Joel’s review of The Big Sick (2017)

Posted on February 14, 2018 by Joel

We watched The Big Sick (2017) starring Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, and Ray Romano through Amazon Prime. I watched the first 20 minutes of it on the plane ride down to Houston in November, but never got around to finishing it. I’m glad, because my wife and I could now watch the entirety together.

It’s an interesting film, and too, it’s loosely auto-biographical — the film is loosely based on the real-life courtship between Nanjiani and Gordon. Kumail Nanjiani is a Pakistan-born comedian and is married to Emily V. Gordon, and they both wrote the screenplay. Kumail plays… Kumail, a Pakistan-born comedian living in Chicago, doing stand-up sets and driving as an Uber driver to make ends meet. His Pakistani parents (wonderfully acted by Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff) want him to get married and get a real career at this point. A hilarious running gag through most of the film is Kumail’s mother inviting available women over to meet Kumail. Despite all this, he meets Emily at one of his shows, and they hit it off. They soon have imperfect relationship, but it works for them. Emily gets sick, and Kumail soon meets her parents, played by Hunter and Romano. Soon enough, you’ve got two people trying to figure out their lives, and pushed and pulled between both sets of parents.

The acting by everyone was great. The story in engaging. You get sad when Emily gets sick. The jokes are good. Definite recommendation.

The Big Sick (2017)

The Big Sick (2017)

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Scout Sunday 2018 at St. David’s Episcopal Church

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Joel

We recently attended church at St. David’s Episcopal Church in nearby Cranbury, as they like to honor local scouts as part of “Scout Sunday.” Our church doesn’t have any scouts, besides Josh and Lily, so we’ve started visiting St. David’s for this. It’s a nice program, lots of folks in attendance, and very nice lunch afterwards in the fellowship hall. We also run into other scout families that we know from Cub and Boy Scouts.

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Lily at the 18th Annual Acolyte Festival of the Diocese of of NJ – Saturday Feb 10 2018

Posted on February 10, 2018 by Joel

Lily spent a day at the 18th Annual Acolyte Festival of the Diocese of of NJ down in Trenton. She’s only 9 (almost 10), but spent a day with other kids and adults in various workshops. She also had members from our church St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, for company.

Weird to think that a 9 year old attended acolyte workshops on a Saturday in Trenton, but she’s a special kid. She had a good time, too!

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Celebrating my Dad’s 76 birthday and wishing life was a little easier

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Joel

My Dad turns 76 this week, so the kids and I took my mother and my father out for dinner at Penang in Lawrenceville (Princeton?) They offer both Malaysian and Thai cuisine, and everything was very good.

I have to be honest and say the family dynamic this past year has been… rough. Let’s be honest that no family is perfect, but you try to make it work. In a perfect world, we’d all be happy, we’d see each other all the time, we’d vacation together, etc. It’s more like a sitcom where there are good days and bad days, good months and bad months. Some days you love your parents, and some days they drive you crazy.

What doesn’t change is that you still love them, and you respect them, especially when you don’t agree with them. As my parents have gotten older, I’ve tried to be more understanding of their situation as aging parents. It’s not easy, but I said I try. They aren’t perfect, but neither am I. My sister and I have often struggled to make them happy, even when it was very difficult for them to see the good things in the world.

In life, all you can do is try. Some days it works. Some days it does not. What can you do? Life is complicated.

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Sometimes you’ve had a really long day

Posted on February 5, 2018 by Joel

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Snowy day

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Joel

We haven’t experienced much snow this season. One heavy snowfall last month that was a good 5-6 inches. Glad the snow thrower started up.

After a recent snowfall, I went to take out the trash, and I thought the house looked nice in the snow.

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Lily and the Spelling Bee

Posted on January 30, 2018 by Joel

On January 30th, Lily competed in a district spelling bee organized by the Hightstown Juniorettes, her first ever spelling bee. She spent the past three weeks studying words, and we were helping her practice. The day of the spelling bee, I took her to one of the local elementary schools for the big evening. There were about 16 kids competing, and Lily did pretty well for multiple rounds. Sadly, “speechless” tripped her up and she was out. She did earn some DQ and Southwest Moe’s coupons, and I hope she also learned that she can do well when she puts her mind to it!

