Ordinary Day - Recent Entries

So there have been rumors about Russell Crowe doing another Master and Commander movie for a while, but apparently there are now slightly heftier rumors! According to this AP wire article, there is an actual script for The Reverse of the Medal, and there are early-stage talks going on with the rights holder for the novels to see if it can happen.

To which I must say YES PLEASE OH PLEASE OH PLEASE OH PLEASE. Because I definitely need me some more Jack Aubrey in my life.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

What with solarbird being out of town this weekend, I’ve taken it upon myself to have some quiet me time, which I really rather needed. Just getting caught up on my sleep is a win. But so is doing various and sundry small chores and errands that needed doing, such as getting the checkbook caught up, buying reflective red tape to go over the broken lens on our right rear taillight*, picking up some more long and therefore work-appropriate shorts to wear to work as well as some badly needed sports bras, and washing clothes and sheets and towels.

Friday night we had all the Bothell crowd as well as jennygriffee come over for more tabletop gaming, and while that was quite hectic, it was also fun. I continue to be full of Win for little Moira and Lillian, and this time around I also got little William’s attention; the boy thought it was great fun to try to help me play my guitar. He’s shyer than the girls and doesn’t talk nearly as much, so it was pretty neat to see him perk up.

Lily and Moira love going up our stairs and peeking in my bedroom because I have a big bed they can bounce on, and also, we have a cache of stuffed animals in there. But they also love making me (as well as any other convenient grownups) chase them in circles around the main floor of the house. Lily in particular commanded me to “be a dinosaur!”, so I apparently need to get right to work on my T-rex impersonation. Meanwhile, Moira wanted to further investigate our DVD collection, and when she spotted the pink boxes that contain our Cardcaptor Sakura anime episodes, I went ahead and let her watch that figuring that it wouldn’t be too scary for her or Lily. kathrynt tells me that Lily in fact is experimenting with being scared, and likes to identify things as “scary”.

This led to one of the cutest things I’ve heard coming out of a two-year-old mouth lately: “scary toilet paper lady” to describe the antagonist character in the movie I showed them. Hee.

And, Moira insisted that I “protect” her while she was watching the movie, and sat in my lap. Aw. <3

It should also be noted that Lily furthermore kept asking me for "Donkey Riding", and when she spotted the background pic of Great Big Sea on my computer, pointed at it and said "that's a picture of Donkey Riding!" She's still a little shaky on which name goes with the band and which name goes with the song, but she clearly now knows the faces of Great Big Sea when she sees them. Mostly. She also thought Eddie Izzard on my T-shirt was Sean, I think. I put her straight!

Yesterday morning Q then IMed me to tell me that Lily told her "we put on shoes and go over to my Anna's house!" I am apparently now Lillian's Anna! Who knew?

Unrelatedly, last night while working on checkbook balancing, I re-watched TOS's "Doomsday Machine" episode (some awesome mileage of The Kirk), Master and Commander (which I think is now well and solidly my favorite Russell Crowe movie Ever), and another 4th season episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which is still bringing the wacky).

* Why the hell can’t I buy just a replacement lens for that taillight, anyway? The light itself is intact, it’s just the outer lower bit of the lens that’s broken. But according to the guys at Schuck’s the assembly is all they have, and they wanted $130 for it. I bought a $5 roll of reflective red headlight repair tape instead and used that. Which should do me for now and hopefully satisfy the next cop that tries to pull me over for having a broken taillight.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

They should totally be bringing Russell with them because he and Alan will be all finished up filming Robin Hood and that would be a perfectly loverly stopoff on the way back to Australia.

And Russell should do a surprise encore.

And it should be "A Little Less Conversation".

Which, as I will be at Stage Alan, I would be right there to see.

Yep. This is exactly how it should happen. In my heart, I know this to be true!

Today has been a day of general awesome, in the following chronological order:

1. Went to have me a nice chiro appointment, even though I was told by my chiropractor that my insurance had denied me coverage for the orthotics in my shoes
   
2. Had a nice little breakfast at Caffe Ladro and started working on the Millicent character vignette I'll be doing for this month's Drollerie Blog Tour
   
3. Had a nice massage
   
4. Scampered downtown to meet mamishka and jennygriffee to see State of Play, the new Russell Crowe movie; more on this below
   
5. After the movie, solarbird came to meet me so she could drive and I could have a pomegranate margarita with Jen, and we all had a pleasant hanging-out
   
6. And after that: Dara and I went and got her a shiny, shiny new BOUZOUKI!

The movie was good. Very solidly acted all around; Russell was as usual quite competent, and he was nicely paired off against Ben Affleck and Helen Mirrin, and the girl playing his young partner at the newspaper was good as well. Nice understated sort of thriller, and if you have any connection to the newspaper industry at all, particularly timely.

