It's just an ordinary day - Recent Entries

Snurched from gamera_spinning, I bring you the trailer for Quantum of Solace, the forthcoming Bond film.

I'm all revved up for Dark Knight, mind you, but this? I'll spare some swoonspace to say BRING IT. BRING IT NOW.

I see I've picked up a couple new folks reading: hi there, mrgoodwraith and sar_anon. Things have been slow around here lately since I haven't had much brain for posting--or doing much of anything else, for that matter. However, things should soon be picking up.

Most of this past week has gone to various appointments (chiro, massage, talk therapy), as well as hanging out with the fantabulous mamishka--who's come over a couple of time and introduced me to the TV shows Moonlight and Pushing Daisies. Moonlight is better than I've expected, at least based on the first couple of episodes; it's got a few amusing moments of self-aware humor, and it makes me grin that it has the actress who played Reinette in "Girl in the Fireplace" in it. Pushing Daisies, on the other hand, is hilarious in a quirky, dark-humor kind of way.

As I feared, the replacement X-Files DVD set that Amazon sent me turned out to also be missing the season closer. To wit: argh. I shall have to find alternate means to acquire that season, I fear. But I also jumped ahead and watched the first X-Files movie, on the grounds that okay yeah fine I'm going to go see the new one and I want to be reminded of various plot points. At least the ones from when the show was still good. ;)

solarbird and I went and saw Speed Racer finally, which I liked way better than I thought I would--and I have to admit, the techno remix of the theme over the closing credits was awfully catchy, and I may have to buy it off of iTunes. Coming home to watch the two actual episodes of the old cartoon I have on laser made me doubly appreciate the movie. The cast really did do a good job nailing the various characters, and sure, it's cartoony, but hey, it's a movie based on a cartoon. Though I can see how, if you never were a fan of the cartoon, the movie wouldn't work for you.

spazzkat and Dara and I went to see Indy IV last night. And, after seeing it a second time, I've found that I've downgraded it to a nice enough coda to the original three movies. Dara has said that she feels that Indy as a character really belongs back in the 20's and 30's, because back then, so much of the world is still Unknown and Mysterious to Western culture--but after WWII, not so much. I think I find myself in agreement with her.

We've had one jam session, about which there will not be a Jam Report still because I haven't had the brain to write them. But it was fun to have folks over, and I hope to resume writing Jam Reports with our next session on the 29th. In related news, Dara has started busking at local farmers' markets--and has made quite a bit of pocket change, which is awesome. I hope to join her next week to help her out, and we're hoping to use the busking money to get us a couple of the new iPhones when they come out.

My energy levels are slowly returning to normal; I've been able to do some decent walking the last few days, going to the aforementioned appointments as well as running errands down to the shops. And my brain's coming back enough that I'm starting to feel a little guilty about not working on the writing (in fact, I finally had an idea occur to me about how to fix one of the skiffy novels I'm working on, about which I need to be taking notes).

I think that's everything for now. A few more days of zzzz and then I'll have to go back to work; in the meantime, though, I got more Nethacking to do!

Ladies and gentlemen, the unthinkable has happened: a bad movie defeated us. solarbird and I could not last more than 32 minutes, 20 seconds into Decoys 2: Alien Seduction. We did, however, make it all the way through Incubus. Which means that Decoys 2 wins this round by default.

Breaking it down by the numbers:

Decoys 2--or at least, as much of it as we could stand to watch--let us know we were in for some pain even before the credits rolled, when we got some Extremely Naughty Tentacle action going on. But that was only the opening blow in a continuing salvo that included the main character from the last movie (looking broody and angstful), blonde alien babes trying to propagate their species (via the aforementioned naughty tentacles, though we do get a flashback of their actual and much uglier forms, presumably from the first movie, which presumably had a bigger budget), a side "plot" (and by "plot" I mean OMG MY EYES) involving horny college boys trying to set up a five-day competition about who could score the most babes, and an extremely bored-looking Tobin Bell (the only name in the credits recognized by spazzkat).

