And That Was The Week That Was

It snowed last weekend. A lot. It wasn't fluffy nice snow you can scoop up and eat, either, it was the sharp killer ice that likes to make you stick to it if you go outside nekkid. Not that I know anything about that as I have special snow pants which I totally got on sale for like $10 in Modell's back in 2001 and that was the greatest deal ever in all my life because those pants deter the coldest of cold. Shame I don't have a similar article of clothing for my face. Not that it matters, because the pain of frostbitten nostrils is insignificant next to the horror that is SHOVELER'S HERNIA. Not that I'm complaining, I actually did really good for a long time before my innards all gave up and went wherever they wanted.

It was the holiday season, and Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of not only my first obscene phone call, but the 20th anniversary of the horrendous death of the daughter of the nurse of the surgeon who happened to be removing a tumor from my boobie that very day. Lockerbie, kids, never forget it. I'm not kidding. I didn't know any of this as I was alternately unconcious and sharing my Jell-O with my Uncle Gene, but he knew, and he told my mum. It was, in my lifetime, one of those days I'll never be able to fully comprehend, possibly because of the Valium, but most likely because it goes beyond storytelling.

Nan found a movie called Subterano about a bunch of Australians trapped in a car park with a crazy killer toy, and then she found The Curse Of El Charro, which is about a bunch of girls trapped in Mexico with a crazy ghost. Lemmy from Motorhead is in the movie, so you Lemmy completeists get on this, but skip it if endings where the hero gets a crappy hand dealt to them pisses you off. One the one hand, we saw a movie with video game characters skipping out of a carpark into a sun-shiny day with mountains and oceans and happiness, and on the other hand we have one of those HERE'S YOUR REALITY endings that pisses me off. Dammit, if I ever defeat the bogeyman don't be locking me up in the nuthouse--at least don't forget my headphones.

We ate scrambled eggs, oatmeal and soup to prepare for the insanely large meal we were about to eat on Boxing Day, and this resulted in lower blood pressure for the two-thirds of us with high blood pressure and helped get rid of my totalbodyheadcramp. Not satisfied, I spent Christmas day running amok with a vacuum, traumatizing the Puppy and gathering every wayward dustbunny and also a little pink felt ear from one of the toy mice. It was like an offering to appease the vacuum god Euroreckhoover. Must have worked, because writing this last bit of this last week in review for 2008, I'm pretty happy with the way things turned out. I started this month terrified of the future, spent the first weeks trying to change what I could, and now I got to introduce my cats and dog to my aunt, uncle and cousin, and my mum and Nan cooked a meal like the olden days of army dinners and the oven didn't cut off and gas us, and of course my hernia tried to complain but eff it. This week was good.

I can't believe the year's down to four days. Countdown time begins in 48-ish hours!

Next week I'm going to be doing something different on Saturdays, something I think is going to be more amusing. To me, anyway.

And That Was The Week That Was

The Penultimate Week In Review.

Monday the weather was gorgeous. It seemed every dolt in town noticed this also and was out racing to get to the beach, but then it rained and got colder. Still, it was nice to head into winter with one last reminder that the world will keep spinning and give us a good memory once in a while if we're lucky.

I took Rite-Aid's generic knock-off of Sudafed. This, I think I've mentioned, makes me love the world for a limited amount of time, and then it makes the world very annoying and wobbly, but it also makes me not fall asleep behind the wheel and scream when air touches my skin, so that's good. Had I really done these reviews of exactly how my weeks are laid out, there would have been a lot more of this kind of boring honesty, and that gets old fast. Three or four weeks, to be exact.

As the days whizzed by getting shorter and shorter, I did a lot of snow shovelling and staggering around clutching my chest, and Last.fm and Quick Fire Pool amused me while I was doing all the stuff I do indoors, and I took a lot of pictures of the snow and my cats and dog--which I'm constantly aware of how lucky I am to have--and was grateful this week was a lot quieter for my family.

Nan found a lot of movies but I'm not sure of the titles. Two were actually the same movie (Holiday Affair), remade after 50 years. Movie film holds up way better than VHS, you know. I hope DVD holds up longer than VHS because the copies of some family videos I've been putting on DVD the past few months better not frikkin' deteriorate any further or I will really give up on the idea of chronicling anything and just go live in a cave.

I thought Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor was really good. It's a Mummy movie, you know, if you like them--as I do--you'll love it. I was terrified of this one in theory, too, because half the cast had changed, but it's a completely different story and I guess it either got me on a good day or it was just that good. I also avoid IMDB message boards like one of Imhotep's plagues, so I've found I enjoy movies a lot better that way.

The Penultimate Week In Review.

Ho Ho Holy Is It The Weekend Already?

I taped Stephen King's Desperation off the Sci-Fi channel for us to watch, and man am I sorry. No, it was okay in a not-as-good-as-The-Mist-but-better-than-Rose-Red way, but I had forgotten King's got it in for animals and holy hell there is some imagery right off the bat that even horrified one of the characters. Then it gets worse (I'll leave it up to you to decide whether I mean the scare factor or the story, because even I'm not sure). But you know, it's King so even a not-great King TV movie is better than some other movies I can't think of right now.

One incredible bit of lost continuity that made Desperation worth watching for me had to be the first person to get shot onscreen is shot near another dead body, and throughout the rest of the movie there's only one body in that area and the character who gets shot onscreen is never seen again. O_O At first I thought it meant impending heroics, then I thought something grosser happened, but then...he was just never seen again. Things like that in movies fascinate me.

It was really windy the next day, which is why I got to write two whole paragraphs about a movie we saw. I also used the indoor time to decorate the tree, and I call it a tree because I observe more than one holiday, so it's got birds and angels and Santas and Snoopy and pictures of my cats and dogs and unicorns and I sometimes like to piss off sticklers who think it's important that one holiday wins (being nice to people wins). It's a tree. I decorated it. I had PMS at the time but the 12-minute Salsoul orchestra Christmas medley was playing on the radio as the cats chased each other around so it all balanced out and it looks quite lovely.

