Inane Chatter

Hey, guys.  It’s miserable me, checking in.  I have a cold.  I think I put up a good fight yesterday, but I gave in when we got home last night, and I have spent all of today on the couch.  I watched a couple episodes of Arrow and a pre-election episode of SNL with John this morning, and I watched two episodes of Glee after he went upstairs to do some programming.  (He gave up on Glee a long time ago.  I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t yet.)  I think I’m TV’d out for now, and I just took some more medicine, so I’m going to curl up under a blanket and read for a while until John gets hungry.  And then I think we’re going to order Chinese so I can have egg drop soup.  I love egg drop soup, even when I can’t taste it.

Update: I burned my tongue on the egg drop soup.  Go me.

I had a strange conversation with a coworker in the car on the way to DC today.

Him: Have you seen that new Sherlock show on BBC?  Isn’t it great?

Me: Yeah, I love it.  Benedict Cumberbatch is fantastic.  Did you know he’s the voice of Smaug in the new Hobbit movie?  The dragon?

Him: Really?  That’s cool.  But that hobbit guy looks really weird.

Silence from me for a few seconds.

Me: You know, the guy who plays Bilbo Baggins is Watson in that Sherlock series.

Him: …That’s the power of make-up, I guess.

I went on to list other things Martin Freeman has been in, but the only response I got was, “He’s the naked guy in Love Actually?  I remember him!”

A guy in a fedora held a door open for me today.  That makes him twice the gentleman any other guy holding a door open would be.  But then he got into a Jeep Wrangler.  That is not the right car for a guy in a fedora.  But what is the right car for a fedora-wearing dude?  (It’s possible he was wearing a trench coat, too, but it’s more likely that my memory is making things up to fill in the blanks.  Apparently, my memory wants him to be Humphrey Bogart (or Rick Blaine, anyway).  But taller.  This guy was taller.)  I really don’t know the answer to that question – wait!  I totally do (because I watch Mad Men).  He should be driving a ’60s era Cadillac or something with fins.  (John says a giant Cadillac or a ’58 Lincoln.)  Definitely not a little bitty Jeep.

…that if I don’t drink coffee/tea/something with caffeine in it on the mornings I drive to DC that I will be struggling to stay awake by the time I get to the GW Parkway?

…that Riley doesn’t like it when John plays his guitar?  He gets all nervous and whiny.

…that we’re putting off watching the 2nd season of Sherlock so we’ll still have it look forward to?

…and that we’re doing the same thing with Doctor Who because of how freakin’ long we have to wait between seasons?  We’re two episodes into season 6 and afraid to watch any more.

…that we haven’t watched the Downton Abbey Christmas episode yet because it seemed weird to watch it when it’s nowhere near Christmastime?

…that once I start thinking about TV I really like I apparently can’t stop?

…that Roxy can tell time and is nudging me because she knows it’s time for her medicine?

I’d better stop before I reveal too much. I’ve gotta keep some secrets.

Kind of.  I had a work conversation that will have consequences.  Might be good or bad.  Let’s hope for good.  I think.

I’ve spent the last couple of days catching up on Fringe.  I was away too long and I missed two episodes, and at this point in the season, missing two episodes is kind of a problem.  Sure, I have Television Without Pity to catch me up, but I’d rather watch them.  Sadly, Hulu only carries the most recent five episodes (and it’s not a Hulu+ show), and it turns out I was seven episodes behind.  I read somewhere that Hulu is about to become even more limited, but I don’t remember where I found the link, and Google isn’t helping me right now.  But that will suck.

You know what won’t suck?  The Bloggess is coming to the DC area on her book tour! But wait – there is something that will suck about that.  I.  Can’t.  Go.  I can’t go and shower her with support because I will be out of town, and as happy as I am (and will be) to be on vacation, I can’t help but wish her visit wasn’t happening right then.  So you know what you local people can do?  I bet you can guess.  Go.  Go see her in Gaithersburg next Saturday (5/19) or in Annapolis next Sunday (5/20). Listen to her speak.  Get something (anything) signed.  Most importantly, tell her she’s wonderful and she can move in next door to me anytime.

I just re-read that paragraph and did a double-take.  Did I just write “shower with her support”?  Oh, wait, no.  I didn’t.

My weekend was packed full of homework and a couple of fun things.  Mostly homework.  Which will be the theme of the next three weeks.

