Marcella and I don’t have too many plans for the last weekend of 2007.

We are going to have dinner tonight with our friends Joe and Donald. I found out Joe hasn’t really experienced much Thai food, so I hope he likes it because that is where we are meeting – Taste of Thai. It used to be one of my favorite places to eat in Greensboro. He sounded like he was game to give it a try.

I’m thinking at least one movie might be on the agenda for the weekend. No Country for Old Men seems the most promising, and I’ve heard some fantastic things about it. Sounds like the Coen brothers are back in form.

I had my fingers crossed that the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will be Blood, might be playing this weekend, but it doesn’t appear that it is, at least not here. It is generating some phenomenal reviews. Oh well, not this weekend, but perhaps soon. I hope I don’t have to wait until after awards season to see it.

For Christmas, Marcella gave me a subscription to Tin House. (Awesome gift, by the way!) It’s a quarterly literary magazine—fiction, poetry, and essays. In my stocking she gave me a copy of the currently available issue, which was focused on women writers, but now the newest issue just showed up in the mailbox today, so I’ve got tons of stories to read.

I’m excited about that, and maybe I’ll post my thoughts about a story or two if I feel like I’ve got something to say. But I might just read. I haven’t been very much in the frame of mind to critique anything recently. I think my mind is too wrapped up in absorbing new knowledge at the new job to properly focus my critical faculties outside of that milieu. Not that I’ve proven especially gifted at critical appraisal, but practice makes perfect (sorry for the lame cliché), so maybe I’ll make myself post at least a brief review about something, if not the stories then a movie.

I’ve also been downloading a little bit of music into my iTunes/iPod combo. Recently I’ve acquired the latest by Spoon, and also the latest by The New Pornographers, so I’ve got those to give a spin.

Other than that I think the weekend will be dedicated to some household chores, hopefully a bike ride on Sunday, and some general laziness. Anybody got anything more interesting going on?