The List - #19 completed

#19. Watch a Lord of the Rings marathon.

Admittedly, this is not a big, life-altering item from The List. But it sounded like a lot of fun, and as a movie fan it is definitely something I should do at least once. I didn't know when I would get around to this one, since I have found that the older A.J. gets, the tougher it is to sit down and watch a single flick uninterrupted, let alone an epic trilogy. And I certainly didn't think it would take place this past weekend. But that's exactly what happened.

My brother's wife and kids are on the Cape right now, so since he was home alone he came down to visit for the weekend. We grilled up some burgers and dogs for the 4th and settled in to watch the Red Sox. Except that didn't happen, as we were screwed yet again by the ridiculous FOX Saturday blackout rules, despite paying pretty big bucks for the Extra Innings package. Thus, without baseball, we had to do something else. Somehow the possibility of doing this came up, and before we could talk ourselves out of it I grabbed the extended edition DVDs and loaded them into the player. Total running time: 681 minutes. We started shortly after 2 PM. It also warrants mentioning that we started drinking immediately.

The first crisis came before we even began when we realized we were low on ice. I don't want to throw all the blame on the wife, but I don't know anyone else in the house that fixes 64 ounce cups of ice water. Anway, she later rectified the situation by running out to the store. Not only did she get ice, but she completely loaded us up with mixers, snacks, and even a cooler so we could keep everything within arm's reach. This was huge.

Early on during Fellowship I decided I had to update our progress somehow, so I made a Facebook post announcing that we were embarking on the trilogy, and then I followed that up with Twitter updates. This was a much bigger hit with some friends than I anticipated, as nearly immediately a couple of buddies chimed in, excited by what they thought was a great idea. They also insisted on running commentary via Twitter, and I was all too happy to oblige. Overall, the trilogy viewing was a lot of fun, although it was also more grueling than I imagined. I hit the wall about halfway through ROTK but I battled through to the end.

I don't know if doing this with all six Star Wars movies will be easier or harder, but I will definitely try that too at some point.