Posts Tagged ‘having to do with television’

Babbling about the weekend

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Well, we finished watching Tin Man over the weekend.  More terrible writing and cliché situations and things where they just really should have thought it through more thoroughly.  The underground place where criminals and other low-life went to live seemed a lot like a Chinatown.  The shape-shifting turncoat redeemed himself, but the only other dark-skinned character remained the evil witch’s faithful servant to the end.

Justin and I agreed that they should take the idea and give it to Joss Whedon.  Half of the characters, including the most lovable and innocent ones, would die in the end.  Parts of it would be absolutely terrifying.  And it would turn out so much better in the end that we’d thank him for it.

We’ve also started watching Battlestar Glactica.  Justin found the 2-part mini-series that brings you from the older series up to the new one.  I don’t feel like looking up the details on that one, but I’m sure you’re more than able to find that information if you need it.  Wikipedia:  The Source of All Knowledge.

Anyway, we watched the first half of the mini-series and I really enjoyed it.  It’s gritty sci-fi, like Firefly, but without the witty, light-hearted banter.  It’s tragic, like . . . lots and lots of stories.  War of the Worlds, Independence Day, I am Legend, Titan A.E. *Grin*  It’s humanity fighting for her life against something she created.  It’s television that doesn’t pull punches.  And it’s fascinating—an enemy that fights against the tools of war, for the total annihilation of life, and can hide itself perfectly within the population.  I’m really looking forward to seeing where this trip goes.  I really have no idea.

I really had a lovely weekend.  I got home Friday afternoon and poked around the house for a while.  Justin was working from home since no one else from his office was going to be actually in the office that day.  I sat and worked on an Excel file that should help us create a functional budget, as well as show clearly where we are with our debt and our savings situations.  I’m trying to have it all set out clearly so we can really start pushing down on the debt and packing away money for travel and such.  It’s been a mess so far, and I’m trying to make it work better.

Saturday we cleaned house.  I mentioned needing to dust, right?  I dusted for 4 hours.  Along with washing windows and tidying and getting the house looking great.  Justin cleaned the bathrooms until they sparkled and you could eat off any surface, if you didn’t mind the addition of ammonia to your meal.  He vacuumed, I dusted.  He put in a fold-out drawer at the kitchen sink.  I dusted.  This house hasn’t been this clean in a long, long time.

So on Sunday, we rested.  I worked on sewing projects.  I have several pants and a skirt that needed mending, and a couple pillows.  I sat watching NCIS while hemming the legs of a pair of pants, pinning the seams back into my skirt, and sewing the stuffing back into the pillows.  And then I sat for many hours pulling out the stitching along the hem of another pair of pants.  They’re made of this really flowing, slippery fabric and each leg is about 3 feet around.  They’re very flouncy.  The hem came out once before and I did a really bad job of sewing it back up.  The fabric gathered and one leg ended up shorter than the other and it just wasn’t good.  I’m hoping that by undoing all my previous work, I’ll be able to get it to work out much better.  I worked on pulling stitches for hours.  I finally went to bed with about six inches left to go—about 30 minutes of work.  I plan to finish unstitching tonight, iron in a new hem (the pants were too long in the first place) and manage to get a neat, clean seam started.  I might do it all by hand, since it’s such a difficult fabric.  But I’ll find out once I get started whether that’s going to actually work better or not.

It’s going to be another long week.  I’ve been working on a complicated project at work.  A project where again and again I find myself completely out of my depth.  I don’t have enough training to understand all of this yet.  Thankfully there hasn’t been much a time crunch, but if it’s not finished by the end of today, things will get dicey.

We had another meeting this morning about the RIF (Reduction in Force) situation.  There’s still no definite information on what’s going to happen with us here upstairs.  So far as I know, the people downstairs in production are still going to be on furlough for several weeks in the middle of summer.  Across the whole company, from what I understand, we’re losing 1,200 employees.  Each department is looking at a 10-15% reduction.  I’m really not sure how that works out, other than losing 2 or 3 people from my department.  Possibly.  We’re still standing on the gallows, waiting.  Just waiting.

I’ll come back and rant about this sometime.  Not about the RIF, exactly, but about the reason for it.  But not today.

I just saw that the beautiful Amy, the fantastic woman who greatly improved my older brother’s life by agreeing to marry him, linked to my post about organizing (Organizing categories and the Landing Strip).  Thank you, Amy!  I appreciate the promo!