It was the scene with the horny college boy hitting on the girl reading Titus Andronicus that did us in. We're talking eye-gougingly bad here, people. We're talking Boy Has Sprayed Himself With What He Thinks Are Sex Pheremones bad. The poor girl he was hitting on was not only glaring daggers, she was radiating an entire armory of loathing and contempt for the entire movie, focused on the unfortunate schmuck who thought it was a good idea to put his hormones on display. Me, I don't blame her in the slightest.

And after all that, Incubus, in the words of solarbird, was a refreshing after-dinner mint.

Seriously, it was much less awful than y'all had led me to believe. Sure, there's the WTFery of an entire movie being filmed in Esperanto--which in turn of course means that all the actors delivering these lines tend to sound extremely stilted, since they're clearly frantically trying to remember exactly what syllable comes next. There are also long stretches of mood shots in which very little happens besides people wandering around in the woods, and one laughable goat-head costume at the very end.

The bones of a halfway decent story are here: young war hero has come home to recuperate from wounds sustained in battle, and is getting looked after by his sister. Only there's this blonde succubus babe who starts stalking him, as she's desperate to score herself a noble soul to pull down to Hell--desperate enough to ignore the warnings of an older succubus-type that truly good people are too powerful for them to take down. This is a plot we've certainly seen crop up in modern-day urban fantasy novels, and as a concept, there's nothing wrong with it.

Problem is, the way the story's implemented is boring. There are way too many mood shots and not enough character or plot development. The cast clearly has issues with the dialogue being in Esperanto. Though, here's the shocking part: William Shatner actually handles his lines most naturally out of anyone in the entire cast, and by and large is the only person who manages to come across as if he's actually talking rather than delivering lines memorized by rote out of a script. This doesn't stop him from going into a bit of truly Kirkian emoting at the end, mind you, but hey, this is Bill Shatner we're talking about here. ;)

So, yeah. Decoys 2 is the undisputed winner of this round. Last up: Mammoth vs. Shark Attack 3, which will bring us Summer Glau vs. John Barrowman. This promises to bring some lulz.

The first round of the Great Movie Suckoff Marathon is now complete. Our contenders: the Sci-Fi Pictures Original movie Phantom Force vs. the theatrical release Ultraviolet. The former was so helpfully provided to me by kathrynt; the latter, recommended by waysofseeing. Well done, both of you, for offering up some deeply wretched fodder for this round of the competition.

And now, the verdict: Ultraviolet!

I thought at first it was going to be a difficult choice. Phantom Force after all had some godawful acting, including delightfully wretched accents, and incoherent splicing of disparate plot elements into one big mess of a movie. It also had Richard Grieco as the male lead. I am informed by the aforementioned Kathryn that he was the "other guy in 21 Jump Street, the one who wasn't Johnny Depp". (To this I must add that yeah, that's about right; Mr. Depp is both cuter and a way, way better actor. Sorry, Richard!) However, it is also worth noting that in one respect this movie did actually surprise me--because it killed off the perky blonde chick who liked Grieco's character, and even more amazingly, the black chick survived the movie. And she got to contribute amusing voodoo mileage to one of the final fight scenes, too.

However, Ultraviolet beats it, hands down. As per the previous advice given, I did watch the 88-minute theatrical cut for maximum amusement value--and oh my yes that was wretched. solarbird and I knew we were in trouble when our heroine delivers this voiceover at the beginning that somehow managed to be both soporific and vomit-inducing. Not long thereafter, once we got into the first fight scene, Dara let out with "Christian Dior, SUPER SPY!" I answered with, during the first of the many Dramatic Pauses in the middle of the many fight scenes, "HI KEEBA!"

And honestly, the fight scenes were the best bits of the movie. It was pretty, I'll give it that, with this sort of eerie, dreamlike quality to the whole thing. The heroine's hair and outfit randomly changing colors was kind of cool, even if it was for no apparent reason. But not even her electric blue jacket could save her from the WANGST WANGST WANGST WANGST she fell into in between all the fight scenes.

For final giggle value, I realized that the bad guy in this movie was the same actor who played the extremely creepy fetishist guy in a second season X-Files episode I watched just last night--the episode "Irresistible", with the guy who kept cutting hair and fingernails off his victims and who eventually kidnapped Scully. His voice wasn't so creepy in this movie, but his face was familiar, and his voice did ping me just enough that after I confirmed it was him, I kept wanting to call "Is your hair normal or dry?" to the screen.

