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I did movies I've seen, so now it's time for books. I'm not going to put the whole list here, but it says I read 41 books that were new to me, plus some novellas - 50 new-to-me things in all. Here's some of what I thought were highlights.

The first things I read in January were Luanne Rice's Last Night and Last Day, very good thrillers. (The 2nd isn't a direct sequel to the first, but they're connected, as I recall.)
The last new thing I read was Jenny Colgan's Cafe By the Sea, which I read in one day because I completely couldn't put it down. That woman's books seem to have that effect on me.
The very last book I finished in 2024 (it's currently 10pm on New Year's Eve, as I'm writing this, so I don't think I'm finishing any more) was not new to me - it was an Expanse book, Babylon's Ashes. That's the sixth book of nine in the series. I hadn't re-read them in three years, apparently, but I don't think I'm going to read the last three right now because I don't like them as much!
In all I have a list of 70-some re-reads for 2024 - I always re-read a lot. (I really don't obsess at all about the numbers because I read so much no matter what, but I do - obviously - keep lists.)
Possibly my new favorites from this year are the (indirect) sequels to The Goblin Emperor featuring the character Thara Celehar, Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones. I believe there's supposed to be one more of those coming out next year.

I also read several more books in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, and those are always very good. There are quite a few of those still left for me, I haven't read nearly all of them. I also read another book about a Sherlock-Holmes-type character by the author of the books in the preceding paragraph (the Goblin Emperor universe, I like to call it) , Katherine Addison aka Sarah Monette, in which the Sherlock character is an angel, of all things - but not at all a typical angel. I really liked that book a lot too, but trying to describe it is very weird. In fact when I tried to describe it to somebody they said "so it's fanfiction?" and apparently it did start as fanfiction but now it's an actual published book! (I assume that's possible because Sherlock Holmes is out of copyright!)

Happy 2025, everybody!

Goodness, where did the year go? I'm sure I will forever associate 2024 with the elections - nothing much happened to us personally that was all that memorable. (No hurricanes, etc!) So good riddance, 2024, even though I have no reason to think 2025 will particularly be an improvement!

We do have plans to go out to eat tonight with my sister, her husband, her best friend and her husband (who I'm sure I've met years ago, since he's from our hometown and I know his older brother, etc., but I don't actually remember him) - but it'll be good, my sister is a talker and so is Kathy so if the conversation flags otherwise I'm sure they'll pick up the slack. And we're going to a really good Mexican restaurant so I'm anticipating fajitas. Then we'll probably go home and watch some NYE broadcast, that's what we usually do. Big excitement, right?

My new year's resolution, so far as I have one, is to be more organized. I forget things. I need to move some money around and I need to figure out Medicare (oh god, I'm old) and well, fun stuff like that. (Rob went over the weekend and bought me new tires, which is also something I'd been procrastinating about. Yay for husbands.)

I meant to write about the "color of the year" a week or two ago - Pantone always announces one in December, and it's something I kind of pay attention to, usually. This year's is "mocha mousse" - it's a neutral but not the terribly boring kind of neutral. I can't say it's something I see myself wearing, because I'm a bright colors person, but it's not a bad choice. I know I've seen lots of brown and burgundy outfits this year so this goes well with that kind of thing. But I can't say I have a whole lot to say about it!

Mocha Mousse

I don't think I'll be going to any more movies between now and Tuesday night, and Rob just got home from Nosferatu, so I figure it's time to talk about the movies we saw in 2024.

I put up a list of what we'd seen in a movie theater this year a month or so ago, and I've updated it to reflect those multiple viewings of Wicked. As far as favorites, I think here I mostly have to go with the two that I saw multiple times - meaning Wicked and Deadpool and Wolverine (which I saw twice in the theater and have seen two more times on D+ so far). Other movies I really enjoyed include Alien: Romulus and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Oh, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, too. (I had not seen any of this new round of Planet of the Apes movies - meaning, I'd seen the really old stuff, only! - and the minute I expressed interest, Rob made me watch all three of the previous ones in preparation.)