I particularly liked the dynamic between Russell's disheveled, crufty print-side reporter character, and the bright-eyed young blogger girl who teamed up with him on the story. They had good professional chemistry and some decent potential romantic chemistry as well; nothing's ever stated outright, but there's one amusing bit at the end where he tells her not to tell him how old she is, because it'll make him sick. ;) Also, Helen Mirrin was suitably awesome as their editor, upholding the tradition of being a hardassed bastard (or in this case bitch) when playing the part of Editor at a Major Metropolitan Newspaper.

But all of that was really almost incidental for me given that in the very first scene, we see Russell's character Cal McCaffrey driving along in his beat-up car and singing along with... wait for it... Great Big Sea. Jen, Meems, and I all lost it when we heard "The Night Pat Murphy Died" and Russell singing along with Sean McCann! <3 I loved that. I loved that SO MUCH. And we hung out watching the credits roll after the movie was over, just so I could have the pleasure of seeing "The Night Pat Murphy Died" and the all-important words GREAT BIG SEA in the soundtrack credits.

Which ties in very nicely to the aforementioned bouzouki purchase, not to mention my icon. Dara's been very much in love with this Trinity College bouzouki that they've had at Trading Musician, and we finally went and got it for her tonight. It's the same maker of instrument as my octave mandolin, and in fact looks a lot like the instrument played by The Doyle in this icon. And while I have acknowledged that this instrument is Dara's, I've demanded visitation rights. Because BOUZOUKI.

So far our mutual impression of it is that LONG BOUZOUKI IS LONG, because dear god the neck on this thing. Dara's done a bit of Interneting and has read that Trinity College makes the longest-necked bouzoukis you can get without going to a luthier for a custom job. Also, LOUD BOUZOUKI IS LOUD. It's much louder than my octave mandolin. It'll be fun to find other differences, too!

Dara has named the bouzouki Kohaku. It seems appropriate, as it does have a bit of a River-Dragon-y feel about it.

The Doyle has just announced that he is going to be in Russell Crowe's next movie, the forthcoming Robin Hood movie formerly known as Nottingham. Not at all surprisingly, he's playing Allan A'Dayle. With a lute!

He's posted about joining Russell for a number of days in Australia, working on archery and swordfighting and everything. Alan is going to be BUFF.

Dude. This is going to be the BEST. MOVIE. EVER.

Longest Night has started here at the Murkworks, and it'll just be me and solarbird tonight, pretty much. Friends came by this afternoon to say hi and drop off a few small gifts, much appreciated, although they had to go ahead and scamper off for shelter ahead of the muck we've had rolling up from the south.

I expect tonight to be fairly low-key. Unless the wind does actually pick up and we lose power, in which case Dara and I will be hanging out in the living room by the gas fireplace, possibly playing instruments. Until then, though, it'll be a lot of just peering out the window every so often to see how the snow is progressing.

Last night we watched some old Star Trek in honor of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, and in particular, the first season TOS episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Nurse Chapel did have an unfortunate habit of falling in love with guys with brains like computers, didn't she?

Tonight, I may have to break out 3:10 to Yuma. Mr. Bale and Mr. Crowe can do their part to help keep me awake.

Happy longest night of the year to you all, and here's to the sun coming back tomorrow morning in so much as it can with Snowpocalypse Round 2 upon us!

It is probably deeply appropriate that Great Big Sea's latest, Fortune's Favour, was waiting for me in the mailbox when I came home tonight from eating sushi--though perhaps not quite as deeply appropriate as it would have been had I done this when I got The Hard and the Easy. ;)

Only a day late, which doesn't surprise me, given that this thing was coming here all the way from the other side of Canada. That it's the very simple thin cardboard packaging, without a jewel case, doesn't surprise me either. I bet that it'd be in a jewel case if I bought it in a store. Also not surprising that I see "Russell" in the list of people being thanked in the liner notes, yay! It seems that the lovely and talented Mr. Crowe contributed some songwriting help on one of these songs, as well as on one of the extra tracks that the folks at greatbigsea.com were handing out.

