Wednesday, February 13, 2008

What the Old Folks Do

I don't turn 65 until Sun day, but I finally filled out the paperwork so I can start collecting Social Security this month. I am officially old. It's one reason why the cut in my pay at the newspaper office didn't bother me so much--Social Security will kick in and add more than I get in salary from the newspaper now.

I guess you aren't "fully vested" until you turn 66, but since my income is going to be negligible in 2008, I'm better off collecting Social Security NOW while it's still available to all of us old fogies.

It's cool to be old. Really!

It's kind of nice that people charge you less. My computer guru who installed my webcam gave me a 15% discount, just because I'm old.

We don't pay for most of the theatrical productions that we attend because as a critic, I get free tickets, but it's nice, when we go to the Lamplighters, to get in cheap because we're old.

It's nice to ride free on local transportation (as Walt does) because we're old.

I hear about how expensive it is to go to the movies these days. Walt and I pay $6.50 each, if we go in the middle of the day, as we did today.

We're discovering that it's really easy to head off to the theatre for the afternoon, at least now while kids are all still in school. At week or so we went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets. This is not the sort of movie that I would normally choose, knowing that I generally only see 3-4 movies in a theatre in any given year, but I really wanted to see this one.

We had seen the original National Treasure on a plane coming home from somewhere or other. It was surprisingly good, gripping -- sort of a lesser known "Indiana Jones."

So when we saw that they'd made a sequel, it shot to the top of our list of movies to see, and we were not disappointed. It can stand on its own as an adventure movie -- in fact, I couldn't remember anything, really, about the first one. And we were both very glad we had gone.

That little outing went so well, we repeated it today. This time we went to see Juno. I had wanted to see the movie ever since I heard Jennifer Garner raving about it on the Ellen Degeneres Show. As with National Treasure, it did not disappoint. Easy to see why Ellen Page (who plays Juno) was nominated for an Academy award.

And it never hurts to see my favorite White House Press Secretary again either!

It was kind of funny because we walked into the theatre at 1:15 and we were the only people there. Just before the movie started, two more people came in, but they were gone when the credits had finished rolling, so we were the first to enter the theatre, the last to leave, and only one of four people to see it period.

Go see Juno. You won't be disappointed. And the theatres obviously need clientele!

When the movie was over, we had to walk down to the newspaper office so I could help write the caption that is going to accompany my feature article about Rinde Eckert. The photographer hadn't written down the name of anybody whose photo he took--and I don't know them either--so putting something together was a real challenge!

We stopped at home briefly so I could change shoes and then we went out to the gym for half an hour. Timing worked well and there were no "familiar faces" there and I was able to complete my workout without concern!

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