So, yeah. Ultraviolet wins this round hands down. But the fight ain't over yet, folks. Next up: Decoys 2: Alien Seduction vs. Incubus. With William Shatner. In Esperanto.

Today's hero of the revolution is kathrynt, who last night brought me not one, not two, but three DVDs of craptastic movie goodness. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that the Movie Suckoff Marathon is about to commence.

But I need suitable challengers for this Triumvirate of Suck, and this is where you come in! Please to submit your suggestions for which movies should go up against these contenders:

Phantom Force, a Sci-Fi Pictures Original from 2004

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction, not a Sci-Fi Pictures Original, but it did air on the USA channel, which is almost as bad

And last, but certainly not least, as this one features the redoubtable Summer Glau:

Mammoth, a Sci-Fi Pictures Original from 2006

ETA 4:56pm: Please to note: anything I have already seen is automatically disqualified. This includes the vast majority of MST3K episodes, as well as anything of Ed Wood's. Ideal contenders: big-budget theatrical releases, preferably as grandiose, overblown, and badly acted as possible. Previous contenders have included Battlefield Earth, The Day After Tomorrow, and On Deadly Ground; if you can come up with something to match those, that's exactly what I'm looking for. ;) Extra bonus points if the movies in question match up with the three above in general theme or monster type!

Somewhat belated, but then, I've had a pretty complicated and distracting weekend... but hey, there's little that a good dose of Indy can't help. ;)

This is the blow by blow spoiler post for Indy IV, people. If you haven't seen this movie yet, for the love of God, don't look behind the cut!

( Spoilers still damn well hanging onto the Hat.... )

Still musing about how I feel this movie holds up against Temple of Doom and Last Crusade. I am pretty sure I'm going to have to go see it again to formulate a real and proper opinion!

First and foremost, folks: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull DOES NOT SUCK.

It's not in the league of Raiders of the Lost Ark--but then, expecting it to be is just crazytalk. ;) However, it does hold up pretty well against Temple of Doom and Last Crusade; how well, I'm still debating. It is pretty much Big Silly Fun, which is about what I was expecting.

There are a couple of "oh for fuck's sake, no" moments that are too silly. But there are also some genuinely LOL-worthy moments, the chase sequences are good, Shia LeBeouf is decent, Cate Blanchett is quite cool (although not quite as cool as she should have been), there are some nice nods to not only the events of the previous movies but also the years between, and most of all... it was ZOMG so cool to see Indy and Marion in the same movie again. Karen Allen in particular seems to share the glee, as she spends a good chunk of the movie with this giddy grin on her face, as if she's thinking, "YAY I GET TO BE MARION AGAIN!"

They went a little overboard trying to prove to the audience that Indy is still perfectly physically capable despite his age--he has a couple of things happen to him that should have damn well killed a younger man, much less a 65-year-old. ;) However, they also do acknowledge his age nicely in other ways. And I gotta admit... from a few camera angles, in certain scenes... yeah. Harrison's still hot. Even for an old dude. ;)

mamishka, casirafics, and I had a bitchin' good time last night having dinner and then linecamping for the midnight showing of the movie. We had excellent Mexican food (for those of you who are local, we went to the Mexican place on the top floor of Pacific Place, downtown) and tasty drinkies (during which I learned that yeah, two margaritas do make me rather loopy, but it wears off fairly quickly), and after that was done joined the already lengthy line at the Cinerama.

There were already about 75 people in the line ahead of us--some of them had TENTS. And lawn chairs. And blankets. They had clearly been there for a while! But once we spotted the group in costume, we knew we were among our Tribe.

We had a delightful conversation with the people in line just behind us, as we all hung out amusing ourselves watching the DVD of bonus materials out of the original DVD box set of the first three movies. It was very noisy there on the street, so Mimi, clever panda that she is, turned on the English subtitles in her DVD program and we watched stuff that way.

It is worth noting that much amusement was expressed over the juxtaposition of the Indy IV poster against the one for the forthcoming animated Clone Wars flick. Double deja vu, that. Sadly, I cannot muster up nearly the same enthusiasm for the Clone Wars flick as I did for this one... but it was still pretty neat to see the posters side by side.

