Today, on what would have been my mom’s 66th birthday, another woman bravely shared her decision to have an elective double mastectomy after she found out that she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation for breast cancer.
The sharing of this news has thankfully reignited an important conversation that is near and dear to my heart, breast cancer prevention and the need for a cure.
If you’ve read the article and now have questions about BRCA and genetic testing, I encourage you to please check out the group Force: Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered. They do terrific work and provide great information and support for those that are considering genetic testing.
Thank you Angelina for sharing your story and bringing awareness to women everywhere about genetic testing and the preventive measures that are available today for hereditary breast cancer.
Happy Birthday Mom – we are getting closer to a cure. Love you. Miss you.
Summer time equals big box office releases and I’m already excited for two films to come out. This is going to reveal a lot about me so please be kind and don’t judge too harshly. I thought about searching for a third less geeky film, something a little more artsy or cinematically beautiful but then thought, nah – you guys already know I’m a total geek.
So here they are, my two must-see films of the summer – so far…
Elysium
Elysium opens August 9th and is directed by Neill Blomkamp who made District 9, another GREAT movie. The movie stars Matt Damon of the Jason Bourne legacy (among other awesome films), Sharlto Copley from District 9, and Jodie Foster from well, just about every great movie ever made.
This is an apocalyptic sci-fi set in the year 2154 where the ‘privileged’ live on Elysium, a utopian society anchored in space and ‘the rest of us’ live on devastated Earth. The premise seems to be that Matt Damon needs to get to Elysium and shake things up – I can’t tell why from the trailer but basically he turns into a total badass cyborg to do it. I really loved District 9 and hope this film lives up to that one if not takes things to the next level. That film had a powerful social commentary built in and I suspect this one will too.
Here’s a peak at the trailer:
The Internship
In a totally different direction, I’m also curious to see The Internship starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson who’ve teamed up again from their Wedding Crasher days. Now this movie looks like it will poke fun at some pretty typical Silicon Valley geek stereotypes and could be a recipe for some hilarity. It also has the potential to go horribly wrong. The premise? Owen and Vince find themselves out of work and worm their way into a coveted internship at Google as a last ditch effort to reinvigorate their careers. Not being programmers or under the age of 20, the jokes start flying.
From the preview, it looks like most of the jokes are on them and not the programmers. This is where I hope they strike a good balance between poking fun at stereotypes and then just making fun of. I hope there’s not too many “oh poor helpless geeks” being saved by the burly athletic beer drinkers bits. Because that’s annoying and stale. From the looks of things and according to AllThingsD, this movie was totally sanctioned and had the full cooperation from Google. Free marketing anyone? Anyway, I hope it’s good because those two really cracked me up in Wedding Crashers. Opens June 7th.
Click HERE to see a preview. (By the way movie companies, make your previews embeddable! That’s super annoying!)
What else looks good out there? What previews am I missing? Tell me in the comments… Better yet, suggest something artsy and beautiful to balance out all this nonsense I’m going to be watching apparently in the next few months.
So stuff is already sprouting in my square foot garden. I’m so excited!!!
Take a peek…
Top: OK, that’s NOT really in my raised beds. That’s our peach tree. Isn’t it beautiful?
Bottom (left to right): radish sprouts, pea shoots and then one of the lettuces (I already don’t remember which one).
It just rained here which is awesome because my irrigation system for the beds is still not set up. Those little sprouts would be all dried out already I’m sure if Mother Nature had not intervened. Thanks Momma Nature!
I’m hoping the tomato and pepper seeds I threw in will take. That’s the BIG question right now… Odds are that I will have to buy seedlings and transplant them. I’m just hoping that the farm down the street has their sale soon and that I will be in town for it. I hear their organic heirlooms are amazing and I’ve never been able to score any. Fingers crossed for either some sprouts of my own or maybe a score at their sale!
After a year looooong hiatus, I’m getting my hands dirty again. This time in the garden and it feels so gooooood. Last weekend, I turned the soil in my raised garden beds and then set out to try square foot gardening. I measured, plotted and then planted. Well, the kids did the planting and because [...]
Anna’s homework the other day was to create a heritage doll to highlight her ancestors’ cultures. After convincing her that Florida was not, in fact, a country nor was it a culture (although technically, she could have won that argued had she known a little more) we settled on Scotland and started our research. First [...]