Tonight, however, we watched last year’s Doctor Who Christmas episode (“A Christmas Carol”), and it was AWESOME.  Really good episode.  It was written, of course, by Steven Moffat (who writes all the really good episodes, as someone (I think Brian – hi, Brian!  Sorry I missed you today!) pointed out a few months ago).

We’re still going at super-slow-snail speed on Doctor Who because we decided it’s nicer always knowing there’s more.  We don’t like getting completely caught up on a show and then having to wait MONTHS for the next season.  Sometimes it’s unavoidable (Sherlock, True Blood (still a full season behind on that one, though), Eureka, Downton Abbey), especially with British shows (WHY are the seasons so short?  It can’t be just to torture us, can it?), but if we can help it, we do.

I’m off to bed so I can be well rested for my SQL exam tomorrow.  I certainly feel prepared.

I don’t think I have to tell any of you how little I care about sports.  That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching a game of whatever here and there (I’d rather go to a game than watch one on TV, not that that happens very often), but for the most part I don’t care who wins.  The other day was different, though.  UK playing Louisville in the Final Four – hell, yeah, I had to watch that one.  (Let’s ignore that I don’t care even a little when they play each other during the rest of the year.  The NCAA tournament is different.  It is.)

So even though I didn’t go to UK or U of L, even though I haven’t lived in Kentucky since 1997, even though I’ve only been to ONE college basketball game in my life (and that was at GW, not either UK or U of L), I HAD to watch this game, and, like I have during every game I’ve watched since 1987, I cheered (and gasped and yelled) for UK.  (Are you thinking that that last clause sounds like I root for UK even when they’re not playing?  Well, maybe I do.  Even though it makes no sense.  I’m loyal that way.)

Why 1987?  It’s more complicated than just that that’s the year we moved to Kentucky.  That’s the year I had to pick a side.  Or else.  Picture 8-year-old me.  I was in third grade, brand new school, brand new state.  One of the first things I remember somebody saying to me at school was completely unintelligible.  “Yookay or Yoovell?”  “What?”  More insistently, “Yookay or Yoovell?”  I had NO idea what they were saying to me, and they couldn’t understand what was so hard about the question.  (I don’t even know why it mattered right then.  It was too early for basketball season, and football doesn’t really count in Kentucky.)  Somehow it got through to me what they were asking, but I still had NO idea what the right answer was, or why anyone cared which one I picked, and why won’t they stop asking and leave me alone?  I remember asking them which one they were for, getting more Yookays then Yoovells, and going with the Yookay kids.  (It was the right answer for several reasons.)  Somewhere along the line I made the mental switch from Yookay and Yoovell to the actual school names, and then Allison introduced me to Travis Ford and his three-pointers (Not literally, of course.  She didn’t know him, but he was only 5’6″ and rarely missed, and she had a crush on him.  We were 14.), and I started watching games.  Just in time, too, since that was 1993-94, and the championship wins were ’96 and ’98.

I fell off the wagon after that, though.  I watched the ’98 tournament by myself in college (I couldn’t believe I knew so many people who didn’t know what March Madness was) and then paid very little attention to basketball except for the occasional UK game (and that one UNC game we watched the night of Jess and Chuck’s wedding).  Even though I enjoy the games when I watch them, the paying very little attention part is still true and unlikely to change.

Still, UK playing UofL in the Final Four is pretty awesome (especially with Rick Pitino (the UK coach during the years I cared) coaching UofL now), and I didn’t want to miss it.  And considering what a good game it was, I’m glad I didn’t.  Even John watched it, although he was rooting for UofL (For reasons unknown.  Out of a sense of balance?  An appreciation of how well they were playing?  Solidarity with Mark?  Sheer orneriness?)  UK won, I cheered, and the championship game is tonight.  I could watch it.  I might watch it.  What time does it start?

Whoa, whoa, whoa.  The game doesn’t start until nearly 9:30?

Yeah…I’m going to bed.  UK, you’re on your own.

John and I are sitting on the couch together, laptops on our laps, mostly ignoring a TV show.  We started watching MI-5 the other day, and we’re enjoying it, but for some reason neither of us is interested enough to put the laptops aside and actually watch it.  But we don’t want to admit it, so it’s still on.

Hilarious (and terrifying).  The last 10 seconds are the best part.

Hey, Min, remember that time geese chased us at the zoo?

