical trial. It might not seem that much of a dilemma to the average reader but to the reader who has followed Isabel from the first book, The Sunday Philosophy Club , it is one that she feels morally obligated to be involved in simply because she was asked. Isabel Dalhousie is a 40-something philosopher, editor of the Review for Applied Ethics journal, mother, girlfriend, aunt and as some say, meddler. She loves to be involved in things that have absolutely nothing...

Finding a strong female lead for any movie is tough. Finding a strong female lead for an edge-of-your-seat action movie is even tougher. But the executives in charge of Salt found that in Angelina Jolie.   In a movie originally written for Tom Cruise, the producers had Jolie read and decided to change the entire story around to focus on a female CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy.   One great characteristic of Jolie is that she is versatile – she can change roles, characters, anything in a heartbeat and make you believe that this is who she really is. That is a trait of a great actor. In Salt , Jolie jumps between the vulnerable Evelyn Salt, to the mysterious Evelyn Salt back to the vulnerable Evelyn Salt all in one scene. The audience has no idea which way is up or down. They are taken on a roller coaster ride of adrenaline and better yet, emotion with Evelyn Salt that you begin to feel for her no matter what situation she somehow gets involved in. To catch up those w...

FYI: This blog contains spoilers. You have been warned. The Good Guy. That phrase has been around for quite some time and when one hears it, they might think of the perfect boy next store – cute, well dressed, well spoken and doesn’t get into a lot of bad situations. So with this movie starring Alexis Bledel and Bryan Greenberg, the question becomes who is the good guy: Tommy or Daniel? The way this movie started was interesting. It started with a scene in the present, Tommy going up to his ex-girlfriend Beth’s apartment asking for help and we feel bad for Tommy and make Beth out to be the bad person in this movie. Then, the movie does a flashback 3 months to when the real story begins: Daniel comes into play at Tommy’s work as a wannabe stockbroker and they form a friendship. And the movie goes back and forth between the good guy being Tommy or Daniel. You don’t know until the end. Alexis Bledel plays this role all the time (example Gilmore Girls) so she wasn’t anything special in...

It took me over a year to decide that I did want to watch this movie. And I am glad I did. This isn’t your normal, Disney animated Alice in Wonderland. This is Tim Burton’s version of Alice and her travels down the rabbit hole and his version and imagination is a little scary at times. The movie starts with a flashback to when she was a little girl and her father was trying to convince people of a fantastical idea. She had a bad dream and her father comes to her room to comfort her. She says she saw a purple cat, a hatter, and a white rabbit with a clock. Her father tells her it was just a dream and she goes to bed.   The movie then jumps 13 years into the future. Alice is in a garden for a party that secretly (at least to Alice) is an engagement party because a lord is about to ask Alice to marry him.   Everyone is excited for Alice, telling her so, but the frown and unhappiness on Alice’s face is the exact opposite. She doesn’t know what to think and everyone is telling her...

It has been a very busy month for this blogger, hence why I haven't had any new postings for over a month. Well, that is all about to change. I need to get back into the swing of things and what better way to do it than an update Entertainment blog. So let's get started. Books - I still have 20 books to read by the end of the year. According to Goodreads.com, I am 1 book behind so I need to start reading more books. The last book I tried to read was The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie.  I got to page 145 after 4 weeks and decided this was not a book for me. I kept trying to give it the benefit of the doubt but just when the story would get good, the characters would get some screen time, Hardie would rush right back to historical fiction information and lots of description that most of the time I had no idea why she was putting that information in there. It felt as if Hardie was tryiing to put a story in the middle of her research on 15th/16th century England.  I kept expe...