Lunafest!

Tuesday night I went to Lunafest with Kat and Carrie. Lunafest is a film festival 'by, for, about women'. It was totally awesome. There were nine short films, all really well made. Some of my favorites:
Whakatiki - A Spirit Rising - Was really powerful, and magically touched on so many powerful themes without explicitly addressing them that I was just blown away. There were themes of body image, family, freedom of the spirit, and it all came together in about 12 minutes.
Chalk - This one was also largely wordless. It was kinda weird to watch a young girl go through the process of having her first period, but it was still a very good video. It followed the story of two young girl gymnasts who are at a competition or something. They are clearly close friends, but then they start to fall apart. There is a boy, the one friend doesn't make the cut, and there is the whole thing with the period. In the end though they come back together and its quite touching.
Flawed - Was another very good one. It was funny, but yet still quite serious in how it dealt with the topic of plastic surgery and how we view ourselves. In the end though I thought the message was a bit shallow; basically your big nose is a part of you and makes you who you are. 'Why try to be ordinary when you can be extraordinary!' was, I think, a line from the end of it. I wasn't convinced. It seemed very much like a grownup trying to make the awkward kid in middle-school feel less awkward even though its the other kids, not the grown up, that has any say in the matter.
And then there was Lunch Date which was just funny and sweet. About a girl who gets dumped when her boyfriend sends his 14 year old brother to pass on the message. There's not so much to say about it except that it was a lot of fun.

As a follow up to my last blog. The hymn sing was great! I think hymns are pretty much the best. Such great poetry, but even better because they are put to such great music. And even better still when sung by a group of people who really enjoy it.

Also, Ben, I'm sorry to report that I have no good mountain biking pictures because I did not end up going mountain biking this weekend. It proved to be just a bit too much of a chore. Mountain biking for me requires switching my tires (not a huge deal, but still a pain) taking my rack off (which I guess I wouldn't have to do...) and then biking at least 45 minutes to the trail head (which is definately doable, it just didn't happen this weekend.)
So I went road biking instead! I biked on over to a park with Kat and Emma, they went running, but I didnt feel like running in biking shoes so I sat by the lake and listened to the Dianne Rehm show on the topic of the legality of the torture of terror suspects. It was very interesting. Evidently the rulings handed down from the military/ secret courts were often thrown out by other federal courts because the courts or the processes themselves were ruled unconstitutional.

Sitting by water is nice.

This park had lots of kids running around and made for good people watching. 

In other news, we got a whole bunch of donations from a recycling center. Its good that we're getting stuff. Our meager shop needs more bike things, but this is some of the stuff that was donated:

We salvaged a couple parts from it!

I don't think the brakes worked very well...