Staying home

Some of you may have noticed that I am not at funeral in the middle of nowhere. Nor am I on my way to a funeral or getting ready to go to a funeral or anything like that. And, no, I didn't oversleep. I decided last night not to go.

I thought that there was too much drama over the transportation arrangements. Apparently there is always drama over this, which I never notice, because I never offer to be the one who drives. I do not like to drive. I do not think that I am particularly good at it. There are several places in DFW that I pretty much refuse to drive to, and then I don't ever drive outside of DFW either, because not only would that be a long drive but it might also involve me driving through one of those places I don't like to drive anyway.

Okay, so I could have gone with someone else, if I had thought earlier this week to ask. But I didn't think that there was really a probably until last night, and then I thought it was too late to call and ask them. I had assumed that my brother would be driving my mother and me, which he said he would, and I thought no more about it until yesterday. Yesterday it seemed to get complicated and there was talk of renting a car, etc.... Then they decided that renting a car would make them late for the service, and that my brother should still drive but drive a different vehicle. I was starting to get a funny feeling about the whole thing, that maybe my brother would be in too much of a hurry to get there and have a wreck.

And then my mother said something like if my brother and I hadn't wanted to go that she could have just gone with someone else. And I thought that if I wasn't going that my mother and brother could both ride with someone else, but they couldn't take all three of us. So if I just stayed home they could both get a ride without all this drama and talk of renting cars and such.

I think that is best all the way around. I stay home, and the transportation problem is solved, and gas money is saved, and I don't have to worry about the clothes I was going to wear being too snug, etc....

So now my mother, who apparently didn't think at the beginning that my brother and I would even want to go to the funeral, now feels bad that I didn't get to go. She said something like--but I know you wanted to go and see *the deceased*. No, I did not want to go and see *the deceased*, but I did want to go and see everyone else. *The deceased* is dead. She's gone. I didn't want to go and see a dead person. That part of funerals I really don't get. Why would I want to see a dead body? I know that some people don't really believe that their loved ones are actually dead if they don't see the body with their own eyes. But, no thank you, I don't need to see the body. I've been told that she's dead and I have no reason think that I've been lied to.

Okay, so I'm staying home. I'm a bit disappointed, but it really isn't the big deal that my mom is making it out to be.

And the clock is back to zero

I have made no progress for several weeks on, I don't know, anything. I decide to do something and then soon enough change my mind and end up doing something entirely different or nothing at all.

After having a really bad day a while back that did not quite come out of nowhere, I've had most of an okay week and even a few days that were mostly pleasant. I begin to tell myself that maybe things are not that bad. But things are going to get that bad soon enough, financially speaking anyway, and I should deal with this and that and the other thing first. And then, of course, I do nothing. Now that there are times when I am not literally too depressed to do anything, I find that I am often too tired to do anything, and of course right now it is too hot to do anything outside and sometimes inside.

Though we did plan ahead a bit and go to the Home Depot and get foam and such, somehow Sunday came and went without our having fixed the problem of properly installing the air conditioner in the window, so there is still this gap around it. Monday also came and went without anything being done about it, and nothing will get done about it today either. Tomorrow I am busy, and it is not the sort of thing he can do by himself tomorrow any more than I can get the job done today without him. So it might get done Thursday, maybe.

Other than getting nothing done and the temperature getting four degrees over a hundred and all of that, I have almost had a pleasant few days. And as I drift off to sleep thinking that things are not that bad at the moment, I have a total change of heart in the middle of the night. For some reason, my husband got up to adjust the air conditioner. He knows that I've already set it to the maximum that I can stand, and I can't imagine that he wanted it warmer, so really he had no business doing that in the first place. But he did it anyway, only he somehow managed to screw up and turn the thing to fan only, and we woke up a few hours later to a very unpleasant warm room. So the air conditioner was turned back on. It was hot for a long time while the air conditioner tried to cool the room down again, and then about the time that it was cool again it started to get too cold for me to sleep comfortably, but not cold enough for me to really wake up and to go and deal with the problem myself.

Then when I finally do get back to sleep I have this terrible dream that we have gone and melted the polar ice caps or some damned thing. The world was coming to an end and everyone was going to die. Really, everyone was going to die, there was no doubt about it in anyone's mind. There was a lot of moving about to avert one thing or another, but then at some point everyone knows that everyone is going to get it eventually anyway, so there's really no point in all of this stuff that everyone was trying to do. And if literally everyone is going to die anyway, one might as well go home and be reasonable comfortable for a bit before that. I should like to see my mother and all of that. So we head for home and almost get there, when we have some difficulty with something, and we decide not to travel that last little bit if we can't contact my mother. And then my husband and I get separated and it all gets very scary, even though other than that nothing really bad is happening. So that last bit of everything being relatively normal is wasted while we are either trying to find each other or trying to contact other family. And then we do find each other, but before we figure out what are we supposed to do now, I wake up.

Not the most pleasant way to start the day.

Now real life rears its ugly head. Someone has died. Not someone in my immediate family, but someone close enough that I would want to go to the funeral. I'm the grown up now, and while I should have had to deal with this sort of thing for the last twenty years or so, somehow with the business travel and all I haven't gone to many funerals until maybe the last five years or so. I guess that I'm getting used to them. They're not all bad. You do get to see people that you don't normally see.

Anyway, I guess that my mother wasn't entirely happy with whatever I wore to Dad's funeral. At some point after that, we were at a mall and she said that she didn't like my black clothes (which is not a surprise as she has been saying that for about twenty years), and that she should buy me a nice black dress, just in case I had to go to a funeral or something. So she bought me a dress, and then like a week later, somebody died. And then a month or two later, someone else died. I ended up wearing the dress a bit more than I liked. But I did at least have the dress, and if and when I did have to go to a funeral, I did not have to think about what to wear.

The last funeral I went to was a bit after Easter, and I wore the dress. And I think that I was a bit overdressed. But there were a lot of people at the funeral wearing all kinds of things, so it wasn't too weird. But still, I do now wonder if maybe there isn't something a bit rude about being better dressed at a funeral than other people in general and the immediate family in particular. Further more, the funeral is to be held in the middle of nowhere, and I expect the people are even less likely to be dressed up out there than they might be around here. And then there is the damned 100+ degree weather, which is not the ideal time to wear my finest black dress. And I'm afraid that I hadn't given it much thought until this morning, when my mother called to remind me of the time and confirm that I would be riding with them, etc.... And I had the time so stuck in my mind that I totally forgot about the drive time to get to the middle of nowhere, so I'll need to wear something that I won't mind having on that long, and I'd forgotten that I'd actually have to get up early to get ready. I'll have to set my alarm clock and everything.

So now I don't really know what I'll wear to the funeral. I guess I'll be spending some time today trying on clothes and such. Not my favorite thing to do at the moment, but it is necessary and I need to quit whining about it and get on with it.

I am already tired and want to forget the whole thing and go back to bed. There is at least a reason for feeling so tired today, but it's not really enough of an excuse to actually do that.

