Tag: comics
Decompressing
Just finished fighting with a Linux server that somehow ended up re-activating a service which it didn’t need, but which interferes with a service that it does need. *grumble*.
Boss returned this morning from a week out following back surgery…and has jury duty. Figures if he actually gets called in, he can easily get it dismissed, but for now, the only number he has is for the automated message.
Managed to mostly avoid fire+smoke problems this weekend, except Sunday afternoon why my eyes just wouldn’t stop itching. A co-worker had to evacuate his parents from Yorba Linda on Saturday, but their house made it through okay.
Got together with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean for Andrea’s birthday and monopolized a table at Cosi for about 4 hours on Sunday. Fortunately they didn’t seem to mind!
Caught up on comics & Netflix over the weekend. Read Crecy, about the 1300s battle in which the English longbow triumphed over vastly superior French numbers. Mostly about medieval war tactics, swearing, and xenophobia. Narrated by an utter bastard who breaks the fourth wall a lot. Did I mention it was by Warren Ellis? Also read Chrono Mechanics, about a squad of techs whose job is to repair time. A bit too crazy even for me, and I loved Tales from the Bully Pulpit. And finally Harley and Ivy, a collection of stories focusing on Batman villains Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, which was great fun.
As for TV, we’ve finished season 1 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I also wrapped up watching season 5 of The Batman (though I haven’t watched the earlier seasons, and based on this one, probably won’t). And then there’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed…I had to watch it because it’s about a speedster, but OMG it was awful. At least now I know Netflix’ "Watch Instantly" service works well with our system/connection. Snarky commentary will go up at Speed Force in the next week or two.
We’ve backed off on the house hunting for a bit. We actually got a counteroffer on one of the places we looked at a few weeks ago, but decided not to take it. We need to reevaluate what we’re looking for before we dive back in.
Drove alenxa to an interview this morning. Thought it was in one of those two new buildings by the spectrum until she told me the address, and realized it was actually across the street from where I work. Highly convenient for today, but the actual job location is off in another direction.
Catching Up
1. Finally took the time to finish reading Victory of Eagles. Very good — on a level with Throne of Jade, which had previously been my favorite in the Temeraire series.
2. Also took a bunch more boxes to storage, including 4 comic boxes. I’d intended to put half my comics in storage when we moved back in May, but I wanted to catalog them all first so that I could find them easily. Then my arms fell off after we moved, and I didn’t want to carry the boxes, and then I just kept putting it off. Now we’ve got a chance of clearing a patch from the co-ax outlet to the TV, so…
3. Arranged for cable. I’d been hoping we’d be somewhere more permanent by the time the fall TV season started, but we haven’t had much luck.
They’re coming on Thursday, but we’ve made arrangements for the second ep of Bones and the premieres of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (try typing that three times fast) and Fringe (that was easier!). Seriously considered Time Warner’s DVR package, which is only around $10/month, but it’s only available with their digital cable package… which starts at around $50/month. And there isn’t really anything we’d be watching that isn’t on the $15/month broadcast-only package, at least not until BSG comes back sometime next year.
4. Finally saw Wall-E, in a theater with 4 other people, including a kid who kept making comments and hadn’t yet learned the art of moderating his volume. And a sound system that went wonky during the second-to-last preview and stayed that way through most of the film, even after I went out to report the problem during the short. Fortunately it was just an undercurrent that sounded kind of like a high-pitched refrigerator warble, and not distortion of the soundtrack. Also, the print was rather badly scratched in the middle third of the picture. Despite all that, the movie was still quite enjoyable.
Catching Up
1. I’ve been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s. They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes. Some of them are total crack, and there’s a web archive with snarky commentary. I got the idea to profile the villains that the Flash fought (even though there’s still a bunch of minor villains and supporting characters from canon to add), so I’ve been looking for pages to get higher-res scans. I found 2 of 4.
The funny thing? It turns out that the Omnivore’s 100 list I posted includes Hostess Fruit Pies because the author was nostalgic for those ads.
2. Dinner with MIL Saturday, after alenxa went to a cousin’s wedding shower.
3. Majorly dehydrated on Sunday, or something. Tried to start going through the piles of boxes against the edge of our living room, but ended up spending the afternoon on the couch reading, sipping water. Read sections from The Flash Companion and a comic book trade, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War. I’d picked it up months ago, before we moved, since it was a sequel to a story I’d liked that came out in 1989 (Invasion!) but hadn’t gotten around to reading it. Not bad, but didn’t wow me either. Fortunately felt better in time to…
4. Hit the Orange Street Fair on Sunday evening. Passed on Abelskivers (sp) this time. Was in line, but realized I just didn’t want them. Agreed we have to explore Old Town Orange sometime when it’s not a fair and businesses are open. I think the last time I did that was more than 10 years ago.
5. Responsible day today. Groceries, Laundry, etc.
6. Interviewed the outgoing writer on The Flash last week!
Goals for this week:
1. Locate cable outlet.
2. Arrange for some sort of TV service. The fall season is starting, and we’ll actually be watching stuff live and not just off of DVDs.
Bees and Cheese
1. House-hunting continues. Just about every place we’ve put an offer in on has gone for ~10K over the asking price, so we’re starting to factor that in. Looked at yet another condo in a complex we’ve looked at repeatedly: fantastic condition (except for the door, which looked like it had been kicked in — alenxa figures it was probably a forced repo), but right in front of the pool. A place that needs work can be fixed up more easily than a place in a bad location can be moved.
