Halloween movies

Okay, so probably nobody else would like to celebrate the season the way I would. As much as I enjoy the Halloween Party, it might be better for me if it were some other time of year, like maybe in March. They are not so much into the ghosts and such. I guess my idea of a good Halloween get-together would be if we all dressed up mostly in black, lit candles, ate weird food on my spiderweb design plates while maybe the theme to The Exorcist played in the background, and then we all watched movies like The Initiation of Sarah and the Vincent Prince version of The Last Man on Earth.



During my last trip out of town I turned on the Syfy channel, only to be disappointed in what they called The 31 Days of Halloween, which turned out that week to be some not very good movies, most of which didn't seem to be much in the theme anyway. I guess they were only choosing from movies they had made themselves (the before mentioned monster movies mainly about mutants and sea creatures passed over by Peter Benchley). Not impressed.



But it was early in the month, and I can only hope that some decent vampire movies are coming later.



So I'm going to try to locate movies that I would want to watch in October. I will come back and add links as I find them.



The Initiation of Sarah (1978 TV movie)(ending missing)



The Initiation of Sarah (remake 2006 TV movie)



The Last Man on Earth

Monday morons--design a better DVD case

I have hated the DVD cases from day one. For some reason, most of them are designed so that they hold onto the disk so securely that you have to bend back either the case or the disk or both to get the disk out of the case. CD cases were not designed that way, at least I don't remember buying any like that, and CDs and DVDs are pretty much the same, so I don't see why they needed to be in differently designed cases. I assume that the DVD cases were made a bit taller so that they did not get stocked with the CDs by mistake, so that part made some sense, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for making the inside of the case different.

So now we have a number of DVD movies, and there are also many DVDs of television shows, and they will often sell a whole season of episodes together in one box. The box often contains a number of smaller individual DVD cases, or cases that hold two disks each, with one disk held on either side of the case. But lately I've encountered a design that is even more annoying, with one case attempting to hold seven disks. So this very securely holds one disk on one side of the box, and one disk on the other side of the box, and they are as difficult to remove as from any other DVD case, that is, that you almost have to bend back either the case or the disk to pry the disk loose from the case. But then over those two disks are two more disks that are quite easy to get at. The real problem then comes with the three disks that are held in place over those, or rather, not held in place over those, as they usually fall to the floor as soon as you open the case.

Last week I noticed that multiple CD cases, such as those that hold audio books, have a totally different design, and in my opinion, a much better one. The case contains a bunch of clear plastic envelopes held together, and each envelope holds one CD, or maybe it holds two CDs, one on each side. These can hold as many as twenty CDs, and the disks do not fall out as soon as you open the case, nor do they refuse to release any of the disks, and there is no confusion about which disk goes where or having to remove all of the disks to get to a certain one or any of the other problems that you get with having multiple disks in a DVD case.

Why didn't they just design DVD cases to be taller CD cases?

This is only a problem for me now with library loans and such. I've bought a travel case which holds 144 disks in clear plastic envelopes that are held in a three-ring binder, and most of my DVDs are stored there.

We're coming to get you, Barbara

As you may have guessed, I'm a bit slow sometimes.

There is this movie The Dish. If you haven't seen it (and you probably haven't), you should. It is about this small town in Australia with a big radio telescope, and during the first moonwalk this particular dish is supposed to help broadcast the television signal. Three or four guys with pocket protectors work there, and during this time another geek from NASA joins them. One of the pocket protector guys is really good with numbers, but not so good with social situations and jokes. Somebody tells a joke involving carrier pigeons. He doesn't get it right away. The discussion moves on. Five minutes later, when they are talking about something else, he suddenly gets the joke and laughs. Carrier pigeons!

Someone in my little group suggested that we all watch an episode of Nova or something called The Pluto Files. This seems to be a reference to The X Files, but I don't get it. I should have gotten it when something was mentioned at the beginning of the program, but somehow I didn't get it til the closing credits. Planet X. The X Files. The Pluto Files.

Carrier pigeons!

Okay, so I haven't been feeling that good. I should be busy cleaning the house, but I'm not, which shouldn't surprise anyone. I haven't done much of the usual stuff, but I did have a project that I wanted to work on, and I should have been done with it by now, especially since I haven't been doing much of the usual stuff. I need to sort out the back room again (now ten boxes of yarn and mostly finished scarves), and I need to go through the holiday stuff again. I did most of this in October, how did it get to such a state in less than a year? Still, it needs to be done again, and I'm not making much progress, mostly cause I just don't feel well. Nothing serious, just the occasional headache or something, and no energy.

So I've spent a lot of time in bed, mostly reading or watching DVDs. So after my ordeal on Monday we went to the library, and I picked up a few more DVDs, one of them being Shaun of the Dead.

I told you I was a bit slow. This was the first time I had seen Shaun of the Dead. (I still haven't seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show either, but that is on purpose, as I think that someday I will win an award for being the oldest virgin.) This movie has been out for five or six years, and everybody loves it, and I just didn't bother to go see it.

It isn't what I was expecting. I was thinking that it was going to be a parody like Young Frankenstein. No, not like that. Still very funny, but not like that.

I didn't like it to start with. There is a lot of character development before you get to the zombie part. There is so much of this, that you start to wonder if you've put in the wrong disk. It is just one of those films about lowlife bums who live in England. Okay, they are not seriously lowlife bums. There are English films about seriously lowlife bums with pretty much no plot and no lines of dialog that do not contain some sort of profanity, and they seem to be made solely for the purpose of entering a contest to see how many times the F word can be squeezed into one film. They aren't that level of lowlife, just that Shaun's best friend does say the F word a lot, calls everyone c***s and n*****s, and is often seen scratching himself where it really itches. No one likes Shaun's friend, for good reason, except Shaun, but Shaun just won't give him up, and Shaun is no prize himself even without the friend screwing things up.

Despite the name, Shaun is not in fact, dead. He's just rather brain-dead a lot. But Shaun is not a zombie.

I very soon got tired of this and wondered, what has any of this got to do with zombies?

But then you start to notice things in background. Maybe there are zombies in this movie. Be patient. Be very patient. It will be half an hour before Shaun interacts with the zombies.

A few minutes later, the best friend yells, "We're coming to get you, Barbara!"

That was funny. If I had seen this in a theater, I expect that line was fall out of your seat laughing kind of funny. My husband didn't get it. It had been too long since he'd seen The Night of the Living Dead to get the reference.

I am not an expert on zombie movies. I have watched a few (and enjoyed a few) and I tend to like a few things such as 28 Days Later, which are sort of zombie movies. But I am not an expert, and I am wondering if I missed a lot of references. Maybe the whole movie was full of lines like that, and I just didn't get it.

There were a couple of things that reminded me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and at one part the music made me think of The Thing. I wonder if they meant to do that, or if it is just me, as I am a bit obsessed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and rather like The Thing as well. (By the way, I hear that that are about to start filming the remake or prequel or whatever it is of The Thing. Cross fingers. And if it is good may John Campbell get credit in very big letters.)

While I was not feeling well, I also sat down to watch TRON. I just never can get through the whole thing. The first time I saw it, the beginning was boring, and I didn't finish watching it. Over time I have seen bits and pieces of it. One time I was flipping channels and saw that two actors from Babylon 5 were on it, so I tried to watch. Of course by then I had forgotten the beginning of the movie, so a lot of it didn't make since. Not that it has just a brilliant plot anyway.

So there's supposed to be a sequel (supposed to be, but now we are having doubts since there isn't much in the way of new news on the subject since San Diego Comic Con two years ago), so I figured that I had better watch TRON cause all my friends are excited that there's going to be a sequel. Okay, I have now watched it, and I just don't get why everyone was so in love with this movie.

Well, not all of them have the hots for Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I have just heard of something else in the line of stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I thought started with Who Goes There. Apparently there was a Lovecraft story before that one, so I will have to read it. It is something that I look into once in a while, like the fictional history of the transporter. Does anything predate The Fly and the Doors that are sometimes in Asimov's stories?

I suppose that is enough for now. I have another ordeal this afternoon. It isn't so bad, and it will be good to get something else over with.

A trip to the library to find The Road

If you have been reading a while you know that I used to read a lot of books, but now, not so much. Most of the time, I don't have the attention span required to enjoy reading books, and my eyesight isn't so good either. So I don't read that many books now.

Which isn't to say that I don't go to the library a lot. Most weeks we go at least twice, as there are several libraries to choose from, and we are nearly always near one. He still reads plenty of books, and he gets audio books for long trips. And I get the occasional book to read, and a few books that I don't read so much as flip through and look at the pictures (cookbooks, how-to books, etc...), and once in a great while I look at a magazine.

And I get a lot of DVDs. I check out tons of DVDs. I very rarely go to a video store unless I am really wanting to see a particular movie. The newly discovered Redbox has only been used about five times. But I tend to get a minimum of three DVDs per week at the library.

So while I am often at the library, I don't use the library catalog as much as I used to. Which is a good thing, since I don't like the newer programs as much.

