Madame Wylie was gracious enough to cut our hair today… Music got her hair straightened, and looks perdy! I just got a trim, but it could be said that I’m perdy too. Trying to upload photos without much luck. More later. 
Last night, Mike and I watched “Grizzly Man,” a movie about Tim Treadwell, a man who dedicated his life to “protecting” grizzly bears on the Alaskan Peninsula. Treadwell took video cameras with him each summer to film the bears and his interactions with them. After 13 years with the bears, Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed, savagely mauled by a bear while the audio ran on one of his cameras.
The movie was very well done and showed both sides: those who think Treadwell was a hero and those who question to wisdom of his decision to interact in such a way with these wild animals. Clips from friends, family, colleagues, and those who learned of Treadwell only after his death (such as the coroner) allow the story to take shape.
After watching the film, I was left with the impresion that Treadwell was an egomanic full or paranoid delusions ungrounded in reality. In many of the clips included in the movie, Treadwell is waxing poetic about how he “beat” the U.S. Park Service, about how he “saves” the bears from poachers (though experts say there are few, if any, in the area), about how dangerous the work he does is, and how singularly amazing he is for doing that work. He coos constantly at the bears about how much he loves them, and is shown in constant physical contact with them. I can’t help but think that socializing the animals- domesticating them, in some sense- isn’t good for their long-term existence. So was he really saving the bears? Was he really protecting them? Did Treadwell, as some claim, deserve to die such a horrible, painful death?
Who knows, I guess.
I’ve added the pictures from our trip to LA over President’s Day weekend.
They’re in the gallery.
Enjoy!
Is it possible that a guy who knows so little about PHP and SQL can create a website such as this from scratch? Apparently it is. It looks rather generically wordpress right now, but I hope to jazz it up a tad, perhaps add some photos, and change the colors.
Music finally gave up on me and went to bed. She’d been laying on the couch snoozing since 10 or so. Apparently her friend Evan (of Disney fame) went to the Los Lobos show tonight and wants to crash on our couch. Music is thawing bacon for breakfast, and I’m tending the laundry.
As a new blog, you’re picking up on things from the middle. While the blog DID just start, my life didn’t, so you’re going to have to either assume what led to this point on the following stories, or ask.
The bathroom cabinet refinishing project is going well. Music has been especially tolerant in my sudden decision to strip all of the paint off of our ragged bathroom cabinet (which was probably constucted in the 20’s — can you imagine how many layers of paint there were?) and stain and poly over it. It’s stripped and rough sanded, just needs fine sanded and stained (tomorrow), and polyurethaned (on Sunday), so we’ll be able to stop using the kitchen table as a bathroom counter by Monday morning.
The down side is that buying a gallon of stripper has piqued my curiosity on what else around the house would look good sans paint. I’m making little quarter sized holes on various doors and trim, peering through generations of ugly colors to see what lies below them. It does make me nostalgic in a way, seeing what the design sense of other bachelors was like. But mostly it’s just a pain in my ass.