Then we watched School of Rock, and THAT...THAT was a fantastic movie. OMG, how did we go so long not seeing that? Fun frikkin' movie and even the kids were great, and I can be bad when confronted with a movie full of kids, but these were like, actual kids. Amazing!

The Last Mimzy also had kids, and a cute bunny, and Roger Waters singing an amazing frikkin' song. I always suspected cute little bunnies would have a hand in saving the world, and this movie ends happier than Watership Down.

I could leave much of the rest out, but I wrote it when I was really tired and that's when I get honest, so here goes. My current reason for being rather bitchy (as you may have picked up) is not merely the holidays, as it's never just the holidays, but family stuff. Health stuff. From all angles. This week The Fluffy One gave us no choice but to take him to the vet who saved The Puppy's walking parts in the hopes of saving his eating parts. My head has pretty much been on backwards for a few weeks about this and my uncle's kidney stones and Thursday will come to be known as Tauruian poking day, during which hunk men born in April have to deal with undeserved crap. I hope the day does not catch on and become any kind of tradition.

This week I also learned that butter is not the correct response to cat seizures. No, really! Who knew? I mean, I kinda knew, but it's like that line from Mr. Mom about whatever it takes. This week that ended up for me being covered in pancake-smelling hairball medicine and for The Fluffy One being full of barium to light up the sexy intestines. It was worth it, of course, because my cats are worth being a crazy cat lady for. There was a happy ending to the freakout this week. Of course everyone who ever wanted to see me get my come uppance for picking on how many treats the cats get had a good laugh, but then the diagnosis was possible food allergies SO THERE.

I honestly got little else done because I went into the same sort of fight-or-flight freakout mindset that my last blog back couldn't overcome when my little flannel-loving man widowed my left arm five years ago and I wouldn't be talking about it at all except that it's the truest part of my life and it wouldn't be fair to not be honest about it, even if it seems like I'm talking in code (I'm not). Hi, my name is Lynda and I'm a crazy cat lady.

You know what else is a pretty good movie? The Dark Knight. That was one of the movies we most wanted to see when this year began, and not to get all serious but after all this year has brought and taken away, getting to see the movie with my favorite people around me in our house was sort of fantastic. Now I get to say I talk like Batman when my hernia acts up. HAHA

Ho Ho Holy Is It The Weekend Already?

It's Begining To Sound A Lot Like I Want To Stick My Head In A Bag.

Oh, hello.

For every odd beastiality movie Nan finds, Mum can find crazy '60s, '70s and porno movies. Like In The Year 2889, Suspiria, and Spider-Babe. So last weekend when she found God's Gun, a western about a priest who comes to avenge his brother. Both characters are played by Lee Van Cleef. When he shows up, voices go, "BAAAAAA!" and if that doesn't sell you, here's the trailer courtesy of YouTube:

More and more Christmassy things started popping up, like the marathon of Peter Falk as an angel movies, A Town Without Christmas, Finding John Christmas, and When Angels Come to Town.

My fifth weekly post went up at Type Your Culture, and if you think I haven't mentioned that blog before it's because I was waiting until I was able to update my blogroll to include it. However I haven't been able to update my blogroll because Blogrolling.com is still doing some sort of secret tweaking that includes not allowing access to blogrolls.

I've been posting to a blog called Type Your Culture, and I realize I'm the last person to define a culture, but there I am on Wednesdays, the girly white New Yorker who can read Spanish but obviously still can't write it (aspiro, for instance, either means I aspire to do that someday or I suck for not keeping those synapses alive). The blog is just starting out and its goal is to get views from all cultures, so spread the word.

Then I guess I got sick. Or something. I don't know. It wasn't enjoyable. Two symptoms are rambling incoherently.

It's Begining To Sound A Lot Like I Want To Stick My Head In A Bag.

The Long Trail Of Gravy

Hancock is actually as good as it looks in the ads! I know this from my viewings. Yes. Not that I sit around watching movies all the time, mind you, no. It's just the movies are the things I enjoy that I figure everyone can relate to. I inhale my cat's armpits a lot. See? Movies!

I'm missing Dancing With The Stars already, that show's just fun. I...guess I'm old now or something. I don't care, I love it. Totally got to see Cloris Leachman tango again, yay!

The night before Thanksgiving I not only burnt out, crashed and dissembled, my hands cracked off. It's very irritating, and I'm using present tense because I don't know if I'll live through the next three days and so this may be it...I never saw the pumpkin pie coming.

This next line is to let everyone know that of course I lived. That's the part that never fails to amaze me. But I am in no place to whine about my maladies when it could be much*...much...much worse. *I was going to link to something about the first much, but it's a family thing and not my story to tell. Suffice to say I am impressed by some people's ability to handle crap and not be whiny.

I, however, am whiny and dammit I missed seeing the wayward toolbag in space! I think. Unless the NASA Flyby website is accurate and it'll still be in orbit next week. I do realize I could just toss my own toolbag into the air and create the general effect, but the most expensive things in my toolbag are my chisels and they weren't even $30 all together. Plus I have chisel karma coming to me so the least amount of chisel misuse I partake in the better.

Nan found a movie called Zoo and it's like a David Lynch story...about a man who died after an encounter with a horse.

Sunshine, the Danny Boyle movie about an amazing cast trying to re-ignite the sun, was also really good, but then I'm a sucker for the skiffy. Even if it does involve extreme sunburn.

I spent the rest of the time adding to my NaNoWriMo wordcount.