There are another couple of movies that I know I enjoyed while I was watching them but immediately forgot the minute I got home - I'm thinking of Dune 2 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Seriously, I can hardly remember Dune 2 at all. (Christopher Walken was in it? I had completely forgotten.)

~~I feel like~~ - no, this is far fewer movies than I typically see in a year. Eventually we figured out that part of that was the aftermath of the strikes in the movie industry a while back, which caused a lot of movies to get delayed. As you can see from his list below, Rob still found a lot of movies to see - not only horror movies, either.

(For anybody reading who doesn't already know this part: I don't do horror movies unless I'm really convinced they're not very scary - which doesn't happen a lot - and my husband loves them, so he is accustomed to going to the movies alone a lot.)

I grabbed Rob and got him to look at the list and tell me what he liked. He named five of them and so I'll put them in bold type in the list below rather than type them all out again! And he said that Nosferatu - which he just saw - was good, but probably not quite to the point of being in the top 5.

==============================================

Rob and I saw these movies together (newest to oldest):
Wicked (twice, and I saw it one more time with my sister)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Deadpool & Wolverine (twice)
Alien: Romulus
Young Woman and the Sea
Furiosa
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Dune 2
Wonka (which we also saw it once in 2023)

And Rob also saw (with favorites in bold)
Nosferatu
Juror #2
Heretic
Smile 2
Terrifier 3
Speak No Evil
Never Let Go
Trap
Blink Twice
Longlegs
Maxxxine
The Exorcism
The Watcher
In a Violent Nature
Quiet Place Day 1
I Saw the TV Glow
Tarot
Abigail
Civil War
First Omen
Late Night with the Devil
Immaculate
Demon's Daughter
The Iron Claw
Godzilla Minus One Minus Color
Night Swim

We had a lovely low-key Christmas - I slept very late, Rob and I opened our gifts to each other once I got up, and then we went over to my sister's house, did another gift exchange and ate subs (we wanted to be seriously low-key, and Rob found some really good hoagie rolls at HEB so they were great) plus a whole buttload of desserts. And then we watched movies - in particular we watched Arrival, which I had not seen for some reason. (I think everybody else had.)

Let's see, as far as gifts: Rob got me a Funko Grogu that is solar-powered and waves his hand - I think it's meant to go in a dashboard but I may not use it that way, but it's really cute - and we both got each other some assorted books and stuff. (I got Son of a Witch, which is the sequel to Wicked.) Paula got me a Butter London polish (which is fairly expensive these days) and then passed on a bunch of assorted items that were re-gifts, but some of it was really nice, like one of those Youth to the People sample sets - I love their moisturizer so I was happy to have that in particular. I had gotten Rob a wallet on Etsy with his name on it that turned out to be very nice-looking, among other things.

And we still have another whole week off - we go back after New Year's. So yay!

Apparently our Christmas Eve - or Christmas Day gift, one or the other or both, is going to be rain. Nothing like cold rain to put you in the holiday spirit. (Although it's not even that cold right now, so if we're lucky, if it rains, it at least won't be freezing rain.) But I saw 80-90% chance of rain tomorrow in our neck of the woods.

I texted my sister to say "Christmas Eve Gift" - it's a race. Not that there's a prize or anything. But whoever says it first supposedly wins anyway. (Still, I'm pretty sure my grandma would be pleased to hear we're carrying on that little tradition. Even Rob got into it, last year.)

I realized yesterday that I hadn't gotten my sister anything for Christmas! We do what we call "token" gifts, which mostly just means small gifts, but still I didn't want to just be running to the dollar store at the last minute! ("Small" or "token" gifts still shouldn't just be random junk, either, right?) It's weird nowadays because none of the four of us (including our respective husbands, that is) are really religious or does a lot for Christmas - and we don't have parents or kids to drag us in anyway - but still, it would also be weird not to have gifts at all. We were all raised celebrating Christmas, after all. Rob and I buy each other stuff, but we do that exchange at home - we usually go and eat at their house but we don't haul all of our gifts for each other over there. (I might take something especially cute over there to show off, but a lot of our gifts are usually books and stuff so they're not all that interested.)

