Bonding with students over vampires

I've been amazed in the last two weeks how much I can bond with (female) students over the Twilight books. One of our student workers was lamenting about not having a car to drive to the mall for the midnight movie premier. I told her I was happy to drive if I could have some people to go with. So she's found at least one other person who wants to come, and now I don't have to go alone. My husband actually wants to see this movie, but he's not geeky enough to want to go at midnight. I'm in it as much for the cultural experience as anything else, I had such a great time at the last Harry Potter premier. But I did buy my "All Star Vampire Baseball League" shirt which arrived yesterday.

Tintentod & cat update

I am anxiously awaiting the release of Cornelia Funk's latest book, Inkdeath. While she now lives in the U.S., she is originally German and I believe she writes in German. The book is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on October 7, one day after my birthday! When I was looking this up this morning, Wikipedia said the German edition of the book has actually been out for a year already. If it were French, I would order it now, but I think I am too lazy and awful at German (even if I majored in it), to tackle a 500+ page book. I guess I'll just have to be patient and pre-order it at my local indie bookstore. I hope these books become big after the movie comes out, they are so good and I can't find anyone over the age of 12 that has read them. But when I convinced a friend to read Inkheart, she couldn't put it down.

My younger cat spent Friday morning at the vet getting bladder x-rays. He does not have stones, but that makes his urinalysis results a complete enigma. They are now both on antibiotics, special food, and he's on an anti-anxiety medication to help relieve bladder inflammation (and reduce stress). He seems pretty doped-up to me, and that pill must taste awful because he will do just about anything to keep it from going down. He drools all over the place, spits it across the room (I'm not kidding), and foams at the mouth as if he had rabies. He gets so slobbery, his mouth is too slippery for me to pry open. I even tried coating it in peanut butter last night, and he was not fooled.

Books into Movies

As I was following the links to the story on Lovely Bones last night, I saw that they're turning it into a movie next year with big-name actors like Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, and Susan Sarandon. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I am so excited about Inkheart and The Golden Compass, but there are some movies you wish they would keep their hands off of. Particularly those magical ones that really sweep you off your feet. I suppose it will depend on how good of a movie they make. Fried Green Tomatoes, The Green Mile, and To Kill a Mockingbird were excellent. I have loved all of the Jane Austen movies made, and PBS did an incredible job with Jane Eyre last year, even if every Hollywood version of that story was awful. But they slaughtered Snow Falling on Cedars, no good movie of Les Miserables has ever been made, and I heard Prince of Tides didn't do the book justice. I watched part of Like Water for Chocolate and couldn't finish it. I don't think it was necessarily a bad movie, it was just a book that was so magical, you lost the magic when you took the imaginative part out of the experience. I would be happy to see some of my favorite books as movies such as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Daughter of Fortune, as long as they were done well. So why the news of Lovely Bones upsets me... I guess I don't believe they can do the book justice. I hope I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps at least it will make more people read the book, and that would be wonderful.