The first program we used was just like the card catalog. You selected author, subject, or title, and then typed in something, and you were taken to what you had typed, or the closest thing to it. If you typed in Asimov, you were taken to lists of books written by people named Asimov, and you would scroll down a bit til you found Isaac, and then you would scroll down more to find the particular title you wanted. If you did not spell Asimov correctly or otherwise made a typing error, you would be taken to the nearest thing that the computer could find, and then maybe you would notice your error and correct it. If you still couldn't find what you were looking for, maybe you would have to get help from a librarian.

So that was the old program, which was very useful to people already used to the old card catalog, if you could type. It was fast. It wasn't very pretty, as it was yellow letters on a black screen. No pictures. But you could see about twenty-five titles per screen before you had to scroll down.

Then the bigger libraries got some new programs, which I found to be a bit of a headache.

These programs showed pictures of the books. But, in return for that added feature, you could only see about three titles at a time instead of twenty-five. And it took time to load all of those pictures. When they first got the new program, they didn't yet have the new computers, and it seemed to take a long time to find anything. They soon got new faster computers and all was well.

Except that if you misspelled or otherwise incorrectly typed Asimov, it didn't take you to the nearest thing. You just get a message that says no entry found. Since it is inconceivable that there are no books in the library by Isaac Asimov, you must have made a mistake. Try again. But when you are not looking for Isaac Asimov, when you are looking for a lesser known author with maybe only one or two books, then maybe you have misspelled something, or maybe the library just doesn't have any of the books you want. There is no way to know.

You have to go and bug the librarian.

Now that we have computers, we can list things under more than author, subject, and title. We can also add things like series. You can look up a list of all the Star Trek titles the library has.

The computer can now search through everything in the library with something called general keyword, which would have just been impossible with the paper card catalog. Like, if someone recommended a book to you, but you didn't write down the name, and you think that it had the word roses in it. Under general keyword, you can type in roses, and then you will get a list of everything the library has that roses in the title, and if you are patient enough, you might find your book.

Okay, so yesterday we went to the main branch of our little library. Our little library has three branches now, though one of the branches is so small that I have only been there once. And I don't use the catalog much anymore, unless I am looking for a particular title, cause I already know where the DVDs are and where the cookbooks are and so forth. I just walk around and see if anything gets my attention.

Recently, we had seen the movie The Road. The Road is a pretty depressing movie, which makes you want to go out and see a nice happy movie, like The Book of Eli. But someone had said that the book was better, and that it had a more uplifting ending, and I should read it. And I like to read books after I have seen the movie, and I like post apocalyptic stuff, so I thought that I would check out The Road, only I forgot who wrote it.

Okay, so I go to the computer and type in The Road. Only the thing seems to be stuck on general keyword search. In alphabetical order it listed six hundred and something entries with the word road. The Road, which probably would have been the first entry in a title search, was on page 35 of the general keyword search.

But I do eventually find it, and I find out the name of the author is Cormac McCarthy, which is what I need to go and look for the book on the shelf. And I see that the library has two copies, and that one is checked out and that one is checked in.

Also, it is on the adult fiction shelf instead of the science fiction shelf, but we won't get into that.

Anyway, I go and look, and I can't find it on the shelf.

Time to bug the librarian.

Maybe the second copy is in paperback or something, and I will have to look somewhere else. Or maybe it is on display. Or maybe it is still in shelving.

So the librarian tells me that their copy is checked out, but I say that I thought there were two copies and that the other one was checked in. She says that the other copy is at a different branch. But then she tells me to wait, that she'll look for one in the large print section.

For some reason, it hadn't occurred to me to look for things in the large print section. I guess that I hadn't even noticed that this particular library had a large print section. The bigger libraries have one, but rarely got anything from there. I left those books for the old people who needed them.

The librarian said that the large print edition was checked in and pointed me in the right direction. I found the book.

I read the book yesterday. I can read the book without taking off my glasses and putting my nose an inch away from the paper. I might have to start reading again on a regular basis.

The Road the book is not much different from the movie. You still don't know for sure what the catastrophe was, though you can still assume that it was a nuclear war or a big meteor. As for the supposed uplifting ending, it is the same except that the woman talks about God in the next to last paragraph.

Today was weird

So, I live in Texas, in a part of Texas that rarely gets really cold, but unfortunately not in a part that is warm and sunny all the time, and I live nowhere near the beach. But anyway, in this part of Texas, with some extra work, one could probably garden all year round, though I am not one of those people committed to doing that extra work, and I would rather not be doing that much work at all. Still, after a week of really nice weather, I thought that it might be a good idea to get started on the spring stuff, and of course right when I decide that is what I should do, then it rains and it is going to freeze later and all of that.

Now the thing about getting started with the gardening is that if you start a particular project that you have to get certain parts of it done before it starts to rain again, or else it looks worse than before you did anything. So, if you were going to turn over a bed, and you get it done before it rains, then that is fine. And, if you decide that it is still too cold and do nothing, and then it rains, then that is fine too, except that you will still have work to do later. But if you decide to turn over a bed, and you don't get done with it, and then it rains, and then you have a bit of a hole in the ground which then fills up with water, and the hole is then surrounded by piles of dirt, which during the rain turn into piles of mud. And then it looks really ugly, and the job isn't finished, and then when it is dry enough to try again you probably didn't save that much time by getting started on it earlier.

In fact, sometimes you have made more work for yourself, as the piles of mud might get to be really wet piles of mud, which travel a bit and it is really a hassle getting the dirt back in the state that was meant to be so that you can plant stuff.

So that is very similar to what has happened here, except that I was moving some dirt from one place to another, and hadn't quite got to the part of digging the hole, but I still a lot of what was almost usable dirt and is now a lot of really wet mud. I was attempting to mix the dirt with sand and compost, and I didn't get much of that done, and I will have to wait for it to get really warm again before I can finish. And while I am waiting for it to be nice warm weather again, it all looks a bit messy, even more so than last week before I got it into my head to get out the shovels and such.

I haven't done much house cleaning this week, as I was trying to do this little garden project instead, and I wanted to do a lot of work before it rained. And then that other stuff happened, and then the rest was just the usual bit of everything taking a lot longer than I imagine. And it is quite wet now. I had thought that I would at least do some work outside this morning before it rained, but I guess that it rained some last night that I did not notice until I went outside this morning. Not a really good rain, just enough to get everything wet so that gardening was out of the question.

So then it was back inside, and I got a bit more rest, since there didn't seem to be any rush to do anything. There was then a phone call from my mother, which I won't get into now but maybe I will post about it later. And then I thought that I would get started with the prep work for lunch, and then I would watch a video before going to the library so that I could take everything back. And then my husband walked in the door.

I wasn't supposed to see him again until Friday night. But there was some screw up at work. I might have made fun of this before, but my husband always seems to work for someone who cannot connect the idea of "working out of town" with "he isn't home." So they will send him out of town, and then they will call here looking for him, when they know that he isn't here. The first few times that this happened, I really panicked and thought that he was missing and must have been in a accident. Over time I just get used to the fact that these people who are supposed to know all about going out of town and such still just don't get it, and that they can't be bothered to look and see which is a person's home phone and which is a cell phone, or even bother to find out if there is a cell phone, and so they just call here, and no one ever makes a note that this is not a cell phone. And they will also never make the connection that supplies needed at the site should be sent to the site, and not to the house when he isn't home, and possibly there is no one home, and possibly the packages left on my doorstep would just get stolen.

So that was the first thing that happened, that this new person called my house to talk to my husband who was more than a hundred miles away at the time. And I had no where to forward the message to, and it wasn't an important message anyway. It wasn't anything like tomorrow's schedule has been changed. She just wanted to know how things went.

So that was Wednesday. Thursday morning, my husband went to the site and waited out in the car until someone eventually showed up to tell him that they had cancelled a couple of weeks ago, and he wouldn't be needed today.

Now, he should have called to make sure that Friday's schedule hadn't been changed and then just gone on to the next site. But, having the whole day off, he came home instead, having not paid any attention to the weather reports. He just thought that he would stay here and get up really early in the morning rather than spend another night in a motel where there is nothing to do.

It is going to be cold and rainy, and possibly there will be freezing rain either tonight or tomorrow, and staying here tonight is just out of the question, unless the schedule had been changed, which so far doesn't seem to be the case. So it was decided that he would stay for lunch, but not dinner, and that after spending a few hours with me he would drive on to the place where he is supposed to work tomorrow.

So, after we got all that worked out, it was time for lunch, maybe a bit early but close enough. I finished cooking, and then went ahead with my original plan of watching some silly video, only now my husband was watching it with me.

The video was Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I had grabbed a lot of videos from the library, knowing that it was probably going to rain and that I would probably not have any TV to watch, but maybe getting this particular video was a bit too much. But how bad could it be, right?

