The Fort Mudge Memorial Dump

It was, perhaps, not the best idea in the world to remind Lily about the existence of ping-pong balls this weekend. I completely forgot that I've got temporary downstairs neighbors this week. Oops.

Pirate Radio was very silly, and very British, and has a decent soundtrack. It's not on the list of Great Movies, but I liked it. (Does Kenneth Branagh have a contract rider that says if he's in a movie, Emma Thompson has to be in it too?)

I wish this month's credit card bill would show up so I can get the heart attack over with. The ATA conference and the vet bill are both going to be on this one.

I really shouldn't send them both back unwatched, but this is absolutely not the week to have a choice between "No Country for Old Men" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" for Netflix movies. I have no idea what I was thinking when I put them in the queue together.

The reason this is not the week for movies like that is because I have run out of cope at work, and it isn't even Thursday yet. I would be taking the rest of the week off for mental health days if I weren't already taking half of next week off for the ATA conference.

Harumpf.

As far as birthday weekends go, it was a very nice one.

On Friday night I did in fact take myself out for dinner at Lineage, where I had the most expensive meal I've ever had, but it was worth it. Arugula salad, followed by sea scallops, followed by blueberry bread pudding (which arrived with a candle in it because I mentioned it was a birthday dinner).

Before I went to dinner, I went to Brookline Booksmith and bought Schott's Original Miscellany, which I've looked at in bookstores three or four times now. I love it, partly because it's so random. (Just for instance, page 81 consists of a list of decimal prefixes, a list of the 12 labors of Hercules, and a list of Santa's reindeer. You can also look up how to read cattle brands, how a symphony orchestra is arranged, the list of English monarchs from 1410-present, and the Braille alphabet.) The Original is from 2002; I looked at the 2008 version, but it's arranged by subject, and less fun.

Saturday consisted of a trip to NH, involving seeing Public Enemies in Merrimack. They got it mostly right, history-wise, but the way they handled the plot came out somewhere around pretty good. I'm glad I saw it, but I don't need to see it again. Oh well, it was a good day anyway, and I didn't have to wait at all for three of the six trains involved in getting there and back. And I got home about two minutes before it started to rain HARD, last night.

Today I should've done a lot of things I didn't do, but I didn't do anything I really shouldn't have done, so it all comes out even.

Up was fun, and pretty much exactly what I needed by way of brain candy. ( Very minor spoiler )

Unfortunately, work is continuing to be the "hip deep in alligators" sort, which it has been for the past three weeks and will probably continue to be for the next seven. (Which reminds me, I have to figure out which week in August I want to not come to work for. Not sure whether the budget will bear going to Falmouth this year, because this year that trip has got to include renting a car.)

I'm debating canceling my dentist appointment in two weeks, because it's Yet Another Co-Payment (I've paid two in the last week, and will have a third sometime soon tomorrow, so I'm perpetually out of cash), and because the appointment is at 7:45 AM and there is no power in the 'verse that will keep them from giving me the flossing lecture, and I'm not in the mood to receive it at all, never mind that early in the morning.

On a more cheerful note, last night after the thunderstormlet was over, the light coming through the raindrops on the pine tree was really beautiful. It looked like the world's biggest sundew. I wish I could've taken a picture that would have done justice to it.

One of the absolutely unnecessary things I'm considering spending money on when I have it to spend (hopefully in July) is upgrading my Netflix subscription so I get more than one DVD at a time. Usually I don't care, but I'm in the middle of Shogun, which is three DVDs long. I watched the first one last Friday and had to send it back on Saturday to get the second one, which I got on Tuesday and haven't watched yet. If I got all three discs at once, I could've had a marathon last Friday night.

On the other hand, if it were three episodes of a TV show, I'd have to wait a week between them, so what am I griping about?

I have absolutely no idea why I put The Headsman on my Netflix list. I did it so long ago that I can't remember. I suspect I saw it on somebody else's list somewhere and said "why not?".

