Happy Thursday and Happy Thursgiving Day! I hope all of yours are still going wonderfully; ours was yesterday! My brother and all the little ones that go along with him are visiting California this week, so they were at my house from Tuesday to today. But I wrote down my schedule wrong so we thought we could have Thanksgiving yesterday.
But it's okay, even though I had to work, we still had a nice rest-of-the-day Thanksgiving.
But tomorrow I have to work from 9 AM to 4:30. :< I hope it won't be as busy as they think it will be.
It was cool having the family visit. The little ones are growing up so much. I only got my bed jumped on once. And then for dinner my aunt and uncle came over, and after we played some Beatles Rock Band, which was cute.
I bought Disney's Sing It! HSM 3 game for the extra microphone, and that game is a little pointless. I can sing along with the cds just fine, thx.
Next week NaNoWriMo will all be over, and I hopefully will be sitting on 50k+ words of a fantastically disjointed novel. I have...43,383 right now, and five days left to finish. I'll share all my thoughts on the process with you next Thursday.
I didn't write any yesterday, so just now I slapped out enough for yesterday and today, which was surprising. And then I went downstairs and my parents were watching P2, a movie which I think I've mentioned before. It's ridiculous. BUT the guy in it, Wes Bentley, is who I named/faced on of my characters after, so it was especially spooky to be writing about Bentley and then go down and see him.
Oddly enough, the aunt and uncle's dog they brought yesterday is also named Bentley. And if I made a movie from my novel, the motorcycle the other character rides would be a Bentley. Lolarious.
SPEAKING OF. I found two new caption sites that I must share. The first, http://averagecats.com/ is captioned cat pictures describing how cats are very normal and do not want cheezburgers or charge lazers or fix computers or do anything like they do in lolcat pictures. The second, http://unrelatedcaptions.com/ is for your nonsense humor fix. Basically, it's pictures with captions that are entirely irrelevant. True genius:
I find this and this particularly poignant.
Also this one I just found. And this.
Okay, it's just about time for me to go to bed. But don't worry! There's always next week!
-Steph
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
30,062
Happy Thursday! I'm trying to think of something super exciting to tell you about, but I'm blanking. Wrote a bunch, worked a bunch, watched a lot of tv. Read a little, cooked a little.
On Saturday we had a store meeting from 8:30-9:30 in the morning, so I was sad to wake up. But the day was so pretty, I convinced the folks to drive down to Sycamore Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains and we hiked. They were resistant--too much things to do, how about tomorrow? I said, the weather won't be perfect tomorrow--and it turned out I was right.
I was looking for a meadow, because as I left work I saw the empty lot across the street, which is as pretty as a meadow, and I really wanted to play in it. We sorta found a meadow in the canyon, but it was sort of sketchy so we went home.
Then we went to this Mexican deli/bakery/ice cream shop? I had a pretty good burrito, and we bought so many cookies and things, since that's what we do at Mexican bakeries. We'll take you there when you visit, Michelle.
My brother turned 32 on Tuesday. So old! I wonder if you picked up Star Trek for your birthday? Anyway, lookin' forward to seeing you all next week! What should I cook?
AMC remade the 60's BBC series "The Prisoner." I only knew of the original show in passing, I don't even know why I knew it at all. And I only heard of the remake like the two days before I saw it. My mom just turned it on, happened to be in the first fifteen minutes of the first episode, and then we watched that for four hours.
What a crazy miniseries! I loved it. Basically, this guy wakes up in "the Village," asks, how do I get back to New York, and the answer is, there is no New York, there is only the Village. It reaffirmed my dream to write a six-hour miniseries, if it can be as cool as that. Seriously, when I get it for my birthday, we are all sitting down and watching it.
My novel got some days behind, so basically on Tuesday I wrote around 5k words and got a day ahead. It was a joint effort, since I'd been writing on Monday, but after midnight those words count towards Tuesday's total. So there were three different writing sessions on Tuesday, before I slept, during the day, and late at night. I finished the "first chapter" of the thing, which ended up taking up half the volume of the total. Good news, though, now I'm past halfway! Actually just over 3/5, as you can tell by today's blog title.