This and that

First, I'm going to remind everyone that Stargate: Continuum comes out on DVD tomorrow, and all of my fellow Stargate fans need to see it. In my opinion it is a lot better than Stargate: The Ark of Truth. Continuum is a time travel story, where we see what might have happened of the Stargate program hadn't worked out the way it did. I like time travel stories, if they are done correctly. Anyway, I like this story. I've already seen it, almost a month ago, because we were downloading a couple of episodes that my husband thought we had missed, and we downloaded this by mistake.

Yesterday we went to see The X-Files; I Want to Believe. It was okay, but I didn't like it as much as the first movie, and that one wasn't my favorite movie either. I guess I was expecting aliens in this one, and there were none. I don't remember the whole of The X-Files the way I would remember Star Trek the original series, or the way that I remember stuff that I'm watching right now or the way I'd like to say I remember everything in Stargate. A lot of what I do remember is about aliens, but that's not to say that the entire series was about aliens. There were also ghosts, and mutant people, and lake monsters, and an insurance salesman who knew when everyone was going to die. But normally when I think about The X-Files, I remember aliens, and I was sure that in a preview for this movie I had seen a reference to aliens (black stuff in someone's eyes, but that just turned out to be plain old blood), so I guess when I didn't see aliens that I was disappointed. The other thing that may have been a disappointment for me was that the plot doesn't really get weird like an x-file til near the end. You know that something bad is going on, but except for this pyschic guy leading everyone around there doesn't seem to be any weirdness that would normally be associated with the show, and the psychic guy could be faking. So most of the movie seems like a more traditional FBI/cop drama about catching bad guys that gets really weird in the last twenty minutes or so.

We have watched the last episode of Baby Spice the Dinosaur Slayer season two, and one of the main characters has died. Of course, it is a sci-fi show about time anomalies, so we will have to want til season three to see if the character stays dead.

We have already wanted the first episode of The Fringe, and I think that we are going to like that a lot. FBI agents running around looking for mysterious stuff and conspiracy theories and all of that make it seem a lot like The X-Files, only with better lighting. The first episode is so much like The X-Files that you wonder why Chris Carter isn't suing J J Abrams. Chris Carter, on the other hand, has a show called The Eleventh Hour, which I have not seen yet, but it looks a lot like The X-Files only without FBI agents.

My husband and some others are all excited about a sequel to the movie Tron called TR2N. I can't say that I'm all excited. I can't even say that I even liked the first movie. I like character driven stories, and I like plot driven stories, but I can't say that I like "gee look at the cool special effects" driven stories. I don't think that I really cared about it at all the first time I saw it. When I saw it later, I thought it was cool that Bruce Boxleitner and Peter Jurasik had been in a movie together before either of them had heard of Babylon 5. But that was about it. So I never got the big deal about the first movie and I don't really see why they decided to do a sequel twenty-five years later, but I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there saying the same thing about The Dark Crystal.

I continue to water my garden through the terrible hot whether, but other than that I'm not doing much work on it. I have not seen one single bee this whole summer. I'm not getting much out of my garden except for peppers, which is somewhat to be expected since most of my plants are peppers. But I also have three eggplants which have yet to produce anything, grape and cherry tomatoes that rarely have any tomatoes, several regular tomatoes that have only just now managed to produce one tomato (that was eaten by birds before I found it), and a zucchini plant which is only just now about to give me one lonely zucchini. I know that the whether is partially to blame, but this is a bit much.

Business is bad, and my husband had only been scheduled for three day weeks for several weeks. And now this week two of his days were canceled, so he's only working tomorrow. Of course, we still won't get any work around the house done. We didn't even put the foam stuff around the air conditioner yesterday.

Yesterday we found a travel coupon book in with the free advertisements at the movie theater, and we were looking through it a bit while we were waiting for the movie to start. We use a lot of these coupons, though not recently. Anyway, these coupons have the price of the room if you use the coupon, and the name of the motel, and the location of the motel, and a little list of reasons that you might like the motel such as free breakfast or heated pool or whatever. So we were looking at the coupons, wishing that since we have all this unexpected time off that we had enough money to go someplace. And on the cover of the little booklet it says something about getting away to South Padre Island, and then it says which page the South Padre Island coupons are on. So I turn to that page and there are a couple of coupons that give the name of the motel, and the location of the motel, and reasons why you might like the motel, and maybe even some dates saying when the coupons were good for (except for special events and weekend rates may be higher). But there were no prices on these two coupons. I don't think that I've ever seen coupons without prices before.

Seems like I had more to say, but I don't remember. That's plenty of nonsense for now anyway.

Who the hell named this car? and rants about being tired

My husband again had a three day work week. This is becoming a regular thing, and a regular thing that we do not want. Still, he had four days off, and we were thinking that we were going to do this and that and possibly get a lot of work done. If one has a four day weekend that one is not spending in some nice out of town spot or digging up rocks in Arkansas, one should at least spend the long weekend doing this and that and possibly getting a lot of work done.

We had actually talked about what we were going to do on the previous Thursday or Friday. I don't quite remember all of what we said that we were going to do, but I do remember we said that we were going to do something, and that he needed to cut the grass and cut his hair. And it was a given that we would see Batman at some point that weekend. So there were some vague plans of some sort, I just don't really remember what they were, other than we would see Batman and that the grass needed to be cut and we should try to get some other work done. This wasn't something I just assumed would happen; we did actually talk about it.

Somehow, whatever our plans were, it did not really work out that way, and we hardly got anything done at all.

For us as a couple, the weekend as usual started on Sunday. Saturday I had it in my head to try to do this and that, and then I remembered what Saturday it was and went off to see some friends. There was a club meeting, and then there's usually something to do after the official meeting, maybe several things, but I usually only make it to the meeting and the one thing afterward. This time I ended up doing four things. I went to the meeting, sat in on a meeting after the meeting, hung out with a small group afterwards, and then went to someone's house to hang out with the big group and watch videos. Didn't actually say anything at the after meeting, and didn't actually watch any videos at the last thing, but I did actually go to all four things, which I don't think I've done in well over a year. So I got home like at two in the morning and got about four or five hours sleep.

So on Sunday after we'd both blogged for a bit and watched Sunday Morning, we decided to watch Batman. Only we'd somehow missed the fact that the first show started at ten and had to wait for the second show at twelve something, and while we were waiting we watched another episode of Baby Spice the Dinosaur Slayer. And in another post I've already said how the movie was followed by a bit of shopping and then spending too much eating at Chaps.

What I didn't say was how see spent the rest of the day whining about how tired we both were. We hadn't done any work, and we didn't spend that much time shopping. The only other thing either of us had done that even remotely resembled work was heating up breakfast and watering the plants. How could two people be so tired from eating and watching a movie and watching a bit of TV and half an hour of shopping?

I think that the rest of the weekend was similar. I don't remember Monday that well, except that it also ended up with us both complaining about how tired we were. And there didn't seem to be any reason for it. We went to lunch and to run a few errands, and three hours later we were back home watching TV and whining about being tired.

