The distance between my front door and that of my elderly parents is 132 miles. I have driven it four times since Saturday. On Sunday, on the drive south, I went through a thunder storm of biblical proportions. There was lightning. There was thunder. There were raindrops the size of figs pounding down at a 45 degree angle. There were entire flotillas of cars pulled onto the shoulder, waiting for the deluge to lessen before they attempted to drive. And then there were the idiots with their hazard lights on, driving in front of me. Just to clarify, once and for all, for you morons who think hazard lights are for moving vehicles, hazard lights are for use when your vehicle is stopped, and on the side of the road with the hood up. All you need in the rain is a decent set of wiper blades, and your headlights. Not your parking lights, but your headlights. Putting on your flashers while you are moving makes for unnecessary confusion in the person driving behind you. And that would be me. Believe me when I say that I don't need to be any more confused than I am.

Yesterday's drive south was beautiful. The storms stayed in the west, over the Everglades. The vistas of flat green land and clear blue skies butting up against walls of purple-grey cloud walls were breathtaking. I saw hawks along the border canal, with the Glades shining behind them, but still haven't identified the species, because I haven't located the Audubon Guide.

Now I'm back in the office, unsure what day it is, unsure what I'm on deadline for, and very sure that I'll be doing the drive again next week. If the sun's out, I'm going to take the convertible.

For the last, oh, I don't know, eight years or so, my husband has gone out on Thursday night with the boys. It started as a Boys' Night Out, morphed into Poker Night, collapsed under the weight of Boys Who Had To Win, went on a brief hiatus when he taught on Thursday nights and is now back in full press Boys' Night Out.

This makes Thursdays My Night In. Oh, the vision of me in my chenille bathrobe (lime green) and bunny slippers. Bottle of red, bowl of popcorn and the remote. With our recent acquisition of full digital cable TV, my mind is positively reeling with the possibilities. Mystery Channel. Yoga Channel. Food Channel. Movies or other movies, or classic movies or indie movies. (Insert Homer Simpson voice) mmmmm, Movies.

You may have guessed, by the fact that I couldn't stop at a mere 100 movies in my lame lists, that film (or fil-um, as some would have it) is a huge part of my life. It is, unless you make actually going to see them in theaters at first release a requirement. Because, you see, I hate movie theaters. I hate the sticky floors. I hate the cell phones. I hate the babies. I hate the packs of teenagers. I hate the volume of the kick-ass sound systems. (Note to theater operators: you have great sound, that's why you don't have to turn it up.)

And this brings me back to a frequent, and passionate rant. Just because you have a cell phone, that doesn't mean you have to be speaking on it all the time. If you are expecting an urgent call, here's a thought: stay home and wait for it. If you'd rather be talking to the person on the other end than watching the movie, leave the movie, and go talk to your friend. Or, maybe, the whole idea of being out is to be unavailable. You remember, way back in the dawn of time, you'd get a call and the person would say, "Hey, I tried to reach you last night." and then you would say, "Yeah, but I WAS OUT." Like, out of touch, out of reach, out of pocket, out of the house, out of town.

Here's the next part of a predictable rant: if the child is too young to follow the plot, the child should be left at home with a baby sitter. Remember them? Older kids who watch younger kids while the parents are out. (Out, there's that concept again.) When I went to see "Finding Nemo", the little kid behind me kept asking mom and dad what was happening. My friend finally turned around and said: "The barracuda ate the mother and the babies. They are dead. They are ALL dead." Shut that kid right up. I don't think he wanted to know what was happening after that. But, hell, it was a kid's cartoon, so it's almost a given that the mother or father had to bite it in the first reel. Isn't that Disney's First Law?

Anyway, with digital cable, I don't have to endure the common mass of humanity. I can pay per view. I can watch rugby. I can watch non-stop sci-fi.

Or I can turn everything off, and read a book. Sigh. Boys' Night Out. I love it.

Someone needs to take Mother Nature aside and remind her that rainy season in the tropics means rain every afternoon, not steadily for days on end. And yet, and yet, there is something so soothing about this steady rain. The sound of it on my roof. The incredible variety of greens it brings to my yard. The coolth (and yes, that's a real word) that it gives the air. And the lightening. God's own light show, daily, from my office window.

I guess going to the gym actually does do all those things gym rats swear to, like lowering your blood pressure and releasing the feel-good endorphins into your brain. Three quarters of an hour on a treadmill and an elliptical trainer and I feel both virtuous and far less filled with free-floating rage than I did yesterday.

Either that or my bi-polar swing is set to manic today. Or at least mellow.

I'm not even raging over the network manager's inability to filter out spam and viruses. Hell, I've got the latest Norton virus defense shield running, updated only yesterday. So who cares if the webmaster account is being drowned in virus spam? I'm just methodically dumping them. Gives some rhythm and meaning to my day...

Today is one of those days when I would love to pick a fist fight with the first idiot to cross my path. Fortunately, there is a plethora of idiots available from which to choose. Even more fortunately, my meds are adjusted so that instead of taking a swing (or a swig, as the case may be) I'm only cursing like a longshoreman (and only in my head) and sticking very close to the computer.

But my mood is soooo black, so foul, so teeth-grindingly angry that I can't stand to be in my own company. Free-floating anxiety and anger.

