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Went up to Red Lodge for the holiday. We got behind the slowest person on earth on the two lane highway going there (possibly the same woman from the district court's office). So it took a lot longer than it should have. We made it in time for the parade though. And I was reminded while sitting on the curb for an hour watching the thing go by how much I don't really care for parades. They're a lot like watching traffic, especially when everyone who has a vintage car, four-wheeler, or sports car thinks they have to be in it.
We headed out to Bearcreek after that and ate lunch at the Bearcreek Cafe. The drive there was fantastic. I'll have to take a camera with me next time I go out there. You cross the hill leaving Red Lodge, and there's just nothing as far as you can see. Really, really nice. I was tempted to move there by the time we made it into town, and was even moreso after we ate lunch. Mine was incredible, and I ate some of Collin's too.
Came back to Billings for fireworks in the evening. Which was...eh. Fireworks. Got a little sunburned, but all's good other than that.
Today we're just hanging out, enjoying a day off. We did finally go out and buy a Nintendo DS though, which I've been meaning to do for a long time. We got New Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass to go with it. I've been really enjoying both, though using the stylus to control Link is taking a bit of getting used to. I have a bad habit of tapping when I don't mean to, which sends Link flying into a rage. I didn't get far either before I got stuck -- at this spot where I have to get a key from this rat that is much better at evading me than I am at chasing after it.
If I ever manage to pull myself away from the DS, I might get some writing done today. I'm getting close to finishing my chapter. It's a rather important one, plot and mythology wise, so I'm taking my time with it -- hoping somehow I manage to get it right.
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I finally have a marriage license in hand. Though, obtaining it wasn't half as simple as it should have been.
As it happens, the Clerk of the District Court's office is staffed by the single slowest woman on the face of the earth over lunchtime. She spent a good five to ten minutes typing in all of Collin's information. Then she did mine in the same timely fashion, hit something on her keyboard and went, "Oops. Looks like I lost you somehow," and had to start over again. There was a waiver for the blood test that we had to sign. She pulled one out of her drawer, and the fan blew it away. So she had to like...chase after it.
We get everything done, and she gives us a copy to check for errors. Surprise. She's misspelled "Camden" as well as my dad's middle name. So then, that copy needs to be shred. So she gets up, wanders to the back of the office somewhere to shred it, and wanders back and fixes the two typos. We get another one to check over, and I notice that she's misspelled my mother's maiden name as well. Repeat process. We finally have one that's good. So she's going to print us the actual certificate. And we're waiting...and waiting. And she's like, "Oh geeze. I forgot to put the paper in the printer." Another lady, who could be helping but isn't, is standing there talking to our brain-dead one about some barbecue going on outside. *rolls eyes*
Me and Collin are both late at this point. I had to run all the way back to work and still ended up being twenty minutes late. I'm sitting here now working through my "Maxed Out" Indiana Jones lunchable and trying not to die of heatstroke. But it's done. And I can finally sleep without dreaming about it.
Two other couples were behind us. They apparently knew one another and were talking about their respective weddings. The one woman had gone to Vegas for her bachelorette party, and then had another one back here in Montana. And she and her beau had just rented a great new double-wide. The other couple also had a double-wide, and they were comparing rental prices. I totally felt for a second like I was in hick-ville...especially when the clerk then leaned over to me and quietly asked, "Are you two related?" followed by "Are either of you currently intoxicated?"
And Red Lodge proved it's friendliness this morning. When I got to work, I had an email from someone there who had come across my wedding website (via a google alert), and had noticed that my driving directions missed where highway 312/212 splits. I had 312 going all the way to Red Lodge, but it doesn't...212 is the junction that goes to Red Lodge. He added a nice little, "I wouldn't want any of your guests to get lost!" So...wow. I couldn't believe it. I emailed him back to say thank you and fixed my directions.
Small towns are awesome.
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| 2008-06-25 09:45 |
| Wedding Progress Report |
| Public |
 anxious |
| wedding |
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Ever so slowly, things begin to come together. Here's how the big day is shaping up so far:
( Schedule )
And, here's what I still need to do in the next few weeks:
( List )
Seriously. Eloping is the way to go. Or maybe we could just continue to live together until common-law kicks in. At least I only have to do this once. Perhaps I'll just go all crazy this weekend and knock most those things off my list. I can't seem to think of anything else as it gets closer and I get more and more tense. I keep having dreams of things going totally wrong. Collin, of course, is completely relaxed because his only duty in this whole thing, as far as I can tell, is to just show up at the right place at the right time. Lucky bastard.