But as far as a gift for P, I was poking around on Amazon and they had a lot of things that still said could be delivered by Christmas, so I got her some L'Occitane hand cream, because I know that's something she'd like, and it was reasonably priced. I know a lot of people hate Amazon but I am just addicted to having everything show up at my door, no fuss.* (The BIL likes dark chocolate so his gift is always super-easy - Rob had already taken care of that part.)

*OK, mostly no fuss. I had some trouble lately with a defective Owala bottle that had a loose piece that kept shooting across the room! But we got that taken care of.

Oh, we watched Red One this afternoon. The reviews were terrible, but people who'd seen it seemed to like it ok, and so did we. Hardly a masterpiece, but it had some clever stuff in it. (I said, boy, between this and Deadpool & Wolverine, Chris Evans has been having a ball destroying his "Captain America" image lately!)

I'm off until 2025 (which sounds good but is all of, what, 10 days?) but I'm part-time so of course I don't get paid, either. I'm not complaining, though. I did tell them I'd work if they needed me to, and I did my time working weekends and holidays when I first had this job.

UT just beat Clemson, and they're going to the Peach Bowl against Arizona State. This playoff thing feels a little weird to me, but the old bowl system, where all the high-ranked teams played one bowl game each and then some guys voted on who was #1 - that was pretty weird too.

I'm re-reading the Expanse series, mostly because I was reading my old journal entries from when I was reading it before. But I checked and I haven't re-read it since 2021 - was that when the last book came out? It may have been. So it's been three years, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I'm almost to the end of the second book. I don't know if I'm really going to read the whole nine books right now though.

I'm not doing so great at writing daily. Maybe now that I'm home for the duration I'll do better!

My husband the horror fanatic is watching something about Amish hauntings - that may actually be the name of it, Amish Haunting(s?). It's kind of bizarre. I've spent some time with a couple of Amish people and I have trouble believing they'd approve of that, but who knows. (It's not like I know them spectacularly well. They just always seem pretty grounded to me.)

I finished the History of LotR #3 (which is called The War of the Rings) - these are big fat books and so every one of those I finish seems like a victory. Now I just have #4, which I've already started - it's called Sauron Defeated.

So, did I mention this already? We are about to go see Wicked again. It will be Rob's second time and my third - I suggested it because I've been watching YouTube videos about it, and I finished my re-read of the book since the last time I saw it, and I'm just sort of trying to fit all of that together in my head. (One unspoilery detail I've noticed: did other people pay attention to Elphaba's glasses? Sort of an s-curve sort of thing, I've never seen any like that before and I've worn glasses since I was eight or something. Somebody's probably got a contract to sell copies of that, how much you wanna bet?)

(Totally spoilers below for Wicked book vs musical vs movie + speculation. Remember too that I don't even really know anything about the musical, I've never seen it.)

(Later!)
OK, I totally enjoyed Wicked again. Something I got from the videos I watched was that (as in the book, and I guess also in the musical, according to Wikipedia) the Wizard is actually Elphaba's father - BUT the movie may have hinted at this early on by having Goldblum's voice doing the singing at the beginning as her mother's lover (just, like a line or two). I thought it did sound like him but it's hard to be sure. Rob & I both also felt like when he meets with Elphaba later, it sort of seemed like he knew that. If he actually gave her mother the green elixir then he should be pretty certain, really! Anyway, we had fun trying to figure all that out.

I'm sure people who have read a lot of fanfic - whether back in the day or recently - may know wtf "Wolfstar" is - Remus/Sirius, in HP fic - but if I had seen that name before, I had forgotten. I admit to reading a quite a bit of fanfic in the past, but for some reason I stumbled across this HP fic called "All the Young Dudes" lately which I had read part of before, and that's what it is - eventually - but it's extremely long and I don't think I got as far as the actual romance part the first time. I don't spend a lot of time on fanfic these days, but I am trying again, since I got there.

