Catchy Name Needed

I think I intended to talk about baseball tonight. Or about television - I think that was because I talked about movies last night and television seemed like the next progression or something. My brain is kind of pinging all over tonight, though, so I don't know what you're gonna get.

If you read the entry from yesterday, but didn't read the comment that was added late in the day, MissMeliss reminded me that the actual title of the book that I was talking about at the end of that entry (although it's not the original title) is normally And Then There Were None, not Ten Little Indians as I was thinking. I think I just had the name for that poem - as I think I must have learned it - stuck in my head. And I read the Wikipedia entry and she is also correct that there's no Poirot, but I won't say any more than that about the plot. It's summarized at that link if you want to know. I can't believe I forgot, actually, now that I have been reminded, but in my defense I think it was somewhere in the range of 30-40 years ago that I last read it.


What I was going to say about television, really, is that I don't seem to be any good at binge-watching. I can watch maybe two or three episodes of something and that's usually where I'm ready to stop. And then I don't come back to them for weeks or months or sometimes more. (I'm still on season two of Agents of SHIELD, for example.) I'm trying to finish Iron Fist, even though it's not all that good, just to be completist, I guess, so I can eventually watch The Defenders. But I also haven't finished season two of Daredevil so if I'm really being completist I need to go finish that also. (I was watching Daredevil with Rob, but I think he's lost interest and I should give up on that part.)

I had watched one episode of Victoria and one episode of The Crown, and I liked them both a lot, but I had never gotten back to watching either of those. But last month when Rob went to Ohio to see his brother, I went to see my aunt for the weekend - she's always telling me to come visit more and I hardly ever do - and she and I bonded over The Crown. She is apparently a big watcher of Masterpiece Theater, and so she had seen Victoria (season 1, I mean) but she somehow had not heard about The Crown even though she has Netflix and when we looked it popped up on her recommendations. So we watched the first episode - I'd already seen it but I figured I could use reminding anyway - and then went on and watched a couple more. And I did watch some more of Victoria since then and I need to go ahead and watch some more of both of those because they're really good.

I really don't watch much series TV, when it comes down to it. The Netflix Marvel shows are probably the most of anything I've watched in ages. (Rob & I both watched one season of Daredevil and then Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and part of season 2 of Daredevil before we played out on that.) We watch a lot of MSNBC and a lot of baseball for six months a year - or seven, this year. (I'll probably come back to that subject another day. It's all I can do not to start typing about it in all caps, shall we say. If you read my Twitter you've undoubtedly already seen that once or twice.) ...And so those two between them take up a lot of TV time. We both work the evening shift and when we get home we typically watch Rachel Maddow and then Rob goes for a walk and I usually start watching baseball, if it's that time of year. (Sometimes I watch the whole game and sometimes I don't. Since I generally know already whether they won or lost that plays into how much I watch, quite often - if it was a blowout and they lost, for example, I sometimes don't bother at all! But this year that didn't happen much.)

Anyway, Rob watches stuff that I don't - I stay up much later than he does, and he gets up much earlier and watches a lot of TV then, I think. (Our bedroom walls are thick so we don't hear each other doing this unless the TV is turned up very very loud.) Rob also watches The Walking Dead (and now Fear the Walking Dead also) on Sundays but I gave up on that after season 2 - it wasn't really the violence per se, it was the worrying about who was gonna die next - and so now I go in the bedroom and let him watch and come out for Talking Dead afterwards. I can deal with Talking Dead just fine, a nice nerdy show that I know what to do with.

guest appearance by my husband
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Rob loves this picture.

This is my quilt, which now has a binding - see the dark pink around the edge? Quilting 101: the traditional way to do a binding is to sew a doubled piece of fabric to the front, then pull it around to the back and whip it down by hand. And despite my avowed hatred for all forms of handwork, I have finished every quilt I have made this way. I don't know why. I guess just because I think it looks better that way. Anyway, in the picture it is just sewn to the front. It will be MUCH narrower than that when it's finished. Well under half an inch.

