Catchy Name Needed

This started out to be a movie update, but I had so little to say about that that I went on to TV and books, too!

So far this year, Rob and I have seen these movies in a theater:

• Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice since January 1st, as well as once in December)
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021)
• Belfast               

The usual January movie "desert" was especially lean pickings this year - that's mostly why we went to see Spider-Man so many times! I think there were at least two weeks where we just gave up and stayed home, which is unusual for us! At least the only new-to-us one that we saw (Belfast, that is) was quite good.

Rob has also been to see these without me:

• Scream
• The Cursed

(He seemed to like The Cursed considerably more than Scream, from what I gathered.)

On TV, we enjoyed The Book of Boba Fett a lot, even if it was a bit uneven. I have also watched a whole lot of Marvel, as usual (Black Widow holds up to repeat viewings much better than I would have expected), and also repeat viewings of Encanto (resulting in a semi-permanent "Bruno" earworm). Rob still watches the news a lot but I have cut back because I find it so depressing. (And he watches a ton of horror movies, mostly when I'm asleep.)

(I've come to think one of the secrets of our going-on-35-year marriage is having schedules that vary enough that each of us can do our own thing while the other one is asleep!)

I've been reading the Cinder series (I guess it's officially The Lunar Chronicles, right?) and re-reading a bunch of other things because I've kind of been in a slump where I can't seem to finish much. I think I've finished a dozen books so far this year that were new to me, but they were mostly short, very easy reading. There's another dozen or more that I started but didn't get very far into - and only a couple that I officially called as DNF. The rest I'll hopefully come back to.

A couple of people have written entries about coffee for Holidailies in the last few days. I started to write one yesterday and it only got as far as how my parents both drank their coffee black before veering off to talk about the other things I drank over the years (large quantities of iced tea, Diet Coke, and Shiner Bock, at various stages of my life). So instead I'm still going to start with coffee but I'm not going to pretend that I'm going to write a whole entry about it. I do have a serious Starbucks habit these days, but it's a relatively recent thing and really has nothing to do with my parents and their (really revolting, as far as I'm concerned) black coffee habit. I only drink my coffee with large quantities of milk and artificial sweeteners, and I don't care how bad Equal is for me, so don't try to tell me. (I'm pretty sure that the Starbucks drive-through people at two different locations in two different towns know it's me just from my order.)

When I was trying to write about this yesterday, I also tried to look up "supertaster" because I've been told several times that I probably am one, but what I got from that search is that the only people who claim to know what a supertaster really is are people who are trying to sell you testing kits. It's definitely true that I'm sensitive to bitter foods, especially, and I basically can only tolerate them if they're highly watered-down in some way. But I'm also generally a picky eater in a number of other ways. I'm super-sensitive about texture - which is why I don't eat shellfish, because ugh, rubber - and I'm far too fond of the kind of traditional Texas diet that's heavy on grease and starch and meat. So I don't really know where all that gets you.


Let's see, what else - we're still watching Jessica Jones, and we're now maybe about halfway through the season. (I haven't looked to see how many episodes there actually are. Daredevil had 13 but I don't know if J.Jones is the same.) We did two episodes today and one yesterday, which is about as fast as we ever manage to go with shows like this. We don't have Netflix set up on our TV, for one thing - our regular (U-verse) television feed is still hooked up to my mom's old TV, which is a large and incredibly heavy old CRT. We keep saying we'll get a flat-screen when that one goes out, and it hasn't so far. It's got to be something like 13 or 14 years old because my mom died in early 2007, coming right up on 10 years ago, now, and I know she had it for a good while before that. So when we want to watch Netflix I have to pry myself off the computer so we can watch it there. It's all very out-of-date, I know, but it's worked for us so far.

I would like to cut the cord and not have regular TV at all, but Rob is a TV addict. One reason our crazy schedule works for us is that he goes to bed a lot earlier than I do (at which point I generally turn the TV off) and then he gets up much earlier than I do, of course, and he spends his mornings (the part when he's not working out, that is) watching old re-runs, which I can't stand. He loves Andy Griffith and Gunsmoke and all that kind of old stuff, which I can tolerate in small doses but generally got sick of years ago. (I got up to pee one morning this week and could hear Edith Bunker's voice from the bathroom - I didn't even know he'd been watching All in the Family.) I have my old Dell computer; I'd like to just buy another monitor like this one (20" Samsung, I see it's less than $100 on Amazon) and hook it up to that for TV-viewing. I don't think Rob would let me cut off the "real" TV, still, though.

Anyway, we both really like Jessica Jones a lot, and I was really happy when we got to this last episode where Luke reappears, which probably means I'll be ready for one of those Luke & Jessica icons by the time we finish. (Is there a cutesy name for Luke/Jessica? Lessica? surely not...)

(I think I'll post this and then go play Marvel Heroes some more. I really need to get Storm through chapter 4.)