(I used the Kirk/Spock icon since it was the only fanfic icon I seem to have, and anyway I'm an Original Series ST fan of old - I'm old enough to remember when it was new, although I was a kid and obviously didn't know about slash at the time! I remember hearing rumors about mimeographed stories getting passed around when I was a teenager, but I certainly never saw any.)

We watched an episode of "The Penguin" today - the first time we'd seen any of it. It was pretty good. And we started watching "The Martian" but Rob wanted to go to bed early-ish (because he gets up and runs early on Sundays) and so we didn't finish it. I think I have the book on Kindle and I'm tempted to go and find it.

I don't think I mentioned that we watched the first Joker movie, which neither one of us had seen - I think that was last weekend, maybe. The reviews are so bad I'm reluctant to watch the 2nd one, even though I did like the first one more than I expected to.

Regarding the dreaded DNF list...

(This is adapted - and hopefully improved, a bit - from something I wrote for my other account.)

I actually don't normally put everything I don't finish on my main DNF list. The idea is that it's the stuff where I made a conscious decision to stop reading, for one reason or another. I made up the concept (for myself, anyway) of type 1 and type 2 DNFs, to reflect this difference. Type 1 is what I'm talking about here, the ones you stop for cause. Type 2 is the ones you just drift away from and may come back to later. I do this a lot, the drifting thing. I don't feel like that's the same thing as going, "I hate this," and quitting.

Some examples:
Twilight - ok, this one illustrates the line, a bit - or, I don't know, maybe it makes it less clear, because I stopped and started on this about four or five times, I think. I said I was quitting and then I came back. Several times. But I did finally go, "NO" and quit for good, which makes it a type 1. Just a weird one. (Rob & I actually did make it through the movie, one time in the interim, with much giggling.)

A Discovery of Witches - Now this one is different, because I really liked the first half of this, but then they went off to... was it France? and it turned into a sort of Interview with the Vampire kind of thing (added: actually, I don't even remember what I meant by that, but that was how I thought of it!), and anyway, it completely changed tone, and I decided I was done.

Then I need a category for "I liked these authors until I read this book":
(OK, that's probably phrased badly. I don't hate the author, I just don't like the book. It's just that you tend to think it's a good way to find good books, to go with authors you like. Unfortunately it doesn't always work.)
A couple of examples for these:
Three Hearts and Three Lions - Poul Anderson - to be fair, I think this may have been a really old book, but the edition I have was published well after he died (which was in 2001). Anyway, totally hated it, couldn't stand to keep going. (I think I remember thinking it was really, really sexist.)
A Curious Beginning - I don't even remember the name of this series, but there are more of them (I checked, finally - it's "Veronica Speedwell Mysteries") so I guess somebody likes them. It was the same author as the "Lady Julia" mysteries (Deanna Raybourn) which I did really like. But I just couldn't stand these, don't exactly remember why, just that something about them grated on me.

I think I need to just quit saying this nonsense about types 1 & 2 and say that my DNF list is just the books I don't think I will ever finish, or, well, don't intend to finish - because I am nothing if not mercurial - and the former "type 2's" are just unread/unfinished.

(...and if you want to see the rest of the actual list, it's over here.)

And ha! If you click on "Twilight" in the tags below, there's an entry from one of the times I was actually reading it. (I'd totally forgotten we watched the movie with Rifftrax - no wonder there was so much giggling involved!)

I bought a book while I was at work tonight - a book about the history of bookstores in the U.S. Like I don't have enough reading material already. (However, the reason I saw this in the first place is because it was on a "Best books of 2024" list, so if you're interested: The Bookshop.) I'm sure I will read it before too long but I don't know that I'll read it right away.

I posted a list yesterday with all the books I bought in 2020, as part of a project that mostly has to do with getting rid of some of my paper journals. I wasn't keeping count, but it looked like I had read more than half of them, for sure, but that's a lot of unread books. I have a list with a lot of my unread books on it, somewhere, and I try to get myself to read from that list - and I do, some of the time.