They let us in fairly early, which was nice of them, and while we were waiting the costumed group's fully costumed Indy guy kept coming down in front and showing off his whip skills. Which were, I must note, pretty impressive! Dude even had a whip made by the guy who makes the official Indy whips--who turns out to be local! Very, very cool.

Lots of high spirits in the crowd, which is of course why one goes to these things. And happily, they didn't inflict any commercials on us while we were waiting--or during the previews. We got a Dark Knight trailer, which triggered a big wave of cheers. And I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved that we did NOT get an X-Files trailer.

This post will remain spoiler-free; I'm going to do another one with a full blow-by-blow breakdown. So feel free to comment right now on this one if you haven't seen the movie yet--and when you do, look for my next post!

Just to pay appropriate note to the various and sundry other things that have been going on in my life:

Jam Reports. There have not been Jam Reports for the last couple of Jams, and I apologize in advance, but there will probably not be. I just haven't been focused enough to get proper Jam Reports written. However, it is worth noting that there is much promise with GBS' "Chemical Worker's Song" with the current set of voices. cflute in particular has some very impressive harmonies coming together for that, and kendaer is feeling some potential for rumbling out the lead on this on days when mamishka isn't available.

On a related note, solarbird and I went to go visit stealthcello this past Friday night, which was made entirely of Win. She and her family have a lovely home full of lovely large Maine Coon cats as well as six two-week-old kittens, with whom we visited as well and ZOMG TINY KITTENS. Dara shared some of the music she's been working on, and Betsy answered with some of hers, and me, I was impressed by Betsy's shiny new black carbon-body guitar.

One giggleworthy moment of the evening: Dara hitting a chord on the mandolin and announcing that that sounded like "ass minor". Betsy's daughter lost it laughing, and Betsy herself pondered the question of what precisely "ass" sounds like. Dara's response, entirely inevitably: "Here, pull my finger!"

I will also not be doing review posts for the most recent BSG and Doctor, again because short on general levels of cope. I will however say that the most recent BSG was quite solid. We actually haven't watched the most recent Doctor yet, but will hopefully be getting that in soon.

Current book on the queue: desperance's Bridge of Dreams, which I have scarcely begun, but already I am impressed by the liquid rhythm of the prose.

And because I could, I went and got RAM upgrades for both my MacBook and Dara's. Now Winnowill and Kiliandra both are at 2 GB, though I have observed that I'm still taxing the CPU a bit if I try to do too many things at once. Less so than before, granted, but the problem hasn't entirely gone away.

Working on listening to s00j's Sirens, to be followed up by vixyish and tfabris's Thirteen. I have however also squeezed in Capercaillie's shiny brand new album Roses and Tears, as well as Nickel Creek's first album, since I've been meaning to listen to them for ages. This marks the first official time I have ever purchased an album calling itself country. However, listening to it, I find it definitely upholds the Alexander James Adams Principle of Celtic and Country Music, to wit: same music, different whiskey. ;)

Dara and I are planning our assault on Folklife this weekend and we are for once actually looking at doing three of the four days. We definitely want to hit the Celtic Band Scramble on Saturday, but there are things that interest us quite a bit on Sunday and Monday as well. I'm thinkin', a great big (not to be confused with Great Big) glorious burst of Folklife just before surgery should be a good way to get ready.

And, it has occurred to me that as I am about to be lying flat on my ass for two weeks, I can finally read Deathly Hallows.

And have another Movie Suckoff. Because there will be another Movie Suckoff, oh my yes.

Last but most definitely not least: tomorrow night, JONES. Meeting casirafics and mamishka for the midnight show at the Cinerama, and there will be much fangirling. What can I say. There are only a few people in the world that can really get me to fangirl, but Harrison Ford is one of them.

And, just because I haven't done this in ages, here's an exercise update as well. I am now on my way back to Hobbiton!

