Forget the cow...

I'm actually doing very well at this dairy-free thing. I'm not as resentful as I was before, but maybe that's because my library search for a lot of vegan cookbooks (they don't make a lot of ovo-vegetarianism specific ones, and most vegetarian-only cookbooks use cheese) has come back with a lot of recipes I'm not only interested in eating, but am happy to make.

Today, we took X-man to Chuck E. Cheese in Bloomington because MacTroll's brother was driving from Peoria to Wisconsin today and he left his camera at our place. So, we arrived at CeC a little after 9:30 and X-man and I went in. MacTroll waited a few minutes and then gave them the camera.

We played games for two hours (100 coins for $20) and then we took off down the street to Zoup for lunch.

It sells soup and sandwiches and salads and is a pretty small, but enjoyable space for a quick lunch. I had the V, DF, LF Split Pea Soup. X-man got a cup of potato and cheese soup, but he thought the guy said cheesy potato chip. :-) He also had a grilled cheese sandwich. MacTroll had some kind of cup of beefy soup and half a sandwich.

When we got home, X-man and I finished the Monopoly game he started last night with KTDID while MacTroll and I went to the movies.

We saw This is 40 at the Savoy 16. It was an odd experience. First of all, there were a million people there for the 6 p.m. movie. They were waiting in incredibly long lines. But no one was at the automated ticket selling machine. So we parted our way through the line and bought our tickets in 60 seconds flat.

Then we went into the movie. Since it was Judd Apatow, I was hoping for dumb and funny mixed together. I'm not a big fan of his other movies. But for some reason, I thought maybe I could identify with this one. But I couldn't. The characters were very shallow. It was like watching some kind of strange anthropological study of a culture you just couldn't understand but were trying not to look horrified.

The best part of the film was when Paul Rudd was on his bike and he was careening around town with the Fiona Apple song in the background. On the other hand, the movie was mostly by artists that would have been most celebrated by my parents' generation (Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Lindsey Buckingham, Yoko Ono, Graham Parker, etc.).

And, um, if you're going to pick someone to play the 40 year old female lead who wants to whine about her age and how it's negatively affecting her self-esteem, her looks, etc. -- pick someone whose forehead actually wrinkles so you can tell them apart from the 20-something.

Because on all counts, Leslie Mann (born 1972) is hotter and smarter than Megan Fox (born 1986) in this movie... and it's hard to pity that at all. In essence, I guess the whole thing was just very Southern California. What is deemed in the film as "mid-life" problems for this family were pretty -- petty.