Here I sit uselessly, unable to get to work because I seem to have lost my keys. Or perhaps my nephews took them or hid them when they were here yesterday; they've had their eyes on my Bubbles keychain for a long time (that's Bubbles of the Powerpuff Girls, not the chimp). And since some phantom has "switched" our long distance service -- to nothing, it seems -- our phone service is disrupted for 5 to 7 days while it's switched back, I can't even call and ask them about it.

Some people might take these things as bad omens for the week ahead, but I'm not that wise. I'll just shrug and wait and write and when the keys turn up under my nose I'll laugh about it. (Hear that keys. Okay, actually I've looked EVERYWHERE and think we'll be going to get new keys made later, but I'll play optimistic.)

We had a busy weekend, so busy we got very little we planned to done. I think this was more a function of overplanning than frittering away. I had to skip my first visit to the local stitch and bitch group because my nephews were hanging around after their first visit to the symphony.

Anyway... we did get to see Kill Bill Vol. 2, and I quite liked it. If Vol. 1 is a Hong Kong action movie, then Vol. 2 is an unabashed, balls out Western. I enjoyed the movie greatly and found it surprisingly sweet, all things considered. The time spent with relatively minor characters was perhaps my favorite part of the movie, since it's so rare for movies to spend any time at all with secondary characters. It's a neat hat trick, the way Tarantino manages to involve you in this story, while still revealing essentially nothing about who the characters are at their core. We learn about them, but only to extents that could be distilled in one word rubrics -- killer, strength, sop. And then the ending suggests that their natures are more expansive, or can be, that these characters can fit more than one side into their personas, even conflicting ones. Oddly touching. I'll be interested to watch the two together and see how they fit together. I think it was probably a very good decision to separate the films, because they have such different points-of-view.

Yes, I'd recommend it. I also recommend you check out the thingy to check out below.

Also, yet another lovely review for THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB from The Boston Globe. Go pre-order and push up that Amazon sales ranking.

worm: "Ode to Billie Joe," Bobby Gentry

thingy/s to check out: "Twin Study," Stacey Richter's story in the new Zoetrope All-Story

namecheck: Karen "All Things Are Within My Grasp" Fowler