Ugh. Really, that's all. All I've been thinking about is this. I need to just get this crap done and out of my head!
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| 2008-06-18 08:33 |
| Favorite Commercials |
| Public |
 amused |
| sweet links |
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I came across someone talking about commercials in their blog this morning -- specifically, really *good* commercials. He cited this one from the Discovery channel which I've really enjoyed as well, and it got me thinking what my favorites have been.
( Every once and a while, I really DO watch broadcast TV )
Just a few of my absolute favorites...for posterity. :)
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| 2008-06-17 09:12 |
| Slow but Steady Progress |
| Public |
 sleepy |
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I went and met with the woman making my wedding cake last night -- got one picked out, gave her my topper, and paid for it. For a three layer cake, plus delivery up to Red Lodge, she charged me $226, which I thought was not nearly enough. I was expecting something more up in the three hundred range. I'm also taking Friday afternoon off to go to the doctor and get my blood test. I'm eager to get to the point where I've got nothing left to do for the wedding and can just enjoy it. Everyone keeps asking me if I'm excited yet, and I'm not...just mildly stressed.
Also on Friday, the rescue mission is coming to our house at about 2:00 to haul off our old beast of a couch. Sometime probably on Sunday we'll head out to pick up our new one from La-Z-Boy, and maybe after that we'll finally be able to have company.
I've been writing steadily for the past few weeks, but I've been terrible about keeping track of it. So I have no idea how much I've actually gotten done. I'd really like to find a writing program that would do it for me -- keep track of per-day or even per-week word counts, that sort of thing. I suspect there's something out there that can do that, but so far I haven't found any good writing programs for windows. I might have to fall to the other side and get a mac when my current laptop finally dies (or becomes obsolete). In any case, I've been doing a lot of rewriting lately, which I'm not sure how to keep track of anyway. I've been getting a whole lot pickier about my writing. Perhaps that's a sign of improvement.
Speaking of improvement...I've been lurking in a few LJ writing communities lately, just reading comments for bits of useful advice. Every once and a while I hit some good information, and sometimes people will give out spectacularly *bad* advice, but for the most part the activity has been a surprising confidence boost for me. Original fiction writers love to disparage fan fiction writers, but in a few months of lurking I've seen pretty much the exact same percentage of the exact same spectrum of total crap pop up among them as I've seen on ff.net. I admit, I'd bought into the idea briefly that things were all sonnets and undiscovered talent on the original fic side of things. I'm simultaneously relieved and disheartened that it's not.
Today I've got pizza place payroll, and since we're out of self-sealing envelopes until UPS finally delivers the ones we ordered, I'll probably be spending the rest of my day stuffing envelopes and sealing them manually. I expect to be brain dead by five.
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( Grammar fun time, everybody! )
Coming up soon: affect vs effect, hyphens, the dash, the semi-colon, phrases, and verb endings -ed vs -t.
My head has been back in mechanics because I've been doing a lot of editing lately, both for other people and myself. I've started going back through the first chapters of This Final Heaven and working on my revisions. I'm looking to tighten things up, cut around 10% as fat, and eliminate existing typos and continuity errors. So far I've finished and re-posted the prologue and I'm in the middle of chapter one right now. It's so much worse than I remember.
Squall just bores me to tears. I can't hide it. Rinoa, too.
Meanwhile, I'm trying my best to get everything done for the wedding so I can stop thinking about it. I tried on my dress last night to make sure that it still fits. It does, but it's bigger than I remember it being...like...holy shit-ton of dress. I'm not sure how I'm going to function in it for an entire day. Cathedral train sounded so nice in the store. Going to work my matron of honor pretty good with that thing.
I'm also going to try to get her to go buy a dress this weekend. And make reservations for Collin's best man at the resort. Also, seeing about tux rentals, trying to get the rest of my colors in to the flower shop, going to get a blood test, and eventually actually getting that darn marriage license. Monday I'm picking out and paying for a cake. And then...I've got to think about favors, little stuff like that. Whew.