The whole weekend is rather a blur of doing a few things that absolutely had to be done, and not doing much else, and then complaining about being tired. I'm trying to count the things that we did get done. My husband remembered at the last moment that he meant to cut the grass, so he did that the day before yesterday. Now cutting the grass is something worth complaining about being tired, but that didn't happen till the last night so it doesn't explain him being tired the rest of the weekend, and I didn't help him in that activity so it doesn't explain my problem either. He also got his hair cut and went and bought two new tires. Again, not real strenuous stuff. We got one of the cars registered, but there wasn't a terribly long line. And we did a lot of eating out, and we took two boxes of stuff to Half Price Books. Nothing major. I don't think we even did dishes or laundry.

We didn't even go for a lot of walks. We usually go for a walk on every day off, and sometimes Saturday too, but I think this time it was only Tuesday evening. Tuesday we also "borrowed" an AC from my brother. I was told that he had three of them just sitting in storage, and I thought that he'd be glad to sell one. But it turned out that it was only two, and he had such a rough time of it the last time he had to get the central air repaired that he didn't really want to sell either, he just wanted to keep them just in case he needed them again.

Anyway, we put this AC in the window, without bothering to go to the hardware store to buy this foam stuff that's supposed to go around the edges of the window. So we'll have to do that a bit later, and I thought that yesterday we should at least go and buy the stuff, even if we don't feel like doing the actual work involved until Sunday. I just thought that we should go ahead and get the stuff ready so that when we do feel like doing the work we won't have to stop working to go and buy stuff. But we didn't do that cause he didn't even feel good enough to go to the store yesterday morning.

We did have some fun this weekend. Like I said, we went to see Batman. And we went to one of my husband's favorite restaurants. We got a gift certificate to the place for Christmas and still hadn't used it, so we used that and spent nearly another twenty dollars.

When we came out of the restaurant, there was this little orange thing parked next to our minivan. Not the new autumn orange, but more like safety cone orange. It looked like something from Speed Racer, only in miniature. I don't care about cars, but it was really a surprise to come out and find this thing parked next to us. I walked behind it to see what it was.

Lotus.

Who named this thing? Isn't lotus the plant that drugs people into being totally mellow and puts them to sleep? Lotus??? You should maybe name a hearse Lotus, or whatever old rich people buy instead of Cadillacs should be named Lotus. You should name this little orange thing Adrenaline or Kicka** or whatever is Italian for "get the f**k out of my way" (or, as a friend of mine says about such cars "I don't have much of a real penis so I had to buy one"), but not Lotus.

I guess that's all I have to say for now. I'm going to go watch TV or something that doesn't even require as much energy as blogging. Cause I'm tired.

Journey to 3-D land is 3 times the price

I like going to movies. It isn't the big deal that it used to be, but don't go out and do much else for fun. I don't drink, I don't dance, and except for Halloween and New Year's Eve and the occasional thing at a con I don't go out and party. I go to a movie and maybe dinner and maybe do some shopping in between. I like going to zoos and parks and beaches, but I'm getting old and I don't like walking and being outdoors as much as I used to. I just like to hang out, and maybe go to a movie.

So we were going to see Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D. It wasn't something that I was getting all excited about. It isn't Star Trek and it isn't the X-Files and it doesn't have Keanu Reeves in it. It's just the new thing that's out, so I figured that we would go and see it.

I'm lucky to live about a bit down the road from a Cinemark that charges about 3.25 for a matinee ticket for new movies, and if I miss anything there another company has a theater a bit north of us that shows second run movies for a dollar. If something isn't showing at either of those places, I really have to want to see it to drive farther than that and pay extra. And I don't go to evening shows very often either, cause it costs more and there's usually more people to deal with.

So my husband and I were going to go see Journey to the Center of the Earth, and we found out that it wasn't at our Cinemark. Okay, I'm like, I don't have to go see this if you don't want to, but my husband says let's go anyway. And after looking around a bit he finds someplace that has it, but that isn't my favorite theater cause it doesn't have stadium seating. If I'm going to pay more, and drive more, I should get more not less. So he looks around again and finds out that place doesn't have the 3-D version anyway. That was odd. I didn't know that you had a choice. So we decided to go to the AMC at a mall and go to eat at a salad place afterward and maybe then do some shopping.

I haven't been to this theater in a while, cause last time I was there the tickets were six dollars or maybe a bit more. That's like double what I pay at my usual place for a mattinee. Anyway, we get there and they tell us that the movie costs extra because it's in 3-D, so the tickets are $9.25. $9.25 for a Monday afternoon? But, we decided to pay it anyway.

Here's the price breakdown at this particular AMC theater (some theaters are probably even higher). $5.00 for shows that start before noon (though there are no shows that start before noon except for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday), $.7.25 for other shows starting before 6pm, and $9.25 for shows starting after 6pm, and an additional $2.00 charge for 3-D films.

See, I didn't even know that there were 3-D films. I thought that there was just this one. Apparently I have missed a few, and there will soon be animated films in 3-D, one about a dog actor who doesn't know it's just a TV show, and one about three flies who go to the moon.

The movie was okay. It wasn't worth three times the price, but it was okay. We had fun, I'm glad I went and all that, but $9.25??? Anyway, I was going to come back to this and write about how it's a fun movie and not a serious movie, and how it's weird that a hundred years ago this was really serious stuff. But I was lazy and didn't come back and write the rest of it, and now I think I'd better just go ahead and publish the damned thing just in case this news about the movie costing a lot is still of use to anybody. I'll have to write that other stuff some other time.

Turnips?

Sunday we were watching Foyle's War. When you're making some historical piece like Foyle's War, you have to have people say stuff to each other that they would probably not normally say to each other, because it's really something that needs to be said to the audience to get a feel for what things were like way back when. So when it is 1944 in England, people probably did not go around reminding each other that it's 1944 and there's a war going on and everything is rationed. The people in the story already know that sort of thing, but you want to try to remind the audience of stuff like that without it sounding like everyone in the story is an idiot.

So in the story there is this old man who's lost most of his marbles, and he lets the chicken or whatever is for dinner burn while he works on a crossword puzzle or something. That way his wife can come in and yell at him for being so careless and lecture him on everything being rationed, etc.... And they could not just go over to the farm next door and get another chicken or anything else because that was their meat ration for the day or the week or whatever and it was gone, period. There was just nothing to be done about it, and they'd just have to eat turnips on toast.

Turnips on toast?

So that just struck me as a really odd thing for a person to be eating. My husband reminded me that people in England like eating odd things like cucumber sandwiches, so maybe turnips on toast was just one of those things. Maybe it is. But I would think that there was something else going on with the cucumber sandwiches, like either it meant that you were well off enough to buy produce from someone with a greenhouse, or you had one yourself and were bragging about your green thumb. A cucumber is probably one of those summer things that you look forward to, but a turnip is probably just a turnip.

In this country, it seems like eating turnips is a sign that either you are from the south or you are poor or both. I see turnip greens in the grocery store next to the mustard greens and the collard greens, and I remember when my mother used to try to force us to eat them, because they had vitamins or something like that. Of course, she served us that awful canned stuff that possibly did not have any vitamins left in it, and since we never actually managed to eat much of the stuff whatever vitamins it might have had was not going to help us anyway.

