mellicious: Photo of a road framed by spring-green trees (spring trees)
2022-04-22 11:22 pm

April update

We're planning to go see The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which is not something I thought I would ever want to see. But... the reviews are good! And... Pedro Pascal! So yeah, we're going. (I have to work on Sunday, and Rob is off on Monday AND Tuesday - because Tuesday is my birthday - and so we're going Monday night.) (Rob has so much time off built up that he's been taking off nearly every Monday in order to burn some of it.)

We saw the Fantastic Beasts movie last week - it was pretty good, certainly much better than the last one, if not nearly as good as the first one, still. Before that we saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was a hoot. We both really loved it, in all its wacky weirdness.

I got my hair colored this week, it is part (or rather most) of my birthday present. I'm not sure how much I'm in love with it, honestly. It's very close to my original natural dark brown and I'm not sure it suits me as much as it used to. I think I may want to go lighter next time. But I haven't even washed it yet (I'll probably do that tomorrow) and it may lighten up a bit and I may decide I feel differently. We'll see. (Also note that I was the one that requested this color, so it's not the stylist's fault if I don't like it.)

I mentioned that I have to work Sunday, and the main way to work - in Galveston - is down the freeway (I-45) which is closed southbound all weekend. There's a huge freeway-widening project going on which has been going on for several years and is not supposed to be done for at least a couple more. It's driving us crazy. (I was driving both of us one day last year, and we almost got mowed down by a semi when the lane we were in suddenly vanished. Stuff like that.) Luckily there is an alternative route, which is the old pre-freeway road to Galveston, and I guess I'm going to have to go that way. (I hate going to Galveston on the weekends and our boss knows that, but somebody quit and somebody else is on vacation so I just have to suck up and do it this time!)

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

Movies seen in a theater in 2022
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
  • Everything Everywhere All At Once
  • The Batman (twice)
  • Cyrano
  • Belfast
  • Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice in 2022 plus once in 2021)
  • Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021)           
...and Rob also saw:
  • X (which apparently is a horror movie about people trying to make a porn movie, thus the title)
  • The Cursed
  • Scream


mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Mel - carnival)
2014-01-08 03:22 pm
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(no subject)

Hey, happy birthday, [livejournal.com profile] ursulahitler, wherever you are!

I miss my old LJ friends. (And I'm the guilty party here, because I'm one of the ones who went away, for the most part.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (spring - cherry)
2008-04-30 09:12 am
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Update, update, update:

Weekend update: My dad came to visit and we ended up riding the ferry. Not really what I would have picked to do on my birthday but it was pleasant enough (except for the hordes of love-bugs that swarmed us at one point). Also in the "not what I would have picked to do on my birthday" category was going to Alvin to pick up my quilts from the quilt show, which I had to do as soon as we got back from ferry-riding, and we were almost late, at that. (There's a reason I rarely visit my home-town - it's a long drive to nowhere.) (And the other half of the weekend was uneventful - I was so tired from running around all day Saturday that I didn't even stir from the house on Sunday.)

Birthday gift update: I don't think I ever put the picture of my birthday present over here, which I will now do. I'm not sure everybody will think this is worth the (rather substantial) amount of money that it cost, but oh well. It's a hundred-odd year old collectible - from back when "collectibles" were  things that were made in small quantities - from Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (celebrating the 60th year of her reign) in 1897. I also got a fairly substantial wad of cash, which is always nice, and a couple of gift cards that are actually very belated Christmas gifts! Hey, better late than never. (And both the plate and World of Warcraft were waiting for me at home yesterday.)Game update: Knowing me I will probably go on at some length about this, so I will do a cut for this too.
Whee... )
Linkage: Interesting editorial from David Brooks yesterday about the divide in the Democratic Party. I can't say that I disagree with his conclusions, particularly.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Dr Who - delete)
2008-04-29 01:19 pm
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WoW I r a N00b

Somebody who shall be nameless bought me World of Warcraft for my birthday. Since it hasn't arrived yet (or actually I think it may well be sitting in the office at my apartments), I have had to content myself with reading: there's a newbie area on the WoWWiki, for instance. WoW Rookie (which is part of a site called WoWInsider) is also interesting. Not that I didn't know this, but it keeps striking me anew every time I find more WoW sites: this game is SO much bigger than GW. Meaning, more players, more sites, more add-ons, just more of everything. It's kind of overwhelming.

(I suspect that I will be spending my evening installing patches. I hear tell there's quite a lot of them.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Firefly - brain)
2008-01-20 11:32 pm

Miscellaneous notes from the 3-day weekend

Rob's birthday is tomorrow, so we went out for a celebratory seafood dinner. (I had chicken, actually, but Rob had shrimp.) Rob got a new DVD player - it's to go with the 2nd TV in the bedroom - and several DVDs that he picked out. Also we spent the night at the Hilton in Houston for the race last weekend and we traditionally consider that part of his birthday present, because it's always right around the time of his birthday and it makes race day much more convenient for him.

