Field Trips

Happy Thursday!  This week we were promised rain, but it only sprinkled the tiniest bit yesterday in the cemetery.  My Bing weather app on my Windows 8 computer also promises weather in the 80s next week, so I just don't know what to believe anymore.

Have I told you that my school has a field on one side, a freeway on another, and a cemetery on the other?  True story.  It was fieldtrip week.

Tuesday me and Beth walked over to the pumpkin patch.  From the freeway, you can see where the pumpkins grew, and a lot are still sitting out in the green waiting for you to come and get them.  But a block or so back, is the dirt lot with allll the pumpkins and squashes and gourds.  And goats.  We were walking up the dirt hill lined with carving pumpkins, and all you could see was pumpkins and pumpkins and sky.  We bought a pie pumpkin and a kabocha, a Japanese squash.  Kabocha got skinned and curried with an apple and mango chutney.  What a sweet curry!  Pie pumpkin is going to get what pie pumpkin deserves steamed and will probably be some sort of pie or cake or cookie or ice cream.

Don't you love fall?

Other field trip was not quite so literally a field trip.  I'd never actually been in that cemetery before, so we just walked right over.  There was a whole corner of Japanese family plots.  We found three Masons.  The oldest grave we saw was from like 1886 or something.  We saw two other people strolling around wearing the same lanyards as from my school.  It was quite exciting.

Other than that this week has mostly been Borderlands and Active Directory.  In one, I high-fived a robot.  It wasn't Active Directory.

We also saw Looper yesterday, which I was ambivalent about because A) Joseph Gordon-Levitt was playing a time-traveling assassin and B) movies with that sort of premise are usually Jumper or Push.  (What I mean here is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, time traveling, and assassins are all 100 points apiece.  Jumper and Push are both -200 points.)  Like Jumper, and less-so Push, I wanted to be able to want to see it and be reasonably sure that I wouldn't regret the decision.  Having learned, however, from Jumper and Push that this is most of the time an unreasonable expectation.  Dem movies be bad.

Looper wasn't bad at all.  I have to say that the sum was greater than the parts; there were some frayed ends in the storytelling, but the through line was quite secure.  My favorite part of the whole thing was the first 20 seconds after the credits started, where I just went, "ah."  I got it.  Not the time traveling mess or whatever, just the heart of the story.  The Why.  Noir, baby.  Sometimes you can find it in a sci-fi western.

I guess you don't know it, but I've always wanted to write a space western noir.  I don't know how.  Really, I'm content with Cowboy Bebop and Firefly (which we've started up again btw).  Space + western + noir, I don't know why, but that is my favorite thing.

-Steph