Currently, I'm in the middle of reading the latest James Rollins book and playing Shadow of the Colossus. Shadow is awesome...but riding the horse sort of sucks with it's super realism. I like directly controlling the horse, not controlling my character who controls the horse by proxy. Also, I'm afraid I really might be too stupid to finish the game. I'm only like...on the fifth colossus and it's already taking me a while to figure out how to climb them.
I also recently bought God of War, but I haven't looked at it much. I played a bit...fighting some sort of sea-monster. I did all sorts of fantastic acrobatics, ripped the sea monster's jaw off...but then I slipped crossing a mast between two ships and fell in the water and the game cruelly went, "YOU ARE DEAD!" Hyrdas...no problem. But swimming is another matter.
Looking forward to my weekend, despite all the crap that I have to do. It's supposed to actually be nice again for a while. Might be able to get in some time on my swing.
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Work, how I am growing to loathe you. Yesterday was pretty bad, to the point that I briefly had to go to the bathroom to cry. The past two weeks, in fact, have been really rough for some reason. So I'm looking forward at the rest of my day here with a bit of trepidation. :\
I don't seem to be able to stick with secretarial jobs for very long. I've been here now for a year and a half...which (not counting my intern/volunteer stint at the human society) is the longest I've ever stayed with a job. I'm getting anxious to move on lest I actually commit to something.
Writing, will you save me someday?
I got my issue of Writer's Digest in the mail yesterday. (I'm not sure why I get it. I think someone got me a subscription as a gift.) Their advice always seems to be either really elementary or really oblique to me and usually not very helpful. But they did have an ad for a writer's conference in Maui that James Rollins is going to be at. I didn't recognize any of the other authors, and had a little thought that if I were to attend I would have to stalk Mr. Rollins through the conference...assuming, you know, I wasn't outside enjoying freaking Maui. I'm not really sure what actually goes on at a writers conference. I can't imagine that a week in Hawaii could make a person a much better writer, so I suspect it's a lot about networking and learning how to sell.
Speaking of popular literature, I've got this application on Facebook called "Books," and when I add a book on it, I can read other people's reviews. I was poking around in the ap the other day and found myself on it's "most popular titles" page. It was pretty discouraging: Harry Potter filled up most of the list, Twilight made a good showing, and a surprising amount of "God Exists" and "No He Doesn't" type non-fiction books were there, too. The Twilights and Eragons of this world really depress me (both had absolutely glowing reviews), and I wonder if the problem is that people have bad taste or that people just don't read enough anymore to recognize crap when they see it.
I should have been busy writing my own crap last night, but I watched Total Recall 2070 on hulu instead. I'd watch it any other way if I could, but it's not out on DVD. Hulu doesn't stream worth a damn, and their little commercial breaks have incredibly poor timing. But it's better than nothing, I guess. Been enjoying Michael Easton just as much as I remembered, and I'm enjoying the relationship between him and his android cop partner way more than I used to. Watched a great one last night involving black market porn where android cop didn't understand a man's kink of wanting to see his wife have sex with another man...and he kept bringing it up to Micahel Easton's character, "Say, hypothetically, you were to find Olivia with another man. Would you--?" "NO!"
I'm really amused by their kind of absurdly good/logical cop & streetwise detective dynamic that I now lovingly recognize from Due South.
Now if only I could find episodes of the show Two where Michael Easton played a carbon copy of Harrison Ford's character from The Fugitive PLUS his evil twin brother. Twice the fun.
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| 2008-06-06 16:03 |
| In like a lion, out like a lamb |
| Public |
| pleased |
| Depeche Mode -- Freelove |
| family, good news, musing |
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Friday at last!
And it comes with good news, albeit in a round-about way. I called my mom to get a phone number for the lady who's baking my wedding cake, and she told me that my aunt had called her to call me and tell me to call my cousin Amanda. (We operate primarily by phone tree in my family.)
So I call her, thinking I know what this urgent news might be. And I'm right. She's going to have a baby! She's not very far along yet and only just got blood work to confirm it. But I'm pretty excited. I'm going to live vicariously through her for the next year or so and let it stamp down my own ticking clock.
I've spent some of my day getting stuff done that I've been meaning to do all week, including: calling to change my address with my Allstate agent, setting up an appointment to get a blood test done for my marriage license, and seeing about getting someone to come take our old couch away so we can pick up our snazzy new one. I also will be meeting with our cake lady as soon as I receive our topper in the mail. I ordered this one off Amazon.