The Long Trail Of Gravy

Long Dark Tea Time Of The Coffee Drinker

I've missed a lot of older movies, you know. I mean, somehow I've gone all these years never having see Long Day's Journey Into Night. Being Thanksgiving is right around the corner I think it was a good time for me to see this movie so I can say without a doubt thank god I'm not in that family. I felt nasty writing that, but damn. The funny part is when it started and Katherine Hepburn was going on about being fat Nan--who also wasn't familiar with the story--joked that she sounded like me...when I was like, 19 and thirty pounds overweight, I guess. Because I think that's the last time I pointed out I was fat, then I took a load of Sudafed and--no, no, that's even funny, the subjects in the story were not in any way funny and sometimes I think I need to be pretty grateful that I live in my nice warm cave.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is out on video and Nan *hearts* Abe Sapien. I've enjoyed everything I've seen from Guillermo del Toro so I was in happy land for about two hours. And OMG The Hobbit is going to be fantastic.

One night Nan found an old Christopher Lambert movie called Resurrection, and eh...if you like Se7en this is sort of like that. Except it's a bit more graphic. By a bit I mean dismemberment is part of the plot. It was really good, though.

Our dryer split its belt a full week before Thanksgiving but the Internet saved our collective sanity. See, in the old days we'd be all ZOMGDOOM! but I calmly typed "dyrer dum not tuerng" and got forty billion hits that boiled down to check the belt, which I did. Solved! It was funny when Steve the dryer repairman went to wash his hands and noticed our crappy faucet that only works when someone uses the sprayer. It's on the list. Not next on the list, because it still works, even if it works very oddly.

I'm still doing NaNoWriMo, because I'm stubborn. Heh. I'm on par for the day (note that as I'm writing this I don't have my exact wordcount but it's close) and I think I can make it to the end despite discoverng the Monty Python YouTube channel.

Long Dark Tea Time Of The Coffee Drinker

Quick! Fire! Pool!

It's nearly pointless to review the week when I've been posting all week. It's like me coming here saying I'm happy The Puppy didn't run off with the little flag I put near my grandfather's tree for holidays, then I flipped out because gay Californians can't marry anymore, then things got really weird.

I found a game that managed to throw me off my NaNoWriMo word goals called Quick Fire Pool, which is not about The Osterman Weekend as the title might suggest. No, it's about shooting pool...really really fast. Sort of like how I play it in real life, and judging by my 1077th place score, exactly like how I play it in real life.

When not potting virtual balls I'm supposed to be writing that story for NaNoWriMo, and apparently in my overacheiving frenzy I'm also unofficially doing NaBloPoMo, and they may cancel each other out but one of my LJ friends pointed me towards Write or Die or WOD, just to throw some more acronyms out there, and holy wow is that fascinating. It's like a game...and you know how I like games. This game has a setting that eats words, and I'm not hardcore enough to go there yet, but I got my wordcount over the daily goal for the first time by using Write or Die. Of course a lot of my characters are now running around yelling, "OMG we're gonna die!"

All my RSS feeds did this crazy thing where posts from over a year ago showed up as new. Overnight I grew 1000 unread items, and at first I was all excited because I thought there were people posting who hadn't in ages. Then I was all excited because I actually remembered reading the posts once.

A few nights last week the Chiller station played Evil Of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing. In Frankenstein's defense, it's the hypnotist's fault the monster turns to crime. I love these, though, and the Burgomeister's screaming wife needs a fanbase if she doesn't have one already.

There was a movie on Lifetime the next night that featured such incredible acting I think I may send some bits of lumber and cotton balls to acting school and see if I can become their agent if they get starring roles in movies like this. I had no idea what the hell the name of this masterpiece was so I looked up the only actor I recognized in it, Jeff Fahey, and then I guessed it was California Firestorm aka Inferno. Surprise, I guessed right! It's right up there with City On Fire for loads of people in flaming lands freaking out and in the case of Inferno, being completely unable to cry. There was lots of cringing and wincing, but no tears...onscreen at least.

And then a huge fire broke out in California and made this entire week in review very very awkward.

Quick! Fire! Pool!

Like Something Out Of A Movie

This week, I seemed to be preoccupied with politics, and yeah, yeah, everyone was already, blaaaargh, so sick of who's going to be in charge of loads of weapons and the free world and all that, OMG hush up already. Except that the guy I'd been pulling for totally won this time around so that caused me to go a little off the deep end. As the week progressed the sky did not crack open and spill tiny little Karl Marx imps of hell down all over the world, but then Circuit City closed and my mayor decided to be stingy and not refund us some property tax so I am still as conflicted as usual about the world. With any luck in a year I can not pick on piddly crap like lack of funds and focus solely on the adorableness of the first family of the country.

Speaking of which, I got a note and a photo from the current first team manager. I was confused at first when Mr. Bush thanked me for all my corresponance over the years and expected the photo to explode, but it still hasn't. I don't know how to feel about this. That, coupled with the tear shed around the world caused me to think I might have been too harsh on the man, but then my dog reminded me about the hurricane season of '05. Hmm. I can only wish him well in whatever he chooses to do in the future. And hope my neighbor gets home from his tour.

We watched some movies, of course, and one I'd been hopping to see since it was release was Get Smart, the remake of the series I watched every single day as a kid. To me the movie was great, I actually laughed, like, out loud, for real at it a few times.

Over Her Dead Body, however...okay, there was a slapstick bit of arm-on-fire-doused-in-boiling-water silliness that really made me laugh, but then I started playing spot the bits of other movies and maybe that was unfair because it was a good movie, it just...there's a fat dog gag in it. Some people flip out over how Indiana Jones can survive an atomic blast in a lead-lined refrigerator, I get picky when two vetrinary assistants together can't lift a dog that couldn't be more than 80 pounds. I have lifted overweight dogs, and I can't lift things. Plus they played the fat dog gag twice in the same movie, and it didn't seem to be like, "ONE YEAR LATER."

You may think I'm picking on the fat dog joke in the movie because of some deep-seated regret about fat dogs I have known, but no, she lost those twenty pounds and I'm just wasting time I could be adding to my NaNoWriMo story because it's easier to blather on about how adorable the Obamas are and pick on the innacuracies of pudgy dogs being owned by skinny women in movies--because that's not how it works, the saying goes if your dog is overweight you're not getting enough excercise and it's true. Then again it could also be due to lack of sheep.