2. We have bees again. This time they’re setting up shop in the bathroom wall, crawling in through the handle in the plumbing access panel in the back yard. One actually made its way into the bathroom through the bathtub overflow before we taped it over.
3. I spent the weekend watching the new DVDs of the 1967 DC super-heroes cartoons by Filmation. Fun in a cheesy, over-the-top way. Only ~2 hours (18 episodes at 7 minutes each), but had to spread them out. Plus I was trying to do a write-up of the Flash episodes, which meant re-watching, taking screencaps, etc. I’ve posted a review on another blog.
4. Speaking of cheesy, we finally watched Aztec Rex. We’d been warned, and it was only because some of the Farscape production people were involved It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected (even if the first ~40 minutes were interminable), though that may have been the sidecar talking.
The Fourth
Went out to see the fireworks at Laguna Beach on Friday. I started the day reading comics, including the new House of Mystery issue — Vertigo is not making it easy for me to cut down on comics purchasing — and the first two issues of Gemini, about a super-hero who doesn’t know he’s a hero. (There’s a second personality, activated remotely by a controlling agency. And the hero personality doesn’t know about his civilian ID.) Also read some old Flash comics, originally to prepare for a couple of profiles on my website, but got distracted by Silver Age wackiness.
Ended up sleeping half the afternoon, since I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve been trying to adjust to getting up earlier for alenxa’s new job. (Annoyingly, I discovered the next morning that a server problem came up on Friday — if I’d been my usual Internet-addicted self, I would have spotted it much earlier.)
Anyway, since Katie didn’t want to wait around for hours on the beach like we did last year, we aimed to arrive around 8:30, during twilight. Again, we made good time down the canyon and parked up at the entrance (across the street from Laguna Playhouse and Tivoli Terrace). It’s amazing how much more expensive it is to park just a few blocks closer to the beach.
We found a good spot, and this year the wind didn’t blow the smoke toward us, so the view was clear, both of the fireworks launched from the base of the cliffs and of the fireworks launched a mile or two farther up the coast. Someone was selling cheap blue lightsabers on the beach. We saw a bunch of them. Unlike the good ones, you could really see the individual bulbs/LEDs along the length of the blade.
We let tradition win out over annoyance at Starbucks, and went to the place that used to be a Diedrich Coffee. That, and I kind of needed the caffeine to get us home. On our way back to the car, we stopped at a gelato place, and I had a really good combo of cherry and chocolate.
Saturday morning I was stuck going into work, then afternoon was mostly errands. Then I let myself get caught up in a flamewar, wasting time I intended to use finishing up on that reading. Finally made the time for it on Sunday, as well as reading through the PDFs of The Flash Companion (I’ve made arrangements with the main author to post some excerpts online to promote it). Discovered that in the Contributors’ Biographies section, my website got hyphenated. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except it’s the domain name, and some domain squatter owns hyper-borea.org.
Running Around
Sunday was mostly errands — replacing the lost rice cooker (In the rush to clear things out of the old apartment, I walked into the kitchen 3 or 4 times to grab or check things, saw a box sitting in an open cabinet, thought “I need to grab that on the next trip,” and promptly forgot about it each time), getting stakes to train the morning glories in the backyard to curl around something other than the patio furniture, getting a new welcome mat (which of course was missing a label, the last one on the shelf, and wasn’t actually on the shelf, so we had to guess which empty bin it was and convince the clerk that it was the correct one), etc. Groceries.
I also launched a new comics-focused blog to go with my Flash website. I’d started posting news on the front page, and wanted to simplify management, and realized I was basically building a mini-blog already. And then there was that domain name I picked up last year and couldn’t figure out what to do with. I had some other stuff I wanted to finish first, but I kept running into news items I wanted to post, and figured it would be better to have them on an actual blog. So I set up a new copy of WordPress, pointed SpeedForce.org to it, picked a suitable theme and and put together a few posts to get things started.
Day Off
After spending Friday night and most of the daylight hours Saturday and Sunday moving furniture and boxes around, putting stuff on shelves or in closets, hooking up electronics, sorting stuff to keep/sell/donate/take to storage, and generally trying to make the new place liveable, I decided to just relax on Monday.
That morning I finally got around to reading The Stardust Kid (which I volunteered to index at the Grand Comics Database last summer when I figured I’d pick it up any day now. Oops). Then in the afternoon, after a quick grocery run, I finished rereading Ringworld. alenxa made purple potato salad from scratch, and we watched “Once More With Feeling” with dinner. We followed is up with an episode of Bones (which is decidedly not dinner material, as far as I’m concerned).
Today: back to work, trying to remind myself that it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.
Music, Christmas, and Deadlines
Ended up missing my company’s Christmas party this year because we had tickets to see Tori Amos at the Grove on Saturday. Good concert, but our feet were pretty much dead by the end of the standing show. Sometime I’ll have to post the experience of trying to eat at El Torito Grill beforehand.
Meanwhile, everyone at my office hopped on a bus last Friday at noon to go out to Las Vegas. Apparently they did a murder mystery dinner for the actual party. It was a bit eerie afterward.
Still scrambling to finish a website at work. Also trying to finish some articles that I’m contributing to a book about the Flash. And Christmas shopping? Hah!
5 days before Christmas is a bad time to find out that you’re almost out of scotch tape, but I suppose it’s better than finding out at 8pm on December 24.
Thanksgiving Weekend
Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.
Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.
Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.
Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.
Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.
Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.
Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.
Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.