| Yes, it IS Saturday night again. |
[Jul. 5th, 2008|09:01 pm] |
And I am posting on here again. But this is no reason for any of us to have the sads! You know why? I'll tell you why.
I have a new Terry Pratchett to read. This is major cause for excitement, because I have pretty much memorised every other book he's ever written (I used to read Pratchett when I was depressed about my love life, as they're funny and there's rarely any romance in them, and I must have been pretty frigging depressed because I've now memorised 30 books and have to find another author to read when I'm depressed about my love life). A new one is justifiable cause for squealing. I've been good and waited all year for it to come out in paperback, but couldn't wait any longer for the hardcover editions to be remaindered for $12.95. $21 is better than $40, right?
I also have dark chocolate M and M's. Because no way do you read an awesome new book that you've been watching all year without good junk food too. Come ON.
Tomorrow, I have nothing more to do than get up, get dressed, and go and visit the Picasso exhibition. (Picasso! And his collection! First time seen out of Europe! Only an hour away from ME! I've been waiting for the first crowds to disperse a bit so that I'll be able to see properly without kicking the tall people in front of me in the back of the knee. I will take my sketch book and my camera and go and be an art nerd with no-one around to give me the hurry along because they're bored! Whee!!
The rest of my week is going to feature going to see Prince Caspian and going to get Yum Cha and going on a social outing with a work friend and maybe catching up with the lovely Dragort if she has recovered sufficently from her illness to put down her bon bons and arise from her fainting couch. And perhaps some more punctuation, or something. |
|
|
| Mendocino/Hendy Woods |
[Jul. 3rd, 2008|10:43 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | silence | ] |
Last weekend Susan and I went to Mendocino and stayed in the Mendocino Hotel. We also stopped in Hendy Woods State Park on the way back home and went on a two- or three-mile hike there, during which she took this picture of me, which I am very delighted by:
( More pictures from our trip! ) |
|
|
| Two things that I read that I love |
[Jun. 28th, 2008|08:17 pm] |
The ever lovely Misful, largely of EXTREMELY GOOD QUALITY SLASH THAT YOU WOULD BE A FOOL NOT TO ENJOY fame has written one of her genius parodies of "Prince Caspian". (Do not start at her most recently posted chapter, oh ye of faint of heart, because oh my god, the boy sex - it is alright for the rest of us because she's been leading a couple of thousand fangirls up to that point for about a year now, but holy cow if you are new, do not start there. I do maintain that her "Drop Dead Gorgeous" story is one of the funniest things I have ever, ever read, even including published and holdable in hands books).
I love the Narnia series with the squealy irrational love of a ten year old girl, and I read and re-read the entire series when I was at primary school. "Prince Caspian" was my favourite, along with "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", and my 12 year old self thought that Prince Caspian was quite a hottie. Go here:
http://mistful.livejournal.com/115137.html#cutid1
One day I will learn how to do hyperlink thingys that say the words that you typed in and send you to the right place, I swares.
Also! I direct you to my favourite blog blog ever, "Boobs, Injuries and Dr Pepper", the best blend of the humourous and the heartbreaking that I have come across (I am quite the one for hyperbole tonight, no?). In particular, a recent entry that cracked me right up. Click on it. Go on. You are not going to be disappointed.
http://boobsinjuriesanddrpepper.blogspot.com/2008/06/curious-about-injuries-in-my-title.html#comments |
|
|
I Met ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) spiritofnow! |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|06:22 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  good | ] |
| [ | music |
| | cars outside | ] |
spiritofnow (a.k.a. Ned) is in California right now, taking a break from her studies at NYU and from her home country of Pakistan. I was supposed to meet her on Friday, along with Susan and Ned's friend Dave, at an IHOP just before Susan and I went to a Monarchs WNBA game. But something came up at the last moment that prevented Dave from driving Ned, so we postponed it to Sunday. There was another Monarchs game on Sunday, so we still met at the IHOP just before the Monarchs game; it was just a different Monarchs game, and instead of Dave driving Ned, Dave's friend Lynda drove Ned. The Monarchs lost the Friday game but won the Sunday game, so maybe Ned's presence in the vicinity helps them win.