I hope that I pushed the wrong button or something. It seems like you have to select either the version shown in the theater or an even longer version, or something. So I selected the theatrical version. Or, at least, I thought that I had. If this was the version shown in the theater, I just can't imagine what was added later.

Anyway, someone said the "F" word every five minutes, and there was full frontal nudity and everything.

Okay, so in the three or four hours that I'm trying to have a nice afternoon with my husband, half of it was spent on this dumb movie. And then there was other stuff, and then there was more food and then there was a trip to the library, and then he headed out.

And now I'm wondering if that was all a mistake, that he should have left right after lunch, and now he's going to get stuck in all this rain, if not worse.

Hopefully in about an hour or so he will call and tell me he has a nice warm motel room.

So now I have this odd bit of having one more night to myself, even though I did not have the day to myself, and the only thing that I got done was cooking lunch and going to the library. Anything else that I had thought I would do today will probably have to be done tomorrow, and it probably won't get done then either.

Saturday, I have to cook something or bake something, or just give up and buy something. Sunday I have this thing to go to, and I have to either bring a dessert or a vegetable. I suppose tomorrow or the next day I will go shopping and see what speaks to me.

Movies and bad dreams and junk

We went to see The Book of Eli on Monday. I liked it. Dmarks will probably like it. A lot of other people won't care for it much. I had almost figured out the ending, about the book, but not quite, and it was just a bit better than what I had imagined it would be. Dmarks will probably guess it more correctly.

And then we went to see 2012 at the dollar theater. Well, I still tend to call it the dollar theater. It is more correctly called a second run theater, and the price is now gone up to $1.25 or $1.75, depending on what time of day you go. And I had wanted to 2012 when it came out, but my husband did not want to see it, so after a few weeks had passed I decided that I might as well wait for it to be at the second run theater, which happened just this past Friday. So I was planning to go sometime this week, and as we had other business in the area yesterday we both went, and I talked him into seeing the movie with him on the condition that I buy him a hotdog. I buy hotdogs at this theater, because they are a dollar, and that is about what they are worth, and I rarely buy any food or drink from theaters because the price is nowhere near what the food is worth.

And when we got to the theater, there was a line of people, which is rare on a weekday, and we wondered what was going on. And then I remembered that it was Tuesday, and I almost changed my mind about the whole thing and left. But it turned out not to be so bad. Anyway, sometimes the theater will run a promotion that makes the tickets fifty cents on Tuesdays, and I had forgotten about it and forgot that it was Tuesday. So this theater that is almost empty any other time that I would go actually had people in it. And this has always puzzled me, and I would never make a special effort to be there on a Tuesday to save fifty cents (now seventy-five cents or even a dollar twenty-five after six). Isn't a dollar or so cheap enough? I would much rather pay a little extra money and not have to deal with all these extra people. So I wonder what all these other people are thinking, that two of them don't want to spend four dollars and fifty cents (or five dollars and fifty cents after six o'clock) to see a movie and eat a hotdog, but on Tuesday they will stand in line to spend three dollars for the same thing. It isn't like actually seeing a movie for free, or seeing the movie before anyone else does, or getting a first run theater ticket for half price, or getting popcorn and such for half price.

It puzzles me, but the promotion obviously works for the theater.

And I have recently found Redbox video, which is a vending machine in a grocery store. That and the pay at the pump gas is probably the main reason that I still have an ATM card, otherwise I would have gone ahead an closed the account while I don't have a job. So we have recently watched Battle for Terra (which is rather like a cartoon version of Avatar, only without the avatars), and yesterday I also watched Carriers. I didn't watch Carriers when it was at the theaters, cause I had not heard of it. It is one of those movies about a plague that could totally wipe out humanity. I tend to watch a lot of those, and this one I had not even heard of. It isn't the best movie, but it isn't bad either. And it stars our new Captain Kirk, Chris Pine. And I was thinking that they were going to Port Aransas or South Padre Island, except that at the beginning of the movie they have surf boards, and there is no surf to speak of in Texas.

So of course after having seen The Book of Eli and Carriers, I tend to have weird dreams. Really depressing dreams where people sit around waiting for something bad to happen, and there's no gas, and maybe we have to move or something. So last night I had this dream and we had to move. I have dreams about moving, cause I hate moving. When I was eleven and I moved for the first time, it was all a big adventure, but mostly since then it has just been a big hassle. You have to throw things away, and while it is good to throw away stuff once in a while, this is different, as you end up throwing out a refrigerator or something like that, cause it just isn't worth spending money to have it moved. So I had this dream where we were moving, either back to the house (which is impossible), or back to the apartment (which is impractical). Neither makes any sense. And I have a deadline and no money to pay to move the big items like the refrigerator, and I have to throw away my artwork.

For some reason in this dream I am also trying to make out with a certain friend, and there are all these other people around, and that doesn't seem to bother me. So that is something that I would never do, especially with this particular person, as one of the nice things about him as that he is not overly touchy-feely and gives me my space, and it is just hard to imagine us ever being anything but friends so why would I ruin it by trying to make out with him? Luckily I do not expect to see him for a while, and I hope to get this image out of my head before then.

Anyway, I had this very disturbing dream about moving all of my stuff to another place which makes no damn sense, and then I woke up and could not get back to sleep after that.

I do not think that I will do much of anything today. After a couple of days effort (you didn't think that I did any work at all with all of the movie watching), I have sold a box of books and donated a box of clothes. My husband also sold a box of books and donated a lot of clothes. So that is something, but as usual I do not even see the empty space of where the items used to be. It is hardly worth the effort, if getting rid of stuff does not result in having more space. Still, I should have another go at it.

A few days by myself

There are little things that I like about having the place to myself. Like I can leave the kitchen light on all night without having someone around to complain about it. Like if I wake up in the middle of the night I can roll over and watch TV without disturbing the other person.

Would have been nice to have a working VCR when I wanted to watch TV in bed, but I still don't have one. My brother gave me a VCR that he wasn't using, but you need the remote to set up the VCR, and the remote is ruined because the batteries were left in it when it was put into storage.

Don't ever put things into storage until you've removed the batteries.

Other than that, I had a pleasant enough day, and I got almost six hours of sleep last night.

Another thing about having the place to myself is that I can take naps whenever I want and not have to worry about the other person's schedule.

A couple of days ago I got out the knitting machine and moved it into another room. It wasn't working very well where I had it, partially because I haven't used it in almost a year, and partially because the table wobbled a bit. So I hoped that it would work better once I got it set up in a more stable spot, which it did, but I am still out of practice a bit, and I've misplaced some tools and what I am using as substitutes aren't working as well as I'd hoped. But they do work somewhat, so I've decided to continue with a project that I hope will end up being Miss Allergies Christmas present.

If that goes well, I will make something similar for someone else. That still leaves one friend that I don't have money for, two friends that I don't have a clue, and most of my family that I don't have a clue.

Back to the knitting.

About a year ago we found another knitting machine in a thrift store. It was a slightly older model, but still basically the same as the one I already had. It was "new in the box" and had all of the necessary parts. It was forty dollars. We bought it. Not that I really thought that I would need a whole second machine, but I thought it would be nice to have replacements parts if I broke a keyplate or something. And of course, I was always losing things like transfer tools and latch hook tools, so now I had a whole new set of those.

So I eventually lost all of the first set of transfer tools, both latch hook tools, and all but one of the new transfer tools. I still have all of the other parts such as keyplates from both sets. And somewhere around here I even have another whole machine that I have never even set up. It is still in the box, but I've put the tools that came with it somewhere else.

I have tried to get other things that would work as latch hook tools. First, I bought several latch hook tools made for rug kits. These are available at most craft stores for a few dollars. But, while they pretty much look the same, they are a bit too big to replace the ones I lost. The second thing that I did was bid on a few eBay auctions to get replacement "needles", thinking that most machines would use the same size I had. Actually, most machines use "needles" that are smaller than those on my machine, and so I bought ten very reasonable priced smaller "needles" that I was going to make latch hook tools from, only after seeing how small they were I didn't bother.

At the time I did all of that I was just looking for backups, just in case. I still had at least one complete set of tools. Now that I have lost all but the one transfer tool, I have to use the other latch hooks, one that is too big, and one that is too small. Though not comfortable to hold, the smaller one looks better, so I am mainly using that.

At this point I would pay for the over priced tools and the shipping if I had any money, which I don't. Yesterday I was desperate enough to try to break a "needle" off of the spare machine. Except that when I went to get it, I found only the empty box from the first machine. Now I can't find the second machine.

I did all of this cleaning. How come I still can't find things?

The other thing I will probably do this weekend is make more videos. I found another contest. In fact, I've found several, but I don't have ideas for all of them yet.

We have received emails from the first contest saying that we had won third place (a hundred dollars) and then the non-winning entries were supposed to receive $20.09 each. Since I had three non-winner entries, and received an email for each, we should be getting a total of $160.27. Except that there has been no word from them this week. Monday was a holiday, so maybe that slowed things down a bit, but I would have thought that they would at least send us another email.

