In fact, as if to underscore how intentionally mid I expected it to be, I actually made a dentist appointment for yesterday morning. While we were in Europe, I lost a filling the dentist had given me previous December, designed to prevent so much food from getting lodged in the space where a tooth had broken away. When that filling broke out, it returned me to where I'd been the year before, going through several toothpicks a day. I finally got around to making the appointment on Friday, and I hadn't realized that "Monday" was also my birthday until she repeated the date back to me. I had the opportunity to set the appointment for a different day, but I just shrugged and kept it.
Oh and let's not forget where I was on my last two birthdays. Two years ago, I was in Sydney on a surprise trip to celebrate my 50th. And last year I was in Singapore. So, a low-level birthday was several years in the making.
But one remarkable thing did happen yesterday: I'm back in the projector game in our garage.
Yes that's right, my wife got me a new projector screen that can be assembled on collapsible poles, meaning not only can it provide a viewing surface in our garage, it can be taken on trips and the like if need be. (Road trips, I'm thinking. It wouldn't make sense to take my projector on the plane.)
Our garage has been through various incarnations of various junk pushed up against various walls, and it hasn't felt like the right space to watch anything for some time now. The wall that used to be clear for projecting -- clear, other than the grooves between the white-painted cinder blocks, which you stop noticing after about a minute -- but in the last year it has had other responsibilities. You can clear out a spot, but it's work, and then you have to find a spot for the stuff you've cleared out. The last time we used the projector in the garage, just about exactly six months ago, we oriented things entirely differently and hung a sheet from the ceiling, with the couch in the middle of the room instead of against the wall. That was meant just for that one weekend and was not sustainable.
But with my birthday present, I may have entered into a new era of projecting frequency and versatility.
Since the screen can go anywhere in the garage, that means I can set up anywhere, and even if it temporarily scrambles the direction of the furniture, it isn't such a difficult thing to put it back. It's not an insurmountable problem even on a random evening when I decide I want to watch a movie this way.
The more difficult problem is, I would say, the positioning of the projector. In order to get it the ideal distance from the screen, so the image is small enough to fit within the screen's parameters, you have to place it obtrusively in the middle of where everyone would like to sit. I'm pretty sure there's a solution for this, and now I just need to make it my business to find out what it is.
Anyway, the kids were -- or at least one kid was -- excited about it, as was the giver of the gift, as was the receiver of the gift, so we went to work assembling it quickly so we could all watch something brief together, and I could watch a proper movie myself, at least to give my birthday a bit better of a send-off. (Why it needed that better send-off: My older son's basketball team also lost their game by one point, blowing their lead with less than a minute remaining, and he didn't play well. Because of the need to get to that game on time, and because of the slow service at the Mexican restaurant, we had to rush out of my birthday dinner before our food could be delivered, and take it in takeaway containers. My son didn't end up eating his until after the game. Yep, it was one challenge after another.)
At first my wife was concerned about what she called the "Made in China" aspects of the projector screen. She had no problem acknowledging that this was not the most expensive one she could have bought, and I wouldn't have had it any other way, given the money we've already spent in the past two months. And it looked like there'd be some challenges reaching both poles with the velcro loops, without which we couldn't pull it taut.
But after we lay it on the ground and took a second run at setting everything up properly, it did come together quite nicely, and then I went to work positioning the projector for optimal viewing.
And finally that meant getting to watch the first ten minutes of my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona.
You may recall from this post and this post that I have been watching Raising Arizona at approximately four-year intervals, accidentally for a while and then sort of purposefully the last time. My most recent viewing was only the start of last year, so that means it wouldn't have been due up again until early 2028. But it seems likely that timeline will be accelerated.
It started with the fact that my 11-year-old drew H.I. McDunnough on my birthday card. Seriously! Don't believe me? Here he is:
Don't you just love it?
By the way, the inclusion of the Flash has to do with the fact that my son is watching the Flash TV show and finds it vastly superior to what he's seen of the movie, which is basically just the way the Flash runs, which they make fun of online. It's something about his arm movements of holding out two fingers and sweeping away from his face downward. Anyway, it became an inside joke for us in Europe.
When the new projector screen came out a few minutes after this card, Raising Arizona was fully on the brain, and I thought the 11-minute pre-credits prologue would make a perfect amuse bouche to a full-length viewing, which the 11-year-old has been saying recently he would like to do. He'd have liked to do it yesterday, in fact, but we were getting started around 9:30, so it just wasn't practical.
The reactions were generous by my wife, who of course has seen the movie multiple times and also appreciates it (though not like I do), and the 11-year-old. The 15-year-old sat in stony silence, but I wouldn't have expected anything different. She laughed several times and the 11-year-old laughed a couple times too, though that could have been merely because of his overdeveloped sense of empathy. He knew I hadn't been having an awesome birthday, and if a few courtesy laughs at my favorite movie would help improve that, he was more than willing to give them. Good egg.
I suppose the test will be to see how quickly he requests a complete viewing. That'll tell me whether he really liked what he saw or was just being polite.
So my next Raising Arizona viewing may not, indeed, come until 2028, when I'm ready for it again. Or it may come this weekend.
And if it comes this weekend, I know I'll have a pretty great new projector setup on which to watch it.
As for the movie I did actually watch, it was Opus, which I told you earlier this month I didn't want to watch on the plane because I'd been saving it for a more optimal viewing environment. In fact, given that I also watched the last 30 minutes of the Netflix movie Steve earlier that afternoon, I almost called this post "A birthday of naming Bloom County characters." Yes, Opus and Steve Dallas are both in the comic strip Bloom County, which I read obsessively around the age my younger son is now. Here they are:
I haven't yet fully processed my feelings on Opus, and I think I need to go back to the Wikipedia plot synopsis to review a couple details. But let's just say I went from liking it a lot to not liking it nearly as much, to not being sure if I actually liked it. I'll give this one some more thought.
But watching a whole movie on my new projector screen reminded me of great times past and previewed great times ahead, so that was nice.
Hey, we movie people, we like our screens, the bigger the better.
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