Crap, crap, feelin' crappy today. I couldn't get to sleep last night until around 3:30 am. And I got up at 7:20 this morning. I'm drinking lots of coffee this morning, but I have a feeling tonight I will be crashing when work is over.

Anyway -- countdown to vacation: T-minus eleven days (not counting today)! I am very excited about being back in Wisconsin. I am also very excited to not be at work for twelve days. It has been so slow here that I have a feeling I will only be missed as a body to work the reference desk. Oh, and plus I get to miss the whole start of the eleven to seven work shift. So hopefully by the time I get back, all the bugs will be worked out.

I finally made it through The Third Man. I have been trying to watch that movie for a long time -- I started it over a year ago, but couldn't get more than ten minutes into it. I checked it out three times from the Towson Library before this weekend -- and I finally watched it. Now I only have fifty-one movies to watch on the AFI 100 Movies List -- watch out, it's a PDF file. The Third Man was excellent. I love Joseph Cotten, and his naive American character was the perfect person to see the movie through. Orson Welles did have -- as Peter Bogdanovich said -- a star role where everyone talks about him for the first hour and then when he finally shows up, it's amazing. I knew that Harry Lime was alive, so I anticipated the scene, but seeing his face light up suddenly -- wow! It was just a brillant move. And the sewer chase scenes were stunning. Roger Ebert's review of the movie says more than I can express. But the zither music is great! Although, I was kind of surprised to learn that The Third Man Theme was quite popular during the 1950s -- it doesn't seem like something you would hear on the radio now. I guess it's kind of like the Colonel Bogey March from The Bridge on the River Kwai.

I also saw another movie this weekend (I actually watched several, but I won't get into that.) The Terminal was excellent. It's the type of movie that I feel my parents would like a lot. The story is great, and I was very happy to see that not all of the plot had been given away in the previews. Tom Hanks is great as Victor Navorski, although I thought he learned English awfully quick. The movie made me cry, which I don't usually do at movies. I won't give it away, because it's near the end, but the Indian character -- Gupta -- was the one who did it.

I'm hoping today gets better. If it doesn't....well, I'll end up posting the list of AFI movies and you can see which ones I've seen. I'm working down in Af-Am today, so it might happen. Who knows?