- Saw Iron Man on Saturday. Very good, possibly the best superhero movie since the first Spider-Man. Perfect balance of action and humor — it knew when to take itself seriously, and (more importantly), when not to.
- Tried “curry chips” at an Irish pub near the movie theater. French fries, only lightly salted, and a bowl of curry to dip them in. Surprisingly good.
- Also watched Never Been Kissed via Netflix. Funny, but in a painful way, since the movie is all about public humiliation.
- Boxed up most of the books on our main 2 bookshelves. The plan is to put most of our books (and the shelves) in storage until we get a more permanent place, except for one to-read box. 10 boxes later, we still have the non-fiction shelf, the manga shelf, the humor+coffee table shelf… We’re going to need more boxes.
- Speaking of which, we’re down to less than 2 weeks to the move. Once we landed an interim apartment, I was relieved, but now I’m starting to worry about whether we’ll have time to pack everything up. Which reminds, me, I never got a response on my request for a quote for movers. More calls to make…
- Finally replaced the last of my large plain T-shirts with mediums after almost a year of holding at 150-155 lbs. Printed shirts are a bit trickier.
- Sleepy+hungry. Finally got around to reading Superman: Birthright last night, which was considerably better than the online consensus would suggest. But it meant I was up past midnight, and I got up early so that we could go to the DMV before work this morning. (alenxa and I both had stuff we needed to do there…this week. The funny thing is, we ended up at windows right next to each other, despite being in different queues.) So I got too little sleep and had breakfast 2 hours earlier than usual, and now I’m ready for lunch at 11:00.
Tag: movies
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.
Musical Weekend
Friday night alenxa and I went to a Gin Blossoms concert in Cerritos. They spent most of the show alternating between songs from the new album (which is surprisingly good) and their old standards. Encore was 2 covers: Rocketman and something I didn’t recognize.
Funniest remark: “We don’t get to play many Performing Arts Centers. Mostly we play casinos and dog pounds.”
Saturday I spent some time filling in random songs for our music collection, going with Amazon’s DRM-less plain old MP3s when possible and iTunes when not.
Sunday we watched Phantom of the Paradise, a truly bizarre mash-up of Phantom of the Opera and Faust set in a satire of the 1970s rock music industry.
Heat Wave and a New Car
Last weekend I spent a lot of time reading on the balcony after things cooled off enough that outside was better, with the slight breeze, than the inside. I finished rereading A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and started on The Farthest Shore.
Monday alenxa and I tried to run out to the local second-run theater and see Pirates 3 again, but they were sold out. None of the other movies looked interesting, so we spent an hour and a half in Barnes & Noble instead, then went for an early dinner at Ruby’s.
Even though it cooled off substantially Monday night, the apartment stayed warm, no matter how we arranged the fans. We seriously considered sleeping out on our balcony.
Tuesday I had the dubious honor of changing a tire in 85-degree heat, which was better than changing it in 100-degree heat on Monday would have been, but still not much fun. I took it to Costco, where they said they could repair it (it was an obvious puncture, with a 1/2″ bolt sticking out of the tire), but the tire was worn down far enough they wanted to replace it. I told them I was looking at replacing the car in a few months, so they stuck with the repair.
As it turned out, we ended up replacing the car this weekend.
Cool
The theme of the day, at least for me, has been trying to keep cool. I went to see Transformers (and I have some things to say about it at K²R) in part because I was curious, in part because I found a Regal movie pass I’d forgotten, but in part because movie theaters are air conditioned better than our apartment is.
Came back mid-afternoon. Rehydrated. Opened up all the windows since it had gotten to the point where it was just as hot inside as outside, and at least outside had a breeze. Thought about swimming, then thought about just sticking my head under the shower for a minute. Finally settled on swimming, for the first time in several years.
We’ve been in this apartment for something like 6 years, and until today, neither of us had ever used the pool. The last time I swam was on our 2003 trip to Hawaii with the IVC choir (with alenxa of course, and also andrea_wot and zehntaur, though I can’t recall whether either of them were on that side trip), when we stopped at a small bay on the north shore of Oahu. That was salt water, so buoyancy was another issue. (On a related note, every time I walk down the main aisles of the Spectrum, I get stopped by the “Wonders of the Dead Sea” spa people. It’s getting to the point where I want to start responding, “Yes, I have heard of the Dead Sea!” and then rattling off a bunch of facts about it. Then telling them I still don’t want their spa products. Do I look like their target audience?)
Treading water is more tiring than I remember. And I seem to have no natural buoyancy. When I lie on my back, I have to flap my arms and legs from time to time or my face starts sinking below the surface. Still, I was out there for about an hour, trying to keep out of the way of the family teaching their two kids to swim (I think it was the mother and an aunt, with the father sitting out on the deck). When I realized that my eyes were clouding up with chlorine, and my fingers were beginning to look like prunes, I climbed out and walked on unsteady legs back to the apartment, rinsed off, and collapsed for a few minutes.
It’s still warm, but it’s a manageable warmth. Evening should be more comfortable.
Bookses
Finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday on Friday.