Sometimes mashing lots of horror movies together is really bad for the mind, like the Alien/Leviathan/The Rock/Terminator 2/X-Files/Creature From The Black Lagoon remake called, Deep Evil, which was totally jarring. I mean...for a TV movie. I don't even mean Lorenzo Lamas being in the cast, I just mean there was some horror even I thought was gross in it and don't you know it has one of those OH NO WE'RE DOOMED AND MY EYES ARE WEIRD endings that would've freaked me out for days as a kid.

Then Nan found a Lifetime mystery called Obituary which I was giggling at because it involves serial killer spyware that makes CLICK HERE CLICK HERE sound like doom, but then it started to remind me of the thing I wrote during NaNoWriMo last year, almost, expect that it had no similarities other than a serial killer and spyware, but I had a migraine so I just giggled at the CLICK HERE CLICK HERE.

Queen Lulu hit 10060 words, despite my PMS'ing about movies and politics. I fell behind almost every single day, but then I'd catch up...I'm behind again.

Like Something Out Of A Movie

No? What Kind Of Negative Month Are You, Punk?

Did we watch movies this week? I can't remember. I was busy and I've got all sorts of bruises and stiff joints, so I'm sure I did something, but it's sort of a blur. Which is why I usually make notes all week, but I didn't even have time for that so I guess I was seriously into something. Hmm.

I finally saw the original Sabrina, which I got a kick out of because the remake with Harrison Ford is one of my all-time favorites (YES I ADMITTED IT SO THERE) and I love Audrey Hepburn so that was all good. Not exactly a new movie, however.

Another one that we'd somehow missed for years was Sleep Easy, Hutch Rimes with Swoozie Kurtz and Steven Weber. It's twisty.

Nan found Scary Movie 4 one night and we love that nonsense so I'd jump around and eat couch cushions to get you to watch it, but you know...it's silly fun.

Like Amazon Women On The Moon. I never saw that whole movie before, I only saw the bit with Arsenio Hall vs. the VCR and and Carrie Fisher being a reckless youth. And now I have seen everything that comes between those two sketches! That's my kinda crazy.

It got sort of freezing and these wild winds came through at one point this week, and while that was going on I worked on work-related things. The cabin fever took exactly four hours to kick in. Before that, however, I nearly removed my hand with the butt (eheheheheheh) of a rather largeish bit of gardening equipment, but I took our tree branches out of the neighbors' airspace, dammit. I feel so manly. *burp*

I added more crap to the sidebars of my blog! I figured out how the Last.fm radio player works and I actually heard some songs I'd forgotten I loved. I'm also doing NaNoWriMo again. As far as I know this story will be completely different from last year's, but then I never did talk about Coffeeman much so you wouldn't know, would you...but no, Queen Lulu has probably never had coffee in her life. I'm not ashamed of the people who live in my head anymore, or at least I've gotten over the idea that I'll be sent off to an asylum if I mention them. If only I'd known all these years that not having medical coverage has its perks.

No? What Kind Of Negative Month Are You, Punk?

The Smell of Autumn!

Last weekend we were down to movies we weren't hopping to see. What Happens In Vegas, for instance, wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, mainly because the side characters were good and the wedding bit in the credits was freakin' hilarious, but as you already know I have a thing for movie inebriation.

The movie was really short, though, so we caught the end of The Dead Girl, which as you might imagine by the title is not at all the type of movie that leaves you happy. There's a character in it that sent me totally frikkin' nuts, though, and dammit I'm telling you all know if you all ever thought I was serial killin', don't burn the evidence for me and let me go on doing it because...okay, I'd probably just be a serial killer of crappy people like how that Dexter guy kills killers and stuff, but still. Damn. Bad enough Mary Beth Hurt's character covers up a crime but then she goes and uncovers her boobies, right there, like, BOOM. Hello.

And then we finally watched Atonement. Oh my god. It's a good movie and all, but...oh my god. It's like the other extreme, don't be being a little bitch to nice men, kids. Not cool.

During the week, I got it into my head to use the gutter rake to take care of the leaves I saw poking out of the top of my house. Two hours later I was covered in the most un-leafy smell and there was wet stuff running down my back. Usually I don't see the point in washing up because it's not like I'm ever washing anything off, but this particular day I was never so glad I bought new $2 Head & Shoulders knock off ever, and that counts every time I get the weird blistering flare-ups.

The very next day, the guy we've been trying to get to come take the gutter off the porch roof because it rotted the portion of wood it was screwed into wrong six years ago (ah, my legacy) showed up, looked at the gutter, determined that indeed it needs help...and the gutters need cleaning, so they'll do that when they come to do the gutter. I regret nothing, there were so many leaves in the gutter the day before that the squirrels could walk along the surface and be totally visible, no fluffy tails bouncing along, no, entire squirrel visibility. So instead of finishing my gutter-cleaning, I cut down 33 gallons' worth of thorny noxious toxic weed vine because no one else is going to come along and offer to do it.

I thought I'd found a place to procure more skill and experience points but the entire website seemed to get hacked and go under within four days of me being picked up. Recall, if you will, how I've killed my favorite TV shows and have a tendency to bring layoffs and sometimes format changes to radio stations, JUST BY LIKING THEM. <Elton John>You're not lucky knowing me.</Elton John>

It was a busy week. I spelled a lot of words wrong and alienated more people than usual, but I slept at least three hours one of the days and can now see more potential raccoon entryways to the yard than ever before.

The Smell of Autumn!

A Short Week

Last weekend we watched Blade Runner again, and I don't even need to say why because it's Blade Runner, man. Oh, okay, it was on TV and we couldn't all get it together to watch then so we waited for Saturday and added pretzels. Of course then I had an allergic reaction to something and spent the end of the movie wheezing into my Benadryl. Blade Runner just wouldn't be the same if one of us wasn't sick while watching it, so I gladly accept that role. Now, because I didn't, like, asphyxiate.

