Three Weeks in Review

[kate_nepveu]

A precious work-free night, and I'm dashing this off very quickly before bed, sweet bed. Though it went and got long on me, so I'll cut the whole thing.

Way back the day after Columbus day, I wasted two hours of my life for a five-minute court appearance. On the other hand, it was a gorgeous day for a drive down to Catskill, and I saw—well, it could've been a coyote, but my backbrain said "Wolf!" in no uncertain terms.

The day after that, I went and got hooked on the TV show Lost (it was the Locke episode). I didn't want to be—my first excursion into online fandom was Prodigy's boards on Twin Peaks back in the day (looking it up, I would have been 12 or 13, so that's my upper bound for letting kids go online)—I remember how well that turned out, and Lost is probably also setting up questions more interesting than the answers will turn out to be. But I couldn't help it. What with one thing and another, I've only seen one episode since then, but I've been reading cleolinda's recaps, which is sometimes just as good.

One thing was baseball; the next Wednesday was Game 7 between the Yankees and Sox. I spent the night switching between looking at the TV, attempting to do work, and chatting at Making Light. The attempting to do work wasn't very successful, and I ended up missing the last out, so next time I probably won't bother. Baseball was very bad for my sleep patterns over the last few weeks. I actually didn't watch the game where the Sox won the World Series; I even expected them to sweep, but I had hit the wall badly that day with fatigue and stress—I watched my other episode of Lost and went to bed. But yay, a World Series win.

(In other sports news, the Patriots bounced back from a bad loss last weekend, which snapped their win streak at 21, with a thorough and wacky 40-22 win over the Rams. After the 2001 season Super Bowl, rabid Rams fans probably wanted to break Vinatieri's kicking leg; after yesterday, they probably want to break his throwing arm too, as on a fake field goal he tossed the ball, quite competently, four yards to Troy Brown for his first touchdown pass ever. Words cannot adequately express how fun that was to watch. Brown also played defense yesterday too, because of widespread injuries; and another touchdown was caught by a linebacker, Vrabel [who also had a touchdown catch in last year's Super Bowl against the Panthers].)

The weekend after Columbus Day our street had a garage sale, which was rather interesting. My ideas of how much people are willing to pay for stuff underwent drastic revising throughout the day, but we got rid of all the furniture we wanted to, and some miscellaneous things too. Anyone want a 20" TV, slightly fuzzy at top and bottom but perfectly good for a basement or kids' room, or a barely-used dryer? After that I drove out to Williamstown, where Chad had been playing golf, and had dinner with a bunch of his college friends and spouses. The next day, we also met Chad's parents, grandmother, and one of his great-aunts for lunch about an hour away from here, so as you can imagine, I got absolutely no work done at all that weekend.

Work has been a bear, and that's all I want to say about it. If we win this case I'll be thrilled and point you all at the decision, though.

I posted about the election, so you all know how I felt last week. It helped a lot having papersky and zorinth overnight Wednesday; I picked them up at the train station right after I'd heard about the concession, and after lunch, we looked at cool things from Union's rare book collection (including a first edition Principia; a Bible of the next generation after Gutenberg, still with hand-painted capital letters; pages of an illuminated manuscript; and a check for forty pounds signed by various members of Elizabeth I's council, which was found in random papers in the library, and no-one knows where it came from). Then a quick tour of Union's campus, including the weirdly-proportioned Nott Memorial, and then just hanging out. It's always lovely to see them, of course, and as an added bonus, it was an excellent distraction for me.

I'm still going cool turkey for a while on politics, though.

In dog news, Emmy was kind of a pain when we put her to bed—"Wait! Someone's sleeping on the couch, and I can't go and stick my nose in their neck and play! I am very upset about this!"—but otherwise was fairly good with the company. A couple of weeks ago, she and I came back from our morning walk, and I shut the gate, left her off-leash to chase any squirrels that were foolishly hanging about the yard, and went inside. Just a minute later, I heard full-out barking; looking outside, I saw she was in the vicinity of the pond, meaning she hadn't treed anything, so I went outside to make sure she hadn't cornered a skunk or something. Well, no, fortunately; it was an uncollared grey cat, crouched on the rocks of the little pond and staring complacently at the dog as she barked furiously, ran around in circles, and generally went as nuts as possible without actually lunging directly at the cat (or getting close enough to me to be dragged inside). The cat eventually wandered off the rocks, still without arched back or hissing, and slowly made its way through the iron fence of the neighbors' yard, the perfect model of unconcern.

On a completely different note, we saw a couple of DVDs recently. Last weekend, it was The Italian Job from 1969, which I really hated, for reasons I stated over on Chad's blog. (I really want Ocean's Twelve now.)

This weekend, it was Shaolin Soccer. This was magnificently goofy, except when it wasn't—Asian movies, or maybe just kung-fu movies, seem to have a much more varied tone than I expect. Legend of Drunken Master is the most extreme example in my limited experience: on one hand, Jackie Chan weaving around pretending to fight while plastered, and on the other, incredibly painful scenes of family shame and anger. The painful bits aren't as bad here, though, and kung-fu masters playing soccer is really not to be missed. Don't watch the American theatrical release; they did annoying things like changing the wall signs to English and putting in a terrible soundtrack.

And now I'm going to bed. Yay, bed.

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

a fake field goal he tossed the ball, quite competently, four yards to Troy Brown for his first touchdown pass ever. Words cannot adequately express how fun that was to watch.

It was hilarious. Even funnier was only half-watching the game, and looking up to the whoops of the commentators as they realized it was happening. (Phil Simms was on later, and I remembered that the Giants used to have a second-string kicker who was also the second-string QB, who used sometimes to convert the extra point into two with throwing antics. But this one was new to me, and to him.)

The whole game was like watching a captain plug the leaks in his boat. Soon enough they'll all be playing Ironman football, every defensive player also an offensive one.