My main characters' names are Huxley and Bentley, and that's what I've named my two new fish. They are Otocincluses, algae eaters, to eat the algae problem I have now. Pepito, the small fish, suddenly also eats algae, but whatever. He's the only one of the babies left, so RIP all the filter fish. I took the tank divider out because it was covered with algae, but I guess the littlest two weren't quite ready.
Okay, I gotta go write some more words, wish me luck!
-Steph
On Saturday we had a store meeting from 8:30-9:30 in the morning, so I was sad to wake up. But the day was so pretty, I convinced the folks to drive down to Sycamore Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains and we hiked. They were resistant--too much things to do, how about tomorrow? I said, the weather won't be perfect tomorrow--and it turned out I was right.
I was looking for a meadow, because as I left work I saw the empty lot across the street, which is as pretty as a meadow, and I really wanted to play in it. We sorta found a meadow in the canyon, but it was sort of sketchy so we went home.
Then we went to this Mexican deli/bakery/ice cream shop? I had a pretty good burrito, and we bought so many cookies and things, since that's what we do at Mexican bakeries. We'll take you there when you visit, Michelle.
My brother turned 32 on Tuesday. So old! I wonder if you picked up Star Trek for your birthday? Anyway, lookin' forward to seeing you all next week! What should I cook?
AMC remade the 60's BBC series "The Prisoner." I only knew of the original show in passing, I don't even know why I knew it at all. And I only heard of the remake like the two days before I saw it. My mom just turned it on, happened to be in the first fifteen minutes of the first episode, and then we watched that for four hours.
What a crazy miniseries! I loved it. Basically, this guy wakes up in "the Village," asks, how do I get back to New York, and the answer is, there is no New York, there is only the Village. It reaffirmed my dream to write a six-hour miniseries, if it can be as cool as that. Seriously, when I get it for my birthday, we are all sitting down and watching it.
My novel got some days behind, so basically on Tuesday I wrote around 5k words and got a day ahead. It was a joint effort, since I'd been writing on Monday, but after midnight those words count towards Tuesday's total. So there were three different writing sessions on Tuesday, before I slept, during the day, and late at night. I finished the "first chapter" of the thing, which ended up taking up half the volume of the total. Good news, though, now I'm past halfway! Actually just over 3/5, as you can tell by today's blog title.
My main characters' names are Huxley and Bentley, and that's what I've named my two new fish. They are Otocincluses, algae eaters, to eat the algae problem I have now. Pepito, the small fish, suddenly also eats algae, but whatever. He's the only one of the babies left, so RIP all the filter fish. I took the tank divider out because it was covered with algae, but I guess the littlest two weren't quite ready.
Okay, I gotta go write some more words, wish me luck!
-Steph
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Twilit
Happy Thursday! I went to sleep at like two or three last night, because I was playing a dumb computer game. This is relevant to the story I'm about to tell.
So I wake up, wide awake, because I hear other people awake in the house and it's light outside. I look at the clock. 6:58! I'm entirely sure that I needed to be at work at 5:30. It's now 7. I'm an hour and a half late. Why didn't someone wake me up?! Why didn't they call?? This is like my worst nightmare.
I'm actually sitting up and getting out of bed, frantic, when I stop and think about it. Where am I? What day is it? Yes, yes it's Thursday. But...what happened to the rest of it? Is it, in fact, 6:59...AM?
Yes. Yes it is.
I think it was because I'd only been asleep for like four hours, and it was a sort of dusk/dawn light so it felt like I'd decided to take a lovely afternoon nap that spun horribly out of control. It was a crazy experience. I had just dis-remembered the facts from before falling asleep, and made up new ones.
Incidentally, 7 PM is pitch black.
After sleeping off that minor freakout, I went to the post office, and I went to the store. And then I came home and spent the day watching a chick flick! While baking cookies! While wearing an apron I made by hand!! Welcome to... the Twilight Zone.
THE PROPOSAL is a movie that underwhelms. The trailers in the store finally swayed me, and I picked it up, and it was alright for a watching-while-you-bake movie. Entirely forgettable. I didn't hate it, and I didn't love it. It just was.