What is surprising is that there's a DVD with this thing! Maybe it's got the same "making of" videos that are now posted up on the site? Clearly this will require investigation, as soon as I'm done listening to the actual songs. A review will of course be forthcoming!

So y'all pardon me, I need to go wine and dine this lovely thing for a while. <3

So, um, yeah! Much, much larger video of the Russell/GBS/Carbon Leaf appearances have been made available by GBS show veteran Lynda Elstad (go straight here to drop her grateful comments for sharing the loveliness). The vids have converted down quite nicely to my iPod. <3

And boxer_ferret, all hail be her name, has gotten a whole pile of lovely screencaps off these videos. I am particularly fond of the good shots of Russell, Alan, and Séan, which is a musical OT3 for me if there ever was one. I'm going to have to see if there can be ICONS.

(This should tide me over quite well over the weekend, while I go down to Norwescon. Assuming that I hang in there with the Martian Death Cold trying to make a comeback--I just can't shake this cold for the life of me, and have had to get more Nyquil and some Rite-Aid-brand Mucinex clone to see if I can wrestle it into submission. Bah. I had BETTER NOT get sick over a convention weekend, that's all I've got to say.)

This came over the official greatbigsea.com RSS feed this afternoon: much, much better YouTube vids of Russell's jumping in on the GBS show!

Russell & GBS 1 - this one's got Russell's intro to "Folsom Prison Blues"!

Russell & GBS 2 - the complete performance of "Molly Malone", with Russell and Alan trading off singing lead!

Two words here, people: SEVENTH HEAVEN. The only way this could get any better is if I'd have been there to see it.

(x-posted between my journal and greatbigsea)

I heard rumors last night that the lovely and talented Mr. Crowe was spotted at a Great Big Sea show in D.C.--and today, checking in on the OKP, I am finding reports of this confirmed. Apparently Russell popped out during an encore, making the audience and the press who were present go absolutely nuts; one poster is saying that even the security guys were taking pictures on their cellphones. I'm not finding pics yet up there, nor video, but I am desperately hoping somebody scarfed some video. Because I mean, damn.

Russell apparently did "Folsom Prison Blues", and then stayed on stage as Carbon Leaf also came out and joined the B'ys for a final encore. Wow. Russell's take of "Folsom Prison Blues" is one of the tastiest things he's ever recorded, and the thought of it with GBS' instrument mix and backup vocals...

Ahem. I'll be in my bunk.

ETA 7:13pm: YouTube video has now appeared, courtesy of Paulawalla of the OKP! All hail Paulawalla!

ETA 7:53pm: Here is another Paulawalla video, a partial for the Russell + GBS + Carbon Leaf "Molly Malone" encore. <3

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

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

Last night, perhaps due to realizing that Faerie Blood has been in the e-queue at Baen for a year now, I dreamed that they accepted it. However, when I got the offer via text message on my phone, I realized that something was wrong with the entire situation and that surely I had to be dreaming.

spazzkat suggests that the dream should have proceeded to have Russell Crowe show up with a copy of the novel, asking for me to sign it so that he could give it to Alan Doyle as a gift. And then Alan would show up, asking me to sign a copy of Russell.

Then they would make out.

That would have been a much more interesting dream.

Who can help out nanocorp with designing a header for her Russell fanfic journal? Sing out if you want to give it a shot.

And now, to make up for last weekend, I'd like to post about some things that don't suck.

I have once more begun to try to cut down on my soda. I am trying not to get too ambitious about the goal here or to make long-term plans, since my luck with that lately has been kind of sketchy, but for the last two days at least I've limited myself to two cans of soda a day. At the same time, I'm trying to take myself off the Trazodone since I have reason to believe it's messing with me, and I've stayed off that for the last two days too. So far I have noticed an immediate lessening of the general background noise of tension I've had in my system for a while. This is a very good thing indeed. And I need to remember this feeling for the next time I start getting way too interested in the diet Dew.

I got a surprise letter from the College of Veterinary Medicine at WSU yesterday, informing me that Ravenna Animal Hospital had made a donation to them because of Polly. And Polly has been added to the list of pet names here. That was an incredibly sweet gesture of the vet, and made me feel rather misty.

A story on our site made me feel kind of misty, too. A couple of days ago we'd run this article about how lack of dental care is leaving the poor in agony, and as part of that article a picture had been run of a guy who was sobbing in the dental office since his blood pressure was too high for them to give him anesthetic. Apparently this prompted an outpouring of offers to help from Times readers to get this guy the dental care he needs. That really made me go "awww". Sometimes, every so often, people don't suck.

As y'all have seen over the last week, I've been more aggressively reading. Which has meant that I haven't listened to stuff on my iPod as much, and that means I have yet to actually listen to the new podcast from Great Big Sea! *blush* I really must correct this little problem this weekend. I may lose my GBS fan cred if I don't. ;)

What I have been listening to, though, is Carbon Leaf. I am seriously grooving on Ether-Electrified Porch Music. I may even like it better than Echo Echo; so far every single track on it is striking me as potential repeat-play material, which puts it out ahead of Echo Echo. This will require a few more plays to give it a proper judging. And I've been slurping up the classical music compilations I've got, too; I have found that they seem to unwind me on a fundamental level. The same level that's been feeling quite good with the hard cut of caffeine over the last two days, in fact.

TV-wise, although I have not yet posted an in-depth post about it, I did like the second episode of the Dresden Files. I don't think I'll do in-depth posting about it this weekend just because I want to focus on getting some writing and editing done, but I did want to at least note that yeah, the episode was good. I liked it a little better than the premiere; it felt more like a Harry story to me.

Movie-wise, courtesy of boxer_ferret I hear tell that Russell Crowe has been signed in a new take on the Robin Hood story--playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. As a good guy, even, investigating a string of murders for which Robin Hood is the suspect. This should be entertaining. And this weekend I hope to meet up with mamishka and go see The Painted Veil, which promises to be full of fun socialness and English-Patient-y romantic angst with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Last but definitely not least, I'm slowly closing in on the five-month mark with Faerie Blood in the e-slush pile at Baen. And trying to remind myself that this doesn't mean much, since their turnaround time is like 9-12 months... but still. It feels satisfying that they haven't told me no quite yet.

Miles from 1/20 up to today: 31.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1730.4
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 421.4
Miles to Isengard: 62.6

New Russell flick, I think, warrants a new Russell icon. Partly to celebrate the movie, and partly also to just be amused at the whole idea of a Russell Crowe film that has him pretty low-key and easygoing throughout most of it. Which is a switch for Russell, both on-screen and off. ;)

I went around reading reviews of this flick on Friday, and saw a lot of reviews that were panning it and one or two that liked it. The one I agree with more or less is the Times review, which pretty much calls it a waste of Russell's talents while also describing it as "delicious" and "lavish" scenery-wise. Which it is, on both counts. It's much lighter and fluffier fare than Russell has tackled in the past.

On the other hand, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, it's a fluff plot, but then again, so was the book.

( Spoilers on the vine back here... )

Yesterday, in the hopes of relaxation and getting my ass out of the house for a little while, I went out to meet up with the lovely and talented mamishka for a viewing of the new Russell Crowe flick, A Good Year. Before I met up with Meems, though, I indulged in a bit of retail therapy on the Ave, since I hadn't been there in ages.

Since Tower Records is going out of business, I stopped in there to see if by any chance they had any Seven Nations discs. They didn't, but I did wind up buying an Afro Celt Sound System disc (Volume 1 Sound Magic) and the second season BSG soundtrack disc (since I do like the music from the show).

At the U Bookstore, I picked up three books: Charlaine Harris' Grave Sight now that it's out in paperback, Yasmine Galenorn's Witchling since she's local and I wanted to have something else of hers (and I wanted to see how she does with something paranormal/fantasyish), and Gina Farago's Ivy Cole and the Moon, which sounded vaguely entertaining and seems to involve a female werewolf.

And last but not least, at Zanadu Comics I finally picked up the graphic novel version of the latest Elfquest story, Discovery. As y'all know I was waffling about whether or not to get that, but after flipping through the soft-bound graphic novel I figured what the hell, I'd give it a shot.

Then I swung down to the Metro Theater to meet up with Meems for the movie. Which turned out to be about what I expected. It's unfortunately not getting very good reviews--I think a lot of people are just really boggled by the whole idea of Russell in a fluffy, comic, romantic movie. I didn't have much of a problem with it, but then, I've also seen him in Mystery Alaska. And I'll be commenting further on the flick in another post!

Wednesday through Sunday miles: 13.3
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1528.9
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 219.9
Miles to Isengard: 264.1

(Hrmm, clearly I need me a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea icon... and now I have the capability to do something about that. Muahahaha. But. Later!)