I could really use $160.27 right about now. We have to sign something first. Maybe something will be in the mail today. But still, you'd think that they would have emailed and told us to watch for it in the mail.

Still a bit early to do much of anything. I think maybe I'll watch Bones or something.

Oh, and yesterday I found a link for a movie my dad rather liked called The 27th Day.
http://www.megavideo.com/?v=M783NEWE

Harry Potter premieres next week

Next Wednesday to be exact. There's a midnight showing on Tuesday, and a sneak preview for some of us either Monday or Tuesday. My friends and I have been planning to go in costume to help promote the movie and our club. It will be like the Star Trek premiere back in May.

I'm not going.

Or, at least, I don't think that I'm going. I never got around to finishing the new hat, and I didn't even start on the cape. Not that I don't have plenty of that stuff already, I just thought that another hat would look better, and that a lighter cape would be cooler and better to wear in July in Texas. But still, I have plenty of other stuff to wear, and most of what we are planning is in the evening and indoors, so it wouldn't be terribly hot if I decided to wear the old stuff.

I just don't think I'm going to have any money. The theater is almost an hour away, and would require at least two round trips if I participate at all, and four round trips if I did everything that I had planned. So that would be nearly a tank of gas, and the tank is nearly empty now, and I really don't have the money to waste on a movie.

I would feel really bad about letting everybody down, except, in my opinion I haven't yet commented to doing the thing anyway.

Oh, I'm sure that everyone knows that I had planned on doing it, but back in May when I wanted to get serious about planning this thing and possibly building some props, no one else much seemed to be interested. After all, they were tired from just doing the Star Trek thing, and Harry Potter was months away.

Only now it isn't months away, it is only days away. They are just now getting around to making a final list of who is going to be there and when, and who needs to bring what, etc.... I began to lose interest after no one wanted to do anything in May, and again when not that many people wanted to firm up the plans in June. So now that it is time to do something and it is too late to do anything about it if we don't have enough props just already in our closets...I am thinking that I have more important things to worry about than promoting a movie. Like is that unemployment check ever going to get here, and if my husband goes out of town again in two weeks do I want to go with him, and now that I have a mostly clean dining room do I want to move the appliances around in the kitchen so that I can give that a serious cleaning too.

I have to spend money on important stuff, like food.

Not that we won't go and see the movie, but the two of us can see the movie, probably on opening day, for about seven dollars. It will cost about three times that much for gas (or, that is how much it cost last time, and I'm thinking that it is more now), my husband might not get a free ticket, and then of course if I go spend a lot of time at this theater that isn't nearby I shall have to either buy dinner out with the gang or take a peanut butter sandwich.

Right at the moment, the idea of not going isn't bothering me that much. What is bothering me is that no one seems to have noticed yet that I'm not going.

Well, it's not like I actually announced that I wasn't going. There isn't an official sign-up sheet yet. But I thought by now that they would have either noticed that I hadn't sent an email about it or maybe they would have sent me an email asking what they could borrow for the event. Neither has happened.

I did tell one friend that I probably wouldn't go to anything for a while because of the money situation. Maybe he said something to them.

One more odd thing about the Harry Potter movie is that one of my friends is refusing to see it. She was probably the first person to tell me that I needed to read these books, she has costumes, and she was more into Harry Potter than most people I know (and I know a lot of people who are into this stuff). But apparently the sixth book upset her so much that she nearly didn't read the seventh one.

NO SPOILERS, PLEASE. I have only read the first book for something at school. I like to read books after I have seen the movies.

Anyway, so my friend refuses to go, and I don't think that I should go because of the money situation. Me, with the scarves and the costumes and the year round Halloween decorations all around the house.

I mean, I will still go see it someplace, but not with my friends, and not doing the whole weekend event thing.

I may end up not seeing my friends this week at all, and this is the week that we would normally see each other anyway.

This is just all a bit weird.

A reader needs advice on Star Trek and the Borg

I think this is going to end up being much too long to put in a comment.



Okay, this is the discussion so far:



bulletholes said...
i HAEN'T BEEN TO SEE THE NEW MOVIE YET, BUT i'VE BEEN GEARING UP FOR IT.i WATCHED "fINAL fRONTIER (OPPS)because I like that one, then got "Generations".Generations was cute, but on the whole disappointing to a non-Trekkie.From what I understand, I can watch this new one without needing to see the others.For a non-Trekkie who never saw anything after "5", (except the recent view of Generations) which of these newer films, in 20 words or less, would you recommend?
5/29/2009 11:16 AM
laughingattheslut said...
Now that is a tough one, especially since I am a Trekkie, and it is hard to think from the point of view of someone who is not.Generally speaking, I think that most people like the newest movie (the current movie is number 11), though some of us Trekkies from way back cannot get past some of the mistakes.Of the movies 6-10, my favorite is number 8, First Contact. It has both the borg and the man who first invented warp drive (though this version of the character is very different from the one seen in the original series back in the sixties). Without getting too much into what the borg are, just know that they are the type of alien that you have to stay away from or you will become one of them (like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Puppet Masters, Invaders from Mars, or The Thing, etc...)I would think that the favorite Star Trek movie for basic non-trekkies would be number 4, where they go back to our time to get a couple of humpback whales. It is very funny and you don't have to know anything about the Federation or Klingons or any of that to get what is going on. But you said that you already saw that one.Funny that you like number 5. Most people hate it.Number 6 has been compared to us trying to be friends with the Soviet Union after something really bad happens to them, like Chernobyl.Number 7 you saw. I think that they were trying to make both the original series fans happy and at the same time make the Next Generation fans happy, and just ended up not making anyone happy. Fans of the original series just got up and left in the middle of the movie.Number 9 was okay. Some people accidently found the fountain of youth, and some other people try to take it away from them to cure their own illnesses. But it is their own fault that they got the illnesses in the first place, so you can't really feel too sorry for them. Captain Picard and crew to the rescue.Number 10 doesn't seem to be anybody's favorite either. It had Romulans, and scary sort of almost vampire-like relatives of Romulans, and a dopey younger brother of Data. But somehow, it just wasn't what anybody hoped for.For most trekkies, the second movie is still the best, even if Spock dies in it.So if you are going to the theater this weekend you should be able to watch number 11 without much trouble, and if you want to stay home and rent a Star Trek video that you haven't seen before I would go with number 8, though certainly number 4 is also worth seeing a second time.
5/29/2009 4:02 PM
bulletholes said...
Yeah, they had "first contact", but the cover of Generations said it had Kirk in it so I thought maybe it was #6 in the series. I don't think it was so bad as to walk out on, and when Picard found Kirk in that house in the Nexus it gave me a good feel. Then they blew it.I like #5 maybe just for one reason especially...my son and I watched it when he was about five and when Kirk asks the big God dude why he needs a Starship...well...my son mimics that scene all the time.He will raise his finger up and say "I have a question"...he still does that to this day.
5/29/2009 5:25 PM



bulletholes said...
hi laffin1 I went and got First Contact at your suggestion. it got a little tedious in the middle, but any movie that quotes moby Dick and then plays some Steppenwolf all inside of 5 minutes has got to be OK. I can't wait to watch it again, so my question is...what should i watch for, and do the borgs appear in a previous episode.I'd never herard of a borg before. That one, she was kinda hot.
6/09/2009 12:47 PM


Well, that's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Okay, I think most of us are agreed that the borg queen is kinda hot. Alice Krige played her in First Contact. Later, the same character shows up in Voyager, but that actress wasn't available, so another actress got the part for a while. And then for the show's final episode I think that they got Krige to do it again.

Voyager also had a female borg crew member. Most of us are generally agreed that she was also hot.

Some of us Trekkies, including some of us female Trekkies, have been known to dress up as Borg. Some of us are hot, some of us, not so much. Some of us get mixed reviews. I had a Borg parody costume myself, but my last time to wear it was about twenty-five pounds ago.

Okay, that was the only Borg appearance in the movies. Before that they were in several episodes of The Next Generation. I think that the second or third was Best of Both Worlds, which was the end of the season cliffhanger one year, and it is usually voted favorite episode. At least, part one is great. Part two was good, but a bit of a disappointment after all of us spent the summer trying to figure out what would happen.

There were more Borg episodes after that. Some of them involved Data's evil twin brother Lore.

There most have been Borg episodes on Deep Space Nine, but I can't remember any of them at the moment.

Then came Voyager, and after spending all that money on new Borg stuff for the eighth movie, they seemed to run into the Borg all the time so that they could use the expensive costumes and props.

There was even an episode of Enterprise where they find a couple of frozen Borg on the north pole or something.

Anyway, there are a lot of Borg out there in the Star Trek universe.

As for what are the best parts of First Contact and what you should watch for if you see it again, I'm not sure. It was all good. I personally don't care too much about the holodeck scene, but the producers of Star Trek do love their holodecks and use them often.

I think that my favorite lines belonged to Lily. "Sorry, it's my first ray-gun." and "Borg? Sounds Swedish."