The first batch of cookies is a failure. The failure began when I opened the can of almond filling and, by looking at it, had a sinking realization that almond filling is not the same as almond paste. I TRIED IT ANYWAY. And then I didn't grease the sheet, so the first batch was useless. And the subsequent batches are chewy to the point of ridiculousness. Next time, almond paste. Almond paste FTW.
Second cookies were chocolate chip cookies, only with cocoa in the dough and with snapped off bits of Andes instead of chocolate chips. So I guess they're almost, but not quite, entirely unlike chocolate chip cookies. These came out as a win, but they are a bit dry, I think because of the added cocoa. Could have used another box of Andes, too.
And then I went to work, which is playing STAR TREK on the blu-ray player. I made up an award for it. The Best Worst Movie Ever. Because, honestly, the more I think about that plot, about the events and situations they present for my amusement, the more I hate it. I hate that script, and I hate the story. I hate what they want me to accept, especially in terms of science. But every other part of the filmmaking, from the casting to acting to special effects, I love it. In those regards, it's a great movie. Best Worst Movie Ever. Comes out on DVD and blu-ray Tuesday. Don't miss it!
My week has been spent writing and working, although I missed two days of writing which I will try to catch up on right after this. The sewing, the baking, it's part of a pattern. It's when there's something I know I have to do, so I say, oh, I'll start that right after this! And then I sew an apron instead of write 1667 words. Even when it's something I want to do, and something no one is forcing me to do, I guess the pattern still applies. But hey, I've still got two and a half weeks left, and I'm sure I'll finish! Hooray, literature!
The game Borderlands also came out, and when two of my shift leaders were discussing it, I had no idea what they were talking about. But then Carolyn got it, and we've been playing co-op, and it's not an exaggeration that we plan on spending all of tomorrow playing it. I know everyone (in the gaming community) is going on about the new Call of Duty, but serious, you need to stop caring about that and play Borderlands instead. You can level up! And that's what really counts.
Oh, the third Twilight mention, to fully justify the title there. We have not one, not two, but three separate locations dedicated to Twilight in our store. Calendars! Soundtracks! The Book! The movie! The movie, 2-disc! Twilight-themed Sweethearts! A fleece blanket! Pillows with Edward's face on one side and Jacob on the other!!!!!!! THIS HAS GOT TO STOP.
>:[
Oh, sad and unrelated news: Fox has canceled DOLLHOUSE for realz. They're gonna run the 13 episodes they ordered, and that's gonna be it. When that runs out, it will mark the beginning of my hopefully life-long boycott of Fox programming. Maybe you'll join me.
Alright, you may now carry on with your lives.
-Steph
So I wake up, wide awake, because I hear other people awake in the house and it's light outside. I look at the clock. 6:58! I'm entirely sure that I needed to be at work at 5:30. It's now 7. I'm an hour and a half late. Why didn't someone wake me up?! Why didn't they call?? This is like my worst nightmare.
I'm actually sitting up and getting out of bed, frantic, when I stop and think about it. Where am I? What day is it? Yes, yes it's Thursday. But...what happened to the rest of it? Is it, in fact, 6:59...AM?
Yes. Yes it is.
I think it was because I'd only been asleep for like four hours, and it was a sort of dusk/dawn light so it felt like I'd decided to take a lovely afternoon nap that spun horribly out of control. It was a crazy experience. I had just dis-remembered the facts from before falling asleep, and made up new ones.
Incidentally, 7 PM is pitch black.
After sleeping off that minor freakout, I went to the post office, and I went to the store. And then I came home and spent the day watching a chick flick! While baking cookies! While wearing an apron I made by hand!! Welcome to... the Twilight Zone.
THE PROPOSAL is a movie that underwhelms. The trailers in the store finally swayed me, and I picked it up, and it was alright for a watching-while-you-bake movie. Entirely forgettable. I didn't hate it, and I didn't love it. It just was.
The first batch of cookies is a failure. The failure began when I opened the can of almond filling and, by looking at it, had a sinking realization that almond filling is not the same as almond paste. I TRIED IT ANYWAY. And then I didn't grease the sheet, so the first batch was useless. And the subsequent batches are chewy to the point of ridiculousness. Next time, almond paste. Almond paste FTW.
