the short version?

I didn’t think it was possible to have more stuff going on than we already did, but that just goes to show how I underestimate the world… Last weekend was spent at home for the first time in too long, trying to help Mr. Janow get packed and organized (against his will — the helping, that is), trying to get our living room in order (moved around, new furniture, new home theater stuff to install), and trying to remember how to relax and not be on the road.

This week has been stressful with it’s typical “hurry up and wait” scenarios at work, where massive amounts of work hinge on some customer trying to remember his damn password to his domain or perhaps how to check that old email address he used when he registered it. Still, Mr. Janow is sorting, trashing, packing the sum of his life’s possessions down into what is worth keeping in a small storage space, what is necessary to travel with him, and what was never really necessary to hang onto in the first place. I can understand the process can be maddening and tedious, but he is nearly finished. I have to say I wouldn’t want that same task on my shoulders with our crap anytime soon — the last time, years ago, when I had to relocate my life into a suitcase, the trunk of a car, and a storage building, it was done so haphazardly that I managed to permanently misplace some treasured items and ended up trashing about half of what I had paid to store for over a year. All this gives me some sympathy for Mr. TheMad, too, who knows a thing or two about relocating his life into a car and a storage building. Having a real room again soon may certainly be an opportunity for him to finally go back and sort through what he’s been paying to store, and I hope he has better luck with that.

Anywho… yeah, yeah, so last night we strapped our geek on and went to Ep. III, where despite our best efforts to be sociable, we ended up pairing off in different theaters. Sorry and that you bought tickets all the way over here and didn’t actually get to see it with us. I’d have much rather had you guys next to me than the Dad and 10-year-old, who talked through the whole thing. In short, the movie was the best of the new three, hands down, and represents what I’ve come to decide is my favorite story-arch, but I’ve also decided that I have to keep up with the novelizations too in order to really love the series. There’s just so much more detail, so much more insight into motivations that you get in the novels, that I’m sure if I hadn’t read those of the first two movies, that I’d probably be a new generation Star Wars hater, myself. The story is amazing, powerful, tragic, wonderful, complex, relevant to our times… but the movies for me mostly just “hit the highlights” and “make the kids go ooh and aah”. The actors all do wonderful jobs with the characters, don’t get me wrong there, but in my mind, the novels are just more mature and add a measure of insight that makes watching the PG-rated movies more enjoyable. I babble… this is all probably just me.

Let’s just say, I had replied in someone else’s post last week about finally getting to the mystery of why the Jedi’s bodies in Ep I & II didn’t dissapear upon their death as they do in the later movies. I thought the novelization handled that point well, but as we were coming up on the final moments of the movie I was about to think they were completely cutting that part. Instead, Yoda makes a pretty vague reference to it just at the end. Afterwards, talking to JT, he confirmed my notion that it was so vague that most people won’t even realize the significance of it. Now, I know that may seem like a minor point, but it was a major let down for me. Yes, this was about the rise of the Sith, but it was also about the turning point where the Jedi realized that they weren’t living up to the potential of their powers, a whole new path in the Force is revealed, and the surviving Jedi must begin their new training in this time of exile so that there can even be a new hope in the future.