Also, as a non-Trekkie you might not know that the Emergency Medical Hologram (Robert Picardo) is the chief medical officer on Voyager. In fact, after the first episode, he is Voyager's only medical officer. This computer program that is only supposed to help the real doctor in an emergency ends up being online all the time in that series. So that part was really funny to fans of Voyager, even though there's really nothing that funny about the scene itself.

Not sure what else to suggest at this point. Maybe other readers have some thoughts on the subject.

Land of the Lost movie and other crap

Tuesday I went and voted in our little community elections. It is a little thing, but the past few years it has created some drama. Anyway, I go in, and a nice old couple is there. And the lady asks for my address and my name, and she apologizes for taking a minute to find me, and says something about it being different than last year and it is just taking her longer to find people. But she does find me, and I sign next to my name. She doesn't ask for my ID or anything. The old man then hands me a pen and a ballot. There are nine names, with three names on each line, and on each line you circle one name. Or, as I have done in the past when people did not send me enough flyers to make a decision, you could just skip a line and not vote for anybody in that spot. I suppose that you could skip all three lines and not vote for anyone, but there are plenty of people doing that just by staying home. There are only three hundred people who can vote, and I'm betting that at least half of them stayed home.

So I circled a name on the first line, cause that was the only one of those three who sent me a flyer. And a circled a name on another line, cause that was the only one of those three who sent me a flyer. But on the third line I had to think for a minute, cause two of the three had sent me flyers, and I had to think did I want the guy who was already there or the new guy. And in the end, not knowing either of them, I went with the one who actually said something specific that he wanted to do if he got elected, even if it wasn't something I was that interested in. But I know that other people are interested, and at least this guy was saying he was going to do something, while the other guy just wrote about who he was and how long he had lived there and didn't say anything specific he wanted to do, just that he would try to do a good job.

And then you fold the ballot and put it in this little wooden box that is locked.

So that all sounds simple enough.

Yesterday I got a note on the door saying that one or more of the candidates had complained that the election procedures were not followed correctly, and to be fair to all of them there would be a totally new election on a date next month.

I cannot imagine what election procedures were not followed correctly. Maybe there were supposed to ask for my ID, but they never have in the past. And we don't have election machines or butterfly ballots to confuse people. I would think this is all simple enough. You circle one name on a line. If there isn't clearly one name circled on a line, don't count it and move on to the next one.

So I don't get what is going on, but we have to vote again.

The long dreaded Land of the Lost movie opens today.

It is a sad thing. Some of us waited ten years for a Land of the Lost movie, only to have the project taken over and ruined by Will Ferrell.

Will Ferrell will not be getting any of my money. I can only hope that this movie will lose tons of money, and that the rights will then be sold to someone else who will do a good job of it and make a serious movie instead of a comedy.

I have been reminded that this actually happened in the case of The Incredible Hulk.

My original plan was to buy a movie ticket for Star Trek or some other movie that I liked playing at the same theater as Land of the Lost, just so I could know for sure that it was as bad as I think that it is and warn everyone else not to see it, but right now I don't think that I am going to bother. Other people have already seen it and tried to warn everyone away. Maybe people will listen, or maybe they won't.

Anyway, I think that I am just too upset about it to go and see it today. And I have some serious work to do in the garden, and I cannot waste my time going to see Will Ferrell instead.

I should have two or three days of normal

Or, I should have two or three days of what passes for normal around here. I want to get started on the Harry Potter stuff, but what I really should be doing for the two or three days is gardening. It will probably rain on Saturday, and I should try to move that big mound of dirt before then.

The new Terminator movie will start today. We won't be promoting that. It would have been fun, and I think that one of our group could have made us up to look like were were cyborgs who had been in a fight, with bits of metal showing where the skin had come off of our faces, and a glowing red light where an eye was supposed to be. And then we could stage a few fights and hit each other with rubber props.

There would have been two major obstacles to this plan, even if other people had wanted to do it. One, unfortunately most of us are not the physical type to play terminators. We have a couple of really young good looking girls, but they have jobs that keep them very busy on weekends. I can't think of any real buff guys in our group. We have a couple who are really tall, and maybe we could have given them shoulder pads or something to make them look more muscular, but that's about it. So we have maybe four people who would look really good doing this sort of thing, except that they're very busy and can't be expected to do that much work on a weekend, much less that much work by themselves. The rest of us are not in such good physically shape, and would not make the most believable terminators, even with glowing red lights and such.

The second major obstacle is that I would want to volunteer anyway, but would probably regret it later. If I whine this much about gardening, think how bad I would feel after a weekend of staged fights.

So it sucks a bit that we won't be doing anything for that, but it is only two weeks after Star Trek, and I doubt that many people would be up for this sort of thing again so soon. What sucks even more is that I won't be seeing the movie today, or tomorrow, or even Saturday. My husband works these next three days, and the scheduling is such that I don't think we can see a show before he has to leave for work. Neither of us were up for the midnight show last night, so it will just have to wait til Sunday or Monday.

Unless I want to lie about it and see it without him, which I don't.

Harry Potter is less than two months away, and I can't seem to get anyone going on that one. We all know that we're promoting this movie, and a lot of us already have costumes. But I don't know what we have in the way of props, and they are not going to magically come into being the week of the movie. If we are going to build something, we need to get started now. And I'm sure that we have little things around, some Halloween decorations and such that would be helpful, but we need to get it all out of storage and look at it and decide what to do with it.

I have twice tried to get some discussions going on the subject. First, I posted a message about needing to look at what we have and decide what else we might need. I was mainly talking about props, but I mostly got replies about what people were going to wear. I know most of them already have their costumes, and that is why we were asked to do this. But we need to figure out what we're going to do with the table. I don't think that our normal Star Trek and other sci-fi stuff is going to work for that weekend. I sent a second message out telling people were they could buy a graduation gown if they didn't already have a costume. I got no replies on that one. I hope that means that everyone already has something to wear.

The main thing that we have decided is that the movie starts on Wednesday, but we will not be working all five days. We'll do what we can on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. We just aren't up for Thursday and Sunday too.

I guess that I should brush up on my Harry Potter stuff and borrow the movies from my brother.

But enough of that for now. Back to the gardening.

More about the Star Trek movie weekend: Part III

Okay, so now it is Friday, May 8th, the day that the film officially opened. I have already seen the movie, and someone in our group had already seen it before I did and watched it again, and someone else had already seen it four times before I did. And I had spent two hours on Wednesday dressed as a Vulcan, and I had spent Thursday evening dressed as a Starfleet Deep Space Nine science officer.

So I already had the science officer uniform top in the car, and I already had the green robe and gold dress in the car. And I had my makeup and such in the car, which I forgot and left in the car so I had to go and get it out of the car and put it on, and then I put that stuff back in the car. So I thought that I had everything that I would need in the car, and I would be ready to go whenever.

But the thing was that I was supposed to go to someone's house first, so that she could make me up as a Vulcan before I went to the the theater. At first I was scheduled to be at the theater from twelve til eight, but then they changed that to four til ten. So that was fine.

And then someone my husband worked with asked us to lunch.

Okay, so should I go to my friend's house first and get the Vulcan ears put on and then just hide them during lunch? Or should I go to lunch first and then go get the Vulcan stuff done after lunch. I was totally okay with doing the first, except that I didn't think I should just show up at my friend's house that early unless she asked me to. By the time we were figuring out what to do for the day, it was almost time for lunch anyway, so we decided that after lunch would be better.

My husband's friend was a bit late, but not that late. Still, by the time I got to my friend's house I seemed to be an hour behind schedule. She told me not to worry, that putting on the ears didn't take that long. But I didn't want her to rush anything, cause I wanted to pay attention to everything so I might get the ears on by myself in the future.

So in between explaining things to me, she has to answer the phone and do her normal business, in addition to talking to other people about the weekend and what costumes they should wear and such as that.

So we get all done with the ears, and they don't look bad at all, and they don't feel bad either, which was a surprise to me. I thought gluing something to my ear would feel just as bad as the tape, but it didn't. Great. So then we deal with the eyebrows.

Wednesday, I had just put lots of brownish eyeshadow over my own eyebrows, but this time I was going to shave them off. Or, at least, I was going to shave half of them off. The funny thing was that while I was out buying stuff on Monday, I found a thing especially made to shave off parts of eyebrows. I don't think Vulcan makeup is what they had in mind when they made the thing, but I found it on clearance and I bought it anyway. So right amount of eyebrow was easier to remove than I had imagined.

It was also a bit later in the day than I had imagined. It was about an hour before I was supposed to be at the theater. It usually takes me about an hour to get there from my house, but I wasn't at my house. But then I couldn't think why I should have to go back to my house, and maybe there was an easier way to get there.

My friend suggested that at three in the afternoon the traffic wasn't that bad, and I could just go straight through Dallas on 35.

I hate Dallas.

No way. No Dallas on 35. But I did figure I could get there another way. And all went fine and I was making good time until I was nearly at the theater and I was supposed to made a left exit.