Second cookies were chocolate chip cookies, only with cocoa in the dough and with snapped off bits of Andes instead of chocolate chips. So I guess they're almost, but not quite, entirely unlike chocolate chip cookies. These came out as a win, but they are a bit dry, I think because of the added cocoa. Could have used another box of Andes, too.
And then I went to work, which is playing STAR TREK on the blu-ray player. I made up an award for it. The Best Worst Movie Ever. Because, honestly, the more I think about that plot, about the events and situations they present for my amusement, the more I hate it. I hate that script, and I hate the story. I hate what they want me to accept, especially in terms of science. But every other part of the filmmaking, from the casting to acting to special effects, I love it. In those regards, it's a great movie. Best Worst Movie Ever. Comes out on DVD and blu-ray Tuesday. Don't miss it!
My week has been spent writing and working, although I missed two days of writing which I will try to catch up on right after this. The sewing, the baking, it's part of a pattern. It's when there's something I know I have to do, so I say, oh, I'll start that right after this! And then I sew an apron instead of write 1667 words. Even when it's something I want to do, and something no one is forcing me to do, I guess the pattern still applies. But hey, I've still got two and a half weeks left, and I'm sure I'll finish! Hooray, literature!
The game Borderlands also came out, and when two of my shift leaders were discussing it, I had no idea what they were talking about. But then Carolyn got it, and we've been playing co-op, and it's not an exaggeration that we plan on spending all of tomorrow playing it. I know everyone (in the gaming community) is going on about the new Call of Duty, but serious, you need to stop caring about that and play Borderlands instead. You can level up! And that's what really counts.
Oh, the third Twilight mention, to fully justify the title there. We have not one, not two, but three separate locations dedicated to Twilight in our store. Calendars! Soundtracks! The Book! The movie! The movie, 2-disc! Twilight-themed Sweethearts! A fleece blanket! Pillows with Edward's face on one side and Jacob on the other!!!!!!! THIS HAS GOT TO STOP.
>:[
Oh, sad and unrelated news: Fox has canceled DOLLHOUSE for realz. They're gonna run the 13 episodes they ordered, and that's gonna be it. When that runs out, it will mark the beginning of my hopefully life-long boycott of Fox programming. Maybe you'll join me.
Alright, you may now carry on with your lives.
-Steph
Thursday, November 05, 2009
V
Happy Thursday! Also, happy Guy Fawkes Day, but we'll get to that.
Let's discuss V. Not V for Vendetta, and not V necks. Not even ctrl+v, which is how I'm pasting in all these hyper links. Just plain V.
So aliens come, right? And Morena Baccarin has short hair and is one. And then three weeks pass. The one FBI agent uncovers a secret ring of alien-haters, which, just to prove their point, is raided by the aliens. The end.
Also, they are among us, which is super Cylon-esque. I've heard two different people say that they would have liked the pilot of V a lot better if the mystery had been strung on a little (or a lot) longer, so that their being evil was a surprise. BUT I say, it's a remake, and the point of the show is that aliens show up and are liars, and the humans have to fight to survive. Removing that element from the pilot isn't going to make it any less true. It would be like remaking BSG and having the Cylons destroy the colonies mid-season. That's just not what the show is supposed to be about.
That being said, I didn't love it. I thought I saw in a review that it was smart and stylish, but I detected neither of those attributes. But, like a few other things I've stuck with this season, it has every chance of growing into something worthwhile. In any case, it's lightyears beyond the original, which has been playing on Syfy. Seeing bits of a few episodes, all I could discern was that the aliens were poor dressers and had a thing against "scientists."
"So who is this family hiding out, anyway?" "Oh, just a bunch of scientists."
blam blam! a guy is shot at a checkpoint. "Who's this guy?" "He's a scientist!"
"You can't die, you're a scientist" and so on and so forth.
But my favorite favorite moment of the original miniseries was when a boy was recounting poorly the attack the night before, and the man says to him, "It's alright, you're okay. And then what happened?" Comedy GOLD.
