An archive of my old LiveJournal
This reminds me of the apocryphal round-robin story written by two people with very different sensibilities as to what makes a good story: Pride and Predator. Starts out as Pride and Prejudice but then an alien lands and starts stalking everyone.
It’ll either be awful or it’ll be hilarious. Possibly both.
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.
Cool short movie: Mac vs. PC – Transformers style!
Thursday night we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater. We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.
There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest. Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children. It’s animated, right?
The movie was good, as always. It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be. In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.
Halloween itself was a bit of a bust. alenxa had made herself up as a vampire, and we’d bought three bags of candy, but I was so exhausted when we got home that I flopped onto the bed for "10 minutes" that turned into an hour and a half. But the entire evening, not a single trick-or-treater knocked on our door. Katie saw groups tromp up and down the stairs right next to us, but they passed us by entirely. She figured there must be some sort of signal you’re supposed to put on your door to say, "We accept trick-or-treaters," and no one told us. So I figure I’ll just take most of the candy into work on Monday. It’ll go pretty quickly.
Saturday we ran some errands down in Lake Forest (among other things, checking for post-Halloween sales at Costume Castle) and drove through a No On Prop 8 rally on the corners of El Toro & Rockfield. We waved, honked the horn, and Katie woo-hooed. [Edit: forgot to mention, there was at least one person holding a handmade sign that said something like "Christians voting against Prop 8." Nice to be reminded that not everyone falls for the false dichotomy.] We had lunch at the original Peppino’s (a bit expensive for lunch, but the leftovers will feed us for 2 more days) and realized that we hadn’t been to one since the restaurant in Tustin closed. Then I spent the afternoon doing laundry catch-up, while Katie got started on Nanowrimo.
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.
Started moving boxes and furniture around so that we can actually have someone install cable. Moved some boxes into bedroom, made room in the closet for others, and dug out my corner desk from the corner of the living room where it’s sat since May. When we set up our computers in the bedroom, we left enough space for the desk, but never got around to moving it.
As it turns out, the desk won’t fit through the bedroom door.
It took both of us carrying it and rotating it about 3 feet in the air just to get it into the hallway, but there’s no way to get it from the hallway into the bedroom without removing the corner leg… and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without breaking the thing.
So the desk is back in the corner of the living room, under a slightly smaller pile of boxes than before. I guess I’ll put some of them where I intended to put the desk.
Also: Watched Labyrinth. I still like most of the movie, but I can no longer take the goblins singing and dancing with David Bowie.
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.
Finally started getting my sleep schedule adjusted, only to send it completely out of whack this weekend.
Friday I just took a break from everything and caught up on comics. I read the first issue of Madame Xanadu (looks promising), re-read the first volume of Welcome to Tranquility and finally read the second.
On Saturday, we went up to LA to see The Drowsy Chaperone. It was the first time in years that I’d gone to see a play knowing little to nothing about it. It was a send-up of 1920s musicals, structured as a fan sharing a favorite from his record collection. It was fun, but I don’t really have any desire to see it again.
We ate at a restaurant called Tesoro, which turned out to be at the base of that amphitheater-like area below the Omni Hotel. I got lost earlier trying to get to it, because I got off the parking lot — excuse me, the freeway — a couple of exits before Grand, and figured that if I took 3rd I’d be able to catch up with where the directions said to be. Somehow I’d never noticed that there were multiple levels of streets with the same names. So instead of catching up to 3rd and Grand, we ended up in a tunnel underneath where we were supposed to be…
Today we went out to see Hellboy II, which was quite good. One of the things that makes it work is that, like Iron Man, it takes itself just seriously enough…no more. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a scene near the middle of the film that is absolutely WTF-worthy and hilarious, but it works. Also dropped into Borders to pick up the new Temeraire novel, and walked out with 3 books…
I also finished a novel, Ringworld’s Children, the fourth volume in the Ringworld series. I think my favorite of the series was probably the second one, The Ringworld Engineers. This one looks structured to be a final book, but then I suppose the others were too. It’s a series in the “Hey, I have another idea for this concept!” sense (or, in some cases, “Hey, fans pointed out scientific implausibilities, let’s see if I can come up with a story that fixes that”), not an arc sense.
It’s been slow going, but we’ve cleared out enough of the living room to set out the coffee table, making the couch usable, and set up the TV and DVD player.
One thing we’re doing, since we hope to find a place to buy within a few months, is not getting cable for the time being. Sure, we were only spending $15/month for the broadcast channels, but all our shows are going (or have gone) on hiatus for the summer. Why pay for something we aren’t going to use? When I explain this plan, people are often very confused. The AT&T tech actually started to say, “Well, you could watch…” Why? I don’t watch TV just to have the TV on. If I’m interested in a show, I turn it on. If I’m not, I turn it off. If I’m bored, I’d rather pick up something from my backlog of books or comics, or go to the internet.
After I set up the TV today, we popped in our DVD of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We’d gone out to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean, which was fun (both the hanging out with friends and the movie), and we found ourselves quoting the new film to each other at relevant points in the original.
1. Wednesday morning, I took the car in to a place that would not only wash the outside (which it desperately needed), but vacccum the interior. I paid a bit more than I probably should have and had the car waxed as well.
Thursday morning, I set a 3/4-empty coffee cup on top of the car as I arrived at work. A gust of wind promptly knocked it over, spilling it all over the windshield and hood.
Thursday at lunchtime, a freak storm hit, drenching the entire region, flooding streets, causing mudslides in canyons.
Talk about timing.
2. Meanwhile, we haven’t managed to excavate the tv yet, and only half the couch, but alenxa and I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on one of the computers last night.
3. Also, finaly let myself get talked into setting up a profile on Facebook. Trying to figure out the culture, not so much for the people I still keep in touch with, as for the people I haven’t seen since high school. Now I know why there are so few members of my graduating class on LJ — most of them must have waited until Facebook was the big site before they started getting involved in social networking.