Also, this is completely unrelated, but I came across this quote from Douglas Adams today that I really liked and wanted to reproduce here:
I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!" In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!
I get vertigo pretty bad in high places. So this tickles me in a funny way, because it does sort of feel like your body, outside of your control, is trying to leap. I'm sure there's a scientific explanation -- I've never really cared to look it up -- but I enjoy this one so much. It's a beautiful little thought to me, to think that everyone once had wings.
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| 2008-05-31 19:38 |
| Book Binge |
| Public |
| content |
| books |
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My mom came to town today, and we went out and bought her a dress to wear to the wedding. I also finally found some floating candles for the centerpieces, so that's two things I can cross off my wedding to do list. I'm going to try to wrangle up a guestbook and cake topper tomorrow, and then see about meeting with my cake lady and getting a blood test for the marriage license later this week.
I also made it out to Barnes and Noble today and went on a total book binge. I quickly picked up as many as I could carry and had to leave the store before I found even more. I got the new James Rollins book The Judas Strain, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, Scar Night by Alan Campbell, Nefertiti by Nick Drake, Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay, and The Darkest Night by Gena Showalter.
I don't know where to begin. It's a toss up at the moment between Stardust, which I think I could blow through in an afternoon, and James Rollins who I just plain love and adore.
This big pile of books makes me happy.
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Tuesday already? It doesn't even feel like I had a weekend, let alone a three day one. Work is just about the last place that I want to be right now.
I spent my too short break mostly sitting around the house since it's still raining. We did get a long enough break on Sunday to mow the lawn though. It was incredibly deep, and it felt like I had to empty the damn mower bag about five hundred times. But it's done for another week.
Last night, I had to pick my brother up at the airport again from another UFC Vegas adventure. It must have been nice down there, because everyone on their plane was wearing shorts and sandals. Jeff didn't have too much to say about the trip, except that he met Robin Williams and that he is "old and short" but also a very nice guy.
We also went and saw Indiana Jones. It was okay, but made me think the entire way through about how much I really wish George Lucas would just stop making movies. The man lost his vision about fifteen years ago and needs to come to accept it. I've read that Steven Spielberg was concerned by the amount of 1950's pulp sci-fi that Lucas was insisting on putting into the film and talked him out of a few script elements. Having seen the movie, I'm curious just how much more they could have had to begin with. And the whole scene with the monkeys? What the hell was that? I can't help but think that there are quite a few legitimate archaeological wonders out there that Indiana Jones could have gone to uncover, and that there's a good hundred or so fan authors out there who could have come up with a much more authentic script.
After I came home from that, I needed to cleanse my palate a bit, so I retrieved my netflix out of the mailbox and watched Witch Hunter Robin. I was intensely more pleased with this show than I was with Indiana Jones. Really loving everything about it so far, with the exception that Amon's English dub has that very typical tall, manly man voice ala Vincent Valentine and Sephiroth. His Japanese voice isn't really much better. But I suppose that's a small quibble. Everything else is fantastic. :D Looking forward to getting my next DVD.
I also watched a little Earth 2. (Seeing a pattern yet? Yes, in fact, I did spend the entire weekend watching TV!) It was better than I remembered, although it was also a lot more boring. It takes them nearly an hour in the pilot episode just to get to the planet, and once they get there the only really interesting thing that happens is that there's aliens that can come up out of the dirt. There is, however, a completely adorable relationship between the character played by Clancy Brown and his daughter. The little girl is one of the better child actors I've seen, and I just freaking adore Clancy Brown as this character. I'd also forgotten that this show was from that brief moment in time when Antonio Sabato Jr. was going to be the next big, hot star. Remember that?
Obviously, with all that TV and movie watching, I didn't really get much of any value done. I wrote a little bit here and there, but I'm having to re-structure my chapter a bit to get everything into it that I want. I've got a few not quite plot related things that need to be resolved yet as the plot rages to an end. So I'm a little over half-way through the chapter, and once I finish tweaking and adding to what I've got to make it fit with how I now see the chapter going, it should be easy to finish off.
In the mean time, I'm waiting for my This American Life podcast to finish downloading so that I can settle in with a nice, relaxing morning of Ira Glass and Bejeweled. At least, for the next ten minutes before everyone else gets here.