Miles since April 5th: 107.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2863.8
Miles out of Minas Tirith: 26.8
Miles to Hobbiton: 1598.2

ETA 10:42pm: Oh yes, I forgot to mention: my Ubuntu VM problem has been solved thanks to help from blargh. The issue seemed to be that VMWare was confused by my machine's having both a CD-ROM and DVD drive, and when I changed the VM settings to tell it not to auto-detect a drive, it started behaving. So now I have a functional Ubuntu VM to use as a test platform at work. Go me! And thanks, Traest. :)

spazzkat, solarbird, and I just got back from seeing Iron Man. And okay, yeah, sure, we're a week late to the party... but now at least I can join my voice to the chorus of DUDE THAT TOTALLY ROCKED.

( Spoilers at 10 percent... )

This came in over my RSS subscription to indianajones.com last night: Trailer #2 for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

( Spoilers! )

Oh yeah. This is starting to feel like a proper Jones film. Even with this old Indy running around in it. ;) I am eying the 22nd now with great enthusiasm--and thoughts of attending a midnight showing! 'Cause who am I kidding, I know I'm going to be there!

The trailer is out! Go! Watch! And join me in hoping this won't suck!

( Trailer reactions back here, to hide the spoilers... )

Winnowill has been flinging me a lot of my Indy screencaps as backgrounds in my random desktop rotation lately. I think this machine is trying to tell me something: possibly that it is expecting me to jump up to indianajones.com tomorrow and check out the shiny new trailer that is about to be released. I'm finally starting to believe this movie is about to happen--but I think I won't quite completely buy it until I lay eyes on this trailer. ;)

Please, gods of cinema, don't let this suck.

Monday afternoon, by way of taking advantage of a day off from work, solarbird and spazzkat and I went to go see Cloverfield.

(Which is, by the way, a quite tight and intense little movie--but for the love of god, be warned, if you're prone to any kind of motion sickness, sit way, way back in the theater. Also consider taking some Dramamine beforehand.)

(Also, we had the new teaser for the forthcoming Trek flick in front of the movie, which I have to admit really rather made my little fangirl heart go pitter-pat, particularly when the first few notes of the familiar theme song welled up over the pan shot across the under-construction saucer section of the Enterprise... and, well, gosh. <3 Man, I hope they don't screw this up. I'm really in an Original Trek mood after giving Dara the remastered DVDs of the first season, so yeah. Bring on the new kids, and here's hoping they do the old familiar characters justice.)

(But I digress.)

I mention the Cloverfield excursion mostly because both beforehand and afterward, we popped into Barnes and Noble. I had a couple of coupons I wanted to spend, and the first one went to me picking up another Waifs CD. I offered the other to Dara, but she couldn't think of anything she really wanted to get even though she waffled for a bit on the very first season box set for The Avengers. (ETA 10:08pm: Dara says I got the season wrong--it's second series Avengers she was interested in. My bad!) So I settled on spending the second coupon on the last box set for Remington Steele.

Which of course was very foolish of me to do two days before my birthday--because Monday night at dinner, I learned to my chagrin that risu was of the opinion that I Really Shouldn't Have Done That, to which I went "ah" and immediately resolved to not open up the package so that I could take it back to B&N and swap it for something else. *^_^*;;

I did that today, and settled on two CDs: In All Things by Leahy, since I do have quite the long string of good luck with Celtic-flavored Canadian bands, and also The Best of the Chieftains, because I keep saying I should damn well have some Chieftains, so now I do. I'm pretty sure that there is a law written down somewhere, probably in Ireland or Scotland, that all fans of modern Celtic music should own at least one Chieftains CD. And I am a law-abiding citizen!

Anyway, it turned out that the extra box for Steele was actually a get-well present rather than a birthday, but most welcome nonetheless. And between that and the gifts from Dara and Paul, it has been a very DVD-heavy birthday, with emphasis on the Swoonable and the Funny. In the Swoonable corner, we have Steele (the 4th and 5th season box set), the second season of MacGyver ("his mind is the ultimate weapon", says the tagline on the box, to which Paul added that this is scary given that it lives under the ultimate mullet), and, to crown off the lineup, 3:10 to Yuma, the Crowe/Bale edition. BOOYA. And over in the Funny corner, we have the 11th collection for Mystery Science Theater 3000 as well as Eddie Izzard's Definite Article.

technoshaman has come over to help Dara with a server swap, and he brought a card with him which was very cute. My boss even gave me a card today as well. All in all, as birthdays go, a pretty fine one indeed. <3

This afternoon solarbird, risu, and I went out to see Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, an uplifting, perky, cheery way to spend Christmas in a movie theater (aheh). Johnny Depp sings surprisingly well, as does Helena Bonham Carter. Alan Rickman is not bad at all as the bad guy, though he had some issues with some of the notes he was hitting. And I am not at all surprised to learn that Timothy Spall has a long and honorable tradition of playing repugnant sidekick characters. He certainly does it here!