The IHOP was probably not the best place to meet Ned, since she's a vegetarian and the menu didn't offer many vegetarian options at all. It was also more expensive than either Ned or I were expecting (neither of us having ever eaten at an IHOP before - unless you count the fact that I ate there with Susan on Friday after Ned had canceled, in addition to eating there on Sunday when Ned was there). But the company was great! It turned out that Lynda has previously worked as both a teacher and an editor, so Susan and I both had plenty to talk about with her, despite never having even heard of her before we met her. We also talked about the plenty of other topics. Ned wanted to know what we thought of Obama and the smear campaign claiming that he's Muslim (which is predicated on the offensive unstated assumption that Muslims are not qualified to be president). I wanted to know whether anything about the United States has surprised Ned. She said she's only been in the most liberal parts of it and therefore finds all Americans to be wonderful so far, but she has been surprised by how biased CNN and our other mass media news sources are.
Anyway, we had a great time. Then Susan and I watched the Monarchs win, and we each went back to our respective homes.
Earlier events in the weekend included acquiring new fish. I discovered on Saturday that the plecostomus, which was the only non-convict fish that hadn't been murdered by her convict fish, was missing from the fish tank. It's odd that it was missing; the convict fish had left dead bodies lying around after all their previous murders, but we never found a body this time. Anyway, on Sunday afternoon I went to buy a new plecostomus (they help keep the tank clean; without one, algae was starting to develop). I found a plecostomus that was already in the same tank as a bunch of convict fish at the pet store, and decided I should buy that one so that I wouldn't be subjecting it to company any more unpleasant than it already had. Then I noticed that there was one other species also in the same tank as the convict fish - some Nicaraguan cichlids. There were many other tanks containing fish that I had read online were theoretically compatible with convict fish, but I couldn't bring myself to actually subject any fish to such unpleasant company unless they already had such unpleasant company to begin with. So I decided to buy the Nicaraguan cichlids, which I had not heard described as being compatible with convict fish, but which were visibly alive in the convict fish tank at the pet store.
Susan's biggest convict fish is a little bigger than any of the ones in the pet store, though, and he seems to be harassing the Nicaraguan cichlids quite a bit so far. I hope the Nicaraguan cichlids don't kill the baby convict fish or get killed by the daddy convict fish.
I think it was also on Saturday that Susan finally managed to induce her next-door neighbor Jessica to fill out the voter registration form I had picked up for her a week earlier. We figure that if every same-sex couple in California can persuade one person to vote against the state constitutional amendment in November that would make same-sex marriages illegal again, we can preserve our right to get legally married - so we've picked Jessica as our person to persuade. She doesn't need any persuading about same-sex marriages being good, but she needs a lot of persuading to actually go vote about anything, ever. So Susan bribed her by inviting her over for dinner with us on the condition that she fill out the voter registration form. It worked; Jessica came over for dinner and filled out the voter registration form. I will stamp it and mail it in, and then in November, Susan is going to make sure Jessica actually votes.
Also on Saturday, Susan expressed a desire to go to the Mendocino Hotel (on the northern California coast). This led to what was by our standards (we being quite an un-argumentative couple) a fairly heated argument. Which is to say that it was perfectly polite but still rather emotional. The argument was over our differing standards of living. To me, a hotel is never a destination in itself but rather a place it's occasionally necessary to stay overnight when visiting a different destination, and staying at one is always an extravagance, normally indulged in less than once a year. To Susan, a hotel can be a destination in itself, and one should stay in hotels at least four times per year. Also, for her the major appeal of hotels is the idea of having people serve her, providing room service and food at her command. For me, having strangers serve me (or even having them anywhere around me) is a nuisance to be endured for the sake of whatever the non-hotel-related destination is. At the Mendocino Hotel, ocean views and other nature scenery would be a sufficient enticement to make the hotel stay worthwhile for me, but Susan kept trying to persuade me that I should want to go there for the hotel itself, which did not work and which instead made the whole trip sound unnecessarily unappealing to me.
Really it was probably very bad form for me to argue over this specific hotel trip, since she pointed out that her birthday is coming up and the trip could be a birthday present for her. But she didn't suggest that it should be a birthday present until after I resisted her other reasons for going. Anyway, we are going! Next weekend we are going to the Mendocino Hotel. There will be beautiful expanses of Pacific Ocean across the street from the hotel, and beautiful redwood forests to pass through on the way to and from the hotel, and beautiful nature scenery all around. And these things will make it worthwhile to put up with having strangers provide room service and food.
Oh, and our tenth lunar revolution (ten-month anniversary) was on Thursday. I still owe her a poem for it. But yay for ten months! Is ten months really supposed to be this easy and fun and not hard work at all? |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