And then I somehow missed wherever I was supposed to go and ended up way north of the place before I found something I recognized and could turn around.

So I did not quite get to the theater by four, and whoever would have been able to see me then missed out. Sorry about that.

So I'm at the theater, and I'm wearing black pants and a black t-shirt, and I take in the green robe and gold dress inside and I fix my hair a bit and put on my costume.

And then I remember that I left my good shoes at home.

Well, we had a lot of discussions about what was appropriate to wear at this event, and I'm sure that my shoes would not pass inspection. But I wasn't going to go home for better shoes, and the green robe hid them most of the time anyway. And they were still black shoes, they just were just old and at some point I was wearing them while working on some project and got a bit of paint on them. I borrowed a black marker and covered up the spots of paint. Not great, but better.

So we were there greeting the customers for the seven o'clock and seven thirty shows. The woman who had seen the movie four times before I did went in to watch it for a sixth time.

I had wanted to get something from Burger King between shows, but there wasn't one around. The Klingons fed me nachos instead.
My friend who put the Vulcan ears on me had planned to come in green makeup, but something went wrong and she washed it all off. So she came by after the seven thirty show in one of the Starfleet uniforms, and she brought some of us cheeseburgers.

I can haz cheeseburger.

So we had some fun with that. And we asked people trivia questions, and the theater manager is all into it. The theater manager wants us to come back for Harry Potter. It will be fun.

One Halloween I made a sleestak costume. Well, not really a sleestak, but an Enik, so close enough. It could be better. Anyway, someone said that I should wear the costume for the opening of the Land of the Lost movie.

Not going to happen. First off, the costume is damned uncomfortable and I can't stay in it very long. And second, I have no intention of promoting that Will Ferrell movie. I want no one to pay to see this movie. I almost want to say that I hope no one sees this movie, but that isn't quite true. What would really be nice is if everyone figures out how to get to see this movie without paying for it (I have suggestions), so that they can still make fun of it without the people responsible for making the awful thing being able to make any money from it.

Okay, so we got that discussion out of the way, and went back to talking about Star Trek. And then we also talked a bit about Fringe and Terminator and Day of the Triffids. So that was fun too.

And then after the ten and ten thirty shows, I was just tired. I'm afraid that I didn't even wait for other people to pack up their stuff. I just told everyone that I'd probably see them the next day and just left.

When I got home I had to take off the Vulcan ears. Getting them off was easy enough, but that left spirit gum on my ears. And I forgot to ask if mineral oil would help with that, so I didn't buy any, and I didn't see any just already in the house. So I'm picking this dried glue stuff off of my ears before I try to get some sleep.

Saturday, I wasn't scheduled to be at the theater, but I planned to be there anyway, because there weren't as many people on the schedule for Saturday and Sunday. Still, since I hadn't promised any particular part of my time, I just stayed around the house and watched TV most of the morning and part of the afternoon. I got there in time for the four and four-thirty shows, and I decided to watch the four-thirty show myself. So that was my second time to see the movie.

Someone in my group watched it four times before I saw it the first time, so now she has seen it at least six times.

This time I was wearing the green robe, but I wore it closed without the gold dress. You wouldn't think that the gold dress would be warm at all, but somehow I wasn't that comfortable in it to start with, and later the theater had some trouble with the air-conditioner. And while the ears had been perfectly comfortable on Friday, I had rubbed my ears raw trying to get off all the dried glue, so they were a bit sensitive. So I didn't feel great on Saturday, and I left right after the ten-thirty show started and didn't help with the packing up and such.

Saturday and Sunday we had some problems with people wearing odd things. If you have ever been to a convention, you have probably seen some odd things. You have probably seen some costumes that just aren't that good, or costumes being worn when they don't fit anymore, or parody costumes. I have a parody borg costume, which I have worn to every other Star Trek movie premiere weekend since I made the thing in 1993. But I did not wear it this time because a.) I have gained some weight since I last wore it and wasn't sure how I would look in it, and b.) we were all sent emails asking us to wear only really good costumes that fit and looked like what was actually worn on the screen. So I took that to mean that we should not wear parody costumes.

Like I know this guy who wears half a Klingon costume with a kilt. He's been wearing it like that for so long, I don't think he still has the pants that originally went with it. So he got the message that his costume didn't count as a "real" Star Trek costume, and he wasn't invited to participate without pants. We have a lot of stuff like that going on. If we hadn't been specific, we would have had a lot more Klingons at this thing, but the four or five that we did have looked just perfect.

Still, other people did not take the hint. I just wanted to strangle someone who kept saying he was going to wear this shirt that was like a Starfleet uniform (only it really wasn't that much like a uniform at all). And then he wanted to wear this other thing that was just like a uniform, only it was something that they only used for Star Trek V, and I don't think that anyone would recognize it as a Star Trek costume. Finally, it is agreed that he can come dressed as Mr. Scott. Only (except for them both being fat) he doesn't look anything like Mr. Scott. Again, he doesn't have a real uniform, just some regular clothes that sort of look like some Mr. Scott wore once, and then he's wearing the next gen badge instead of the one that Mr. Scott wore. So except for the people who read the email, no one knew that he was supposed to be Mr. Scott.

And then there was a group of three who were sort of doing this parody thing of a group of people who were in an episode of the original series.

At least, I thought it was a parody. Apparently, one of the women thinks that she's really hot, and wasn't trying to make a joke. We later found out that in certain light her dress is very see-through, and you get this same problem whenever someone takes a photo with a flash.

So we found out that not only does this woman think that she's all that, she wasn't wearing a bra either. And all of these people that we had hoped to impress with our authentic costumes now have pictures of this woman in a not so great costume that is see-through and doesn't have a bra.

So some people got into it with her. But I'm sure she still doesn't get why people were upset.

Saturday night I had less glue to take off of my ears, and I had mineral oil to help with that, so Sunday my ears were not giving me any trouble. Again, I wasn't on the schedule, but there weren't that many people signed up for Sunday because it was Mother's Day. So I wanted to be there, but because it was Mother's Day, I thought that I would probably be going to lunch with some of my family, which I did.

To save time with getting my costume on after lunch, I put the Vulcan ears on before lunch and just brushed my hair in such a way that they would probably not be seen.

So I went to lunch with my family, and my brother knew that I had the ears on, but I don't think that anyone else could tell. But during lunch my mother is really looking at me, and I think that she sees them. And my brother sees us and he's laughing. But she doesn't see the ears and doesn't know what he is laughing about. She just hasn't seen me since the haircut, and she really likes it.

So my brother is still laughing, and I pull back my hair so my mom can see what he's laughing about. She tells me to put my hair back down.

My mother hates Star Trek. Odd that. My dad was all into science fiction, and she just hates it. I never got what my parents had in common before we came along.

But a long time ago, my mother didn't hate Star Trek. She didn't like it as much as my dad did, but she didn't hate it and she watched it with him. In fact, way back then, my mother did like some weird stuff, and her favorite show was One Step Beyond. But now she just really hates all of that stuff.

So we finished lunch, and she asked if I'm going with them to see my grandma for a bit. Only I have to go home and put on the costume right away if I'm going to get to the theater in time for the four o'clock show. So then I ask if she thinks I should show Grandma the costume. But then I think that is silly, since my grandma can't see that well, and I then think I should just skip it and see her later. But no, my mom says that will make her laugh and I should do that.

So I go home and put on the brown dress that I wore Wednesday night, and then I put my hair up and go to Grandma's house. Only when I get there she isn't feeling well and she's gone to sleep. But I get to see three other relatives, who all tell me how nice I look.

My mom and my brother are like, no, really look at her.

So then they see the ears and the eye makeup and are impressed. So I'm getting ready to leave, and my mom comes and grabs one of my ears. "Is it glued on?"

"MOM!"

Really, I put the ears on hours before so I be done in time, and now she's pulling on one of them and it might come off.

But I guess that she's so happy that I'm wearing a nice modest dress instead of the borg thing or some other thing that she really hates. So I don't have time to go home and check on the ear, and I think even if it does come off that someone else at the theater will have something to fix it.

I get to the theater, and the friend with the makeup kit isn't there, but everyone else assures me that the ear damage minimal and no one will notice it.

Some people left to go to the dinner. I decided to stay at the theater. I had practically just come from lunch anyway.

The original plan for Sunday was to pack up after the seven-thirty showing, so I was going to help them do that. But then they decided to stay til ten-thirty as usual. I wasn't up for that. I went home.

We are now planning stuff to do to promote the Harry Potter film in July. We are all tired and have decided to tone it down a bit and limit it to three days.

More about the Star Trek movie weekend: Part II

Thursday morning I didn't do much, cause I didn't want to get too tired. Some of us were going to meet at the theater at about four, which meant I would be leaving the house around three. I decided that the gold trim I had added to the green robe needed going over again, but that was all I had time for. Someday I will probably make that other white piece to go over it, but it will have to wait.