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Ha! Swapped out old hard drive for new SANDISK SSD and it’s so much faster

Posted on January 27, 2018 by Joel

A few weeks ago, we had a random power outage, and it seemed to have corrupted our kitchen PC. Not sure what happened exactly, but the hard drive came down with some serious drive errors. Even with a repair, it was slow and wonky.

Fed up, I rebuilt it with a fresh Windows 10 install, and it was still slow. At one point during boot up, I swear I saw drive consistency error messages. Maybe the drive was irreparably damaged. The kids primarily use it for homework and checking our calendar and tasks, so a non-functioning or slow machine doesn’t work.

I found a SANDISK 240 GB SSD hard drive for about $74 so I ordered it and it arrived late Friday. We don’t store any data locally, so this was an easy migration. I watched a video on how to remove the back off of a Dell Inspiron 24 3000 all-in-one PC, and it took me 20 mins in total from start to finish. Easy peasy.

What took longer was getting the PC to boot from USB. I used it only a few weeks ago, and now it wouldn’t boot. After spending 30 mins, I went back to look at the actual USB flash drive contents, and I was annoyed to find I had the wrong drive. Doh!

I found the right drive, booted up with no issues, and it was smooth sailing. Doctor, the operation was a success.

Now I’m installing software and other updates. Damn, it’s fast. And all this time, I thought the processor sucked. It was just the original clunky Toshiba 5400 RPM drive that came pre-installed.

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My review of The Greatest Showman (2017)

Posted on January 20, 2018 by Joel

This may be an unpopular opinion in my house, but I…. really didn’t care for The Greatest Showman (2017) starring Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Rebecca Ferguson, and Zendaya. The film is a fantasy version of the story of P.T. Barnum, the showman who eventually started a traveling circus. The real life P.T. Barnum was all about taking people with deformities, and showing them off as “oddities.” The fantasy version of P.T. Barnum was about putting on a good show, and hires people with deformities to be his entertainers. And every five minutes, we have a song for the audience to tap their toes to.

I’m sorry — I’m not trying to be a hater, but let’s acknowledge that this is a fantasy, and not at all biographical.  The film starts many years earlier when P.T. Barnum is a poor child working for his father, a tailor. Soon enough, his father dies, and Barnum is living destitute on the streets. Somehow, he pulls his life together, gets sort of rich, marries the wealthy girl of his dreams (Michelle Williams), and they start a few businesses. He later starts his circus, gets very rich — rich enough to buy a ridiculously large mansion in record time. It’s unbelievable.

Eventually, Barnum wants to get more respectable, so he enlists playwright Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron) and famed Swedish singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson.) Blah blah, more songs.

The songs themselves are okay, but I wasn’t a fan of a song every 5 minutes. I also didn’t enjoy the fantasy version of Barnum. I could excuse the glossing over of the past, but the fantastical elements through me off. He goes from poor to rich, to starting his circus, to needing more attention. Sorry, I couldn’t get into this film.

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We bought ourselves a new KitchenAid cooktop

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Joel

First new home improvement for 2018 – a new cooktop.

We started looking late last year, but didn’t find very much that we liked. Even then, it’s a bit of a process:

  1. Go to a home improvement store and find all these options that may or may not fit.
  2. Pay (and schedule) for someone to come out and measure your current cooktop,
  3. Wait for them to show up daya later.
  4. The plumber takes a few days to report back the exact measurements.
  5. Go back to the store and try to figure out what will or won’t work.

Initially, we had our eyes on a particular 30″ Samsung model, but all their new models have a 1.5″ long Wi-Fi antenna that sticks out. Don’t really need Wi-Fi on my cooktop, but there’s no way to remove it. Unfortunately, we learned that the Wi-Fi antenna wouldn’t fit in our current cutout.

Back to the drawing board.

Ultimately found (and ordered) a KitchenAid model online. I called up our local Lowe’s store, and they didn’t think it would fit either, according to the measurements on the Lowe’s website. Argh! I went back to the store in person, spoke to an appliance person, and we checked the actual KitchenAid website. It should fit, and it did.

The model is a nice upgrade from our previous model that was original for the house. The old cooktop was functional, but we wanted something newer and matched our other appliances. Also, the prior model had 18 years of burned on crud that couldn’t be cleaned off.

    • Stainless steel to match our other appliances.
    • 5 burners with an optional griddle.

    Looks nice. Works well. No Wi-Fi but i guess that’s okay. 😉

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