Ten or fifteen years ago, we lived somewhere else and had a really big garden and tried growing a little bit of everything. And at first a little bit of everything included turnips, but then we really didn't know what to do with them. They look like the somewhat unattractive big brother to the radish, but I liked radishes and not turnips. We usually gave some turnip greens to grandmother, who probably remembered them from the good old days or something. I don't remember doing anything with the turnip roots.

I don't know anyone else who eats them. But someone must eat them, because they are always there at the store. They wouldn't always have them at the store if no one ever bought any, and if someone is buying them then someone must be eating them.

Does anyone eat these things?

Bad Economics

There's all this stuff going on that I see on the news, but I'm not really paying attention. Like the price of gasoline is going up and is now about $4 a gallon and might get to be $5 a gallon. I can't do anything about that, and off the top of my head I can't really say how much that will cost me. Other people have a better grasp of this, like they now spend $60 a week on gas just going to work and school and normal errands and such, while they were spending $45 a week when gas was $3 a gallon, but a bit before that they were only spending $30 a week when gas was $2 a gallon. Or maybe they don't live near work and they spend a lot more than that. And maybe now they take the bus to work, or if they have a Monday thru Friday 9-5 job maybe they're petitioning the company they work for to switch to a four day work week. Or maybe to make up for the extra money they have to spend on gas they've stopped ordering pizza and stopped going to movies or didn't buy the new TV that won't need the converter box next February, etc....

I don't really have any solid plans, so I can't say anything as concrete as all that. All I can say for sure is that the more expensive gas is annoying, and I'll just have to see how it goes from there. I guess the main thing that worries me is that I'll eventually have to settle for taking some job I'd earlier decided wasn't really worth my time, and then after I take the job and work for a few weeks I'll decide to quit because I really end up working for just about nothing. Like if a while back it would have cost me $30 a week to drive to a certain place and it would now cost me $6o dollars a week to drive to that same area, I couldn't take anything with only part-time hours like that Halloween job. That was $8 per hour then, which added up to about $160 most weeks, but then there was taxes and such taken out, and if I'd spent $60 dollars on gas instead of $30 that's just not worth it even if it was a bit of fun sometimes and came with free haunted house tickets.

The other stuff on the news is even more vague. Banks are closing. I don't think that mine is closing, but I suppose that eventually it could. Still, unless I win the lottery I won't have anywhere near $100,000 in the bank, so I shouldn't be out anything even if that does happen. And then there's the whole bit about mortgages and people not being able to pay them and companies that deal with that sort of thing closing. I don't own a house or pay a mortgage, and most of my relatives who do own houses don't owe anything on them. So that wouldn't directly hurt me or most of my family. But I'm afraid in the big picture it will end up being bad for me somehow, and I cannot possibly try to calculate any of that.

I vaguely wonder if things will be really bad. Would things be bad enough that those of us without much money should start growing our own food? I mean, I like gardening, but I more like just the idea of gardening. I don't think that I'd be very happy if I really had to live off of this stuff. Growing a lot of stuff would be a lot of work. And the bees really are disappearing. I don't think that I have seen one all summer.

So I can't really deal with any of that, and nothing is to be gained by actually worrying a lot about it. I'm just watching the news now and then with vague interest, and half-seriously thinking that if I had a bigger garden there would be less grass to cut.

Just regular day to day stuff is much easier to figure out. We're doing it wrong.

I've been thinking that I shouldn't take a regular ceramics class at college this fall, though I would like to take the non-credit throwing class if we get enough people to make a class. I've been thinking that I have several hobbies, and taking a break from this particular one would save money and gas and such. And if I'm not in a regular college class being totally obsessed with clay, I might feel up to getting some yard work done or I might think about getting a job, even if it is some dumb job that doesn't pay enough etc.... And if I find that I get too bored, I'd still have the knitting to keep me busy.

So I've found that I tend to buy a lot of yarn when it is on sale, so that I'll have it later when it isn't on sale, or even much later when that particular kind is no longer available at my local craft store. Which doesn't mean that I always know what I'm going to do with the yarn, just that at the time it seemed to be a really good deal, so I bought some.

So now I have boxes of yarn that I don't really know what to do with.

Last week I spent forty dollars on yarn that I found on clearance. So I felt I needed to buy it because a.) it was a good deal, and b.) since it was on clearance I wouldn't be able to buy those colors after it was sold out. But unlike my usual yarn spending sprees, I actually had a plan for this particular yarn. I'm not sure that I will end up doing this particular project, since it would require buying a lot of additional non-clearance sale color of yarn, but I have wanted this for about two years now and when I found two of the colors on sale I just had to have them. So I bought all of the one color that was at the store, went to another store and bought all that they had, plus bought an equal amount of the other sale color. At the checkout I noticed a coupon that was only good on Sunday from 4pm-8pm, and I was told that it would also be good for clearance items. But I didn't want to chance that the yarn I wanted wouldn't still be there on Sunday, so I went ahead and made my purchase. After taking the yarn home and adding things up, I figured out that I would still need just a little bit more of one of the yarn colors if I ever did start that project. So I thought I might as well go back to the store on Sunday and use this coupon.

Now on Sunday we went to see the Batman movie, which was at a theater that was nowhere near the craft store. After seeing a movie at this particular theater, we usually have a slice of pizza and a soda at the place outside the theater, and that costs another seven dollars, which is not a bad price for lunch or dinner. But after the movie was over, my husband decided he didn't especially want pizza, so he thought we should look for something else that was near the craft store. So we went to the craft store, and I bought four more skeins of the color yarn that I "needed" and then four more of a different color just in case I might want it later, and then I noticed that some other yarn in the color Sunflower was on clearance so I bought the two skeins they had left in that. Then I looked at all kinds of other stuff but ended up not getting anything else that I didn't "need". So while I'm proud of myself for not getting this other stuff that I didn't "need", I only ended up getting about twenty dollars worth of stuff and the coupon only saved me about five dollars. If I had put the other yarn back earlier that week and it had still been here on Sunday, I would have saved like another eight dollars, but I'm glad that I didn't do that because I "needed" that yarn and with my luck the orange would not have been there in Sunday. So I don't regret that, and I don't regret making the trip to use the coupon that only saved me five dollars. That's still a good deal, and that's about what I usually save with the coupons, unless I'm buying something expensive like a knitting machine.

What was not a good deal was afterwards spending $17 to eat at Chaps when I would have been just as happy eating pizza that costs $7. Let's see, $17 to eat at Chaps verses $7 to eat pizza is an extra $10, minus the $5 I saved buying the yarn with the coupon equals we spent an extra $5. So that didn't work out at all. But I guess the point was more that he really didn't want the pizza and he did want to go to Chaps.

Still, if I'm thinking that things are maybe going to be bad, I should start thinking different things entirely, like I don't "need" any yarn at all no matter what a good deal it is or what I might intend to make with it, and I don't "need" either a pizza or Chaps. But without more solid proof that things will get bad, I still "needed" to see the Batman movie.

Roadtrip?