After that we wandered around downtown a bit to see if anywhere was open, since we wanted to have Chinese food. We were shot down until we got back to Kenmore and found that the place down the hill from our house was open for business. They gave me a surprise mug along with the check and wished us a Merry Christmas.

Hope yours has been a good one, all! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Peter Jackson has resolved his differences with New Line and is slated to be executive producer of a forthcoming two-movie adaptation of The Hobbit! No director or script yet, but they're expecting to start work in 2009!

The floor is now open for rampant speculation as to the appropriate persons to play Bilbo, all twelve dwarves (especially Thorin Oakenshield), Legolas' father ('the Elvenking'), Bard, and most importantly of all, the voice of SMAUG. :D

And since it was a four-day weekend, there's quite a bit of weekend to review!

Thursday: Day of Turkey, and as with previous years, we had the Murkworks Homeless Waifs Thanksgiving Day Turkeyfest. flashfire came up from California to join us, which was neat; he brought his XBox 360 with him and there was much gaming mileage. More locally, we had mamishka and marzipan_pig and sksouth and darthhellokitty and king_chiron and dpatows and epatows and ypatows. Much tasty food was consumed. Jenga was played, as was Wii Bowling and other assorted Wii games. Kittens were mightily admired. As was their rightful due!

Friday: Day of going to speak with my radiation oncologist, as previously posted. Aside from that, there was a lot of lying around going "zzzzzz".

Saturday: Day of going out to see American Gangster finally, along with the aforementioned darthhellokitty and king_chiron. mamishka had hoped to join us, but sadly was feeling poorly. The movie, however, kicked ass. It was on the long side, but I honestly can't think of a single bit that could be easily deleted since it's all vital data in there. The plot thread with Denzel Washington's character and the one with Russell Crowe's character are rather like two charging bulls closing in inevitably on one another until they collide with thunderous impact towards the end. Denzel put in a hell of a performance, flipping between dutiful son and loving husband to gangster with a frightening temper, and Russell was fabulous as always.

Saturday night, after I got back from the movie, we watched the BSG movie Razor on the Tivo. More on this in another post. ^_^

Sunday: Balancing the checkbook, oh joy oh glee, but there was also Jam! More on this, too, in another post. The Jam, that is, not the checkbook balancing.

Other general points of interest: I worked out with my boss this morning how to rearrange my schedule during my forthcoming radiation treatments. We agreed that I'd come in earlier than normal, which translates to "get to work by 8am". As I usually get in around 8:45, this means I'll have to get up 45 minutes earlier, too. Which means I have to get up at 6. Ugh. Here's hoping that it won't kick my ass too terribly much, both the earlier time for getting up and the radiation treatment in general.

The good news is, though, that I did work out how to get to Kirkland from downtown and then home again from Kirkland by bus. So I won't have to drive for any of it, yay. And I got updated FMLA paperwork into our HR department today, to cover all my bases in case the radiation fatigue I've heard about does actually kick my ass.

Meanwhile, the weather tonight has been atrocious, and I've been sneezing off and on all night. I had damn well better not be coming down with a cold, as right now is a perfectly godawful time for me to get sick. I'll be sucking on as many zinc lozenges as I can stand.

Miles since the 6th: 39.9
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2484.7
Miles out of Isengard: 691.7
Miles to Minas Tirith: 94.3

This weekend I mostly snoozed and read. I occasionally surfaced from Vicodin-induced grogginess enough to try to play Nethack, or poke at the books, or watch another couple episodes of Season Three of Remington Steele... but mostly, it was all about the snoozing and the reading.

mamishka came over on Friday, bringing with her a Robert Redford movie to watch, Three Days of the Condor. More fun than I had expected, and for bonus points, the first Robert Redford movie I can actually ever remember watching. It was our general consensus that The Bourne Identity, at least in overall style, owed quite a bit to this movie.

solarbird and I walked down to the shops yesterday afternoon because I was tired of lying around being tired, but that turned out to be too ambitious. The walk quite wiped me out. I'm feeling better today, though I did wind up working from home and took a nap partway through the afternoon. I am hoping to stagger back into work tomorrow, something close to my normal self. We'll see how that goes.

