Goodbye busy 2007, Hello quiet 2008
I’m not one for looking backwards. I’ve always been a delayed gratification girl who’s goals are all ahead. I see the past and who it’s made me and I’m happy. I have no real regrets because each has made me who I am today and while I know I’m not perfect, I’m content with who I am and look forward to who I’m becoming.
So why am I writing about 2007?? We’ll it’s been a big year, lots of ups and downs and I think it will be good to have the key events highlighted for prosperity’s sake.
January brought with it my 29th birthday. I took a group of friends to the Magic Castle for some food and fun!! It’s an invite only location in Los Angeles, and a fun date. It has a dress code and secret things only insiders can know. I think it was my best birthday to date. At the end of January we caught the housing bug and started our search for a house. We bought within a week or so of our search and signed the escrow papers in February. We had a fantastic real estate agent and if you are in need of one, please ask me for his information. He really made the whole thing so much easier than most of the things we had heard.
So then February brought wrapping up editing Trading Spouses for Fox and moving into a new home. 2 bedroom, 2 and 1/2 bathroom town home isn’t a shabby way to start home ownership in the Los Angeles Area. It was quite the adventure and I think we made the whole process look easier than it actually was.
March brought the birth of our friend’s first baby: Ruby. She’s a cutie and we can’t wait to see the person she will become! I edited Driving Force for A&E during this time frame.
April was a slower month. I went to Disneyland with a friend. Then Sam and I went to the premiere of “Hot Fuzz” with a crew Q&A afterwards.
For May, Sam was away on a movie, so I decided to take a trip up to Toronto. My parents had started talking about moving down to the US and I wanted to catch up with old friends before I would no longer have a place to stay. I also took my parents to a Blue Jays game where I got hit in the face with a baseball. That’s another story though!!
June became very action-packed when my appendix decided it didn’t want to be in my body anymore. They thought it was my ovary, so I’m still thankful that it was only my appendix. It meant that I missed the Police concert I had bought tickets for, but it was necessary down time. My first adventure out after the surgery was to see Lucha Wrestling. Eric and Sam protected me from the flying midgets and wrestlers.
July was back to work with me, a few dinners, poker nights and we rounded out the summer fairly mellow while still recovering!
August we took a spontaneous trip to Las Vegas to meet with friend’s of my parents during the Star Trek Convention. I also started working on Overhaulin’ for TLC. We also toured Stan Winston’s Creature shop seeing dinosaurs from Jurrasic Park, the costume/robot outer wear for the new “Iron Man” movie and more. I could live there it was so fantastic!!
September started a new hobby of Sam and mine thanks to our friend Eric – bowling. We were asked to join “LA Amuse Buche” Foodies Group. We quickly became addicted to both bowling and to the wonderful food hiding around Los Angeles. I also became an aunt. My brother and his wife gave birth to a baby girl, Isabella.
In October Sam and I hosted our first Canadian Thanksgiving dinner with a few friends. I had 2 days of Jury Duty where I almost got selected for a murder trial.
November was mellow, the Award Nomination movie screenings started. We did our usual Thanksgiving at Matt & Dan’s place this year with 21 attendees. More bowling was on hand, and another Foodies outing.
And now we are here to December, I wrapped up editing/Story Producing for Overhaulin’ and started editing for Intervention which airs on A&E. Sam and I took a road trip to Grand Junction, Colorado to see my parents new house and visit with my brother, his wife and their baby. We had a great visit and were excited to be able to spend Christmas with the whole family.
Now I sit here and wonder what 2008 has in store. I know that I’m throwing myself a 30th birthday party as well as going to see the Leafs vs. the Kings the night after my birthday. I will continue editing on Intervention. Sam will spend the first month away working on an independent low budget feature film.
But that’s it. That’s all I know. I hope it’s full of friends and new adventures. More road trips with Sam. This is the first year in awhile I haven’t had specific goals for the year and I’m not sure what that means. I think it will be a quiet year full of hard work, lots of saving and a little more calm than 2007.
A Golden Compass
I was going to come up with a witty title for this particular blog although everything I could think of was just down right mean:
Christian Shee-ple, Insane Boycotts, Emails that make your Stomach Turn for example. None of them however could fully and accurately portray how important and heated this issue makes me.
I am not a parent yet, and I understand parents WANT to protect their children. I believe it’s something inside each of us, and I’m not trying to diminish that at all.
So what happened?? My parents sent me an email explaining why I should not go see a movie. I trust my parents, I love them dearly but this made my eyebrows raise. The email went as follows:
__________________________________________________________________
Click on the link below for Snopes and read the article regarding the movie….scary. http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp
This is important since the marketing for this movie has already started. It looks a lot like “Narnia” but is so far from it. BEWARE!