As a matter of fact, I had some trade paperbacks of The History of the Lord of the Rings - a couple of big fat volumes of them, and they were old enough that one of them fell apart while I was reading it. (I'm guessing I'd had them since shortly after the movies came out, so probably 20 years or so!) - Are y'all familiar with this series? It's Tolkien's son Christopher doing a deep, deep dive into his dad's manuscripts. It's pretty fascinating. I actually read both of those this past summer and am almost finished with the third one - there are four in all. (Three books was not enough to cover the three volumes of LotR, apparently.) And there are more volumes for his dad's other works, too - I think it was a dozen total.

So I guess I kind of had Tolkien on the brain, and I happened to notice on Black Friday and over that weekend (which seems to have just become an extension of Black Friday, I assume I'm not the only one to notice that!) that, well, the Tolkien books were on sale. I don't think it was all of them, but it happened to be concentrated on some that I didn't have - The Children of Hurin, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Fall of Gondolin. That's what I bought. Oh, and one more volume of the History of Middle Earth (which is the full series title for the rest of those books I was talking about above). The one I got was the very last one, The Peoples of Middle-Earth. Hey, they were $1.99! (I've been happily reading about the Prologue to LotR, which for some reason is covered in that volume.)

And it's not like I had read all the Tolkien I had in the house, either. I know I have Lost Tales lurking somewhere, unread, and maybe some more. I kinda have a book-buying problem - not that that's anything new. (I'm sure a lot of y'all can sympathize.)

(But - progress in the unread department - I did finally read The Three-Body Problem this year!)

I should say if you stumble across this that I have a new project: I'm putting my old paper reading journals online. (It's actually intended to be in a separate journal, and now it is - here's the corresponding entry, and it's just called Mel Reads.)

This list is books I bought in 2020 (probably mostly in Kindle format, if I know it's not I'll say so). Bold means I know I've read it at some point since. Many of the others I started reading and just haven't finished! Also I didn't start keeping the reading journal until the middle of the year, so I have no idea if the first half of 2020 is here or not! (It may be that I had been keeping a paper list and I just copied that over, but I don't remember for sure.)

The Physicians of Vilnoc (Penric & Desdemona)
In Their Own Worlds (stories)
Last of the Moon Girls (a freebie - First Reads, something like that)
White Out (First Reads)
A Curse So Dark & Lonely
The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13 - paperback)
Someone to Romance (Westcott series)
Witch Is Where It All Began
Lost Horizon
Girl Waits With Gun (Kopp Sisters #1)
The Unspoken
Vanished (I think this is part of a series but I didn't write the name down)
Spindle's End (Kindle copy; I wore out my paperback)
A Killing Frost (October Daye #14?)
Throne of Glass (this is a series, right? but I never read any further)
Aftermath (paperback) (Chuck Wendig, a Star Wars book)
The Fifth Season
Ancillary Justice (another series)
Ahsoka (Star Wars - obviously!)
Lady Cop Makes Trouble (Kopp Sisters #2)
One Salt Sea (October Daye - another replacement for a paperback that was falling apart)
Masquerade at Lodi (Penric & Desdemona)
Lord of the Rings (it doesn't say but I think this was one big edition with all three books), & also The Hobbit
Touch Not the Cat (a book I had in paperback years ago)