I missed the whole first half of the Texas-LSU game. I gather it was very close the whole way. I listened to most of the 2nd half on the radio (while I was sewing binding), then I went downstairs and watched the end with Mom and Art. I can't say I'm totally heartbroken. They were in the top 8, after all. Now I will have to root for LSU, I guess!

Columbine (who is such an LSU fan that he didn't know they played today, incidentally) sent me an invitation to play Guild Wars Factions this weekend, since he knew I have been interested in playing. They were having a preview-type thing. It was a good way to test it out, I think. Despite my subpar video card and my (horrors) incredibly slow dialup connection, it worked pretty well. He took me around tonight - in a virtual way - and gave me a tour. I have never played a "real" MMORPG before (Dofus and Kingdom of Loathing don't really count, I think) and it is quite a bit different. But I was starting to get the hang of it.

(I am retiring the Longhorn icon for the year. You shouldn't have to look at it for a while unless Texas happens to win the College World Series again - highly unlikely, I think. University of Texas Athletics has had a pretty good year, haven't they? but I don't think we can expect it to continue indefinitely.)

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 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!!

(Maybe I should put this behind a cut since this involves explosions and oral surgeons and other fun things and it's liable to get long.)

( Read more... )

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.

Yesterday I said to Rob, "We ought to go up to Fry's before Christmas and get you a couple of movies." Well, before I knew it, we were in the car heading up to Fry's. He did the same thing Mom did, he said "It doesn't look that busy" when we were driving up - the thing is, you come up to it from the back side. It was packed, again (although the checkout line wasn't as bad as it was on Saturday, thank goodness). He bought three, count 'em, three vampire movies - one was the old Nosferatu silent, and one was the Jack Palance version of Dracula, and Blacula (Me: "Are you sure you don't already have that?" But apparently not. He did have Nosferatu on VHS, but this one was only $4.99 so it's worth buying again for that kind of price. I bet the transfer isn't too great, though.) I ended up spending more than he did, I bought season 1 of "Dead Like Me" - my thinking was that at $35 it's cheaper than a couple of months of Netflix, which apparently is about the only other way I'd be able to see it. We've already established that the local video stores don't have it.

We went to Jason's Deli and had lunch, since we were already up that way, and then swung by the Redneck Wal-Mart on the way home (that's my pet name for the one in Santa Fe). We bought a couple of gift cards and ROTK EE, which was on sale for about $7 cheaper there than at Fry's, and first thing you knew we'd spent $98. Which means that it was an expensive afternoon, altogether. But oh well, it's Christmas. We really haven't gone altogether nuts on the gifts this year, so we should be ok. (We have an "extra" paycheck each next month, because of the way our bills fall due - it's all going to be going straight to Visa.)

We went & had dinner at Kelley's Country Cookin' (great name, ain't it?) - we used to eat there all the time but we don't eat out at the drop of a hat like we used to. Well, at least, Rob doesn't; I still do way too much eating out at lunch. I'm going to have to behave for the next two weeks because we're broke as all hell. We cheated tonight and charged it but we can't keep doing that. Anyway, I only have two work days this week so I have limited opportunities to eat out. I'm off Thursday and Friday, yay!

We went to Dillard's after dinner and got a gift certificate for my sister's birthday, since I didn't know what the heck else to get her. We also bought Rob a pair of Timberlands that were 50% off to wear to work. He's been wearing a pair of Earth Shoes that we bought at Target for a year or so and they were pitiful. I hadn't been paying attention or I would have made him get new ones sooner.

I might ought to start thinking seriously about packing a little bit. We're going to a four-day quilt retreat, and if you're going to sew, it involves taking a good bit of stuff. (Every year my mother's boyfriend says, "Why don't you just stay here and sew for four days? It'd be a lot less trouble.") And we have to get off fairly early Thursday morning, partly because my mother is a person who likes to have a schedule and it'll make her crazy if I'm very late, and also because we're going to have lunch with my sister on the way up. Her birthday is next week and we didn't think we'd have another chance before then.