Then I remembered that I had a gold dress, so I got that out of storage to see how it would look worn under the green robe. It wasn't quite as I remembered. I thought it had a high neck, but I guess that I was thinking of the silver dress. I buy a lot of stuff to use for costumes, and then I forget what I have. So I tried on the gold dress with the green robe, and decided that I should keep on the black t-shirt under the gold dress because the neck was too low, but other than that it should work.

So at three I put my gold dress and my green robe in the car, along with a Deep Space Nine science uniform shirt that someone had loaned me, and I headed out to the the theater. I stopped somewhere to grab a taco, cause I thought that I wouldn't get another chance to eat til after ten. Getting the taco took a bit longer than I thought, so I was a few minutes behind schedule, but no big deal.

None of the others were at the theater when I got there, but I noticed that our main props were already put up. So some of us had already been there, but apparently they had already left.

The assistant manager told me they would be back about 5:30.

That sucks. The reason for meeting at four was so that some of us could get into alien makeup and such. Someone was going to put Vulcan ears on me, or at least, that had been the plan. So now I had no Vulcan ears, and an hour and a half to kill.

I got a soda and went in to various theaters to watch previews. I could have gone to dinner, but I was hungry after rushing to eat that taco.

A few other people started to show up a bit after five, and weren't happy to find that I was the only one there. And then the first group that had been there came back, saying that they had left to try to fix problems with the props. So the problems were all fixed, and at about six most of us were all there ready to go.

And there wasn't time for anyone to put the Vulcan ears on me. Glad that I hadn't shaved my eyebrows yet. I tried on the gold dress and green robe, just so that my friend could see what it looked like, but then I took it off because it would be silly to wear that without the Vulcan makeup. I already had on the black pants and t-shirt, so I just put on the science uniform top. Not the greatest costume, but it works, and I was glad that someone had thought to loan it to me.

News people came and took pictures and video, as they did the night before, but I don't think that I am in the final cut of anything. Thursday night I did not have the best costume, and Wednesday night the guy kept trying to get pictures of me while I was wearing my glasses, and I kept trying to wave him off or get him to start over, which I guess that he didn't want to do. But friends of mine are on tape saying this and that, and we all had a good time bugging the customers with trivia and such. We ended up with four Klingons, two Vulcans, a Romulan, and lots of people in Federation uniforms. We even had some of the new uniforms.

The manager was very impressed with us, and he wants us to come back later and help promote Harry Potter.

We stayed til about ten or eleven, and then it took some time to get the smaller props and such packed away. I wasn't very helpful with that, since none of the props are actually mine and I didn't want to move anything without being instructed to. But I stayed that first night until everything was put away, so I didn't get home til after midnight.

More about the Star Trek movie weekend

This will probably go on for a while. And then when I finally get tired of posting about the events of the weekend, I'll go back to writing about Kellogg's stuff and toys from Burger King. And then maybe by that time I'll have the novelization and I can post something about that.

Probably, I should go back to the beginning.

It was Wednesday afternoon, and I had put a collar on my brown dress and attempted to add some fabric to the skirt to cover a slit that went to about my knee. The skirt didn't look good with the added fabric, so I removed it. I will just have to work on that later, and until then I'll wear boots to make the dress more modest. I gave up trying to decide what to do with the rest of the fabric and just sort of draped it over my shoulder.

I had added a hood to the green robe, along with some gold trim and some additional green fabric. I was trying to make it look a bit less like a bathrobe. I had wanted to have this white piece to go over it, sort of like the Vulcans wear in the first and third movies, but I decided that I didn't have time for it. Maybe later.

I went and bought some things for my hair, and some mounting tape. I had these really stiff elf ears which I trimmed down and attached to my own ears with the mounting tape. Then I put this mostly elastic hair thing on, and that covered part of the ears so that the cut part didn't show. This is how I used to wear the alien ears that I had twenty years ago that looked really good, but I didn't remember the tape being so uncomfortable. And the elastic thing was too tight, so my head hurt. And the brown dress was a bit warm, so I was uncomfortable in general. But the place I was going was like two miles from my house, and I was only planning to stay for a hour or so. I figured that we would talk to people til about six, and then they would go in to watch the movie, and there wouldn't be much to do after that and I would go home.

I wanted a friend to see me in the brown dress so she could tell me if it was good enough to wear on Thursday. At six she still wasn't there, so I decided to wait ten more minutes. And then she still wasn't there, and I decided to wait a bit longer, and then she still wasn't there, etc....

So while I was waiting for my friend, the head of our group got a call from the other theater manager saying that our sneak preview was back on. Earlier that day, he had told us that he couldn't get one of the film reels opened. But now that the problem was fixed, we were invited for a 9:30 show, if we could still make it.

So I went home and posted the information and sent out emails. And then I took off those ears and the brown dress and put on jeans and a T-shirt. And no one replied to my email, which surprised me a little, cause I at least thought people would ask if I was sure and want to confirm the location of the theater or something. But no one said anything about it, and I ate dinner. And then I checked the email again, and still no one replied. So I replied to it myself, thinking that would at least get the title of the email to pop up again so maybe if they missed it the first time someone would see it. And still no one replied, so after a few minutes I left. The theater was an hour drive away from my house, and I hadn't been there in a long time and wanted to make sure I could find the place, so I left half an hour early.

Right after I left, someone replied to the email saying that they hadn't gotten the message that there was to be a sneak preview.

Was I not clear? That was the message. But, I guess for them it would have been too late anyway. I think people had time to get there, but they didn't have time to eat first or hire a babysitter or finish whatever else they were doing. Still, everyone who wasn't there complained that they weren't told, why weren't they called, etc....

So I had no problems finding the place, and I was there half an hour early, by myself, with nothing to do. I left to go buy some ice cream. I came back. I was still by myself.

So at about 9:25 I was starting to worry that I would be the only one there and that the manager would not show the movie just for me by myself. But then two people came in and said they got my message and were a little surprised that no one else was there. And then people started coming in from the other theater, in costume, which we were not supposed to do. But it was a Wednesday night, so it wasn't like a lot of people saw us to wonder what was going on.

So there were less than twenty of our group there, and I was surprised that most of them were in costume cause they had been at the other theater, and most of them had bought tickets at the other theater to watch the second and third and forth movies, but they left the theater after watching Wrath of Khan so that they could watch the new movie. I don't think that I would have left the other theater if I had paid ten or fifteen dollars to watch the other films. But they did, so we had three Klingons and five people in various Federation uniforms.

So whatever complaining I might do later about things not being quite right and not matching up with what happens in the original series or the animated series or any of the other series, I just want to say that it is a good movie and that for the most part I liked it. So everyone should go see it, unless you are one of those people who just cannot stand remakes.

Okay, so that is enough for this post, and I'll write some more later.

My sneak preview of the new Star Trek movie

First we were getting to see it, and then we weren't getting to see it. And then when most people had made other plans for the evening we were getting to see it again. And then we were about a half hour behind schedule, so some of the people who said that they couldn't make it at 9:30 probably would have gone if they had known it wouldn't actually start until almost ten.

I was the second person to hear that it was back on again. And I was the closest person to a computer, so I was the one who sent out the email. I was surprised when almost an hour later no one had replied. I expected some reaction. I expected someone to at least ask if I was sure and to confirm which theater we were supposed to meet at. So I replied to my own email, just so that the title of the first email would show up for a second time, but that didn't seem to help much. So I didn't want to be late for the show myself, and I left. Hardly anyone got the message in time, except for those people who got the message in person right after I did.

We weren't supposed to bring a lot of friends, but we were allowed to bring a few. I tried to invite a couple of people in my family who were interested, but again they didn't get the message in time to get to the theater at 9:30. So there were less than twenty of us there.

The odd thing was that one guy had already seen the movie somewhere else, and one lady was watching it for the fifth time.

The fact that someone would want to watch the same movie for the fifth time should tell you something.

The sneak preview was supposed to be sort of a secret, but most of our people had just come from another Star Trek event where they were watching the second and third and fourth movies in costume. I had time to go home and change, but most of them didn't. So we had with us three Klingons and five people in various Starfleet uniforms.

I don't want to give any of it away to those who haven't seen the movie yet, but I wanted to say something to the people are wondering whether or not to bother with it since it doesn't have the original actors (except for brief appearances by Leonard Nimoy). Remember The Next Generation episode "Rascals" where Picard and three of the crew become children in a transporter accident. So that was an episode where other actors were playing the characters, and it still works. And it's funny when you watch the actors do or say something just like the character should say, and it's even funnier when they say or do something that is just the opposite of what the character should say.

I don't feel great at the moment. I tried wearing the brown dress last night, and it was a lot warmer than I expected. And I wore the not so great Vulcan ears and an even less comfortable hair ornament. I wanted out of it almost as soon as I put it on, but I decided to go and make an appearance. I thought that I would stay for about an hour, but the main person that I wanted to see me in the costume was running a bit late. So I thought that maybe I could stay for two hours. In the middle of the second hour we learned about the sneak preview, so I waited another ten minutes or so and then went home and peeled everything off, except that I did not wash off the excessive eye makeup.