Okay, so I know that there's all this stuff that needs to be said, and I know that there's all this stuff that needs to be done. There's still several boxes of books that need to be sorted. And of the books that have been sorted there's still a couple that need to be taken to Half Price Books, and there's clothes and other stuff that needs to be taken to Goodwill. Everything is still a mess, and outside there's a lot of work to be done, and I've not even gone through a forth of the dirt I set aside to make clay from. There's just a ton of stuff to do.

And then he comes home and says-- "How would you like to spend a few weeks in Phoenix?"

So all of that other stuff temporarily goes out of my head while I think about whether or not he might be offered an assignment in Phoenix, and if he does get offered the assignment should he accept it, and if he accepts an assignment in Phoenix do I want to go with him? And then there's stuff like how much would it cost us just to go to Phoenix? And how much of the cost would be reimbursed since the current per mile bit does not actually cover the cost of gas anymore, and they only pay $50 plus tax per night for motel rooms.

And there's not much point in taking a trip all the way to Phoenix if we're not going to do some tourist stuff. What would we really want to do and how much would that cost?

See how quickly I really got wrapped up in all this?

I don't think that we are going, even if the assignment is offered. He doesn't know off the top of his head how much in the hole he is general speaking because of the 20 cents per mile bit verses the now $4 per gallon of gas. So having no numbers to work with, we can't plug in the miles between here and Phoenix to make a guess at how much we'd be out. He didn't know off the top of his head, and after I asked he couldn't do any math to figure it out either. Maybe he'll watch the numbers on the way to work today and figure up something, but probably not.

Then there's the possibility that he'll be offered this assignment and assignment only, cause there won't be any work here for him to do. We really need to figure this out. Would a trip to Phoenix actually cost us more money than staying home and not working?

And then if he does go and I decide that I do want to go with him, should I just let the plants die or should I try to do something about that? Two weeks or more is a long time to be gone, and no one I could ask to watch the place would remember to do things properly without constant annoying reminders. If my pepper and tomato plants were doing better, I could ask a neighbor from down the street to water the plants in return for peppers and tomatoes. But the pepper plants aren't producing that much and the tomatoes aren't producing at all. Not much incentive there. Still, I'd rather that they not die, because they'll probably be nice healthy plants again in the fall.

And then there's decisions about what to pack. Since I'd mostly be stuck in a motel room, I'd like to take my knitting machine. Taking it on a drive that lasts a couple of hours is one thing, and having the thing taking up space for two days is something else. We might want something more practical, like the travel frig and an extra suitcase.

When you've been used to traveling a lot, you start thinking funny things. When you've been away for a long time you look forward to going home, but after you've been home for a couple of months you start getting bored. Wouldn't a change of scenery be nice? Wouldn't a few nights at a nice motel room make me feel better? I could have some quality time with the knitting machine and some cable TV, and not have to worry about whatever chore the knitting time is taking me away from. There are no chores to speak of in motel rooms. And they often come with air conditioning units that are more in working order than ours.

So, yes, a few days away right about now might be pleasant, but a few weeks? And in Phoenix in July or August? We had a pleasant enough time in Phoenix about eight years ago, but that was in February. And it was still pretty warm there in February. What the hell is it like in August?

So I don't really think we're going to Phoenix for a couple of weeks, but it would have been nice to get out of here for a while.

Life sucks, and then, life sucks some more

I'm having a terrible time right now. I'm having one of those days when I realize how much life really does suck. Okay, I was already having one of those weeks. But I try to ignore it. I can't just say that life sucks and go back to bed. But, yes, life sucks.

Then there was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I do not feel good a lot of the time, but I cannot just go around complaining about everything. It may be that I'm thinking some unpleasant thing every damn minute of every single day, but I cannot voice those thoughts. I would never get anything done. I cannot just go around the house screaming, "Why did any of this happen to me!" I am thinking that, but I cannot go around acting like I think that. The dishes have to be done, food has to been bought and cooked and eaten, laundry has to be done. I have to get out of bed every morning and take a bath. I have to brush my teeth and my hair and pretend I care what I look like before I give up and put my hair in a ponytail. Sometimes I go to the library and sometime I have errands to run. I do not have a job now, but there still always seems to be something that should be done, and if I stay in bed feeling sorry for myself or just stand around screaming about this and that, nothing that should be done would ever get done. Even the small things like washing dishes would not get done.

Screaming women should not wash dishes.

So I'm having one of those weeks. I know that life sucks, but I'm getting up and bathing and washing dishes, etc.... And then there are days that I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to get much past the bathing and the dishes will not get done. Still, even when I am thinking that, I'm thinking that I can't just go back to bed. I'm thinking that I will give an hour or so, and that after I've watched a bit of TV or done some other dumb thing that I will feel a little bit better and get on with things like dish washing and laundry.

An hour later I didn't feel that much better, but planned to put one foot in front of the other and somehow end up washing dishes.

Only then there were a bunch of phone calls, most of which turned out to be salespeople or wrong numbers. And one call that was not a wrong number. And then I had a really bad day after that.

The person means well, but I never have a good day after one of these phone calls.

Okay, the dishes did not get done, and the laundry did not get done, and I did not go to the library, etc....

I don't know how I can explain it in different way. Am I not speaking English? I am not over what happened, and I am probably not going to get over what happened, and just because I am not screaming at the top of my lungs or staying in bed feeling sorry for myself doesn't mean that feel normal again. I do not. I just don't see that I should have to remind everyone how I feel at every opportunity. I do not think that the neighbors need to hear about homewrecking-sluts. I do think that I need to at least give the appearance of someone who feels normal again, but I should be able to do this and still have a few people know that I am not feeling normal and not ask me questions like "What's wrong?" If I pretend I feel normal I can usually go about the business of washing dishes and watering the plants and such. I cannot do those things if I stay in bed all day. And I cannot do those things after people ask me "What's wrong?" even if they mean well.

Anyway, there was gnashing of teeth, etc....

Then I learned that someone knew more of my business that I chose to share. Someone read about it on a blog. Not this blog, though for all I know people read this one too. I don't think that they do. I once told a friend that I had a blog and that I'd written about a certain thing, and then later he told me he'd found my blog. Maybe he didn't really, because he never left me a comment after I told him to. Maybe he found another blogger writing about similar things and has been leaving her mysterious comments. No way of really knowing who might have read my blog. But just in case, I have been careful not to mention certain things here, only to have someone I know find out some of it on someone else's blog.

I am seriously in the twilight zone now. And I have not done the dishes and I have not eaten. I half want to go to bed and hope I feel better tomorrow, and I half want to just start throwing stuff onto the curb. If I threw out all of his stuff and most of my stuff, would I feel better? Or would that just be one more thing to feel bad about next week?

Okay, life really does suck now.

You'll have to excuse me. I'm not up to screaming right now, so I'm going to go to bed and feel sorry for myself for a bit.

I have nothing to wear

I think that this weekend was more interesting than the last one. So far as I know, none of my relatives had smokers or grills or other expensive things stolen out of their backyards. So that is an improvement over earlier in the month.

We saw both Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D and Hellboy II. Hellboy II was okay. If you're a fan of Ron Perlman, and you're thinking that the king of the elves or the fairies or whatever looks familiar, that's Roy Dotrice, Father from the Beauty and the Beast TV series. Still, other than the wraith-like whatever they are, I think that I like the first one a bit better. There's no rookie character to look at everything weird like it's really something weird.