There will be a new Children’s movie out in December called THE GOLDEN COMPASS. It is written by Phillip Pullman, a proud atheist who belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C. S. Lewis’s Chronicle’s of Narnia and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumbed down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. Nicole Kidman stars in the movie so it will probably be advertised a lot. This is just a friendly warning that you sure won’t hear on the regular TV.
ALSO, for additional info, follow the links:
Pullman, a prominent British atheist, has acknowledged that this is in fact his goal. He has claimed that “it is my goal to go after Christianity, I want God to be dead in my works. I want to undermine Christianity.”
______________________________________________________________________
I have several key issues with this email. I am a Christian, but I do not support these kind of boycotts or email spams.
So I wonder, since when does a person’s beliefs determine whether their work of fiction is valid, good or bad?! I love Asimov’s writing, and he was an atheist. It doesn’t mean he was a bad writer, he was actually a great writer. More so, just because a book is written by a Christian author doesn’t mean it’s good. In fact most of the time if it’s written by a Christian author I assume the book is bad because the Christian subculture has accepted mediocrity for too long, in ALL of their artistic endeavors: music, books, movies etc. I don’t understand why are some people saying this is a bad series of books, or even a movie based on the author’s beliefs? I shouldn’t have to go thru the list of American classic novels or award winning works, and their authors and list off all their religions. They would be too many to count and it should not be an issue.
Edgar Allen Poe – Atheist
Mark Twain – thought to be Presbyterian although wrote the anti-religious book “The Mysterious Stranger”
Ray Bradbury – Atheist
E.M. Forester - Railed passionately against the church
Aldous Huxley – Humanist
J.D. Salinger - Known as Hindu although dabbled in Buddism, Scientology, Christian Science and Homeopathy
George Orwell - Agnostic and especially disliked churches
Leo Tolstoy – Rejected the church and is known as being a Rationalist
Should we also then seclude authors who are alcoholics? Hemingway and Faulkner for example. Or authors who committed suicide?? Or any other thing we want to classify and judge as a sin for that matter?
Furthermore, spam emails are not authority. Shouldn’t we want to be educated? Read or see the information for ourselves and then make the decision?? Education is power, not blind following – or becoming sheeple. (Sheep + People = Sheeple) We must think and decide for ourselves, that is the power of free will. Shouldn’t Christians have learned from the emails to boycott Disney?!?!? Seriously, it didn’t work then why do you think it will work now?
Shouldn’t parents use this movie as a means to talk about religion, atheism, and diversity of the world with their children?? So that instead of teenagers and adults that have been overly sheltered going into the world and having overload, they know already what they believe and why. Wouldn’t that be better? The world is too small these days and diverse to live inside a bubble. If there is a God, he then created all this diversity for a reason and it should not be excluded just because it’s different.
Then there’s the fact I work in TV and have dabbled in film. I know with great certain that rarely does the writer’s true intentions become the final product of a film. There are too many people to go through. For instance networks, executives, directors, screenplay writers, editors, producers all put their spin on the story. Does this mean any movie that someone works on that believes something other than what we believe we should not go to??
All this to say, please don’t think all Christians eat these kind of emails up. There are many of us that don’t. And please decide for yourself!!!
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because I’ve always been able to celebrate two Thanksgivings: Canadian and American. Canadian Thanksgiving is more a harvest festival than about being discovered by the Europeans. My mom being American would always invite other Americans over to celebrate US Thanksgiving, and on Canadian Thanksgiving my Dad’s side of the family would always get together, play some softball, eat too much and crash. One of my Chovancek cousin’s is a chef (Jonathon), and he cooked for us one year the best Thanksgiving meal EVER. When my grandparents on my dad’s side past away Chovancek family Thanksgiving stopped.
This year Sam and I are cooking for some friends. It’s the first Canadian Thanksgiving I will have had since moving here to Los Angeles 8 years ago. Needless to say, I’m excited. There are so many things to be thankful for: good food, good friends, happy families, good work etc. So today, have a great Canadian Thanksgiving and spend a few minutes reflecting on everything you have to be thankful for!!
Tonight’s Premieres -
BET J: Conversations at 8 pm
BBC America: Top Gear at 8 pm
VH1: I Love New York at 9 pm
Adult Swim: The Boondocks at 1130 pm
The passage of time
As I find my 30th year on this planet approaching quickly I’m amazed at how much quicker time is flying. It seems like just yesterday my little brother was learning how to walk, I was learning how to ride a bike, I was moving to LA, getting married… my Grandparents warned me that as I would get older time would go faster.
This morning at 2:37 am (Kansas time), my little brother and his wife gave birth to their first child. Isabella Alice Zina Chovancek joined us today at 7 lbs 4 oz, 20 inches long. She’s named after my Dad’s mom, Alice. And the Zina comes from the God mother who was in Tanja and Andrew’s wedding last November.
Take a peek…
