36

Maybe I'm jumping the gun but what the heck. Tomorrow, Suzanne reaches the all-important milestone of 36 weeks. I'm sure some of my readers are like, "Enough with the freaking countdown, Count. Just tell us when the baby gets here." Sorry about that. It's just that for two months we've been waiting for this day to come. We have been anxiously praying that we could at least make it to a point where the baby would be reasonably safe. Well, hopefully tomorrow is that day. Obviously, childbirth is a tough thing and there can always be complications but the likelihood of those complications drops dramatically after tomorrow. So I'm glad. Sigh.

In other news, I'm on the verge of making an executive decision. Executive decisions for me don't come often. In many ways, I'm a go-with-the-flow sort of guy. I try to do what I'm "supposed" to do and it's fairly rare that I will make the choice to not. When I was a zone leader on my mission, my zone was in charge of our annual Christmas conference including the clean-up duties. We didn't finish up until after midnight (unheard of for a bunch of faithful missionaries) and so as we all heading back to our apartments, I announced an executive decision: everyone sleeps in until nine tomorrow. My Elders seemed to think that was inspired leadership.

Anyway, I have a copy of Quo Vadis sitting near the tv waiting to be watched. The thing is, I just can't bring myself to do it. It's a 3 hour long sword-and-sandal epic from 1951. It's a precusor to later movies like Spartacus and Ben-Hur. Those movies are important because they represent the beginning of the end of the Blacklist era - but Quo Vadis is. . . not so much. As near as I can tell, it's just long. From what I've read, it's similar to The Robe, which was fine but no big deal.

So I think I'm just going to drop it back in the mail and not watch it. I'll just eliminate it from my QE list and that will be that. I don't want to watch it. Not even a little. No one is going to break my fingers if I skip it - so I think I will. I've watched around a hundred films so far which is more than enough. So I think I'll let Quo Vadis go on its way undisturbed.

Now I'm in the process of batting clean-up. There are important movies I haven't seen in almost two years and I need to review them so they're more fresh. I've got Double Indemnity here and I probably need to get Scarface and Public Enemy again. There are also a couple of important ones I haven't seen yet that I probably need to get. G-Men, Brute Force, Kiss of Death to name a few. I've yet to nail down an exact date with my committee but the exam is coming soon and I need to be ready.

I finished a book on genre the other day, finished Thomas Schatz's Genius of the System last week, and I'm about half through Stephen Prince's Classical Film Violence now. I'll finish it in another two or three days. I need to order a couple of Film Noir Readers from the library and I need to finish Bordwell's Classical Hollywood Cinema. I've been nursing that sucker for months and months. It must be finished.