We shall cut the overture. Overture is out!

Last night Andrew and I watched Spartacus. It's three hours long and counts as three hours of "outside" research for one of his Italian classes. He's required to do 24 hours of outside research (ie. research not on the syllabus, that isn't related to any papers he has to write for that class, research above and beyond the 2 hours of homework per class period--strange, I know) each semester. I think this semester the teacher is actually allowing them to use their "paper research" time to count toward their 24 hours of research, which I'm happy about. I thought it was so odd how she wanted them to just do hours and hours of research that they would never be tested on, that they would never write a paper on, that they wouldn't use in any of their other classes, but just for fun.

Not that research for the sake of research is bad. I enjoy doing research, but when you are taking 20 credit hours and have major projects in each class and are working 25 hours a week, it's hard to enjoy that extra 24 hours of research. Thankfully Andrew only has 18 credits this semester, which is somehow a whole lot nicer.

Anyway, we put Rachel on the floor to play because she doesn't do very well sitting through movies unless she has full roam of the floor, and then turned on the movie. After selecting "play" from the menu, the movie went immediately to the overture, obviously, since that's what is supposed to come first. What was kind of odd was that the screen was completely black all through the overture. Andrew and I were sitting on the couch, facing the television and Rachel was sitting somewhere between us and the television. She was very confused.

She would stare at the television and, noticing it was completely blank, would then turn and look at us with a a look of curiosity. Since we were still looking at the screen, she would check to see if anything was on it. She was so perplexed; we found it quite entertaining so we spent several minutes focusing on the screen, trying our very best to look interested in the nothing that was on while Rachel continued to look back and forth between us and the television, trying to figure out what we were watching.

Even that got boring after awhile and we didn't have all night so we fast forwarded through the rest of the overture and started the actual movie. Rachel was visibly relieved when a picture popped up on the screen to accompany the sound coming from it. Her face read, "Phew! Mom and Dad aren't crazy!"