Then we played Grand Theft Auto III a lot. One great thing about driving in GTA is that the flickering of late-afternoon sun is very nearly nonexistant, unlike realy life, and holy crap if I ever accidentally drive into a bus you'll know I went out crying some slurred thing about not being able to see.

I have five projects going on that I can't talk about right now if only because they've all blurred into one and I'd only say something like I think I'm listening to paint.

One night Rosemary's Baby was coming on, and I hadn't seen that since the '90s, so I'd forgotten they don't all get their comeuppance. Wow. Heavy. I happened to see on IMDB that a remake is in the works. Why? WHY? WHAT WILL YOU DO TO ITS EYES?! I'm betting CGI. Gotta be better than the lizard baby puppet in V, though...right?

Nan can find winners of movies, though, and this week's late night winner was The Obsession a tale of a guy so sad he begins stalking a 14-year-old ballerina of questionable quality and somehow knows that merely leaving a condom wrapper in the car of his crush's father will set events in motion for him to take over the dancing school and change the ribbon in the now 16-year-old dancer's hair. It's made-for-TV, they can't do anything more pervy than that and scrapbooking. The young dancer, see, she reminds teacher dearest of his dead wife, except that his wife, in flashbacks, does not drop her arms like she's really tired as she's dancing and her expression changes sometimes, so actually I couldn't see the comparison at all, but hey, I'm not a creepy pervert who stabs ballerina boyfriends.

I hacked up a lot of things in my backyard and it made me sad afterwards. I don't like cutting the cherry tree, but as a result it's sort of dying, so I pruned a lot of the lower branches to encourage it to maybe not die. I may have cracked why cutters cut. Then I pruned the Rose of Sharon for the winter. Already. While wearing shorts. Unreal. I love you, but I ain't getting hypothermia for you.

A Short Week

The Movies Are Getting Seasonal!

Looks like telly's pulling out all the horror a record five weeks before Halloween! It probably gives away what hour I was up writing if I say I saw a Tales From The Darkside with a very young Christian Slater in it. I think we've seen just about every episode of that show, but I'd forgotten this one, so it was fun to see.

Last weekend Sci-Fi played one called Tale of the Mummy, which was obviously an early movie for Gerard Butler and an in-between other films job for Christopher Lee, because although the hype said they're the stars, they are not. The star is apparently a swirling bunch of evil bandages, that pulls entire people into toilets and does really rude things to guide dogs.

Then we watched 30 Days of Night, which is about vampires in Alaska. Not hot vampires you'd like to follow to a jazz club, mind you, as you would not make it out of the driveway. As a pick-the-cast-off horror movie it's okay, but if you happen to like Alaskan Huskies in an unstabbed state, be warned that the beginning is not cool. No one warned me.

From Lifetime came the cautionary tale The Ticket, which proves you shouldn't ask anyone for their airplanes if you've won $23 million dollars, because for some reason money makes people utter gits to each other everyone only ends up being shot at, frozen, and set on fire. And I thought the news was mad.

The best movie we saw this week, though, was a rather popular flick over the summer called Iron Man. HOLY CRAP IRON MAN IS FANTASTIC!

Notice I'm totally focusing on the movies again because my personal life is a twisted wreckage of mismanagement. The rain loosened up the decorative front wall outside of my house and not for anything, there is no style called, "Crack house chic," so as in most Octobers in years ending in 8, I'll be bringing amusing tales of concrete next week.

The Movies Are Getting Seasonal!

Hanging Out With My Special Friends

Some new movies we'd been waiting for finally came along, like Deception, the Ewan McGregor movie we waited years and years for...and...I don't know why they make him talk like that. *sigh* We were guessing what was going to happen next, and there was something that happened in the end that we guessed better than what actually happened. Not that I advocate running off with millions of dollars with no questions asked, but movies, they're meant to be fantasy. I thought.

My faith in movies was restored the next night when, as we were poking around the Pay-Per-View listings, a little movie called Speed Racer turned up. You may recall me obsessing over the movie in the months leading up to its release. I loved every insane second of that movie, and my love affair with the Racer family remains alive and well.

Over the weekend the weather cooled off so I caught up on painting things I couldn't get near during the hotter summer days. Then summer ended. Ah well. I like autumn better anyway. Until baby raccoons try to set up house in our tree. I yelled at a lot of raccoons this week. Eventually I think it thought I wanted it to come over, and that is when I learned raccoons get used to humans after a few days. Not mutual, my freaky furry friend, not mutual.

Dancing With The Stars came back and I sat there and watched every minute of it like the strange characature of myself I've become. So far my favorites are Cloris Leachman, Warren Sapp, and the guy dancing with Julianne Hough.

One of Nan's finds on Sci-Fi was a little-known superhero flick called Lightspeed, featuring Jason Connery as a dude who runs really really fast while wearing what appears to be a speedskating bodysuit. Bottles of blue chemicals that may or may not be window cleaner also figure into the special powers. I love movies like this.

I got it into my head to create a record six strips in one week, because now that I'm a month ahead on my comic I want to be two months ahead. NaNoWriMo and the holidays are coming, you know. Of course I'll probably be all, "THREE MONTHS AHEAD!" next week. This will only be funny if I happen to die and my comic strip outlives me.

Hanging Out With My Special Friends

Reasons For Keeping My Conversations With Myself To Myself

Last weekend's movies were on two ends of the ratings spectrum, but had the similar theme of alter egos who walk around and get the person imagining them to do things.

Say what you want about Kevin Costner, but I seem to end up liking his movies. Even Waterworld. Throw in William Hurt as the wacky "imaginary friend" who likes killin' and Mr. Brooks was actually a good movie. I don't why but I remember it as not going over with critics. I guess because humanity isn't supposed to go around...well, I don't want to give it away.