I'm planning to blog about Journey to the Center of the Earth later, so I'll skip that part. While we were in the theater we saw an ad for a British show called Baby Spice the Dinosaur Slayer. Not really. Actually it's called Primeval, and as with just about everything else that we're not watching on cable, my husband says, "I think I can download that." So we've watched the first two episodes and for now we like it okay, though it may not turn out to be Stargate or The X Files.

Saturday, I went to meet up with a fellow blogger and her club. Not that I need a new club. But it was a chance to meet a fellow blogger (only the second time that I've meet someone in real life after finding them online first), and I used to enjoy meeting other people's clubs. Back in the good old days (most of the 1990s) a lot of the clubs around here used to actually do things together. Recently my own club has gotten rather large. And sometimes we hang out with Klingons.

Speaking of Klingons, I have to decide if I want to go out with them in a couple of months. Several of them I like, but one I really don't. At least, I don't think that I like him anymore. I'm just debating whether or not I dislike him enough to avoid the whole group. The matter will probably be decided not so much on whether or not I decide I need to avoid this person, but more on whether or not I find something nice to wear.

And on a similar subject, next month my own club plans to go out and scare the straights, but I have nothing to wear. I suppose I could find some Hogwarts stuff to wear, but that's about it. Most of my more suitable costumes no longer fit me. And it is not appropriate to run around the restaurant in my underwear, which is more or less what I did at the last Halloween party. You know that you are not quite wearing enough clothing over certain areas when one of the men admiring your behind suggests that you might need to cover it.

Anyway, the game is to freak out the mundanes, not get asked to leave the restaurant.

It is July now, and I have not yet decided on a Halloween costume for this year's party. Nor have I decided which art class to take in the fall. The two are somewhat related, as if I choose something complicated for the Halloween party I either have to choose a class that won't take up much of my time during October, or else I have to do most of the work on the costume before October gets here.

Yesterday and today I spent about forty dollars on yarn. The original price of the yarn was closer to a hundred and twenty, so I was quite happy to find it on the clearance rack. I have made a couple of Dr. Who scarves and other long scarves, and I was thinking that I might also like a Dr. Who season 18 scarf. Except that I never made one, because it needed a different kind of yarn than I usually work with. The seasons 12-17 scarves were made of wool yarn, and you can make an okay copy from common 4-ply medium weight acrylic yarn. But season 18 is a totally different color scheme, and the yarn used is totally different. It has a more frilly or fuzzy look to it, and it is orange, red, and purple. I've had trouble finding those three colors that look good together in a more interesting yarn, and of course when I do find some that looks like it might work it is rather expensive. So yesterday I found some purple on clearance that might work, and today I found more purple and some orange that might work. That's great, except now that I look at how much I'll actually need, I think I might still be a bit short in those two colors. And the red is still regular price and would cost me another seventy dollars or so. I don't think that I want to make such an expensive scarf. Right now I'm not sure if I'm going to be doing this at all, or if I might do a similar type of scarf that is smaller or what.

Would you like to read my book?

Real writers are not supposed to say that. You are not supposed to say, "This is my book." You are supposed to say, "This is a book that I have written." "This is my book" says that you've only written the one book. "This is a book that I have written" implies that you've written a few books and this is just one of them. Or at least it implies that you intend to write something else later.

So there was this book that I wrote many years ago. I'm not even sure where it is now. It may not survive. I have moved twice since I wrote it. Also there has been rodent damage, and a lot of flood damage. So I don't know where it is, and it is probably lost.

In any case, "This is my book" was still the more accurate thing to say. It was not the only thing that I ever wrote (you knew that, you're reading my blog), or the only thing of fiction that I wrote, or even the only thing of book length that I wrote. But it was the only thing of fiction and of book length that I wrote and finished and was totally mine. There was also a lot of fan fiction, and a few short stories, and tons and tons of stuff that never got finished. Once I thought I was really on to something and was really writing a lot, or a lot for me, and when I got about to page forty or fifty my computer was stolen. I had copies of most of it, wrote another ten pages or so, but having my house broken into and computer stolen upset me a great deal and I just never got back into it.

Except for "my book" the only original fiction that I finished was stuff that I wrote as a teenager, and it probably wasn't that good, and while at the time I thought I'd written just pages and pages, none of it was really book length. Anyway, that was even before I wrote "my book" and I lived with my parents, so that was three moves ago. I really have no idea where that stuff is, except for two works of fan fiction I retrieved from my mother's house last year.

My last attempt at serious writing came from a couple of couple of classes on children's literature and creative writing that I took during the 2003/2004 year. Before that it hadn't really occurred to me that I might write for the Young Adult market, but with some encouragement from my teacher I decided to attempt a few stories and later a book. Two chapters of the book were written for class credit, and I did intend to keep writing it, except that right about then my husband all but insisted that we move from our apartment. So I got no writing done that summer, and that fall I had to concentrate on classes and graduating. After that I would have liked a job, and I needed to sort through stuff and get the house organized after being rushed into moving when I didn't want to. So I told myself that I would not work on the writing until after I had gotten the house organized.

We all know how that went.

And then all that other stuff happened a couple of years ago, and I just never got back into it. I do occasionally get out the two chapters, just to make sure that I haven't lost them too, but other than that, nothing.

So when people ask to read something of mine, it isn't that I don't like you and don't want you to read my stuff. Some of us just don't like to have people read stuff until it's "ready", whatever that might mean. I only like to have completed drafts read, and if I hadn't been in a writing class no one would have read the two chapters of the young adult novel. I don't have a lot of short stories. If I find one, I'll let someone read it, but right now I really don't know where they are. I tend to start longer things, but I don't tend to finish many of them.

I have a sequel to The Dark Crystal that I wrote when I was fourteen or fifteen. Also from that time I have a Star Wars novel. I don't really like either of them right now, but back then I was really proud of them. Anyway, they are fan fiction, so the odds were against anything happening with them anyway.

I'm afraid that "my book" was the only thing that I was really very happy with, and I'm afraid that it is lost, so I can't share it now.

Not quite a Freaky Friday, but...

I used to do this almost weekly feature where I would discuss the odd Google searches that lead people to my blog. Mostly, they get here by mistake looking for nutritional info about Rudys and such. And there are still people looking for penis costumes and wondering if everyone is going to hell.

Anyway, with school and everything I said that I didn't have time to do the thing properly, and that I wouldn't be doing it again until the end of the semester. And then the end of the semester came and I didn't pick up where I left off. And now it's months later and I still haven't done it.

But I did get back to where I was just checking the tracker thing for fun, even if I wasn't going to write anything about it. I got a lot of traffic after that business of the convention closing, and recently people have come looking for Doctor Who scarves but probably didn't even find the post with the pictures of it, and a lot of people want to know how to get out of jury duty. Not that I can help anyone with that, but I hope that they were entertained at least.

So a while back I was looking at the tracking thing, and I found that some people came here cause they had problems with mice. So that totally made sense, after I had recently posted something about my own problems with mice. So I then clicked on the link to see if I was at the top of the Google list.