That's the end of that list, but there's more on a separate page:
Night of a Thousand Stars (this one's a series, don't remember the overall name)
Serpent and Dove
The Assassins of Thasalon (more Penric and Des; that series is mostly novellas)
Thrawn Ascendancy
On Tyranny (pb)
The Once and Future Witches
Winterkeep (the Graceling series)
Silent in the Grave (a Lady Julia mystery)
Aftermath: Life Debt
Black Narcissus
A Court of Thorns and Roses (another series where I never read any further, although in this case - unlike Throne of Glass, which is the same author - I did actually like this book)
What the Dead Leave Behind (another mystery series but I don't remember the series name)
Cocaine Blues (Miss Fisher #1)
The Sookie Stackhouse Companion (hardback) and also a book of Sookie-related short stories
From Dead to Worse (pb)
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
God-Shaped Hole (some book club was reading this)
Tears of Amber (1st Reads)
Murder on the Ballarat Train (Miss Fisher #3)
The Lily Bard series, which is 5 books, I think, which I bought over a couple of months - some in paperback & some on Kindle
The Goblin Emperor
U.S. Grant (a combined edition of Catton's Grant/Civil War books, Grant Moves South and Grant Takes Command)
The City We Became
A Curious Beginning (another series which I never read any more of - this one is the same author as the "Lady Julia" books, I think)
The Dark Enquiry (Lady Julia series)
Coraline
Lincoln's Admiral

(Possible mild spoilers, of course!)

I always feel like I should read something appropriate for the season, every year. Last year, all I think I ended up doing was re-reading The Christmas Bookshop. This year, I actually read the one Thanksgiving book I happened to have, which was Penelope In Retrograde, and which it turned out I really liked. I thought it was going to be a romance novel - I bought it a couple of years ago, I think - and I figured out at some point that it was set at Thanksgiving, which is not something you see all that much, so I decided to save it for seasonal reading. It actually was not really a romance novel - there was a romance there, but it was more like a comedic reconnecting-with-family kind of thing in the end. Much more fun than I was expecting. (I don't know if it's a nearly-senior-citizen thing or what, but I don't have much use for romance novels any more. Suddenly they bore me.)

And then it turned out that Amazon had what they called a short story (and I would call a novella, it was around 100 pages, I think) by the author of said Christmas Bookshop, Jenny Colgan. It's called The Christmas Book Hunt, and it is right up my alley: a little romance, a little family drama, a lot of poking around in bookshops looking for what turns out to be an extremely rare book. I enjoyed it, you might can tell. It's the librarian in me.

I don't know if I'm done with holiday-related reading; it's still two weeks til Christmas, after all. I have a couple more unread books that I think are actually that kind of thing - meaning holiday-themed - but I also think I've already tried reading them before and didn't get into either one. I'm probably more likely to end up re-reading some old favorites, really!

Current Music: singing "Dancing Through Life" to myself

DEFINITELY SPOILERS here, if you care. And I'm trying to summarize this from my one viewing two days ago, which is why I'm trying to just hit the basics.

So, Rob & I watched the two existing episodes of Skeleton Crew, a new Star Wars series aimed at kids but still enjoyable for adults, too, at least we both liked it so far. Two episodes have been released and then they'll come out every Tuesday until they run out of episodes. I think there are six more episodes, so if that's right it'll start with a new one tomorrow (it's early Monday as I'm writing this) and go into January. And it does say "season 1" on it so apparently the plan is to make more.

The first two episodes seem to have been released together because as I'm reading it, between them they set up the rest of the series. (I may be wrong, but Jude Law is the adult star and he doesn't turn up at all until the very end of the 2nd episode, so I'm assuming after this the kids will go on some sort of adventure with him.)

There are four kids that are on this adventure, two boys and two girls. I don't have kids and I'm not good at telling kids' ages but the girls look a little older than the boys. I'm guessing that they're somewhere in the vicinity of 9-12 years old. (I'm trying to write this without looking stuff up, so we'll see how close I am later!) Three kids look human and the other one is that sort of elephant-looking species (I feel like I ought to know the name but I don't) that's always been around in Star Wars.

The most hilarious part to me was that the kids basically live in a Star Wars version of a suburb - detatched houses and all. They've got more advanced tech than we do, of course, droids and all that, but it's stuff that would be very recognizable to a kid audience. One of the kids is late for school, and takes a shortcut across a sort of wilderness area, and he stumbles onto a mysterious door. At first they are just sure it's Jedi temple, only it turns out to be a ship, and somebody inevitably hits a button and they just take off without warning into space. I guess there was supposed to be a course already laid in! The ship goes tearing off, past what they call "the barrier" - and that's the end of the first episode.