Last but not least, grateful acknowledgements must be sent out to amaltheae for the gifts that showed up in our mailbox today: a DVD of one of my favorite Elvis movies, Kid Galahad, and a slightly battered copy of The Twenty-One Balloons. I plan to be charmed all over again by the former (it does have one of my favorite Elvis Serenades the Girl scenes in it, as well as far better acting than any Elvis movie has any right to claim in it), and charmed for the first time by the latter. Thanks, amaltheae!

Miles since the 1st: 2.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2444.8
Miles out of Isengard: 651.8
Miles to Minas Tirith: 134.2

So I neglected to mention last weekend that spazzkat, solarbird, and I went to go see Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Not as solid a movie as the original Elizabeth, I think. Yet Cate Blanchett was certainly queenly, and oh my yes the Errol-Flynnesque Handsome-and-Dashingness of that Walter Raleigh fellow was a potent force indeed (the Queen had a great eye for his, aheh, "immensities"). Anybody besides Dara and me grin at the "Bess tending her lady in the bath" scene? I mean, damn. Let's just say, after seeing that scene as well as the Queen pitching a massive hissyfit later, it was pretty evident that her royal jealousy was a lot less concerned with Walter. ;)

I also neglected to mention that after Jam this past Sunday, technoshaman and cflute left a coat and the chocolate sauce that had gone on the pumpkin pie behind. So I took them over to their place, which was the first time I'd seen it, and which let me see a few of the winding back streets behind the Murk. In return, they gave me two more Echo's Children CDs as well as the Echo's Children songbook. Yay!

As one might expect my reading rhythm has been mightily thrown off this week, but I hope to maybe finish up reading rachelcaine's Midnight Alley. And it is worth a mention that I have finally purchased a copy of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, as I did not actually have a copy in my library, which seemed a rather criminal lack. You don't get much more Classic Urban Fantasy than that book.

The kittens are steadily growing. In the last week in particular they've both suddenly become mightily aware of the virtues of being petted, which for me has meant that if I'm lying on the couch with my laptop, trying to write, one or the both of them will climb up onto my chest and purr like mad. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, this has been documented for posterity by Dara!

I have but a single episode left in Season 3, Volume 2 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which has some prime silly in it as well as several episodes I remember vividly from when I watched this thing as a kid. No less than six, count 'em, six episodes where Captain Crane gets his head taken over by the Monster of the Week, too. I begin to wonder why the hell he still has security clearance, by this stage of the show. ;) I have not yet acquired any spectacularly crappy movies to watch during my recovery time, but I do not lack for stuff to watch; I've still got the Dresden DVDs as well as the rest of Season 3 of Remington Steele, and the discs from ravyngyngvar as well.

I continue to add to the Buy Anna a Black MacBook Fund, a.k.a. my savings account. I hope to have enough bucks by the end of the year to get that computer--specifically the black one, since Dara and Paul both have white Mac laptops and I want to be able to tell mine apart. I'm pretty sure that once I get said machine, I will be calling it Winnowill--even if by rights any computer named Winnowill ought to be a Windows box. But Winnowill sounds cooler as a computer name than either Venka or Teir, and I've got too many past associations with Rayek to use that as a computer name. ^_^

To those of you who are so inclined, a belated Happy Samhain! I hope your celebrations went well. And belated Happy Halloween as well. We had a fairly quiet one here at MurkNorth; only about ten trick-or-treaters showed up, total. But we did get some interested reactions to the Japanese candy that Dara was handing out--these tasty little chocolate-covered biscuits shaped like mushrooms and acorns. They come in small packages, and you can buy a big bag of said packages at Uwajimaya. Since we had so few trick-or-treaters, we have quite a bit of this candy left. Oh darn, whatever shall we do with it?

