Day 24: Good Friday

We took a ride to the Black Forest post office this afternoon and noticed this lost soul nearby.

What I'm watching today

Trolls: World Tour (2020, Google Play streaming) - When the first Trolls was released in 2016, it looked like a giant turd on paper. But I will happily admit that I was wrong; Trolls is an unbelievably good movie that effectively uses music to tell a unique story, and it easily found its way onto my list of favorite movies of the past decade. Given how good its predecessor was, I had high hopes for World Tour. Boy, I was wrong again. First, this movie is only 90 minutes long, and I would guess about a third of that is spent on cliched pop medleys and unnecessary dance numbers. Then the movie rewrites the history of the trolls clan established in the first movie. But my biggest gripe is with the music itself. The basic premise is that a hard-rocking faction of trolls is attempting to take over the troll world and instill a rock and roll lifestyle for all trolls. Rule #1: When making a movie that uses the power of rock music, then that rock music should in fact rock. What we get instead is watered down showtune adaptations of songs, again cliched, like "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and "Crazy Train," and I'm fairly certain I heard some Pat Benatar as well. Ozzy Osborne has a role in the film, basically as a troll version of himself. His first appearance is great as he emerges from the toilet and mumbles some Ozzy gibberish. But then the writers gave him more lines. There are some high points, however. Kelly Clarkson's performance as the leader of the country tolls is fun. Anna Kendrick is delightful as always. And the movie has Sam Rockwell. But that's about it. I have this rental for 48 hours. I don't see myself watching it again.

What I'm doing today

Walking - We started the day with a brisk early-morning walk. There's nothing better to get the blood flowing early in the morning than pushing 70 lbs of fruit-snack-chomping dead weight in a double stroller for three miles. Except perhaps when you're 1.5 miles from home (or anything else) and the 7yo tells you he really needs to go to the bathroom. So our speedy walk ended even more speedy.

Tech supporting -  The kids have been hitting the video games pretty hard, understandably. Unfortunately, our Nintendo Switch rand out of storage space, so I set out on a scavenger hunt to find a MicroSD card in the house. After scouring old phones and ziplock bags full of cables and other bits, I finally located an 8GB card that was leftover from an old Nook. (You remember the Nook, right? That was Barnes & Noble's half-assed attempt at an e-Reader about 10 years ago. It was overpriced garbage whose only purpose was to extort money from its owner. Fortunately it was a huge failure.)  I got the card installed and, of course, it wasn't properly formatted, and only showed a capacity of 22MB. So, I then needed to dig out a laptop to format the card. I booted up, and Windows decided that it was going to force an update that took 30 minutes to complete. But once that was done I successfully repartitioned and reformatted the card. After all that, the Switch gained another 8GB of storage, which, in the grand scheme of things, is really not a lot. But at least it's something.