I'm not sure how we ended up seeing Nim's Island, because it's obviously a kid's movie, but Gerard Butler probably had something to do with it. When it was over, I liked it. Even though it was like Willie Scott goes looking for Castaways for Six Days and Seven Nights. I watch too many movies. Also, as in Monk, dickering over touching a doorknob is how you convey that you apparently need help. Never mind that it's everyone else who touches the doorknobs after not washing their hands that makes the doorknob a germ-ridden filthpool in the first place.

*ahem*

No, seriously, Nim's Island gives kids the wrong idea. I'm guessing that not everyone who receives an e-mail from a stranger saying, "Help, there's pus coming out of my leg," is going to end up with their dream life of isolation with a ready-made family featuring Gerard Butler. That's one rare success story. My luck I'd end up with something out of The Net. And I don't mean Jeremy Northam, either, because you know I'd probably just spend the last few minutes of my stolen life giggling maniacally at who was about to kill me if he was involved.

I'm pissed that hurricanes are still allowed to toss around entire cities, and even more pissed that what is meant to be the greatest freakin' country is having nineteen types of breakdowns. Maybe because that makes me feel lame when I note that my sink drain has been leaking for a while and the floor still feels strange and guilty that for us the weather merely turned grey and cool. That weather brings out a sort of non-zombie version of me who is able to do things, so I caulked my porch steps for the winter. There aren't that many steps, but it took two tubes of caulk. I expect the bugs living under the stairs were surprised that globs of some gooey crap were dripping from the sky. There's an image that will mess with my mind for a few minutes. I'll focus on the funny part, when I was testing one strip of old caulk and at first said it was fine, then pulled on a loose bit and the entire three-foot section came off in my hand. Hey, if I don't laugh at it I'd puke. And it's nearly impossible for me to puke the way my insides are positioned. I also scraped down the porch paint in the hopes that I'd be refreshing that soon, and fixed the lamp post timer after some dude wandered into the side yard and chatted on his phone for like, fifteen minutes, left a bottle of pee in front of the neighbor's house, and then slammed the gate and terrified my cats. Thanks, guy. I wish I could have scared the living hell out of you, too. Only I don't actually have any nifty imaginary friends who are capable of coming up with better idea than shining a light at you and poking you with a pointed stick. I mean, I could bash your head in with a kettle, but denting the kettle would make coffee time difficult, and I do not like my coffee time difficult.

Then I got a cold and all the nice weather to do outdoor things sort of passed me by. I was not so ill that I couldn't smack a mosquito, however, and the one I just killed has left legs all over my hand. Um. Excuse me, I need to have various horrified reactions.

Reasons For Keeping My Conversations With Myself To Myself

The Week I Got Verbose Late At Night

Much of this week was taken up with repairing technology. I think it all went rather well, now I just need to find the cure for the kind of injuries incurred crawling around behind furniture with a FANTASTIC-SMELLING coaxial cable (I like the smell of new cables, lumber, eggcrate mattress pads and cat armpits) and playing with IDE ribbon cables (yes, I inhaled).

We saw The Forbidden Kingdom, the new Jackie Chan/Jet Li movie. I mean, come on, it's got Jackie Chan! And Jet Li! And...a white boy as the main character. He turns out okay, though. It was sort of like The Wizard of Oz meets The Katate Kid with some Lord of the Rings thrown in for good measure. And the ending was nearly better than Xanadu, but if I say more than that I'll spoil it.

Somehow I managed to not know anything about the Large Hadron Collider until the logo changed on Google on the day the potential black hole maker was turned on. Of course, once I knew about it I started to wonder if I should attribute the way my dog walks around looking spooked to some special canine knowledge that the planet is being sucked in on itself. Then she saw the neighbors and all was right with her world again. Hussy.

I had decided not to write anything about 9/11 this year, because I've told my story of that day so many times and all I wish now for everyone who died as a result of that day needs is peace. So I was out in the yard, taking pictures of the wildlife and cloud formations, and this bird, perfect little flying bird-shaped bird, got into one of the pictures. The angle reminded me of one of the last pictures I'd taken before that Tuesday in 2001, one that everyone went crazy over because wow, the colors! And a plane, not blurry at all, just PBBBT in the middle of the shot. It was the last time I deliberately took a picture of an airplane. I don't like airplanes, never did, much like I wouldn't like living in the path of oncoming trains or buses, so the picture caught "Ew," and I rarely thought about it over the years. It's sleep deprivation that makes me think a bird reclaiming the sky in my photographs is worthy of an entire post and 189 words the next day, but there it is.

If there's anything that stays consistent about 9/11, it's that we watch a lot of movies that day. No, really, that may seem harsh but there comes an hour when I need to stop experiencing things I can't fix. Generally this is about ten minutes after I wake up, but the women I live with are hardcore. TCM was playing a bunch of Kay Francis movies so I got to see Gloria Stuart (I make no apology for how many times I've seen Titanic) play pool and crash a car in Street Of Women and then we all started cracking up during Give Me Your Heart because Robert Osbourne had to tell the story about Kay Francis' problem with the letter R. I realize I've just made people who can't form Rs very angry, but remember, I can't walk around in sunlight without looking like a drunken maniac, so feel free to giggle at that and we'll be even.

I had the unfortunate experience of not only finding aphids checking out my forsythia, but a chunk of rot in one of the side supports of my swing--now entering its twentieth year of standing outside in sun, rain, snow...hell, I wouldn't have made it past that first summer. I busted out the horticultural oil for the aphids, but found that the tub of wood filler downstairs shares my tendency to crack and dry out over time. So I used Phenoseal. I caulked wood. The end is nigh but I'm holding on. I'll be damned if I don't go out swinging. As high as possible. By moonlight. Listening to '80s new wave. Surrounded by cats. You know, that swing has tried to kill me three other times, but I keep coming back for more. Sometimes I wonder if my love of swingsets is connected with my loathing of things like tags in clothing and being touched or my ability to blather on at length about the songs that were playing when I had a thought twenty-four years ago. Most of the time I don't wonder about it at all.