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As it happens, we got that flood I was talking about after all. At least, from about five to six o'clock while I was on my way home from work. I took some pictures, because I so rarely get to see this kind of thing.
( Flooding Downtown )
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Apparently, a plane crashed in my neighborhood last night...literally into a building just a few houses down from my aunt's house.
Newspaper Article: Mail plane crashes near Main Street in Billings; pilot killed
It seems like a lot of people heard the explosions. They were all calling in on the radio this morning telling their stories of waking up in the middle of the night to a huge boom. I was not one of them -- I was completely out last night. But it occurs to me that if that plane had failed just a few seconds earlier...it would have hit a residential neighborhood, possibly even my aunt's house.
And the rain is still coming down. Day three now, or something. It's making me crazy. The Yellowstone is at it's banks but not flooding. Weather men are actually saying that it should start steadily going down, even with the rain, because the storm is making it cold enough in the mountains that it's stopping snow melt. We're still under a flood warning though for streams.
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Barack Obama is in town today. He flew in last night and spoke this morning in the West High auditorium. I would have liked to go, but I didn't find out about it until all the tickets were gone and it was sort of in the middle of the day on a Monday. So I spent my morning, Barack-less, at work instead. I did just see a military helicopter flying toward the airport while coming back from lunch though, so now I have this really awesome mental image of him boarding this kick-ass Chinook to fly to Bozeman. :D
Apparently, Collin's manager's wife saw him working out at the YMCA this morning. Must be nice to be one of those girls. You know the kind. Their husbands make a lot of money, so they spend their days shopping, working out, and (apparently) hob-knobbing with politicians.
By the way: this entire visit has made me a real fan of Obama. I can't really remember an instance of an important Democrat ever visiting Montana, let alone in election season. Added to the fact that he's braving deep Republican country, he's going to be visiting a reservation later this month. Has an important politician on either side ever done that? Not here, that's for sure.
I think it's more apparent here than it is anywhere else in America just how rocky things are for the Republicans right now. Montana is the land of the Unibomber, the Freeman, and the NRA. And right now we have a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and one Republic congressman. If we're losing faith in the brand, I guarantee you that it's happening elsewhere even more.
And now, to change subject completely, I've got some pictures of Sticks I took yesterday when he was lying on my new swing with me. I only managed to snap them with my cell phone since he'd rolled over by the time I retrieved the digital camera.
Tell me this isn't a spoiled kitty:
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| 2008-05-18 13:17 |
| Birthday Report |
| Public |
| relaxed |
| birthday |
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Today marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the day I was induced, creating a lifetime of insecurity and abandonment issues.
I don't have plans to do anything to celebrate, but I went out to Lowes and bought a really fantastic porch swing/lounge yesterday as a gift to myself. I sat outside almost all day yesterday with my laptop writing. I had plans to do the same today, but it's been windy all morning. I'm hoping it will calm down enough this afternoon to head out. I got an intense amount of writing done yesterday out there. There's something really focusing about the birds and the trees and the sun.
My parents bought me a few things off my Amazon wish list. I've already gotten one of them, the book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers which, as it turns out, pretty much just talks about Joseph Campbell. I'm still waiting on a few strategy guides they got me including Kingdom Hearts, Dirge of Cerberus, and Final Fantasy 12...all of which I had stopped playing for lack of proper strategy. So maybe those will get me going on my PS2 again. They might even be able to make FF12 remotely enjoyable.
And Sticks gave me some early morining cuddles. He was at the foot of the bed when I woke up, and when he saw that I was awake he came up and laid down on my chest and nuzzled around on me for a while. I even got a little birthday smooch.
Other than that, I've got nothing to report. Which is a somewhat positive thing.
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My understanding of economics on the whole is pretty dim. But I listened this morning to an entire episode of This American Life dedicated to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. They explain in detail how the whole mess came about, why it's such a big deal, and what it means in the long term.
Episode 355: The Giant Pool of Money
This comes to me at an interesting time since I just bought a house and have been dealing with the process. Coming out of it in this atmosphere of fear, where banks don't want risky loans, I'm astonished at the way they were doing these sub-prime loans. These people didn't have to provide ANY documentation, just make a statement about how much their monthly income was. For my loan, I had to provide W-2's, pay stubs, bank records, income tax returns, credit histories, copies of old bills, etc. And all of that still had difficulty overriding the fact that the credit bureaus now rate me as risky because I don't have enough credit.