On Halloween I went to work as Speed Racer. On the whole, people thought I was Gilligan, second guess was "Scooby Doo," and two guys actually came up and said "Speed Racer!" It was fun. What was coolest was that Carolyn threw together a pretty good classic Racer X costume, and we went out together into the world to show of our awesomeness. And then we played Rockband and then we watched SPEED RACER. It was a full day.
Next day, I committed myself to write a novel during National Novel Writing Month. You can track my progress here. I'm writing about my vampire academy, which is a misnomer because it is not primarily about vampires or an academy. Then again, it's not called that, it's called Epoch, since it's about the fall of one era and the start of a new one, and the mistake one man made to cause it, and the resolve of one woman to save him regardless. It's sorta epic.
And since I have something I should be doing, of course I've been doing everything but. Have you seen the cute apron I sewed? I sewed a whole apron! You can find it on Facebook. And I'm halfway done with another, and I sewed a pillow and another half apron. And I watched every movie like HITMAN and VAN HELSING and SCOOBY DOO 2 and EASTERN PROMISES and MILK. So we're keeping pretty busy.
Y'alright, I'd best be back to work. I'm 200 words over my daily goal, but that just means I gotta keep writing. I'll let you all know how it is when it's done!
-Steph
Let's discuss V. Not V for Vendetta, and not V necks. Not even ctrl+v, which is how I'm pasting in all these hyper links. Just plain V.
So aliens come, right? And Morena Baccarin has short hair and is one. And then three weeks pass. The one FBI agent uncovers a secret ring of alien-haters, which, just to prove their point, is raided by the aliens. The end.
Also, they are among us, which is super Cylon-esque. I've heard two different people say that they would have liked the pilot of V a lot better if the mystery had been strung on a little (or a lot) longer, so that their being evil was a surprise. BUT I say, it's a remake, and the point of the show is that aliens show up and are liars, and the humans have to fight to survive. Removing that element from the pilot isn't going to make it any less true. It would be like remaking BSG and having the Cylons destroy the colonies mid-season. That's just not what the show is supposed to be about.
That being said, I didn't love it. I thought I saw in a review that it was smart and stylish, but I detected neither of those attributes. But, like a few other things I've stuck with this season, it has every chance of growing into something worthwhile. In any case, it's lightyears beyond the original, which has been playing on Syfy. Seeing bits of a few episodes, all I could discern was that the aliens were poor dressers and had a thing against "scientists."
"So who is this family hiding out, anyway?" "Oh, just a bunch of scientists."
blam blam! a guy is shot at a checkpoint. "Who's this guy?" "He's a scientist!"
"You can't die, you're a scientist" and so on and so forth.
But my favorite favorite moment of the original miniseries was when a boy was recounting poorly the attack the night before, and the man says to him, "It's alright, you're okay. And then what happened?" Comedy GOLD.
On Halloween I went to work as Speed Racer. On the whole, people thought I was Gilligan, second guess was "Scooby Doo," and two guys actually came up and said "Speed Racer!" It was fun. What was coolest was that Carolyn threw together a pretty good classic Racer X costume, and we went out together into the world to show of our awesomeness. And then we played Rockband and then we watched SPEED RACER. It was a full day.
Next day, I committed myself to write a novel during National Novel Writing Month. You can track my progress here. I'm writing about my vampire academy, which is a misnomer because it is not primarily about vampires or an academy. Then again, it's not called that, it's called Epoch, since it's about the fall of one era and the start of a new one, and the mistake one man made to cause it, and the resolve of one woman to save him regardless. It's sorta epic.
And since I have something I should be doing, of course I've been doing everything but. Have you seen the cute apron I sewed? I sewed a whole apron! You can find it on Facebook. And I'm halfway done with another, and I sewed a pillow and another half apron. And I watched every movie like HITMAN and VAN HELSING and SCOOBY DOO 2 and EASTERN PROMISES and MILK. So we're keeping pretty busy.
Y'alright, I'd best be back to work. I'm 200 words over my daily goal, but that just means I gotta keep writing. I'll let you all know how it is when it's done!
-Steph
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