It's so cold even I think this sucks...

Although we got to do the throw a pan of boiling water up in the air and watch it all freeze in a cloud of snow before it even hits the ground thing. Twice, because it was so cool to watch the first time.

I'm reminded of all the stories I've read of polar explorers freezing to death. You don't decide to stop trying to live, you stopping making the decision every second to keep going. It's about that cold out there now. Lucky for me I have a nice warm house to go back into.

On a different note, I have two end of month wrap-up posts I'm working on. I'll still be talking about what I've read (not much this month, my return from zombieland was not as complete as I had initially thought. Getting sick will do that to you. My ears still just ache all day long; very annoying). A day or two later I'll post all the movies I watched in January. Well, watched for the first time; I have some things I re-watch a lot. January was a bumper month for movies; we got a lot of gift cards and cash for Christmas which we used to buy a monster stack of movies, and I still had a ton of Hindi movies I bought from Eros just after Thanksgiving and never had a chance to watch until after New Year's. So that first movie post will be a doozy. But if there is anything I like to talk about more than books it's movies, and I've seen some cool things.

Updating this and that

If you're reading this from Myspace, perhaps you've already noticed my spiffy new layout with the red and the snowflakes. (I really like it, actually. I've been viewing my profile all day just to admire it.) The website is still a mountain of ugly. The text is very nice, I think; I wrote it myself. Then again I put the website together myself as well. It's abundantly clear I'm more of a text person than a visual person. As soon as I stumble across some extra cash, I'm totally paying someone to pretty up that website.

The other item of business was the picture of me that's on everything. You know, the one my mother hates. I have no good pictures of me anywhere, and having my husband take another one will probably net the same results as last time. So, having no other recourse, I did the camera-at-arm's-length thing. Not a particularly fun afternoon. I hate getting my picture taken; it seems I hate it more when I'm also the one taking the picture. I'm not sure if I got anything that's an improvement. So I'm putting it up to a vote.

Here is the best one from outside:

Which I kind of like. It's like I'm thinking about how incredibly tall I am, I can squash you like a bug. (Or something. It's been a long day.)

Here's the best one I tried taking inside:

Mostly I just look really pale.

I do have a good one that keeps turning up when I scrolling through My Pictures picking shots. Sadly it's not me, it's Malaika Arora Khan, just something left over from the desktop wallpaper wars (that when on so much longer than Gary Coleman and J. Lo, believe me). I probably can't use it, I suppose:

Suit up!

So, I don't watch much television. Avatar: The Last Airbender when it's a new episode. Good Eats, Mythbusters, or Ninja Warrior are all good for the occasional viewing when we're not doing something else in the rare evenings I don't work. The last few minutes of a Timberwolves game (I gave up on watching the whole game after Yao Ming and the Rockets stomped us so bad, it was like the teachers vs. students rugby match in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life).

I do, however, like TV on DVD. Because making time in my schedule for watching something on a weekly basis is too much of a commitment, but all the episodes at once I can fit in as I find the time (often not even whole episodes at a time; it becomes a bit like how I read a novel - especially when I watch DVDs on my laptop, carrying it from room to room as I do chores. Then it becomes a lot like how I read a novel).

Hence Lost. Although I liked Season Three so much I'm seriously considering recording and watching Season Four episodes as they play. They said they would play them all in order without breaks or reruns. More importantly, my husband got hooked on the show, and it's easier to find time to watch things that he will watch with me. For those familiar with the show: feel my pain. He started watching at about disc 2 of the third season, with the only real intent to inform me at every opportunity that Sayid was not as hot as I kept saying he was (this from the guy with a total man-crush on Mohinder from Heroes). Then he started paying attention to things and asking questions. A lot of questions. This is not a show that welcomes jumping in at the middle. Luckily there's the pause button to allow me to explain all the back story in loving detail.

Another show I've watched on DVD but never actually on TV is How I Met Your Mother, which actually reminds me a lot of Lost. They're like drama and sit-com siblings. They both have a story that is telling up to a definite end point (it's just all the middle bits the writers are making up as they go along), which lends itself to a certain level of structure not often found on TV. How I Met Your Mother also has a wonderful way with nonlinear storytelling (like the episode where Ted wakes up next to a strange woman and with a pineapple on his nightstand and spends the episode trying to reconstruct what happened after he drank all of those shots that led up to that waking up scene).

But honestly, for me the show is all about Barney, and the slow revealing of fresh aspects of his character. Lots of shows have had the character who embodies the Id, and they often have a moment or two where it's revealed that they have a deeper side - they secretly do something sentimental or compassionate, or they suddenly speak with great wisdom for no apparent reason then go back to being the Id. And I've already given away why I generally dislike these characters: "no apparent reason", other than the quick laugh. The thing about Barney is that everything is true to his character in a terrifically complex way.