(Because it's grim, that's why not.)

Today in the mail I got an embarrassment of riches, embroidery-wise. I do know where I'm going to start, at least (in fact, I already did).

I also, today, gave myself burst blisters on the backs of both heels. I know better than to wear shorter-than-ankle socks with my sneakers, but I did it anyway. This would be a minor inconvenience if I weren't planning to go swimming in the ocean a fair bit at the end of the week; since that is in fact what I'm planning, the blisters are a fairly major inconvenience. (Although if it rains there like it's been raining here, they may be a minor inconvenience again. I'm not going swimming anywhere in a thunderstorm.)

In the "but it was on sale" category, I went slightly mad with used DVDs yesterday. I shouldn't have done that, but I fell prey to a "buy 2, get the third for 1/2 off" sale. And now I own Fantasia 2000, which I love for the bit with the flamingoes (and for letting me now associate "Pomp and Circumstance" with Donald Duck).

Lily seems to think there's something wrong because I'm not going to bed yet. Because of the Vietnamese coffee I had with dinner, I'm most decidedly not going to bed yet.

It isn't often that things on television will cause me to break down crying. As of today, there are two movies guaranteed to do it.

I think I'll have to take the resulting epiphany to paper and argue it out.

Yesterday whuffle and halleyscomet and I went to see Sweeney Todd. Because it was Tim Burton, I was expecting to have nightmares last night, but I didn't. (I will never watch The Nightmare Before Christmas again.) I do have bits of the music stuck in my head, though.

Johnny Depp can sing, but he doesn't have the depth of voice for Sweeney Todd. He sounded like he was skating over the top of it. Maybe he had to concentrate too hard on keeping his accent while he was singing. I wonder what the final bill for red paint came to?

Today, since yesterday's cramps seem to have abated and it's not looking so much like a day best spent hibernating, I'm going to go run the rest of the Brighton errands. I'm contemplating buying a paper shredder, but having just bought a new coffee maker yesterday, I don't think I want to run out and spend more money on things I don't necessarily need (I can use the shredder at work).

I wish I could consistently remember that I can indeed cook when I want to.

Baseball: yay. (I’m largely indifferent to baseball results, which is practically a travesty in this city.)

Football: yay! (Enough with the perpetual hype about the invincible Peyton Manning.)

Weekend: Good weekend. On Saturday I found a really good pumpkin for carving next weekend and hung around with people and went on a minor expedition out Concord way for no particular reason, and came home and found My Fair Lady on one of the old-movie channels I seem to get these days, so stayed up late watching that. I hadn’t seen it in years, and I forgot the couple of places where they really hit you upside the head with Pygmalion references.

On Sunday I ended up back at Wilson Farms again for my semiannual overindulgence in vegetables, demonstrated what the big deal is about cider donuts (they’re best when they’re warm), discovered (a) that Penzey’s is open on Sundays and (b) that Penzey’s is a place I should remember, bought about six kinds of spices that inspired various thoughts about cooking, filled up my sinuses with one spice blend I really didn’t like (which then made everything after it smell funny), came home and found The King and I on a different old-movie channel and watched that (the other old-movie channel was playing From Here to Eternity; I guess it was a tribute weekend since Deborah Kerr died last week).

This morning I had a terrible time getting going. The bus waited for me to run down the block, partly due to the traffic light and partly due to the two other people who were also running for the bus from different directions than I was. Just after Washington Square, we hit the aftermath of a fire truck blocking traffic in Brookline Village, and it took 15 minutes longer than usual to get to work.

I’m starting my annual resentment of the fact that it gets dark at dinnertime. My natural inclination is to stay up late and sleep late, but I also like daylight.

Random thought: why isn’t “intensive” the opposite of “extensive”? [ETA: I suppose it is, if you think in terms of college courses. You can take an intensive course, or extensive regular courses.]