Went to see Stardust again. It holds up quite well to a second viewing. Ever since seeing it last week I’ve been desperate to reread the novel, but maldis still has my copy. Since we were near a bookstore, I decided to pick up the paperback version, though, since it’s actually a different format than the one I’ve got already. The downside is that it doesn’t have Charles Vess’ illustrations. The upside is that it’s more portable.
I ended up rereading the whole thing last night. short comparison.
We’ve been trying to be out during the hottest part of the day, since our air conditioner isn’t terribly effective. It’s not really the AC’s fault, it’s the airflow in the apartment (or lack thereof). I’m out on the balcony right now, which is really nice. Step through the giant open screen door into the living room, and it jumps up considerably. Further back, into the room with the computers? Forget it!
So I’m sitting outside, occasionally glancing out at the trees, or up at the not-quite first-quarter moon, typing on the laptop.
Random
Got out to Santa Monica last week to meet up with my brother and his coworkers as they returned from a conference in Taiwan via LAX. Must remember to post pictures of dinosaur topiary and sundry oddness. (Edit: I finally got around to it.)
Speaking of photos, alenxa and I managed to get some really interesting cloud & sunset pictures yesterday.
Saw Stardust w/ andrea_wot and zehntaur. It was good. Disappointed to find how few people went to see it, though. Seriously, Rush Hour 3? At least it didn’t lose to Daddy Day Camp. Anyway, Stardust is highly recommended. If you haven’t seen it, try to catch it this weekend while it’s still in theaters.
Apartments are resurfacing the parking lots this week. Tomorrow through Saturday we’ll have to park on the street. This place doesn’t have enough street parking normally, never mind when 1/4 of the spaces are unavailable.
Quick bits
Finished The Bard’s Tale this weekend. [Review moved to website.]
Also watched This Film is Not Yet Rated, which alternates between an expose of just how arbitrary the ratings are, and an attempt to determine just who actually sits on the ratings board, since their identities are kept secret. I think I lost faith in the ratings system in high school, when The Joy Luck Club (which we’d read for school) came out with an R rating.
Visited alenxa’s family on Sunday for her sister’s birthday.
Finally packed up the old camera to send it in for repair so we can have two cameras at Comic Con this year. We kept trading off who had the camera last year based on who was going to which panel, and kept running into “If I’d only had the camera!” moments. There’s only so much you can do with a fuzzy, fixed-focus, zoomless VGA-resolution cell phone camera.
Pirates of the Coffee Bean
Went out to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End on Friday. alenxa wore her pirate costume again (previous versions at last year’s Pirates and, in a more appropriate setting, on the deck of the H.M.S. Surprise). We got to the Irvine Spectrum around 6:15, and ended up about 30 feet from the front of the line for the 8:30 showing. We had pizza from the food court, and later chocolate chip cookies from Donna B’s.
Since some moron genius decided to chop the courtyard in front of the movie theater in half and put in more shops (have they filled the shops in the last expansion, yet?), the theater has had to get a little creative in finding room for lines. Ours started between California Pizza Kitchen and P.F. Chang’s. Being off in the corner, we only got to see the pirates in our own line.
Anyway, the movie was a lot of fun. My main objection was that it got hard to keep track of all the double-, triple-, and quadruple-crosses. Despite what the reviewer for the L.A. Times thinks, it doesn’t require intimate knowledge of the previous films. All you have to know are who the major players are, and how they stand in relation to each other. You can do that by seeing the other films once while sober.
It let out around 11:30, and we went looking for a place that was still open to get something to drink. We stopped at Coffee Bean, where we discovered all the employees were dressed up as pirates. The guy at the counter was impressed with Katie’s costume, saying she was the first serious pirate they’d had all night (I guess they all stayed closer to the theater?) and gave us our drinks for free.
Weekend Antics
Friday: Finally watched The Legend of Zorro (the second one with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones). Much better than I expected, even if they did play fast and loose with history. Odd moment when alenxa recognized one of the actors as Ben from Lost.
Saturday: Mostly trying to catch up on my website. (Lots of new stuff in the last couple of weeks.) Ran some errands. Dropped by the local comic store for Free Comic Book Day & picked up several books, including a BSG book which is supposed to be a prequel, but which I don’t dare read until we’ve gotten a bit farther along in watching the show. Also felt I ought to buy something, and not just grab the free stuff, so I picked up (and read) a JLA book I’d been meaning to read, Syndicate Rules. It’s a sequel to both JLA: Earth-2 (in which the Justice League meets their mirror-universe counterparts, the Crime Syndicate of Amerika) and JLA/Avengers, which I finally read a few weeks ago after picking the series up at Wizard World LA. Much better than I’d been led to expect by some of the reviews.
Sunday: Went out to see Hot Fuzz, figuring Spider-Man 3 was guaranteed to still be in theaters next week. Great fun. Keep your eyes open: Once he arrives in Sanford, no detail is wasted. I liked Shaun of the Dead better, but I think that’s largely because the genre conventions being spoofed were more straight-forward: Zombies vs. a combination cop-buddy/horror/action film.
It was amazingly clear out, since it was the first day of Santa Ana winds (though they died down by midday). I seriously considered driving up into the hills to find a nice viewpoint, but after the movie, a late lunch, and some errands, it was running late enough that we just went home.