I wondered if everyone would stare at that. But since I spent most of the rest of the evening with three Klingons, I guess no one really noticed.

Today is the big day...sort of

Okay, so today is the beginning of the Star Trek movie premier weekend, which will start at about five or six or so tonight when some of us start putting up tables at a local theater which is showing the second and third and fourth of the Star Trek movies. The plan is to put on our costumes to advertise our club and help collect for the canned food drive and all of that before some of us (not me) spend ten or fifteen dollars on tickets to actually watch these three movies.

The rest of us were supposed to head to another theater to watch the new movie. In theory, new movies are tested on the Wednesday or Thursday before opening day, just to make sure that the print is okay and that it has all the previews with it that it is supposed to have and all of that. So we were supposed to go and do that, so that we would get to see the movie ourselves before we do all the other stuff that we have planned to do the rest of the weekend.

And I noticed yesterday that I hadn't been told what time to meet everyone at the other theater.

Okay, so I didn't expect that the time would just be listed out for everyone to see, because only certain people are invited to the thing. If you aren't helping out this weekend, you don't get to see the movie before everyone else. And if you don't have an appropriate costume, then standing around the theater in your regular clothes doesn't count as helping out, and maybe you just aren't supposed to know when the early showing is.

So I wasn't really worried that I hadn't seen the time posted, but I did wonder that no one had sent me a private email about it. And then I thought that we had been emailing about so much other stuff that they probably thought that they had told me already and just forgot to send me a separate email. So I sent them some questions, which didn't get answered right away.

So it turns out that the movie might not get to the theater until Thursday morning, which kind of ruins our plans.

I could watch the movie Thursday morning, but I don't think that anyone else can. And I'll need to get ready to do this other stuff by maybe four or five, so I doubt that they will make an effort to get us in Thursday.

So that sort of sucks.

So today of all days, when I really need my sleep, I wake up at four in the morning and can't get back to sleep. I'm still hoping that we get to see the movie tonight, which means that I'll be up til at least one in the morning, and then I'll have a busy weekend after that.

Friday I've been invited to lunch at a very nice restaurant, but I will have to decline. By noon I am already supposed to be at the theater, and before that I will need time to get into costume and such. I volunteered for the early shifts on Friday, because I don't have a job. See?

So I'm sitting here when I should be asleep, and after checking my email there's a message that they still don't know if we will get to see the movie tonight.

Yesterday I decided to make one last shopping trip before working on one of the costumes. And my first trip was to Walmarts, where I did not quite get what I needed, but still managed to spend thirty dollars on this and that. Now, some of that was just stuff that we needed anyway, like soap. But most of it was stuff that I wouldn't have bought except for the movie being this weekend. And not having found some of the stuff I needed at Walmarts I started to go to Jo Ann's, and then I thought, I've already spent thirty dollars at Walmarts, so what am I thinking going to more stores?

So I ended the shopping trip and went to lunch instead. After lunch I went and bought eight more boxes of cereal that was on sale. I now have all the badges except the Klingon, and I think that I will just have to do without that one. I also have twelve more packages of cookies (mostly Grasshoppers) and the tokens that came with those. So I'm now just waiting to hear from Kellogg's if I can use those to get a T-shirt or if those are only good for flash drives. As soon as I get an answer I'll send off for something.

With DVDs of Star Trek movies playing in the background, I went to work on one of the costumes. It started with a brown dress that I thought needed to be altered somewhat. First, it has a slit to about the knee on one side. And second, I thought that it was cut a bit low in front for a proper Vulcan lady to wear it. So the first thing that I did was buy a yard of fabric that I planned to use to correct those two things.

Only then I thought that the fabric might look better draped over my arm. I found two other pieces of clothing that I thought could be cut to alter the dress. One piece would fix the neckline, and the other piece I would cut fabric from to close up the slit. I finally got the neckline all fixed, but then I noticed that the piece I meant to use on the skirt looked really good sort of draped around my hair. I got a haircut recently, and while I don't hate it as much as I did, my old hair looked better for a Vulcan.

So now I have nothing left to fix the skirt with. But I guess it doesn't show that much skin, and I'll probably wear boots with it anyway. But now I really should go out and find some more stuff to fix my hair with, even though I had said that I wasn't going shopping today, cause I should stay home and rest.

I probably won't work on the green robe now. It will just have to wait for some other occasion. It will probably double for some Harry Potter type thing. But I probably won't wear it myself for Harry Potter, cause I am planning to make a really nice hat, and they just wouldn't go together.

So I guess I'm going to go watch Hulu, cause I can't get back to sleep.

More wardrobe and other malfunctions

Okay, so this is the week that all the stuff is happening, and I'm still working on costumes. I shouldn't worry too much, since someone will loan me a science department shirt if the new stuff doesn't work out. Still, it is annoying.

I am working on two Vulcan costumes, one is a brown dress and one is a green robe. I had originally thought that I would wear the robe open and have the brown dress underneath, but I have since decided that the green robe is going to be too warm to do that, so it will probably be worn closed over a T-shirt and shorts or something like that. And since I'm going to wear it closed, I thought that I would have this white piece over it, like they have in the first and third movies, so I went out and bought some more fabric. This particular fabric is thick and stiff, somewhat like denim. And since I had planned to paint it and such I thought that I should wash it first.

Big mistake. I've spent a long time trying to get the stuff ironed, but it still doesn't look as smooth as when I brought it home from the store. And at some point I got a bit of makeup on it, so I'm not too happy about that either. I'm debating if I should go and get some more of it or just deal with it the way it is. Whatever I am going to do I need to go and buy the last of the supplies today and be done with it. I will briefly need something to wear tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow is the big day. There just isn't time to shop for more stuff.

The brown dress is okay, though there is nothing about it that really screams Vulcan. (I could put some symbols on it, but I really don't want to do that since except for the Idic I don't know what any of the symbols mean.) The original neckline was a bit low for what I thought a proper Vulcan lady should wear, so I was fixing that and almost got it perfect but I just cut something just a little too much and there is this tiny little hole showing in between the original neck and the new collar, and now I'm debating should I go back and get more fabric and try again or buy a brown T-shirt to wear under what I've already done, or maybe I should just pin it somehow and hope that no one notices.

As you can see I get frustrated with one, almost give up on it, then work on the other for a while until something goes wrong there, and then I go back to the other one and see if it is worth fixing. So I am not quite finished with either one of them.

Someone is holding a blue shirt for me. I should give up this nonsense and find my girdle and a black pair of pants that don't make me look fat.

Other people in the group are giving me a headache. Miss Allergies has decided not to participate at all, in spite of the fact that she was recently given a nice uniform with all of the pins, so that all she would have to do is find nice black pants and shoes, or else a short black skirt and black boots. If she wasn't going to wear the thing, the thing could have been given to me.

Also, despite having repeatedly asked for a certain level of costume, a few people just don't seem to get it. Some people don't have any costumes or uniforms, or they bought a uniform many years ago and it doesn't fit anymore. But they want to do something this weekend anyway.

Well, that's not the way it works. People want to see you in costume. People do not want to see you standing around in T-shirt and jeans saying that you used to have a costume.

This one person in particular just doesn't seem to grasp the concept of a uniform. Some shirt you buy at a regular store that resembles a uniform is not a uniform. Some other shirt that you have that looks like a uniform except that it is green instead of blue is not a uniform.

I'm not talking about the different colors in fabric. That one is bad enough, but it happens. The homemade uniforms and the store bought uniforms aren't ever quite the same color. And then if you really have money to blow and you send off for the exact fabric used by the studio and have a red uniform made exactly the same as those worn by the actors...

...well, you end up with a purple uniform and don't match anybody. Some stuff just looks different on film than it does in real life.

Still, those people had really good intentions, and they are to be thanks for their efforts, even if I am really envious of their disposable income.

No, that's not what I'm ticked about. I'm ticked about this guy that keeps coming up with stuff that looks like something he saw on one of the movies, but to most of us it just isn't a recognizable uniform. I think that the thing he's talking about is from Star Trek 5 and doesn't even have the Starfleet logo on it.

Jokes about Star Trek 5 aside....

Even if he bought this thing right from the studio (which I know he did not, he just bought something that looks like it) most people wouldn't recognize it from Star Trek.

I mean, if you have to tell someone that it looks just like a movie costume instead of people recognizing it as a movie costume, it just doesn't work.

Okay, so we have people with perfect costumes who can't be bothered, people with no costumes who won't take a hint, and most of the rest of us have put on a few pounds and would never be mistaken for real Starfleet officers even with our uniforms.

I know that I have stuff to do and shouldn't be wasting my time with this little rant. Except that it is too early in the morning for me to seriously attempt anything else.

On the bright side, there are now 97 of the new Outer Limits that I can watch on Hulu next week when things get back to normal. And later, I'm going to go to Burger King for lunch and see if they have toys yet.