When we bought the DVD player at Sam's yesterday I also bought a huge bag of mixed caladiums - 50 or 60 bulbs, I think. I got out on the back porch and stuck about half of them into various pots out there. They may not all come up but it doesn't really matter. I've had good luck with caladiums in the past, so hopefully a lot of them will come up, at least, and I will have plenty of color out there all summer. I have more pots on the front porch so I will probably plant a bunch more out there.


[livejournal.com profile] columbina may kill me - I finished another GuildWars campaign tonight. Nightfall, this time. I wouldn't have thought of trying it except that he and I were experimenting around with Gate of Madness earlier today. We didn't get close to finishing, so tonight when somebody in the guild started looking for people to do GoM with them, I went. I figured that even if this group didn't finish, it would be good to see how people handled the part that Col and I wiped on. And I did see that - and we finished the mission and then some of us went on and did the final mission too, Abaddon's Gate. As is the pattern with the other ones I've finished, the last mission was pretty easy. It's always the 2nd-to-last mission that's a booger - then the final mission is pretty much you battle the Big Bad and you're done. I was kind of laughing because Abaddon is this gigantic thing (although you only see his head and hands) and I was thinking that this has been my weekend for gigantic monsters. First there was Cloverfield, and then the Torchwood episode that was on last night involved another gigantic incarnation of Abaddon, coincidentally, stomping all over London - or Cardiff? I dunno - like Godzilla. They're everywhere!

(Col, I will tell you more about GoM later. I suspect that it is doable with heroes & henches, except that I'm not so sure about how to handle Shiro, in that case.)


This is pretty accurate, I think.
meme )
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Default)
2007-01-08 12:16 pm

1-20-09 and other birthday gifts

I ordered Rob one of those bumper stickers that says "1-20-09" (the last day Bush will be president) for his birthday, because we saw one a couple of weeks ago and he couldn't stop talking about it. I bet we end up putting it on my car instead of his, though, so as not to mar the pristine-ness of the Corolla. We'll see.

I also ordered him a pair of pants from Land's End, because he hasn't had any new ones lately and it's almost impossible to find his size in a store, especially in the chino-type pants like he wears to work. (He's six feet tall & very skinny - the only pants that fit him in most retail stores are the ones intended for teenagers.) The only other thing I've bought for him is the movie The Descent, which I found at Sam's. I know he wants that one. He had told me a couple of more obscure movies he wants that I'll probably order from Amazon. The other piece of his birthday present is traditionally the night we spend at the downtown Hilton for the marathon - that will be this Saturday. (Usually his birthday falls closer to marathon weekend than it did this year - the marathon is next Sunday and his birthday isn't until the Sunday after, which is good because my mother usually likes to have some sort of birthday celebration for him and we won't have to try to deal with that on marathon weekend.) Rob is taking his comp day from the Day of Mourning last week - because he worked the whole day that day - on the Tuesday after the marathon, and since Monday is MLK day he'll have two whole days to recover. Which is good. He'll be all of 44 years old soon and doesn't seem to recover quite as fast as he used to.

We didn't do much this weekend, except go see "The Pursuit of Happyness" - which was pretty good. I'm not usually too big on, you know, heartwarming single-father dramas in the normal way of things, but this one was not overblown and Will Smith was likeable but not quite as cocky as usual and, I don't know, it all worked. (I am just not a good movie reviewer. It's hard for me to put a finger on what makes a movie good or bad.)

I was going to meet my mom and Art at the house yesterday, but he called me to say that she couldn't make it up the two steps to get inside. Her right leg is just practically dead - she can't lift it at all. We are trying to get her back up to Houston to see the oncologist and get another chemo treatment, since the last one did seem to help. The two hospitals do not seem to coordinate their services very well, though. Something about Medicare coverage that I don't quite understand, apparently. I wish we had a Medicare expert to run interference on this, I really do. It's ridiculous.

I almost forgot to say that we are in an orgy of possession-purging, brought on by having to move bookshelves and stuff on Friday and again today, since they are coming back to finish the sheetrock. We are working on piles of stuff for Goodwill and another one for library donations - my god, do we have a lot of books. I found a whole box of books that I thought was Rob's old books and turned out to be mine. It had The Last Unicorn in it, as well as some old Larry Niven and some other stuff I thought had gone in some past round of book-purging. I started re-reading The Last Unicorn and apparently I haven't read it in so long that I can't remember what happens at all. I think, "Oh, yeah, I remember this," as I read, but so far I have completely failed to remember where things go from there. Makes it interesting.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter snowflake)
2006-01-23 02:06 pm

(no subject)

We spent most of yesterday celebrating Rob's birthday, even though his birthday was actually Saturday. My mother had decreed that I would just go over to her house Saturday like normal, and we would celebrate on Sunday, and since she's sickly she mostly gets her way about these things. Rob didn't seem to care anyway - he went off to the gun range to try out his new Winchester 1894. Mom and I went out to lunch at a Mexican restaurant, which seemed like old times, a little bit. It's the first time she & I had been out to lunch since before her biopsy at the beginning of December.