For anyone new and reading this because of the link, I’m trying to start a small professional organizing business.  It’s been very slow-going.  But hopefully things will start to pick up soon.  More news on that as it happens.  But now and then I’m going to try to post about things that I’ve organized around my own home and ideas I have about that whole thing.  Feel free to drop me comments or emails with questions and thoughts about that.  Most of the time, obviously, this blog is just about me rambling on and on about whatever’s going on in my world.

Okay!  I’m pretty much out of time on my lunch and I’ve got to get this up and posted.  I hope you’re all having a fantastic day!  I’m still sitting here waiting for the rain that was supposed to start falling on Thursday.  (Who stole my rain?!  Give it!)  But hopefully the weather over all your heads is beautiful today.

Cheers!

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Posted in Living! |

Babbling about television stuff

Friday, March 13th, 2009

[I wrote this post yesterday off ‘n’ on during the day.  And then I forgot to email it home so I could post it.  So, it’s a day off and not all that informative, but hey!  It’s a post.  More posting to come, I promise.]

I’ve been dealing with some blockage.  Of the brain kind.  Of the writing kind.  Things have been happening, thoughts like “I should write about this” have been happening, but I haven’t been able to sit down and write about them.  Haven’t been able to get my brain in a place where that sounds like a good idea.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the weather.  This is the time of year when I absolutely love the south.  It was in the 80s yesterday.  Today will be cooler, upper 60s, low 70s.  We’re expecting rain.  And rain for the next several days.  Rain will be wonderful—make all the grass and flowers and trees give up this dismal winter brown and get some green on.  Right now, where I grew up, it’s -2˚ F.  Where my sister lives, it’s -5˚ F.  At my house, it’s 64˚ F.

I love the south.

For a few more weeks anyway.  Soon it’s going to be over 100˚ F and I’ll be sweating as soon as I get out of any air conditioned building.  And freezing anytime I’m inside those buildings because southerners are crazy about their air conditioning.  And so is my husband.

The pine trees are dropping their magical fairy dust all over the place right now.  We opened the windows of the house over the weekend to air out the place from being shut up for so long.  When I went to bed, I noticed a fine layer of dust on top of my book.  Yellow dust.  Layered over everything.  Guess how much dusting I’m doing this coming weekend?  Lots!  And this is just the pine trees so far.  Just wait until the flowers are actually blooming.  Fun times, fun times . . . .

I should share the work situation and Justin’s health situation, but I don’t want to talk about it.  Not here.  Not yet.  It leaves me with a fairly limited conversation pool, unfortunately, because those two items take up a lot of the brain-use time that isn’t thinking about the weather.

I watch TV, though, so I can talk about that.  Justin and I rented Tin Man from Netflix.  It’s a 3-part mini-series based on the Wizard of Oz.  Very loosely.  But it’s really fun!  Okay, so the writing is really bad sometimes and doesn’t make a lot of sense.  And for some reason, I keep totally missing information and Justin has to explain what the heck is going on.  I think his description of the show was “The Wizard of Oz done in steampunk while on acid.”  It’s a good description.  We’re waiting for the second disk now with the 3rd part of the series.  I’m interested to see how they’re going to wrap it all up, whether they’re going to avoid the really cliché ending that I could see happening.

I’ve enjoyed watching Zooey Deschanel and Alan Cumming.  I like seeing Zooey in things (even if Justin does find her extremely attractive).  She’s a fun actress and since we watch her sister (Emily) on Bones so often, I have fun seeing how these sisters are progressing in their careers.  And Alan (who played Nightcrawler in the X-Men movies) is playing a fun character that I’m really enjoying.

Bu the thing that irritates me a lot since Justin pointed it out to me?  The turn-coat character is a shape-shifter who turns into a dog.  And he is absolutely the only dark-skinned character in the whole show.  Everybody else?  Pale, pale white.  This guy?  Dark brown African American man.  Seriously, now!  Didn’t anybody think about that just a tiny little bit?!

I’m also still watching NCIS.  I’m about 1/3 of the way through season 2.  It’s going to take me a good long while to watch all these but I’m enjoying it.  I’m a little confused about the episode I watched last night (mostly “Why?” and “Why those people in particular?”) but still lots and lots of fun stuff.

And since I’m always happy to see Firefly people employed, Justin and I watched the first episode of Castle on Monday (I’m pretty sure it was Monday).  Nathan Fillion plays Richard Castle, a best-selling mystery novelist with charisma flowing off him like stink off a skunk.  Pat, one of our friends, called it “The anti-Bones.”  Best-selling author works with law-enforcement to solve crimes.  Yea!  It’s also been explained as being pretty much the same old story as told so many other times before, only better.