Our personal banker, though we told her we weren't interested, tried to see if we qualified for a home equity loan. We're paid through July already on our mortgage, have paid off our credit cards every single month in full the entire time we've had them, and we still got letters yesterday saying no, we don't qualify, because we have too little credit history. I wonder whether our mortgage consultant strong armed us into our loan and overrode the credit report with what he knew about us. And it really makes me consider how difficult it's going to be for people to go out and buy their first house now.
Anyway, food for thought on something I rarely ever think about.
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| 2008-05-09 11:32 |
| I need to make some kind of list |
| Public |
 contemplative |
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I found my alien-spider-causes-hallucinations episode of The Outer Limits: it's the 9th episode of the third season, called "Tempests." And it was written by Hart Hanson, creator of one of my current favorite TV shows, Bones.
And the other day when I was watching a bit of seaQuest, I noticed Lawrence Hertzog pop up in the credits -- a writer I know from La Femme Nikita.
And surfing Amazon I came across the TV show Alien Nation, which for some reason I always assumed was somehow connected to The Outer Limits. I clicked on it out of curiosity, and by God, whose show do you suppose that happens to be? One Rockne S. O'Bannon from both seaQuest and Farscape (and I'm just waiting to see him pop up in Outer Limits credits).
Now that I'm paying attention, I'm astonished at the sheer amount of creative cross-pollination that has been going on in my life. A variety of influences from my early TV watching days really manages to boil down to a single group of men who just keep recombining their talents. Perhaps the TV sci-fi writer world is really just that small. (Complimented now by J.J. Abrams who I also can't get away from...he even showed up on This American Life. Radio, dammit!)
So I'm thinking I might make a list, perhaps even a web, of creative-type-people who persistently pop up in my life. Should be an interesting little project. More on this work in progress later...
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| 2008-05-08 09:03 |
| On the mend? |
| Public |
| sleepy |
| Savage Garden - I Want You |
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I've been fighting off some stubborn stomach thing all week long. But today I'm feeling like I might be on the mend. A little more sleep could probably help though. I'm looking forward to getting some of that this weekend.
I've been working on my chapter, but mostly in editing and re-writing. So it hasn't actually advanced any all week long, but the beginning is a lot better for the attention. I don't have that much left to do -- two scenes, essentially at about 3,000 words. I think I'll be able to finish writing this weekend and then probably get the last of my editing done early next week. I'm starting to get close to the end now. Once I'm done I'm going to go through and polish up the whole thing once, and then...then I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I've got a couple of side fan fiction projects waiting in the wings in case I can't come up with anything else: a Final Fantasy 8 fic and (surprisingly) a Dark Angel one. But I'd like to try my hand at some original stuff for a while and do some writing just for myself.
Right now I'm watching The Outer Limits. I made it through my androids and robots disc with a pretty bland feeling. It seems only two things can be done narratively with a robot: explore the definition of "human" or re-hash Frankenstein. In my opinion, the ones that look to Mary Shelley tend to be the better robot tales, but that could be because I don't particularly care for Asimov and tend to fall into the boring camp of people who define human in biological rather than psychological terms. I've now moved on to the much more interesting "Aliens Among Us" Outer Limits collection, which has so many more directions it can move in. I watched a good one last night with Robert Patrick. I am finding the episodes more predictable than when I was younger though. Maybe I have a better understanding of narrative progression now, or am more finely tuned to picking up hints, but none of the surprise endings have come as much of a surprise so far. Perhaps I'm just watching them too early in the day. It's very much a watch at one in the morning show.
There's one episode that had a real impact on me back when it was on TV, and I've been hoping to find it on one of these DVDs, although I'm not sure where it would fit. It has these astronauts who crash land on a planet, and these spider-like things infest their ship. They spend most of the episode fighting them off and dying at an alarming rate. But a few of the astronauts get out and manage to make it back home to earth. Only from there, the point of view shifts and you find out they've never gotten away at all: they're ALL still back on the ship, wrapped in gooey webs and hallucinating while the spiders are eating them alive.
Today I've brought my keyboard from home to work with me so that I can type away all day long without anyone realizing what I'm doing. It's got low-profile laptop keys for super silent ninja writing and is a lot more comfortable to use than my noisy generic-Dell work one.