(There was a bunch of stuff about school etc. that I'm skipping to just kind of hit the highlights here!)

If I'm interpreting what they said in the second episode right, it may be that their planet is hidden, so we've got a sort of a lost kids thing going on. The first episode starts by saying there are pirates on the edges of the universe (hasn't that always been true in Star Wars?) so it sort of makes sense that if you had the tech to hide a whole planet, it might be desirable under the circumstances. That's what I'm guessing about the whole "barrier" thing so far, anyway.

I've been watching (in sections) a two-hour video (I added a link in case you want to torture yourself with this!) of a young British woman going through the plot of the book of Wicked in - clearly - significant detail, but then it's also a big fat book, which I'm well aware of because I've been reading the paperback edition. It's making me feel better that somebody else thinks this book is deeply weird. It is deeply weird; I don't know what state of mind I was in back when I first read it, that I didn't come away thinking that. Or maybe it's just that I read a lot of weird stuff!

I'm still not feeling too great. I stayed up all night (not unusual for me) and slept all day (which is). I missed the whole first half of the UT-Georgia game, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem to have been that eventful. UT doesn't seem to be able to handle Georgia too well; I thought that the first time they played this year. They're the only team we've played that's been that way. This is an excellent team but not quite a national-champion one, apparently. I'm going to be interested to see how this whole (expanded) college playoff thing goes. -- OK, now our guys are suddenly playing better. And... there will be overtime, looks like.

(Also, this game is on at least three different channels on my TV - ABC, ESPN, and some kind of weird ESPN feed with no announcers. I ended up watching ABC.)

It's 55 degrees here. Not exactly terribly cold, but we're not used to a lot of cold around here. Our apartment is kind of chilly, although obviously I didn't have any trouble sleeping.

OK, now overtime. Aaaand Georgia wins. Oh well, at least we forced the overtime. Coming into this year, nobody was sure how UT would handle the big bad SEC, and we certainly got through that pretty well.

When I was reading back through old entries a couple of days ago, I found my old quilt journal that I had mostly forgotten existed. It's mostly a mass of unfollowable links, but some of the links still work. Maybe I'll start posting some stuff, just for fun. Except for the couple of quilts on my couch and the bed, I don't usually even remember to look at all the quilts I've got stored away. My mother would not approve.

I've been over to LJ to gank some of my old icons from there, since I have more space, at least temporarily. (This one seems particularly appropriate.)

I don't know if it's the weather or what, but I'm feeling really crabby and I don't think trying to write a whole new entry is a good idea at the moment. So what's here will have to do and hopefully I'll be in better shape later. (The first part of this was written yesterday, you see!)

(I'm supposed to go shopping with my sister later today, but I'm wondering if that might be a bad idea if I'm still out of sorts. Hmm.)

Current Mood: crabby

(written earlier today)
So it's 4 in the afternoon and I'm at work and I just realized I completely forgot about writing a Holidailies entry when I got home last night. Never thought about it once. I remember being distracted by something-or-other - probably a game, but I barely remember. So I pulled a page out of my work notebook and I'll write an entry here, I guess, to post later.

I guess I can talk about work! I don't really know that I have talked about that here in a while, and while we're a small group at Holidailies so far, I assume that at least some of the people reading don't know/don't remember all my job history. My job is not terribly exciting, by any means, but I mostly enjoy it. I work at a university gym part-time, and I have for a good many years now - 12 or 13 years, maybe? I got laid off from this same university back in 2008 after the big hurricane hit here - that was Ike, and I think a few of y'all probably do remember that at least vaguely because it was kind of big drama at the time!. I tried picking up another career and that never really worked out, but while all that was playing out I took this little part-time job where my husband worked, and I'm still here and so is he. He's full-time and can retire at some point before too long. Actually, I can too, I worked full-time long enough to be retirement-eligible, but I don't know how much money I'll actually get. I'm not even thinking about that yet. Maybe when Rob retires.

