Kung Fu Panda

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Lois and I had a slightly unusual, but completely lovely weekend.

On Friday, our goddaughter and fiance drove a Budget rental truck up from Richmond, VA with a bunch of their stuff. They are moving to NYC after their honeymoon (putting them in NYC in three weeks!). We helped them move their stuff in and then had dinner with them on Friday night.

On Saturday, they worked (like crazy people) for roughly 13 hours in their new apartment. We had a very late lunch, or very early dinner (you pick) when they were ready for a break.

On Sunday morning, we all left for VA very early. For us, it was part of our normal trip down to Zope (except that this trip will end with their wedding, hardly normal). For them, they rented the Budget truck one-way only, so we were giving them a lift back to VA.

All well and good, except that we had previously arranged to visit our friends in Leesburg, VA on the way down (I’ve written about them a number of times), including taking a bunch of boys to see Kung Fu Panda. Our NYC guests agreed to join us for the festivities.

We got to Leesburg right on time (in fact, we beat our friends to the restaurant). We had our typically great Chinese Buffet (11 of us). Then we gave the parents a break and took five boys (ages 7-10) to see the movie.

For a movie that’s been in theaters for two weeks, I was quite surprised that it was as crowded as it was. The seven of us (Lois, me and the boys) sat in the third row (usually, that’s too close up for Lois, but it wasn’t all that bad this time around, perhaps because it’s an animated movie). I don’t know where our goddaughter and fiance sat.

OK, since the title of this post is the name of the movie, I may as well say something about it. I really liked it, thoroughly, start to finish! It’s a cute story, with hearty laughs throughout, reasonably cool martial arts stuff, and lovable characters. Even the silly stuff (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon type stuff) is easier to swallow in an animated version, no? Yes. 🙂

Mixed in with all of the action and laughs are a bunch of proverbs and general Zen-like philosophy. I don’t know if it appeals to the kids, or if they even realize that wisdom is being imparted, but both Lois and I liked it. Here’s one particular one that we have both repeated a number of times since yesterday. Additionally, we both feel we’ve heard it before, but clearly, didn’t keep it top of mind so were glad to hear it again:

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow’s a mystery.

Today is a gift.

That’s why they call it The Present!

Lovely!

Anyway, if you have kids, take them to see the movie, you will enjoy it as well. If you don’t have kids, sit near a group of them, so that you don’t look like you just like cartoons. 😉

After the movie we drove to Fredericksburg and met out friends (our goddaughter’s parents) at our hotel. We all had a lovely dinner together, and they took posession of the soon-to-be newlyweds and drove them back to Richmond.

We did our usual Walmart run to stock up for our trip. When we returned to the room, Lois did an incredible job of unpacking and organizing while I relaxed and watched some TV. That lasted an hour, and then a wild storm in Fredericksburg knocked out all of the electricity to the hotel (at roughly 8:43pm). The generator got the lights back on for about 30 seconds before it failed completely.

There we were, in the dark, watching a cool lightning storm outside the window. After about 25 minutes, with nothing else to do, we went to bed (we were wildly exhausted anyway), at 9:06pm. We have no idea when the electricity came on, but we were both awake (briefly) at 1:30am, when it was indeed back on. Thankfully, Lois ran around and turned off all of the lightswitches before we went to bed, so that we weren’t woken up.

A number of things made the weekend unusual. One of the more unusual things was for me not to turn my laptop on at all yesterday. Amazingly, my hands didn’t twitch even once (at least not that I noticed). 😉