Folks, Nanowrimo time is upon us. Which means that, although I am going to be shooting for only half a Nano this year--i.e., adding about 25K to Queen of Souls, already in progress--a lot of my already limited cycles are about to go into making that push. Which means that I'll most likely be paying reduced attention to my Friends list. I will still be periodically posting, so be on the lookout for such things as BSG commentaries, impending squeeage over the release of A Good Year (which is out in NINE! MORE! DAYS!), and even louder impending squeeage over the coming of Courage and Patience and Grit (TWENTY!). Because really, if there's anything that can make a November for me, it's a new Russell flick and a Great Big Sea DVD!

But reading the Friends list, not so much maybe. So if there's anything hugely critical you want to share with me, better do it in email or via IM.

Oh, but before I go completely dark, I have got to share this link, cheerfully snurched from temeraire_fans, of a page where someone's done some nice Temeraire fan art. I am especially impressed by her depiction of Temeraire's hatching. And gosh, I think her Laurence looks a little familiar. ;)

Anyway, if you're interested in actually following my word count updates, you might glance over on scuzzboppers for short Nano-related upates, or on annathewriter, where I post all my writing updates anyway.

Days till A Good Year: 9
Days till Courage and Patience and Grit: 20
Monday through Wednesday miles: 5.55
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1498.9
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 189.9
Miles to Isengard: 294.1

On the one hand, my kitty's apparently having escalating problems. She's started pulling the stunt she did not long after we got her, when she had stones in her bladder and had to have surgery--she's been urinating all over the house, and it's got blood in it, and this really concerns me. It may be a recurrence of the previous problem, or--and this is equally likely as far as I know--the thyroid meds I've got her on may be messing with her kidneys. I really need to talk to the vet, and called twice today to try to get her to call me, but so far she hasn't called back. If she doesn't call me tonight I'm going to have to call back tomorrow morning and leave a more urgent message.

And I came home tonight to find a new spot on the carpet, which had apparently been there long enough to stain, along with quite a bit of Polly's stern communique on one of the leather sandals nearby. Does anybody know how to clean a leather sandal? Should I bother? Or should I just air it out?

Also, the power supply on my laptop is acting like the connector has a short in it. It's starting to do that thing where I have to wiggle the cord around to make it stop flashing the battery icon up onto my systray. Meh. This means I'm going to have to see about buying a new power supply, 'cause, well, I need a computer and stuff.

On the other hand, boxer_ferret has posted a whole new slew of Russell Crowe pics over on russellcrowefan, and several of these pics have The Doyle in them. And if there's anything that can bring a smile to my face, it's pictures of Mr. Crowe and Mr. Doyle making music together.

Saturday miles: 0.1
Sunday miles: 2.4
Monday miles: 3.9
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1416.95
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 107.95
Miles to Isengard: 376.05

Why in the world don't I have a Maximus icon in my userpics? I really ought to do something about that.

I ask this question this, of course, because the recent iTunes/iPod update did something long overdue--it removed the little "skip" between tracks, so that finally, if you're playing an album where the tracks blend together, it'll sound right again. Like, for example, the Gladiator soundtrack. Which I hadn't listened to in a very, very long time, since it just didn't sound right with the tracks doing that little skipping thing!

And oh my gods, I'd forgotten how much I loved that music. So much goodness in "The Battle", track 3--the Maximus Kicks Ass theme that shows up again later in "Barbarian Horde" was far and away my favorite musical bit of the entire soundtrack, but "The Battle" also has that glorious tympani roll like passing thunder as the battle theme winds down and segues into the more plaintive vocals at the battle's end. And oh, the trumpet playing in "Earth", track 4. Beautiful, liquid notes that flow like water, and I don't normally expect that coming out of a trumpet.

In related news, in this column about movies forthcoming this fall, the paper which employs me says of the forthcoming Crowe flick: "A Good Year" (Nov. 10), Ridley Scott's film version of Peter Mayles' Englishman-abroad novel, should answer the burning question: Who is more photogenic: Russell Crowe, or the landscapes of Provence? Hee.

(Hrmm. I need me a Good Year icon, too. I feel a rearrangement of my icons coming on!)

Anyway, now that the iPod does this right finally, I can resurrect my Gladiator treadmill playlist for the next time I get on the treadmill. Yay!

Sunday miles: 2.4
Monday miles: 3.2
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1372
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 63
Miles to Isengard: 421