Of course this is a sit-com, not Dostoevsky; we're grading on a curve here. But I do like Barney. The episode where he gets on The Price is Right is my favorite: funny and sweet and very Barney.

On another note, the boy was indeed sick and not faking. We all learned this when he shared it with the rest of us. Much apoligizing for doubting him ensued, along with the general lying around and groaning from the muscle and joint aches. We're all better now, but what a start to the new year. Plus, our oven broke. Sometime in November, actually; I've spent the last month or so convinced I was somehow messing up every third or fourth meal by not setting the oven correctly. I do dumb things when I'm living in a fog; it's not inconceivable that I could bump the temperature knob or shut it off completely and not remembering doing it. But I really should give myself more credit; no one makes the same stupid mistake over and over for a month. We needed a new stove anyway, the one we have now was the best we could afford when the last one broke, by which I mean it was the cheapest stove Sears offered. On Thursday Best Buy will be coming by with my brand new, just-a-shade-higher-than-the-median-price stove. Very exciting. I might be able to make a pepper tart that cooks on time with an oven that holds its temperature properly.

And this is where any thought of this blog having a unifying theme go out the window: a collection of pics of our cats, taking turns sitting on the box. It's meant to discourage clawing up our door frames, and with a fresh sprinkling of catnip they really do shred the thing, but mostly they just sit on it. Which apparently is very exciting; we always know where at least one of our cats are:

(Valentine)

(Molly)

(Spike)

Back from the Zombieland that was the month of December

Someday I'll have a job like my husband's, where they strongly urge you to take the week between Christmas and New Years off since no one else is working anyway there is no reason for you to be there. In the meantime, I'm still in the world of health care where the only day I had off was Christmas itself (because that would mean paying double time), a day spent in a stupor watching my boys assemble some freaking huge Lego sets. Like a cargo ship and a pier with a crane to load 'er up.

So I'm still in the recovery phase. On the bright side, the health care holiday work load is still nothing compared to retail holiday work load.

I'm not even remotely going to try to catch up on two months' worth of news and books and such. I even abandoned my Heinlein marathon. Two words: Glory Road. Three more words: Pissed me off. It's one thing for a guy to threaten a woman with a spanking if she doesn't stop try to tell him very important information. It's quite another thing for this woman, the ruler of 20 galaxies or some such, to actually shut up and go all meek and "of course you're right". The fact that she had to have her ovaries harvested to stop her monthly cycle before she could become ruler, because clearly she would go nuts 3 days out of the month and be totally unprofressional, you know like all women do, am I right guys? That really pissed me off. But the part where one Heinlein woman tells another that a man who wants to sleep with you is paying you the most sincere compliment a man can pay a woman? That was just funny. So I took a break and read His Dark Materials instead, just so I could stop putting my hands over my ears and humming real loud to avoid spoilers, virtually impossible when there's a theatrical release involved. (I would highly recommend those books, except I'm pretty sure I'm the last person to read them, so that would be redundant).

We did finally figure out how many frogs we had in our tank when Spike shattered it on the floor 2 a.m. Christmas morning. The instructions that came with the tadpoles (you know, the ones that assured us we'd be lucky to see one make it all the way to adulthood) recommended not putting them in a tank with a filter, so they'd been living in a slimy green and orange cloud for weeks. People who came over were invited to nudge the rock they hid under and guess how many little critters were stirring up the murk.

As it turns out, we have six, five little ones and one big fella. (And we went to Petsmart and dropped a chunk of Christmas bonus on a tank with a filter and a pagoda, because clearly nothing is going to kill these frogs, not even a cat who took hours to come out of the laundry room ceiling, he was so freaked out by what he had done). I named the big guy Mr. Eko. Not Mr. Echo from the Young Ones bit, but Mr. Eko:

'Cause all I did in December was work and watch TV (that's pretty much my definition of zombie), namely Lost Season 3, which I got for my birthday.

Today was officially back to school day, but the elder fell mysteriously ill. Quin says it was because I laughed and showed them all this blog entry, but that couldn't possibly be it, could it? So he spent all day in bed and I just schooled the one. (Quin called it our soft opening, because after we were done with Lost we watched Ocean's 13). It was actually kind of nice; Oliver is transitioning from first grade to math to second grade and we decided to celebrate by having him start formally learning spelling. Which might not sound like a celebration to you, but then you don't desperately want to write but are self-conscious about your lack of spelling skills, do you?

Dinner beckons. But I promise to get back to an every-couple-days kind of schedule. And who knows? Maybe I'll even write some fiction...