And good luck to everybody out there tackling Nanowrimo this year! I will not be doing it officially, though as with last year, I hope to achieve the personal goal of 25,000 words written. Some of these will have to go into the tail end of Queen of Souls, but hopefully the rest of them will go into one of the skiffy novels I'm working on, Child of Ocean, Child of Stars. I'll be posting periodic updates on that to my writing journal as well as to nanonov.

I am now in the Epilogue of Queen of Souls, which means the end is in sight and I should be putting out a call for beta readers on that thing real soon now. I am dubious that I will be able to finish it up this weekend, but we'll see how many braincells the Vicodin leaves me. I still need to send that inquiry postcard to Baen as well, and also review the state I left Lament in and see if there's further tightening up I need to do on its final chapters before I send some queries back out on it.

I have no brain to speak of this morning, thanks to the Vicodin, but have nevertheless been able to putter around and get some things done. I'm very thirsty, thanks to the anesthetic gas they had me breathing during the procedure; they'd warned me it'd leave me with a bit of a sore throat. But all in all, I'm feeling pretty good. And George has now jumped up on me twice demanding pets. Aww. Perhaps a good chunk of this afternoon will be devoted to petting the cats. ^_^

Miles since the 25th: 8.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2442.6
Miles out of Isengard: 649.6
Miles to Minas Tirith: 136.4

Went and had another appointment with my endoc today and told him a number of things. One, about the BFFN. Two, that I thought that having me on the T3 as well as the T4 was a good idea. Three, I'd felt fabulous initially after going on the T3 and while in Japan, but that when we got back and the weather got colder, I started feeling more sluggish. Four, that as a result of the BFFN I was a lot stressier than usual. Five, that I'd ditched my birth control after my cancer diagnosis.

All of which amounted to his rearranging my prescriptions again. I've been bumped down to 125mcg of T4 and bumped up to 10mcg of T3. And, he wrote me the T4 prescription for the generic version this time rather than Synthroid, which I haven't ever had before. Ten bucks cheaper doesn't suck, though I don't know if there'll be any actual physiological difference taking generic T4. We'll see what happens when I start the new dosages tomorrow. If my head explodes, y'all will know what happened.

Meanwhile, I have acquired the second half of season 3 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, thanks to a fortuitously timed 15-percent-off Barnes and Noble coupon arriving in the mail. Muahaha. I am well armed now for recovery days next week. And when I run out of Voyage, I've got the Dresden DVDs gamera_spinning so kindly sent me, as well as some Norwegian ones from ravyngyngvar.

Tomorrow we're probably going to go see the new Queen Elizabeth movie, and on Sunday, there will be Jam! sutures1 will be joining us, so we'll have five people instead of four. If anybody wants to see my five and raise me, better sing out so I'll know how much pie we need. ^_^

And last but not least, I am within 3-4K of finishing Queen of Souls. I may even get it done before Surgery Day. Go me! That'll leave November for a half-Nano attempt on my part, and ideally also following up with Baen on the status of Faerie Blood and getting Lament of the Dove back out the door where it belongs.

Miles since the 22nd: 10.9
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2433.9
Miles out of Isengard: 640.9
Miles to Minas Tirith: 145.1

Dr. Towbin's office called me at lunch this afternoon to follow up as per my request, and tell me what gets to happen next. The nurse I spoke with tried to tell me that I needed to "do some soul-searching" about what route I wanted to take--mastectomy vs. conservation/radiation--and I assured her I'd already made that decision. So now I'm scheduled to go in for a pre-op appointment on the 29th to discuss the game plan. The 31st will be Surgery Day, at which point the cleany-uppy things I've mentioned before will be taken care of all at the same time.

They've recommended that I take two days to recover, so I'll arrange to take the 1st and the 2nd of November off. Which means I'll be out of commission for less time than for each of my thyroid surgeries (which is a bit weird to me, but hey!), and which means I'll have me a five-day weekend.

And what this means is: MOVIE SUCKOFF TIME, baby! The floor is now open for suggestions as to appropriate movies to skewer. No movie too awful! No Sci-Fi Pictures Original too goofy! Remember, people, I'm going to be on painkillers. Hit me with your best shots!