While I wasn't quite at the top, I was like third or forth. In fifth or sixth place was--Meg Cabot.

Meg Cabot. That's like Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries and some other cool stuff. Meg Cabot.

Hey, Meg Cabot has a blog. So does Orson Scott Card. Hey, now I can not feel so bad about wasting my time on this blog, cause they have blogs too.

Of course, that's different with them, cause they are blogging AND getting their real writing done. My real writing hasn't been touched since maybe the spring of 2004.

Meg Cabot.

I think that's one of my goals in life. To look at a list of author's names and see my name above somebody like Meg Cabot. Only it wasn't supposed to be a list of blog posts, it was supposed to be a list of published books.

Okay, back to my usual stuff. And, no, I don't know how to unstick five gallon bucks.

Still not getting much done

The house cleaning and the sorting has declined somewhat. I had given up on trying to tackle anything big, cause that was taking too long and I just end up getting depressed and giving up. I then decided that the best thing was to do something small everyday and also to break up the day with other things like reading a chapter in a book or watching some old TV show that I haven't seen in twenty years.

Anyway, I thought that I was making some progress, and that was making me feel better. But yesterday I was looking for something, and I couldn't find it. This is not that unusual for me, except that the particular thing was among some stuff that I sorted through two or three weeks ago, so I should know right where it is. I don't. And I guess that I've even accumulated some new stuff since then and that didn't help the process. But I didn't get that much stuff, and most of it was stuff that had a place and a purpose, so it shouldn't have been a problem. But I suppose for me that all stuff is eventually a problem.

The sorted through things that are going to go are mostly out in the hallway. I guess that it will help to actually go ahead and send it wherever it is going to go instead of leaving it in the hallway. That probably isn't going to happen today. My husband announced last night that he hoped I did not have any major plans for the day, since he had to go to work an hour early and that wouldn't leave us much time to go where he wanted for lunch etc.... So that was odd. He doesn't usually announce where we're going to lunch the night before. Maybe he's got the days confused. The place he wants to go has a sale on Wednesdays. Anyway, it seemed a little weird.

Also weird is this problem I'm having with my skin. No, not the usual problems I have with my skin, but this is sort of an itch. No, not like that either. But it just feels like there is sand everywhere. There can't be sand everywhere. Look, no sand, or at least not enough that it should bother anyone. Still, I keep imagining that there's sand everywhere, getting in inconvenient places.

Okay, so I've decided that as long as I'm dealing with this imaginary sand that I might as well start making some mud. I should have started a long time ago. The summer is half over, and I'm just now getting started. I bought the over-priced screen like six months ago, and I've hardly used it at all. Anyway, I had thought that I would work with a little bit of it everyday over the summer, and then by the fall I would have a lot ready to make clay with, and I just didn't do it. It's July now. I should have started this in May.

So now I'm working on it, and I've traded the imaginary sand for real sand. Sometimes it's a matter of picking out a little bit of sand from the clay. This time around it feels more like washing the clay off of the sand. Well, it's not really that bad, and maybe I'm having a false memory of it being especially easy before. And the sand will just go into the garden, so it's not like it's a bad thing.

Okay, today I'm going to get lots of work done. Not really, but I am going to run a few errands and sift through some of this mud. And apparently I'm going to have a nice lunch.

BBC says no more knitting

Looks like I missed a bit of excitement about two months ago, both in the world of fandom and the world of craft-related websites.

For a while now, my husband has been saying that I need to start a new blog, one that is entirely about knitting. I haven't done it yet, for several reasons. One, the husband has a bunch of blogs that he tries to make money from, and he thinks that I should do the same, while I think the idea of making money from blogs is mostly a boat that has already sailed and don't really want to bother with it. Two, there are already a lot of other knitting blogs out there written by people who are really good at it. Three, if I did ever do such a thing, I would want to do a good job of it, and that would take a lot of time and maybe a lot of work, and I hate to put that much work into something on the remote chance that I might make a few bucks. If it was something that I enjoyed doing and could create something that I was proud of, and then it happened to make some money, that would be different.

Anyway, I got to thinking that I could set up another blog and start writing stuff on it, but for now just not publish any posts. So I've done that. I created a new blog that doesn't have any published posts. I started writing a few things, but they are only drafts at the moment and only I can read them.

So I haven't embarrassed myself yet, see?

Okay, so while I was working on the thing I thought that I might as well have some links, and that I would want to link to doctorwhoscarf.com, just as I have a link to the site on this blog. And I haven't visited the site in several months. Probably I haven't looked at it since before Christmas. But yesterday I went there, just cause I was about to add this link to the new blog. And there was this message from about six weeks ago saying that the guy was afraid that the BBC was going to order him to shut the site down, and that we should all make copies of any patterns we wanted, just in case.

The reason he was afraid of being shut down was this story. Apparently the BBC saw that someone was making these little knitted things that looked like aliens from Dr. Who and then selling them on eBay. So eBay pulled the listings for the items. The BBC then went to the website where a fan had posted the knitting patterns for the alien things and told her to stop. She wasn't selling the patterns, she had created the patterns herself and was giving them away for free to anyone who wanted to try to make them. Someone else was trying to sell stuff on eBay. Not quite sure if they just politely asked her to stop, or if the BBC did some legal thing, but either way the woman pulled the patterns off of her website.

Anyway, fans have been making their own Dr. Who scarves for about thirty years now. There was an "official" scarf many years ago, but they only made it that once and they didn't make enough to match the demand. So if you know how to knit or you are friends with someone who knits, you make your own or you have someone else make one for you. Sometimes someone makes a lot of them and sells them on eBay or even on their own websites.

Which is not saying that the people making these scarves are getting rich. I've seen the scarves sell for about a hundred dollars. Even if you have a machine to do a lot of the work, for the most part a knitting machine isn't something that you push a few buttons and then go to lunch and come back to find a completed scarf. So even if you have a machine you still spend a lot of time on it. And of course yarn isn't free either. If I wanted to sell a scarf, and I wanted to make a reasonable ten dollars an hour for my time, I would need to sell the scarves for at least $175. (That's for season 12. Other seasons are longer or more complicated and would cost more.) So I figure that the people who sell the scarves on eBay are a bit better at this than I am, but they are still working for about five dollars an hour.

Anyway, while there are copyright laws and all of that, and the BBC probably has the legal right to make someone stop selling things that came from the show, and they might even have the right to ask someone to stop telling people how to make their own toys and/or costumes, for the most part you're supposed to know not to enforce this particular right on fans who are not getting rich from knitting and who are not in direct competition with anything they are selling. Fan made stuff is free advertising, so the fans are usually left alone.

All of this was almost two months ago, and the Doctor Who Scarf website is still there, so I'm guessing that they are not going to do anything about it.

So why all the drama over some knitted toys now, while we've been knitting scarves for decades without anyone bothering anybody about it? My husband thinks that it's because the alien knitting patterns were designed on something from the new show, and the people in charge are more serious about such things now than decades ago when the old show was on. My theory is that the recent toys are the image of characters, while the scarves are just scarves. We try to copy the pattern of the scarves, but there's not anything like a Dr. Who logo on them and the don't say Dr. Who on them or anything like that.