It really is a whole lot of fun.  Fillion is so much fun to watch no matter who he’s playing.  And in this show, he’s a frat-boy author with great insight into people and a whole lot of charisma.  He’s cocky and impulsive, but cares a lot for his daughter and mother.  And it drove him crazy until he worked out the problems with the murder in the first episode (murders based around scenes from his books).

We really enjoyed it and we’re recommending it to pretty much everybody.  It’s on at the crazy time of 10:00 EST, but it means we’ll watch it curled up in our pajamas before climbing into bed.  Or we’ll just record it, like everything else.

Anyway.  You should watch it.  It’s fun.

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Posted in Living! |

TV makes me cry.

Monday, February 16th, 2009

NCIS, the show that I love but only watch upstairs in the bedroom, which means I never actually save it on the DVR thing so am only able to watch it when I find it playing on real-time TV, is wonderful, but it makes me cry.  I’ve been watching it for a while and, because I only watch it when I find it, totally out of sequence and totally at random.  And I’ve seen two characters get killed.  And both times, even though I really haven’t spent a lot of time with these characters and haven’t seen their character developed in any sort of rational sequence and so really don’t know them very well at all, have made me absolutely cry like a little baby.  Quietly so I can watch the show, but with snot dripping down my face because, dang it!  They made Abby cry again!  And me!  And McGee is all sweet and Tony’s all angry and Gibbs is fierce and gonna avenge them.  And I just want to sit with Abby and her farting stuffed hippopotamus and cry!

This is how I know it’s a good show.

When Justin and I were working our way through Buffy, we hit the episode called “The Body” and if you’re at all familiar with the show you know why I’m bringing it up.  I bawled and bawled after that.  Like, sat on the couch shaking while Justin whispered comforting things in my ear bawled my eyes out.  And Whedon did that to me so many times–when Amber died, when Oz left, when Fred died, when Wash died in the movie, again and again and again.

Good TV.  But rough on me.

I have no idea where I’m headed with this.  Just that I got done with NCIS a few minutes ago and, after sniffing a few times, giving Justin a kiss and a hug, and poking at my computer a few minutes, I wanted to write about it.

It’s been an unpleasant couple of days.  We’ve been sick.  Not anything diagnosable or something we can medicate and just be done and over with, but this awful, lingering nastiness that just won’t shake.  Justin’s eye infection came back with a vengeance and he’s seen both our ophthalmologist and his internist about it.  They’re running more blood work to see what they can see, but until then, he’s putting in eye drops and wearing an eye patch when light gets too painful.  And taking Advil to deal with the headaches.  I’m eating cough drops and drinking tea trying to keep my voice and pull the cold out of my chest, so very tired most of the time.  I don’t want to talk about Valentine’s Day.

Still, things aren’t too bad.  Our insurance is fantastic.  One of the prescriptions we picked up on Saturday didn’t even have a copay.  We’re both still able to work.  Justin can even work from home, which is great.  My birthday is in a couple days and I’m completely avoiding the normal freak-out when I get all depressed and think that no one’s going to remember or care.  Yeah, I do that.  I’m pretty sure I mentioned it last year.

I took out my navel ring tonight.  I looked at it while in the ladies room at work earlier today and realized that it was bleeding.  Not from the piercing itself, which isn’t uncommon for me, but from a split in the skin behind the piercing.  It’s migrated forward leaving a funky little trail behind it and that trail had split and was bleeding.  It never really healed, though.  The piercing itself has always oozed and been, frankly, a little gross.  Kinda smelly.  I showed it to Justin and we agreed that it was probably best if I just took it out.  Let it heal up.  Get it done again later on if I want.

So I took it out.  Stiiiiiiinky!  Wow, I didn’t expect it to smell like that.  And then I soaked it little, peroxized it a little, put Neosporin on it.  It feels really weird.  I’ve had that little metal rod in my belly for how long now?  Just over three year I think.  Now it’s this hard little knot with little purple holes in my flabby, flabby belly.  Too much?  Sorry about that.  But I miss it a little!  It’s a good call, pulling it out and letting it heal up.  But it’s a little sad.  Gillian, Sara, and I all got those done and mine was the last one to come out.  I can’t remember if Sara got her’s done again or not.

Anyway.  I’m just in a weird mood, tired, not feeling great.  And it’s about 10:00 so I’m going to go take my vitamin and curl up in bed with my book for a while before falling asleep with the light on.  I’ll think of 5 Grace things in the morning.  And I’ll catch up with ya’ll again in the sunshine of tomorrow.

Good night!

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Posted in Living! |