Whoa, I just went down a rabbit hole (it's pretty slow here today) and started reading my Dreamwidth/Livejournal entries tagged "work" all the way to back before Ike - I certainly talked quite a lot about my old job! and some about this one, too. (And some about the other part-time job I had for a while in there, which I practically forget about now.)

All the hurricane stuff reminds me that in the car going to see Wicked the other day with my sister and her friend, we started comparing hurricane stories. We were talking about how it's easy to remember the big storms like Ike, for the most part, but it gets hard to remember all the little ones - they all tend to blend together. When you've lived on the Gulf Coast for years like all three of us have, there are a lot of the little ones (and a good many medium-size ones) - you go, now wait, which one was that? Beryl? Harvey? (Those are just the first two that popped into my head. Beryl was the most recent one around here. Harvey was the one that dropped a shitload of water on most of greater Houston and made a huge mess, back a few years ago. It wasn't that strong of a storm, but it sat over our heads and rained for days and days.) (I really remember Harvey pretty well because where we live has creeks all around and we couldn't get out to get to work for several days.)

(possible spoilers because I'm talking about the book vs. the movie - excluding the Broadway version only because I never actually saw it, although I know about the twist ending)

OK, Wicked is turning out to be my obsession of the moment. But anyway, now I've picked up the Wicked book again - I had re-read a good bit of it before I went to see the movie the first time, and I was already to the part where Elphaba is a wanna-be insurrectionist and is having an affair with Fiyero. (I like the actor who plays Fiyero in the movie, but aren't Winkies supposed to be painted warriors? Couldn't they have given him some tattoos or something, enough to at least suggest that?) Anyway, I got past the part where Elphaba is in Kiamo Ko* with his widow, some years later - honestly, I had completely forgotten the existence of that part. It's been quite a few years since I first read this book. But now she is back in Munchkinland with her father and Nessa, and Nessa is now the Eminent Thropp which I guess makes her effectively the Witch of the East, right? I really remembered much more about the first half of this book than the second, and I'm still not done, so whatever else I've forgotten, I'll have to talk about later, but really the spoilery thing that I'd forgotten that I wanted to talk about now was that Fiyero was dead at all. That had definitely gone right out of my mind. I remembered that Elphie was dead, in the Maguire book as in the Baum story - of course she's not Elphaba in the Baum story, but she's still the same character - but I didn't remember that Fiyero was too. So it's two characters that the musical had to resurrect, not just the one.

(And I confused things by bringing up Baum, because Fiyero doesn't exist there, although the Winkies do. The musical we're talking about is the one based on Maguire's book, not Baum's, though!)

* I had to check the wiki to see if I actually spelled that place-name right, but I did! (Also I just realized that I was looking at the "Wicked Wiki" which strikes me as funny. Although what else would you call it, at this point?)

So I have now been to see "Wicked" twice - last week with Rob and this afternoon with my sister and her best-friend-since-childhood (who I hadn't seen in years and years, so that part was fun too). I enjoyed the movie as much the second time as I did the first, 2 hr 40 min running time and all. I dunno, it just works. (Hollywood Reporter says it's starting to get Oscar buzz, and I think it ought to, really.) My companions both loved it, too. The theater was pretty full for a matinee show, and it was almost all women around our age group, although there were younger people there too. Apparently Monday is Senior Day at Cinemark, which I didn't know because I almost always go on weekends with Rob.

We did actually watch "The Wizard of Oz" on Disney+ (I think that's where it was) over the weekend. We hadn't seen it in ages. I've been watching Disney a good bit lately - we are watching the series version of "What We Do in the Shadows" (and we watched the movie too, but we had to pay a few dollars for that one) and I've watched "Deadpool and Wolverine" at least twice since it's been on D+ and there's an Assembled (making-of) episode for it, too. Plus a month or so ago I went on a Disney Sing-Along tear with Encanto and Little Mermaid and maybe something else that I've forgotten. So yeah, lotsa Disney, and none of it Star Wars, amazingly. (Isn't Andor season 2 supposed to finally be along in the spring?)

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