Yesterday we met my mother and Art at Casey's, which is a nice-but-not-ridiculously-expensive seafood restaurant (actually it's ajacent to and owned by the same family as the very-much-ridiculously-expensive one both of us used to work at - it's where we met) and they bought us lunch. (I had chicken. Rob had a gigantic grilled seafood platter.) So that was nice. Then after they had left, we decided to go up to Fry's and let Rob pick out a couple of movies for his birthday. Technically, staying in the fancy hotel in Houston last week was his main birthday present. But I usually get him some more stuff anyway. I had bought a couple of little things but I felt like he was getting shafted a little bit. So, movies. We ended up spending a hundred freaking dollars, of course. That place is a black pit that sucks in your money! He got several movies, though, and the new version of Combat Flight Simulator, which he had never gotten, and I got a couple of small things myself, so I guess that wasn't bad for all of that.

What I got was a quilting magazine and year-before-last's copy of The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas (hey, it was on sale), because somewhere in my head I want to go back to Vegas again. I've been sort of halfway keeping an eye out for cheap tickets to Vegas for a while now. Really, if we go, it ought to be later this year rather than earlier, though.

Anyway, I had a Foley's gift card (from my dad) that I never had used, so while we were up that way we went and I bought a couple of pairs of shoes (a pair of black Naturalizer loafers and a pair of clunky brown Clark's). I needed them.

I spent most of the rest of the day playing Dofus - and quizzing [livejournal.com profile] columbina about what the heck I was supposed to be doing, because I was sort of lost. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it a little bit, though. I also seem to be hooked. I stayed up until midnight collecting arachnee legs for my next quest. Damn these addicting games!!
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Up)
2005-04-24 07:36 pm

(no subject)

Birthday lunch with assorted parents, step-parents, etc., today. I ate so much chicken-fried steak it nearly made me sick, and then they brought out cheesecake. Jesus. But I got almost enough money to pay for my new camera, altogether.

I worked on the patio for a little bit before dark. I finally planted my caladium bulbs, and I repotted my evolvulus (is that how you spell it?) - which is good, because it turned out to be terribly root-bound.

Anybody else watching this Locusts movie on CBS? It's sort of an all-star cast of has-beens - Lucy Lawless, John Heard and Mike Farrell. To be fair, they're all has-beens that I like, but still, it's sort of amusing. (SPOILER, in case anybody cares: John Heard was the Misguided Scientist who started the whole thing, but eventually died a noble death trying to right his wrong. What a shock. And they defeated the locusts using sort of a giant bug-zapper, which was funny.)

President Bush is coming to UTMB. Woo hoo. (Like they'd let me anywhere near that if I wanted to be.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (totoro dancing)
2005-01-25 09:30 pm
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(no subject)

I haven't posted a real entry in a couple of weeks, and I start out with the cheery news that I am vaguely depressed. (I thought yesterday was supposed to be the most depressing day of the year!) I don't know, my allergies are bothering me, maybe that's why I'm not feeling well. I had almost an entire year free of major allergy/sinusitis problems, and now that they're back, it worries me. They're still not back in any major way, really, but moreso than they've been in all this time. You know, I always wondered if the depression and the chronic sinusitis were related - they've seemed to coincide in the past - and this seems like additional evidence that they might be.

In happier news, my mother is continuing to recover well. It's taking her a while, but she's getting there. She had an appointment with the rad onc people today, so she may be starting her radiation right away - in fact, it's possible that she started today. I know she's dreading it, because she had a bad time with it before, so she's ready to get it over with. There's no reason to think that this time will be as bad as the last time, though. Completely different kind of cancer.

We went over there Sunday and she and Art took us out to Saltgrass Steakhouse for Rob's birthday, and then she and I went to SteinMart. She needed to buy presents for some birthdays that are coming up. I always enjoy going to SteinMart, anyway, even though I rarely find any clothes I like there. (Their large-size clothes always seem designed for somebody who lives a completely different life than I do.) Then we went back to Mom's house to eat birthday cake, and then Rob dragged me back to Oshman's, which is right next to SteinMart, to spend a gift certificate he'd been hanging onto since Christmas. He could have just come with us in the first place, but that would be too easy. Then we went to Fry's and spent all of Rob's birthday money and a little more - he bought one of those MST3K sets that have about 4 movies on them, and then we bought a new VCR, since ours has apparently died. I thought VCRs had gotten cheap, but no dice; they cost more than some of the DVD players - I guess maybe because they're selling fewer of them these days?
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter berries)
2005-01-21 10:52 pm
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Happy birthday, Rob!

Rob woke up this morning and said, "I'm 42," in an extremely gloomy voice. I think his birthday might have gone uphill from there, though.