This week Mum made pancakes, and when Mum makes pancakes, I eat pancakes for days. Those pancakes frikkin' rule. Refrigeration and microwaves are also pretty neat.

Hurricanes aren't neat, though. Way to make me feel like a whiner about my rot, Ike. Stay safe, kids.

The Week I Got Verbose Late At Night

Six Months In A Leaky Boat

Last week we finally caught Harry Potter and the Order, based on the book I still haven't finished. I will reserve my opinion about whether the director did the same. I realize it couldn't be an eight-hour movie, but I would watch Gary Oldman stand around in doorways being underused for at least three hours, then they'd better give him something to do for the next five. It was a good advert for the book, though.

Superhero Movie, the latest (I guess?) of that spoof series...that spoofs...movies. I enjoyed it, I actually laughed a few times even, which is generally unheard of.

Then I watched a lot of tennis. Oodles of tennis. Tons of tennis. And Jon Stewart. Then I found myself outdoors one night staring at my feet, and that never ends well. I'm still waiting for it to pass, actually. Now it's raining and no one can play tennis, so I have to watch other things. Like Frontline. Hmm.

You know how the sun has that warning label about not staring directly into it? I haven't quite figured out how to pull that off while driving. Everyone gets annoyed when I close my eyes, so that's out. The great thing is that even on these rainy days I still have the image of the sun burned into my retina. It's super!

I also dodged a bat and chased a raccoon this week. I wouldn't have noticed either, except the cats tend to pay attention to great big creatures infiltrating their space and they've not got the afterimage of the sun burned into their eye, so that also gives them an advantage. I had to walk up to the raccoon with a flashlight before we saw each other, and the raccoon was like, "HOLY CRAP!" and slowly scaled the fence. The bat just flapped about, avoiding us. Luckily these two incidents didn't take place on the same night, or I'd be checking for snakes and Indiana Jones in my hedges.

Six Months In A Leaky Boat

Tidy Oop

This week the Olympics ended and the U.S. Open started. I wanted to be a sports fan and not pay any attention to anything else. Then again, some of those five-set tennis matches can get pretty vicious and run pretty late.

In an attempt to make my online time more efficient, I tried Google Reader to cut the RSS reading time. I'm not sure if I like it yet because when I first imported my OPML file with its "1000+" feeds my computer melted down. Then I marked everything as read and went to Newsgator to catch up, then kept going back and forth and noticed it was taking twice as long to check my RSS feeds.

The movies were a bit sparse this week. We found a remake of The House Of Usher which is sort of a total retelling. Like, the characters are named Usher, and there is a house, but the thing I remembered from the original story was the big-ass crack in the house and maybe I blinked but there's more cracks in my house than the house in the movie. Another thing that made me giggle was as I'm sitting off to the side of the TV, wearing my headphones, writing, Roderick Usher is in the TV, wearing headphones, typing, and freaking out about sunlight. At least I can safely say I'm not hooking up with my sister. Although I could find a few uses for the bacta tank they kept in the basement.

Wednesday I busted out my pole pruner and took on the vine of doom that has yet to bring any nice boys named Jack or mutant geese my way, but apparently is a megabee doom juice filling station for megabees. I had a horoscope that told me to go take risks, but maybe standing in a cloud of mosquitoes waving an sharpened orange stick at something that delivers a sting that I read feels like a hot nail was a bit much. The yard looks pretty in that corner again, however.

Thursday was an electronic disaster, starting with the discovery that I had a wonky wire somewhere in my room and ending with discovering that I can't fix everything. Luckily Barack Obama starting talking and I forgot all my problems for an hour. I spent the rest of the night debating whether to mention that to the Internet, then realized I spend 60% of my blogging time talking about how stuff in my yard, and went for it.

Friday I cut back more of the vine. There is so much vine, I can't believe it's able to survive with the ounce of rain we got this summer. But it does, and so does the oak tree I totally didn't realize was wrapped in vines! I'm guessing my neighbor doesn't know that thing is growing there. At least I hope they didn't want it. Er....

Tidy Oop

I Slip Further Into My Split Personality.

Last Saturday we were still not finding movies that were more interesting than Olympic tennis, but we tried anyway.

I Could Never Be Your Woman, and this is a first for all the movies we watched this year, we turned it off before Paul Rudd even showed up. One of the main draws was Tracey Ullman in the cast, and she was a pretty neat pissed off Mother Nature ranting about humanity but um...then there was a plastic surgery montage. A graphic plastic surgery montage. I guess it just wasn't the right night for it, we did give it another five minutes after Saoirse Ronan (fabulous actress nominated for an academy award for Atonement) was given a line describing what she found in her underpants at school that day, but when the period storyline seemed to be dragging on longer than most girl's first--I'M SORRY GUYS, I'LL STOP NOW.

We checked out another movie, Meet Bill. Once again, we went for it based on the cast (Aaron Eckhardt! Jessica Alba and Timothy Olyphant are in it too, and Craig Bierko's not credited but he is in it as well and so that was a nice surprise). I learned that night that I prefer guy awkwardness comedies to girl awkwardness comedies. Because the second movie was better.

Sunday morning I woke up in the middle of a midlife crisis. I hate that. It's been happening more often (again--last time was 2001), and I hope it stops (again--sooner than six months later) because it's bloody annoying and there's very little I can do about the state of my roof even if I was near it. After a while I went back to sleep, and luckily something in that sleep made me want to repair the couch when I saw it again. It's got these rods that go through the coils, you see, and one rod has slid sideways out of one coil ages ago. I couldn't get that to go back but by god I had scrap wood to make a BETTER support. Then again I was told it was a bit rigid, so maybe better isn't the right word.

Sunday also redeemed my faith in movies. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is crazy adorable if you happen to love Frances McDormand and Ciarán Hinds, which we do.