Anyway, I had a look yesterday, and Dr. Who type scarves are still available on eBay. So I guess for now only the toys are forbidden, and maybe that will be the end of it.

Not much of a bang

The 4th of July weekend started for us on Thursday and will probably go on til Tuesday. Not that we planned it that way. Not that we were going to do anything interesting. And not that we ended up doing anything interesting after we remembered that we'd have all this time off. Having all this time off also means having a lot less money, so there's no point in planning a trip or anything. We've spent too much money just hanging around the house doing the regular stuff.

My husband just had off an extra three days, because they couldn't schedule any work this weekend. People just have better things to do than get their pictures taken. So on his first day off we went to see Hancock. It was okay. I didn't see that coming. Somehow not what I expected.

Speaking of not seeing that coming, we just caught up with the Dr. Who spinoff, The Sarah Jane Adventures. That was great. But I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it.

Anyway, we were at the movie theater watching the previews before Hancock. I hate spoilers. Once I've seen or heard enough to know that I'm going to watch a certain movie, I don't want to see or hear anymore about it. So I'd already seen a preview for the movie Blindness, which looks to be like The Day of the Triffids, only without the Triffids. So I'd already decided to see it, and I don't want to hear or see anymore about it, but there was another preview of the movie Thursday, so now I know more about the plot than I wanted to know ahead of time. Oh well.

Then there was a preview for The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now, when I first heard about this I didn't think that particular movie needed a remake, though I'm probably one of the few people who really enjoys remakes. The second version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is really good, and it might even be my favorite movie. The Fly and The Fly II are both good. Miracle on 34th Street gets remade every twenty years or so, and I think all versions turn out pretty good. Lost in Space would have been excellent if they'd written a script that didn't switch to a different time theory in the middle of the film. So I really don't have anything against remakes if they are done well. But I don't think that I would have picked this movie for a remake. It was made within ten years of developing the atomic bomb and within five years of first seeing flying saucers, and it just really needed to be made right at that time. --Why don't you quit trying to blow up each other and learn to cure cancer or something? Grow up or else.-- Other films with a similar theme were made at about the same time. My dad really liked this low budget thing called The 27th Day, but I doubt that anyone else has ever heard of it.

Anyway, it was a message sort of movie, not an amazing special effects movie, and I wasn't sure that we needed another version of the film fifty-seven years later. But what the hell, it's fifty-seven years later, so let's go ahead and do it. Especially if we can get cool special effects and Keanu Reeves in it. At the beginning of the preview, they almost make you think that it has something to do with The Matrix. The preview looks very impressive. If it goes well, maybe they can remake The 27th Day, only add enough techno-babble so that the ending will make sense.

There was a preview for a third Starship Troopers. This one is direct to video. I'm not sure if that's from lack of plot, or just because the bad CGI won't hold up on the big screen. I suspect it is both. But unlike the second film, it has the characters from the first story, so I will probably watch it anyway.

This weekend I also sort of accidentally went ahead and watched Stargate: Continuum. I won't get into it much, cause I hate spoilers. But I think that I won't be giving much away by saying that it is a time-travel plot, and I liked this movie better than the last one, maybe because I like time-travel stories. SG-1 has traveled in time before, and those were good storylines too.

Other than that, Friday we didn't do anything. And I don't mean that we didn't do anything special for the 4th, I mean that we really didn't do anything. I got up and blogged a bit, went back to bed and read a little bit. Then we watched the Stargate thing. At some point he ate a hog dog and I ate leftover pizza for breakfast. I read some more while he was on the computer. Then I was thinking that I should eat lunch, but I really didn't feel like it and ate a bunch of cookies instead. Then my husband wanted to go eat, but I wasn't hungry because of the cookies. So he read for a bit and I used the computer, and after a while we went to Panchos. I'm not sure when that was, except that it was after two but before four, so I'm not sure if that counts as late lunch or early dinner. We came home and I remembered that I hadn't watered the plants yet, so I did that, and then I was thinking how I hadn't done any work. We were going to go for a walk, but very soon into it we decided to turn back. It was hot, but mainly I was just too tired. Too tired from what? We didn't do anything except go to Panchos. We didn't do even just normal stuff like wash dishes. I didn't do any laundry or any sorting or anything. Except for watering the plants late, I didn't do anything in the garden. We didn't even have sex. Why the hell was I so tired? Later, we did manage to take that walk, and I tried to figure out a bit of knitting from this video I rented, but I didn't try for very long. So that was it. We didn't go anywhere to watch fireworks. In fact, we didn't even bother to go outside and try to watch any just from the house. I was just too tired. But what the hell was I tired from?

Anyway, like I was saying, no big excitement on the 4th of July. Other than watching the Stargate thing the most excitement we had that day was at Panchos when I tried to eat a roasted jalapeno. I know better than to eat those, really I do. But I got one anyway and sliced it. And the tip of a pepper usually isn't as hot as the rest of the pepper, and the hottest part is nearer the stem where there are more seeds. So the first bite was good, and the second part was good. And then I kind of forget what I was doing and stopped being careful. About the fourth bite or so was a mistake.

Taz hate pain! TAZ HATE PAIN!

Okay, that's enough excitement for one day.

Someone started their holiday weekend off early by stealing my brother's grill earlier in the week. But I guess the smoker was too heavy for them and they left it. So we still went to my brother's place on Saturday and had brisket for lunch, but it wasn't as big a deal as it was about a month ago. No grill, so no hotdogs, no corn, no stuffed peppers, etc.... And there were only four of us, while last time there were six of us.

So that was pretty much it for our holiday weekend. I spent most of it reading the Tripods trilogy. I should have tried to get some work done yesterday, but, no. I spent one more day being totally lazy. Anyway, it turns out that I read the schedule wrong and my husband has to work today, and he even has to leave early, so that's soon enough to think about work.

The Star Trek Experience in Vegas is closing

If you haven't been there yet, you have a month or two, and then they plan to close. I have been there, though only once, and not at a great time. But I have been there. One thing crossed off my list.

I've only been on the one ride, which was probably the first one, at the end of which I was sworn to secrecy. I think that they have added two more since then. I would have liked to have seen them too.

Other rides like that from Vegas have gone on the road, and I ended up seeing them while visiting Moody Gardens in Galveston. So I'm hoping that the same might happen with this. And I've read on another website that the ride is actually owned by the company that owns Cedar Point and several other amusement parks, so maybe in time it will move to Ohio and my friend from the great white north will get to visit it. They also own a park in Kansas, so that would be good too.

General Hammond of Texas is dead

Or at least, actor Don S. Davis is dead. I'm just now hearing this, but it happened Friday. Also Friday was the release of the DVD Stargate: Continuum, which I didn't know about either.

Don S. Davis was at the last convention I volunteered at three or four years ago. He was a very nice guy, and he signed autographs, and he read us a poem about smoking with Willie. Most of my regular readers won't probably won't understand, but that's Willie Nelson. A general hanging out with Willie is an interesting image.

Anyway, in my little group we are glad that we got to meet him and we're sorry that he's gone.