February is the worst month.
Other than Groundhog Day, which is a fairly disappointing holiday, and Valentine's Day, which is a silly commercial holiday, February is a month filled with snow, rain, ice, fog, grey skies and the slow reveal of an impending spring cleanup in the yard.
To be fair, the weather has been mild and it looks like spring might be here. I hesitate to say that it is here because, since I have been writing this column, every time I have said that spring is here, more snow falls. I am cautiously optimistic about the early spring but I am not holding my breath.
Often at this time of year, I would have launched my husband and me on a last-minute, ill-thought-out home renovation to give us something to do until the weather clears. However, the home renovations that we needed to do seemed like a lot of work. Instead, I have tasked myself with a very important job this month. I am getting caught up on the Marvel movies.
It is a serious task, I know. A binge of comic book movies is a task perfectly suited for a petulant month such as February. Now, prior to this month's binge, I have seen a few of the Marvel movies but since I've had the children, I had lost track of which movies had come out and when. Before children, I would be able to sit through a movie without falling asleep or getting pulled away by a crying child.
Now, I'm lucky if I can watch the first twenty minutes of a movie without nodding off in a charming way. Before this binge, I had seen, I think, two out of the three Iron Man movies, an Avengers movie and possibly the second Avengers too but I may have been unconscious because I don't remember any of it.
I watched the Netflix Jessica Jones series and it was amazing, not only because a former Dr. Who, David Tennant, plays a wickedly terrifying bad guy. I am also a regular watcher of Marvel's Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D on primetime. Sometimes it is a little terrible but it usually redeems itself in time for me to give it another go.
There is a small problem with watching some (but not all) of the Marvel movies. The entire Marvel universe is a self-referential, incestuous series of stories that will use plot points from other movies as known facts in other shows.
So far, S.H.E.I.L.D. has referred to "the events from New York" and Agent Carter has hinted at a number of events from other movies that are going over my head.
Now for your information, I am a lazy geek.Growing up, I read some comics and watched X-Men cartoons and I like science fiction and fantasy. I am not a huge comic geek so I cannot keep up with the plots of these movies. On my binge, so far, I have watched the first two Captain America movies (first one good, second one - sure) and now I am stuck watching Thor. I keep turning it off because, although the main character is fairly handsome, his clueless God-like speech patterns are making this movie difficult to enjoy.
The point of the binge is to have something to distract me from how much I hate February.
So far, it's working.