The Olympics continued to be on and I continued to get more interested in Beach Volleyball despite knowing Tibet and Burma are still having a bad time. Not in Beach Volleyball, just in general. I keep assuring myself watching something that's being broadcast anyway is not going to doom Tibet anymore than if I didn't watch it. It's the same reasoning people have used on me for why I should eat meatballs. It isn't really necessary, you know, Nan and Mum's meatballs are on the list of exceptions because really, fifty years down the line (and unfortunately it looks like I will have another fifty years) will it matter than I refused bits of dead cow or that I ate the family meatballs? Exactly.

Around Sunday I also started to question the amount of reviewing that I'm doing.

Like on Monday, while I was watching the two-hour Chinese beach volleyball match getting some writing done, I slowly noticed parts of my innards burning. I hadn't eaten anything to cause it unless the peanut butter finally decided to kill me--oh, that's right, I lifted a couch. You know, the first year I had a hiatal hernia, I totally thought I'd inherited exploding heart, and then weeks went by and I kept not being dead, and now some twelve years later, I no longer think I'm dying so much as I hope I would, quickly, because the burning, it burns. Alas, I will live, and next week I hope to report that all my parts have gone back down where they belong, quicker because of my tilted bed.

Other highlights of my week were rescuing a ninja ladybeetle (this was the bizarro black-with-a-red-dot variation) from a scaly euonymus branch I was pruning by letting it walk on me, and being asked by someone I don't know on Twitter if I wanted to do it. The Twitter post he replied to was a lament about not having a fan built into my brain, so perhaps he was just offering to help me install one. Still, I declined. I also rethought my original response of, "Pfft! In 140 letters?!" because maybe I'd be hitting a nerve. Wouldn't want to do that to someone who's been looking for a lady for sex since May (going by what came up when I Googled his username) and obviously has no idea who he was hitting on.

I Slip Further Into My Split Personality.

I Think I'm Getting Tired Of Movies.

Last weekend we ran out of new movies to check out and turned to that tape I put The Company on back, like, last year. I took to calling it Brotherhood of the Spying Pants. There was a Russian ballerina spy named Rainbow, though, and that was one reason I stayed awake for the first part, because Russian ballerina spies named Rainbow ought to be in more movies. But then I think I was asleep when it ended because the next thing I knew we were watching an episode of Lilo & Stitch where Stitch meets...a snot vampire.

The next night we watched the rest of The Company, and I started to suspect the Burger King Ketchup & Fries chips Mum had us eating were laced with some sort of loopy seasoning, because I fell asleep again halfway through part two. It's not that the movie was boring or anything, as a matter of fact I woke up to the sound of the characters all yelling at each other, because they too were trying to figure out what the story was about. Apparently in The Company, every wonky thing that has gone bad in history is the fault of a rowing team from Yale. Michael Keaton (Batman) plays the chain-smoking head of the CIA and while I was concious, I alternated between X-Files references and Night Shift cracks like, "This is Chuck to remind Bill to shut up," every time a tape recorder was on screen. That's a sign I've stayed up past my bedtime if there ever was one. Chris O'Donnell (Robin) was also in it, and dude, Batman and Robin were in the same movie! Something was totally in those chips.

See, there are these bags of stuff that we somehow end up eating on the weekends, that seem to just appear mysteriously despite no one wanting any of it. I eat them to be part of the team, and that team is a team whose blood pressure does weird things when they eat things that are high in sodium. Not really funny unless you witness the slow reluctance with which I have these things. Chex Mix with cheddar? Uh...I shouldn't...okay...some...a little...I don't care...whatever. Burger King Fries with MSG powder? Uh...oka--zzzzz. I used to drink alcohol, but under the same premise and it had the same results. Now when we watch movies I drink cranberry juice and spend the next morning wondering why my chest is burning.

The Olympics were on in the background of everything, and I can't help loving those swimming relays. Every time we're into sports, I always make up my mind to only watch sports from then on so I don't have to know what's going on the world, because sometimes the world is an uncertain pit of despondant gloom but damn if a bunch of swimmers being happy they did good doesn't make me forget that for a few minutes.

The only other thing I can think of to mention this week is that Flickr Uploadr was running way slow, and that's cramping by big backup project.

It also rained a lot, but the lawn needed it. I tried some Off! that was being passed around, and still managed to feed a small contingent of mosquitoes. I'm considering coating myself in the melted wax of a citronella candle.

I Think I'm Getting Tired Of Movies.

The Sights And Sounds Of Strange Worlds

Last weekend we decided to watch a mini-series I'd taped nearly a year ago called The Gathering. This would be the one with Peter Gallagher, not the one with Ioan Gruffudd. No, the gathering in this one is much more active. So active, that the entire borough of Manhattan is taken over by them, and Meadow Sorprano teaches Runes to children of affluent voodoo doers and even after three hours of witchery, Peter Gallagher just can't believe what's going on. Neither could I...neither could I. The entire end was full of lightning, so I have no idea what happened, but there was lots of yelling, then they all ate onion rings bird feathers and it just ended.

Because Nan loves Jack Black (yeah, okay, so do I), we checked out Nacho Libre. We'd never seen it before, and we haven't laughed so much in a while. At least until the next night when we watched Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear, not to be confused with the Baby Cart series. Thinking about it now, I seemed to be the only one laughing at that one. I'm assured it was actually scary. I made a neat little origami crane out of a napkin when I ran out of commentary.

The finale of So You Think You Can Dance was this week, and I will miss those kids terribly. If you haven't seen this season, this and this and this will give you an idea why that show just makes me happy. Which is possibly why I got silly and wrote several in-depth soul-searching Twitter tweets that starrted with the realization that I'm still the Miss Bates of my own personal Jane Austen tale. UPON MY HONOR!

And then the Olympics began. Yes, oppressive governments suck, but what other time do I get to see badminton and table tennis on TV? I'm watching it as I'm writing this. My inner Asian wants me to point out that I used to kick ass at table tennis. Mainly my own ass, but believe me, if I could beat me, I was GOOD.

The Sights And Sounds Of Strange Worlds