holidays – Still Not King

Thanksgiving

Spent Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, who were helping host a huge Thanksgiving dinner for people at their church. So instead of the 8-12 people I’m used to for holiday dinners, it was 24. Hectic, but I discovered that I’m actually good at playing Jenga. (I swear, I haven’t played the game since college, and I don’t remember being any good at it at the time.)

With the warm weather, I’d been joking that we should have a Thanksgiving barbecue. The first thing I saw when we got there: a barbecue. Okay, it was being used to cook a turkey, but still…

There was also the highest pie-to-person ratio I have seen in a long time. I think there must have been at least 10 pies, if not a dozen. Probably enough for everyone there to eat half a pie!

We stayed in on Friday, avoiding the insanity of Black Friday sales (though I did look through the 15 or so emails from various online stores whose lists I’m on), then drove up to Westwood in the evening to see Equivocation (Shakespeare gets caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot).

Current Music: Some video game from someone else in the waiting room at the car service dept

The New Year

Took a half-day on Wednesday, then went home and took a nap. Went over to help my parents set up for their New Year’s Eve party, planning to come home later & watch LA Confidential, and ended up staying. Watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the “auditions” for the Evil League of Evil submitted by fans. Some were good. Some were…not.

Slept in Thursday. Started out reading Greg Keyes’ The Hounds of Ash, a collection of short stories set in the same world as The Waterborn and The Blackgod. After 2 stories, decided to re-read the novels. Fortunately, we recently pulled them out of storage since alenxa was thinking of reading them. Ran some errands, ended up across from the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We’d already discussed replacing the mostly-dead PowerBook, both wanted to replace it with another Mac, and we’d even worked out which model we were going to get, so we just went for it. Then headed over for dinner w/ my brother & his fiancee (who flew back on Friday) & my parents, where we helped work through leftovers from the party.

Friday: more reading. Made a point of walking to lunch. Laundry. Working on my Flash site after a long delay. Watched 2 episodes of “Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs” (computer-generated nature show with prehistoric animals). Nice visuals, but I was bothered by some of the things that I can’t imagine could be extrapolated from fossils — like protective coloring & behavior that’s not based on skeletal structure.

Saturday: Shopping. Finished “Walking w/ Monsters,” watched “Helvetica.” More interesting than expected, but less interesting than was led to expect from reviews.

Current Music: Vienna Teng, “Whatever You Want”

Christmas: Day 1

Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I’d like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it’s been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a “relaxing” evening yesterday of laundry, dishes, and wrapping gifts, with a break for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

Today, went over to my parents’ for breakfast, meeting up with them and with my brother and his fiancee, who flew down Wednesday and are staying at their place. Then carpooled off to my grandparents’ house for the big family get-together. Follow-up with alenxa’s family on Saturday, originally scheduled around SIL and her boyfriend driving down from Oregon. With all the snow earlier this week, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to try the drive, so it looks like we’ll be hitting the post office sometime in the next few days.

Overnight in San Diego

My company will sometimes do its Christmas party as a destination event. It was in Las Vegas one year, and one year it was even a 3-day cruise. I think it’s a holdover from the dot-com days during which we’d always have an annual ski trip and an annual summer trip. Then it was cut down to one trip. And now it’s combined with the Christmas party.

This year it was held in San Diego, at the Omni Hotel. Since it’s relatively close, we were all on our own for transportation, so alenxa and I took it at our own pace, spending Saturday afternoon in Old Town, hitting a farmer’s market, and so forth. Unfortunately it was casino-themed, and I’m not really big on gambling (though Katie made a killing at blackjack), but the food was really good (it was the in-hotel McCormick and Schmick’s, and while I couldn’t eat the seafood, the steak was quite good, and the chocolate cake was excellent), and I think I have gained at least a rudimentary understanding of craps beyond “you roll the dice and bet on how they land.”

( K2R: Old Town, the Omni, and just how big is that space by the convention center, anyway? )

Now if I could just figure out what to do with this wireless keyboard and mouse…

What I Did on my Thanksgiving Vacation

My brother and his fiancée drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents’ house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which cards to toss.

Family gathering on Thursday at my grandparents’ house. In the old days we’d drive to my parents’ house, then pile into their minivan and carpool the rest of the way, but since my mom traded it in for a Camry, we had to split 6 people across two cars. I’d planned on driving since I knew neither Brion nor Marti was going to want to spend ~2 hours driving in holiday traffic after spending the entire previous day on the road.

Other than visiting family, I mostly stayed at home. No Black Friday sales. I did order tickets to a play (The School of Night, about the death of Christopher Marlowe), and tried to order tickets to Man of La Mancha only to discover it was in presale, and I didn’t have the code. (Subsequently signed up for Reprise’s newsletter. Next time…)

Did a lot of reading. I’m about 100 pages into George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and decided I needed a break. I picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward the day before ABC announced the first casting for the TV pilot. Jack Davenport — yes, Steve from Coupling and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean — is playing the lead , and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is playing a character who is either new to the adaptation or shows up at least halfway through the book. I get the impression from earlier articles that they’re not adapting the plot so much as they’re taking the concept and using it as the basis for an ongoing series. I also reread Girl Genius from the beginning, which is much easier to do in book form than on the computer.

alenxa completed Nanowrimo over the weekend, having written 50,000 words during November, though she’s pretty sure the full novel is going to be more than twice that.

Also, on Tuesday we went out to Huntington Beach’s street fair to see Gigi Edgley, Farscape’s Chiana, do fire twirling (write-up w/ photos at K2R).

Today, I’m tired. 9 days of antihistamines plus 3 days of getting to bed late and getting up early plus a couple of weeks of not sleeping well. Okay, back to work.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy

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.

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.

Current Location: car dealer

3 Malls, 1 Day

Finally got out to do serious Christmas shopping today. Hit a couple of individual stores at the beginning & end of the day, but the bulk of it was taken up by a 3-mall tour:

The Village (formerly known as the Mall of Orange). Not too bad. Parked quickly, though not terribly near the mall. Crowds weren’t too bad, even in the food court where alenxa and I had lunch. Full circuit, found stuff. Stopped at Jamba Juice & Coffee Bean on the way out.

Main Place. Total nightmare. Took 10 minutes to get into the parking lot because it’s behind the mall. They had cops directing traffic, but weren’t making it clear just who they were gesturing to. And then there was turning left into the parking structure at a blind curve with oncoming traffic. Much more crowded — seemed like it was also a hangout mall, in addition to people shopping. Even after doing a full circuit, neither of us found anything suitable for presents. Though we did find a good gelato place. Incidentally, there are some Nirvana songs that are just not appropriate for a store called “Simply Kids,” even if it is primarily an anime/manga store.

The Block. Much nicer. Again, easy to get into the parking lot. At least seemed less crowded. Disappointed to find that Earthbound Trading Company is gone, but managed to actually find stuff for people. Dinner at Tu Tu Tango. Sitting down was a nice change.

Aftermath. Got home, got ready to start wrapping presents for people we’re going to see tomorrow. Remembered we were out of Scotch tape. So I got back in the car & took a trip to the grocery store. They were out of regular ½” Scotch tape. Fortunately, they had 5,000 displays of 3-packs of ¾” tape scattered around the store.

Current Mood: 🙁exhausted

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.

Current Mood: busy

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.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy