Mary Poppins Anyone?

By /

There’s been a lot of Mary Poppins in my life recently.

A friend and cinema-buddy of mine is a huge…and I mean HUGE…fan of Disney movies. This meant that he would no doubt drag me to see the new Mary Poppins movie, Mary Poppins Returns.

Now I don’t mind Disney films. In fact, I quite enjoy them. There was only one problem with me going to see the new Mary Poppins film. Only one. And that is….I had never seen the original Mary Poppins movie (GASP!). Yes, it’s true.

I was a Mary Poppins virgin.

So when I informed my friend about this little-known tidbit, he immediately suggested we rent the original (1964) movie and watch it together. So we did.

And I absolutely loved it! Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke were both phenomenal and it was quite a magnificent movie for its time. The acting was excellent, the songs were catchy and it was a visually enjoyable movie. If you, by some chance, haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. It is quite an impressive film.

So now that I had an original Mary Poppins under my belt, I was ready to witness her return on the big screen. So we went to see the new movie starring Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins and while it was good, it wasn’t quite the same. That initial magic just wasn’t quite there. I thought that Blunt was a lot more serious, more no-nonsense and a lot sterner than Julie Andrews’s vision of Poppins. She felt a tad distant and unapproachable to me – almost cold, actually.

Now don’t get me wrong. I did enjoy the movie and would give it a solid B. I found it interesting how the plot paralleled the first film. That being said, I enjoyed the storyline and the cinematography. The songs were okay though they weren’t as catchy and memorable as those in the first film. After we had rented the first film, I had those damn songs stuck in my head for days (especially “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”).

So do I think the movie is worth seeing? Yes, as long as you don’t expect it to be as good as the first one. But of course, that is my own opinion. Perhaps I was biased given that I saw the first film only a week before this one and it was still fresh in my mind.

But regardless, Mary Poppins Returns is a solid, entertaining film that I’m glad I saw.

Have you seen it? What did you think?

Mary Poppins Anyone? Read Post »

My Bookish Academy Awards video

By /

I’ve been busy the past few days working on videos for my BookTube channel. For those of you not familiar with BookTube, its basically a YouTube channel where one talks about books: reviews, books acquired, books read, favorites and the like.

Yesterday, I recorded a video entitled “My Bookish Academy Awards” which is a tag video in which I applied all of the same academy award categories to books. So in essence, it’s kind of a “best of” video about the books that I read in 2018. This is actually an original tag by Bookadoodles (link to original video).

I put the video below if it’s something you might be interested in viewing. If you like this sort of thing, please consider subscribing to my BookTube channel as well.

My Bookish Academy Awards video Read Post »

Quote for the New Year

By /

Quote for the New Year:

New Year’s Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Quote for the New Year Read Post »

Happy New Year!

By /

Fireworks image
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Last day of the year….kind of crazy how quickly the past few months time flew by.

Today, I spent the majority of my day planning for 2019. Not making resolutions, mind you, but planning.

Resolutions are to be broken. Goals/plans are to be achieved. Says who, you may ask? Says me…or at least this has been my experience.

So today, I put together a list of my business goals and personal goals for the coming year — things I hope to accomplish in my professional and personal life — and then I scheduled it all on my calendar (faithfully adhering to my “calendar-based productivity system”). So it looks as though 2019 is going to be “the year of writing’ for me as I have many, many books planned, some fiction, some non-fiction, and some courseware (though these are better classified as manuals rather than books — 400-page manuals mind you, but still manuals nonetheless).

And several video courses too.  But these will be for techie stuff like Lightroom and Photoshop.

Speaking of books, one of my fiction books will be published in January (fingers crossed). This would be Book 4 in my Ghost Oracle series in which Nick once again gets himself in a whole heap of trouble. Huh…I just realized that I don’t have a title for the book yet. I guess I better get on that.

Book 5 is also nearly half written so you should be seeing this one pop up in the coming months.

Oh — and there is also a new series that I’m working on that will hopefully see the light of day this year (But shhh! It’s a secret!).

Some of the stuff I’m planning for the coming year was stuff that I should have done in 2018. But two surgeries delayed me a tad and pushed me off schedule. A lot. But now I’m back on track and ready to face 2019 with optimism (and no surgeries!).

What are your goals for 2019?

Image courtesy of Vijay Kiran

Happy New Year! Read Post »

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

By /

This summer Mike and I went on a 2-1/2 week long motorcycle trip to Canada, the Niagra Falls, and to Lake George, NY and I took a little bit of video along the way — my first vlog, actually. So below is the video of our trip. It’s about 20 minutes long or so. I learned a lot while putting this together so hopefully, the next vacation video will be better!

 

What I Did On My Summer Vacation Read Post »

Dumping the To-Do List

By /

calendar screen shotI’ve kept an electronic to-do list for years now, and every day, like clockwork, I find myself swiping the majority of the tasks in that day’s agenda to reschedule them for the next day. There never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done, and essential tasks habitually end up getting moved from one day to the next and the next and the next.

Then, a while back I watched a video of someone who advocated a “calendar-based” lifestyle in which rather than creating never-ending to-do lists, everything is scheduled on the calendar.

Everything.

The idea here is that the reason we fail to tick off all the items on our to-do list is that we underestimate how long it takes us to perform tasks. We add 25 items to our list when in reality, it’s only physically possible for us to complete 11 of them. Moreover, when every hour is scheduled on a calendar — including breaks, relaxation, and meals — there is less chance of us getting distracted or forgetting to do something.

I did a bit more research into this, and as it turns out, many productivity folks use and advocate a calendar-based productivity system rather than a to-do list based one. The more I read about this, the more it made sense to me, so I decided to give it a try myself in 2019. I spent a good portion of a day creating a workable schedule though I imagine it will go through several iterations until I tweak it enough that it works.

What’s important here is that every single item that I want to accomplish during the day is on my calendar and that every one of those items has a notification set to it so that I’ll be alerted when it’s time to switch gears. To start out with,  I set the default notification to 5 minutes for tasks and 30 minutes for appointments.

I’m looking forward to delving into this system and seeing whether it’ll help me to be more productive. Perhaps 2019 will be the year when I’ll retire my not-so-trusty to-do list application.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Dumping the To-Do List Read Post »

Scroll to Top