YOB: #19. Have a Lord of the Rings Marathon

By Beth

In case previous articles haven't let you in on this very well kept secret, Lara and I are rabid, uh, I mean AVID Lord of the Rings fans. We have each watched the movies several times, and the commentaries and the special features. I will admit that Lara has watched the commentaries and special features more thoroughly than I. It is a situation I am slowly beginning to remedy. Having a LOTR marathon made the list because it was cheap, easy and didn't require too much in the way of special equipment.

We did decide early on that this had to take place at Lara's since we were less likely to be interrupted, even though I like my TV better. I plan on starting a petition to get Lara to buy a flat screen; when we go to Best Buy though, she is always more interested in the refrigerators than the TVs. We don't really see eye to eye on that one.

So, with Lara's multiple health concerns, we put off some of the bigger events on the Year of the Birthday list and focused on the ones that we could do sitting down, in one place. On October 9th I headed down to MD for what seemed the easiest of what was left, the LOTR marathon. It took me much longer than is usual to get there on this day. But no worries, I've learned that having my iPod plugged into my radio helps with my road rage/impatience. But no blue slushies were thrown on my car, a piece of truck tire didn't hit me and no government vehicles sped past me in the left lane going about 90. Quite an uneventful drive, unlike most trips I take to see Lara, long though. I can usually make the trip in 90 minutes or less, but this time it took nearly double that. This is also something I need to remedy, the living so far away. It's in my 10 year plan.  

We did not start the marathon right away Friday night, neither of us is as young as we used to be and I don't think we could survive an all-nighter. Working with the youth group at my church and having a lock-in taught me that! We did go to the grocery store to buy our snacks for the day. For each movie we were going to try and get some sort of food that was part of the movie. Apples were the first snack for FOTR but unfortunately the store didn't stock lembas bread and we just let our taste buds decide what else we would eat. Some of the snacks were: Pringles, Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies, Little Debbie Cakes, sticky buns, chocolate covered pretzels and chips and salsa which we ate with our dinner, cheeseballs. It was a very healthy day!

I began the day by using Lara's exercise bike. I figured we'd be sitting on our butts all day eating, I needed to try to get some sort of workout beforehand so my jeans would still fit at the end of the day. I've neer used her bike before, so I pushed some random buttons and ended up on a P4 workout, whatever that means. It became clear early on that the P stood for Punishment. It was a 30 minute workout and it kept up-ing the intensity, like I was pedaling uphill. The 5 intensity changed to a 6, then a 7, an 8 and a 9. If it had changed to a 10 I may have quit, but then it started going back down. I was drenched by the end of the workout with sweat but I did feel better about all the junk I ate.

There's not much to tell about the actual marathon. I kept time, we started the first movie at 11:23 AM, took short breaks between discs, counted to make sure Pringles wasn't lying when they said there were 100 crisps in every can (there were 103 in mine) and the last movie, ROTK, ended at 11:23 PM (weird, huh?). We tried to promise each other that we wouldn't quote the whole movie but we kind of broke that promise. It's hard not to, you know?! I swooned when Boromir was on screen, Lara swooned when Haldir was. We both did with Aragorn and Faramir! We did not watch all the commentaries or special features. That is for another weekend. As always, we had fun. I can't think of a time that I've been with Lara that wasn't fun, over the last almost 20 years of our friendship! Even if we're somewhere completely dull, if we are together, we can make it fun.

Comments

[Lara]

*sniff* Aww. You're so sweet!