And why? Who knows. My primary car is in the shop waiting for its brainbox to be replaced. The emergency back up car is idling hot and its radio (which was one of its finer points) decided yesterday morning to just up and die. I was listening to Public Radio and the story was about how America's foreign policy has placed us in the top five "most likely to be hit by terrorism" countries on the planet. I snapped the radio off with a pithy remark about the current occupant of the White House and how he helped us make that list. When I tried to pop a tape in the deck as an alternative listen, there was nothing but silence. The sound system had died.

So what? Really, these are all minor, petty annoyances, not life-altering problems. It is just that my tolerance is at an all-time low.

And I'm tired of the rain. PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTT.

On go the headphones, and I am going to retreat to the black lagoon of my mind.

One would think, after all these years, that I would know better than to take my husband's recommendations for movies. But, no. I went with him last night to see "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

It blew. It blew large, frothy chunks. What unadulterated, misbegotten crap with a side order of dreck.

There was a plot... just less of one than the comic book on which it was based.

There were recognizable characters, but only by name, and only if you'd read a lot of Victorian-era literature, or at least had seen the movies based on those books. Having said that, only the names were familiar, because the characters were mere caricatures of the originals. And original this shlock was not.

How anyone with even a passing knowledge of "Tom Sawyer" would extrapolate that wild youth in to a "Wild, Wild West"-style government agent speaks to the theory of alcohol abuse or pre-frontal lobotomy.

Mina Harker, the widow of Jonathan Harker of "Dracula" fares no better. She has become a, uh, um, chemist? scientist of nebulous specificity. She is also a daylight-dwelling vampire with never-healing neck wounds. Mina also makes dubious wardrobe choices, appearing alternately in widow's weeds with a net veil (I'm guessing that passes for her sunscreen), a marvelously tooled black leather corset and an 1890's stenographer's white middy blouse and walking skirt -- worn with her long hair loose, which, as any indifferent student of the era can tell you, was acceptable only for young, un-married virgins.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the house: Jekyll with red-rimmed eyes and an ability to see (and talk to) Mr. Hyde in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Hyde himself wears a top hat made to fit, despite the fact that the rest of his costume is shredded like the Hulk's clothes after a transformation. In one of the more jarring stylistic anachronisms, Mr. Hyde also looks like he was designed by Todd Mcfarlane. When one of the bad guys drinks the Hyde juice (an entire retort of it in one face-wetting, Gator-Aide style splash) he becomes more Hyde-like than Hyde, and his head and neck appear to be sprouting from somewhere around his sternum. That's when I started laughing and my husband had to poke me and tell me to be quiet, not everyone in the theater wanted to be informed as to the exact points of suckiness.

Alan Quartermain, Dorian Gray, Moriarty and Captain Nemo all make appearances, as does *an* invisible man, but not *the* Invisible Man. This invisible man even refers to "the franchise." Ugh. The dialogue, such as it is, relies heavily on late 20th century American slang.

The star of this mess is probably the Nautilus, Nemo's ship. (And remind me again how Nemo became an Indian, a pirate and a worshipper of Kali?) This is not the Nautilus from Disney's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." No, this a Nautilus the length of a 7th Fleet aircraft carrier and the width of an original VW bug. Except on the inside, in true fantasy film form, where it is incredibly spacious and impeccably white. Despite its size, the Nautilus is capable of navigating the canals of Venice, going so far as to be seen passing under the Bridge of Sighs.

That was when my mind overloaded from the impossibility of it all, and so I cannot explain how the League went from Venice to Inner Mongolia where they destroyed a lot of things and, uh, beat the bad guys (Moriarty and Gray) and lived (?) happily (?) ever after. Except for Gray, who saw his portrait and the evil transferred from it to him and caused him to spontaneously discorporate, and Moriarty who gets shot in the back from half a mile away and goes down, and Quartermain, who may be dead and buried (back in Africa), but who may not stay that way, because there's a witch doctor doing the hoodoo that he do so well over the grave and then thunder splits the sky and the credits roll.

And then so did my stomach, and not from the popcorn.

It's been raining, but then, this is the rainy season in the tropics. One may as well complain that San Francisco is foggy. It is the nature of the beast.

The nature of my own personal beast is this: I hate my job. I really, really, hate my job. I hate sitting in front of a computer. I hate working in an office. I hate dressing up and wearing make up every day.

Today I had my headphones on and listened all day to a little compilation of MP3s I call "easy for ME to listen to". This is so it won't be confused with the concept of easy listening by anyone else. It is heavy with Bob Dylan boots, but there are a smattering of cuts by Frank Sinatra and Billy Joel and John Lennon. Mostly though, it's boys with bad voices singing about bad relationships and crummy life choices.

It makes me feel better. What would really make me feel better is a vast quantity of very, very cold vodka with a splash of vermouth and a matching large quantity of olives.

Another thing that would make me feel better would be for my father to accept that my mother's Alzheimer's has reached a state where we would all be better off if she were institutionalized.

This has to be one of the most horrible diseases to inflict man. Everything I read could not prepare me for the reality of it. I can deal with her not recognizing me for the simple reason that I can no longer recognize her. This mean and bitter creature is not my mother. My husband has a much easier time than any of us dealing with her. He says it's because he knew so many acid casualties back in the day that he can talk to someone who is so totally in the now, so completely owned by their paranoia and hallucinations and delusions.

I never liked dealing with burnouts. That's probably why I have such a low tolerance for Deadheads and alcoholics. And now, for the person who was my mother.

This entry started out about work and weather, but like everything else my mind touches on these days, the spiral just goes around the drain to the sucking vortex of my mother's dementia.

Drinks, anyone?