I poked a little again at the short story today, though not as much as I would have liked. It’s a bit like poking at a nest of bees, then being strangely disappointed when they don’t sting. The bees here, I think, are ideas, or words? I’ll admit I haven’t quite thought the metaphor through.
Mostly, though, I helped my father assemble a new snowblower, which was made excessively difficult by the instructions that came with it. We still have to put gas in the tank and test the machine out, and a really proper test will need to wait until a major snowfall. It’s kind of an enormous beast of a machine, and I think it might be overkill for the amount of snow we need to clear. (It might not even be maneuverable in the driveway with three snowed-in parked cars.) But the old snowblowers we inherited a few years ago when my aunt moved down south don’t do trick — even though that’s snowblowers, plural — and my father said this was actually one of the smaller ones he could find. I’m just hoping it works…and that we won’t need to find out anytime this particular winter.
After dinner, I watched Battleship, which was about as terrible as I expected and then some. It rallies a little near the very end, almost turning into dumb good fun in the last twenty minutes, but overall it’s quite terrible. It’s true that I’ve been watching a fair number of bad movies this week, but mostly in the hope that one of them will be as entertainingly bad as Equilibrium.