Oh, and we got a letter from the city earlier this week telling us that we need to trim our hedge back from the sidewalk or they're going to fine us $500 every day it's not trimmed back. We went out to look, and it's literally over 1 inch of the sidewalk. So I had to call my dad and have him bring us down some hedge clippers from Red Lodge because we don't have anything to do it with. Collin's going to trim it tonight after work, but...good lord. You can't have a perfectly well groomed hedge hanging over the sidewalk even a few centimeters in this city, but it's okay for our neighbors to never clean up the elephant sized piles of poop their mastiff leaves in their yard? Whatever. I found the whole letter very condescending.
And I'm getting a little bit tired of hearing about the looming recession. Seems like every client that walks in wants to talk to me about it, and every time I turn on the TV some economic analyst is pointing to charts and arguing semantics. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. If someone wasn't clamoring around, telling me that my house is worth less and my dollar doesn't buy as much and that I should be freaking out about the price of gas...I honestly wouldn't have noticed a difference between May 2008 and May 2007. In fact, I still don't aside from the fact that the deli where I like to eat lunch has raised prices on everything by $1.
And I'm officially sick and tired of this economic stimulus thing which I really think will do absolutely nothing but make my phone ring and swamp the poor suckers at the IRS.
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Sticks just came home from about fifteen minutes of outdoor adventuring with mud all the way down his back, on his legs, and down his tail. So he got his first bath. It was quite the experience. He's sulking now and meticulously grooming everything back into place. I'm taking a sick pleasure in his discomfort, seeing as my rug is still filling the garage with the evil smell of cat pee while half a freaking galon of "Nature's Miracle" dries on it. I hung over the top of the shower while Collin administered the bath and gloated: "This is what happens to bad kitties."
The rest of my day was entirely uneventful. Partly because I've been half asleep. I know I slept last night becuase I had a stupid dream about finding an abandoned baby in an attic and then rescuing it from a freak, killer tornado...but I can't say how much sleep I got exactly. Doesn't feel like it was a whole lot.
I was really rolling on my writing last night and wasn't at all ready to stop when midnight came around. I've really only got one scene left to write before I'm done with my chapter, but I have a feeling that it's going to go through multiple revisions before I'm happy with it. I'm already itching to go back and start ironing, but I'm going to try and actually finish the scene before I rewrite it for once. I've got a few lines that popped out here and there that I'm really happy with. I think when I'm done with this fic and begin my final revision, I'm going to go through my printed copy and just highlight all the lines that I still enjoy and file them away for later use.
I'm reading Zorro by Isabel Allende right now. It's one of the better books I've read recently. Certainly a step up from the total peice of shit romance novel I read before it -- this is Shakespeare by comparison. Plus it's sort of a nice atmosphere for spring. It makes me want to go out and buy a hammock or a really cushy porch swing and take a week off to work to just relax in the shade outside and read. (That would be absolutly glorious.)
In other news, I'm watching SeaQuest online, and I was surprised when I saw both Rockne S. O'Bannon and David Kemper pop up in the opening credits. Now I'm suspicious that Darwin the dolphin was just a sophisitcated muppet -- possibly voiced by Lani Tupu. I must like these two men, becuase I somehow keep watching their shows without realizing it's them. Now I'm tempted to look them up and see what the hell they've been up to since Farscape. It's probably something I'd love. In other SeaQuest related news, I'm looking forward to getting to season two and the introduction of Lt. Brody. :) MH-Ahoy-hoy.
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| 2008-05-02 22:19 |
| Movie Recs |
| Public |
| emotional |
| movies |
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So...I'm not getting as much done on my evening home alone as I thought. Instead, I curled up in my jammies on the couch and watched Train Man. I laughed. I bawled. I turned into a gelatinous, emotional mess of girl all over the place. Freaking fantastic movie. Seriously. I'm still fighting off an overwhelming amount of warm fuzzies.
Last Friday I watched Nowhere in Africa, a German movie I'd seen the beginning of but had never finished. And the experience was much the same, except that movie involved a lot more sobbing on my part than this one. Hands down, one of the best movies I've ever seen.
I'm just so utterly happy with my latest Netflix picks that I had to share.
*satisfied*
Ahh...maybe now I should try to get something done. :)
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