Are you watching Smash?  I started it today and I’m three episodes in (yay Hulu Plus).  So fun!  And right up my alley.  I mean, come on.  It’s a show about a new Broadway musical.  Singing, dancing, backstage drama, singing, dancing…  Did I mention there’s singing and dancing?  I love singing and dancing.  I didn’t even bother to ask John if he was interested in watching this one with me.  Singing and dancing!  The only thing I’m wondering is how it’s going to keep going for a whole season.  I’m three episodes in, and it seems like we’ve already seen half the musical.  There seems to be plenty of plot to keep it going, but not enough show.

I went for a run this morning (unusual lately).  I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it could have been SO much harder.  It was also SLOW (no singing and dancing).  I didn’t take my watch (just as well – the details would have been depressing), so all I know is it took me less than 40 minutes.  How much less?  NO idea.  That time included a short warm-up, some stretching, and a walk back to the house to cool down (not included in the mileage). And for today, I guess I don’t really care.  I’ll try again on Thursday.  DC for work tomorrow, so unless I get up at 5, I’m not running tomorrow.  Nope, not even if I get up at 5.  I don’t like to run in the dark.

Meanwhile, catty backstage drama is catty.

I like how the internet is like magic on TV.  Anyone can find out anything in one quick search.  And don’t get me started on the police and the FBI.  All of their databases are connected, all the time, and the TV character doing the search has the right access to pull information from any legal database in the world.  Wouldn’t it be nice if it really worked that way?

Have a pretty picture.

I want to go to there. But only in daylight. That cave would creep me out at night.

Every time I see a great house on the water somewhere, I think how great it would be to live there.  But then I remember two things about me and water:

1. If it’s still, it will have mosquitoes and I will be eaten alive.
2. If it’s running, I will have to pee ALL the time.

So maybe I shouldn’t go live in a house on the water.

John and I discovered How I Met Your Mother a few months ago (November, maybe?).  Seven years late, of course, but being so far behind has its advantages.  We’ve slowed down some, but there were some nights and weekends where we’d watch episode after episode after episode…  We’re in season 5 now, aware that we’re catching up quickly, so we only watch a handful of episodes a week now.    Anyway, I found this on YouTube last night.

I want them to finish singing it! They stopped at the best part. Man, I love that show.

I can’t even count the ways that I am sore.  Last  night was my first night back at my Muscle Blast and yoga classes since Thanksgiving.  I’m very happy to be back, I really like those classes, but oh my god I hurt so much now.  Every muscle we worked on is screaming at me.  The aches sorta crept in one by one throughout the day, but they’re all here now.  Hi everybody!  Now go away.

I spent the entire day in a tiny little room with my boss (plus an hour and a half each way in a car with her to get to that tiny little room).  I need some space.  I need some alone time.  And I need some sleep.

You know what’s awesome?  Tomorrow’s Friday and it’s the beginning of a three-day weekend!  You know what’s awesome-er than awesome?  The first season (well, the 2005 season) of Doctor Who arrived in the mail yesterday!  With extras and commentary and lots of hours of Doctor and Rose goodness.

Does anyone know where we can find the last season of Torchwood (the season set in the US) online?  It was on Netflix for a little while, but it’s gone now.

My plan for the weekend:

1. Do my homework (I have an assignment due for Data Modeling and Design)
2. Finish Faithful Place
3. Start The Hunger Games
4. Exercise
5. Grocery store
6. Blah blah other boring things
7. Oh, also SLEEP

It’s not cold enough.  I should be happy about that (I hate being cold), but it’s hard to feel Christmas-y (or Hanukkah-y – yes, I’ve been lighting candles this year.  Please pick your jaw up off the floor.  That’s not sanitary.) when you barely need a coat to go outside.  I’ll get over it.  Just as soon as we hit the road.  Which can’t be soon enough for me.  What I’m really looking forward to is the time off.  I need a long, long break.  Or maybe…yeah, we don’t talk about that on the internet.

I also didn’t mean to publish that yet.  The Publish button looked a lot like the Save Draft button just then.  Whoops.  (For those of you coming late to the party, first of all, shame on you.  Get it together and be on time.  Secondly, it’s kind of obvious what just happened, so this explanation is unnecessary.)

I regret my choice of post title now.  Not just because it’s dumb, although that should be enough.  No, I regret it because that song is stuck in my head now.  I like it fine, but I’ve been having this problem all day, and I can’t settle on a song I’d be happy to have looping through my brain all day.  I woke up this morning to the theme from The Price is Right (thanks to the episode of How I Met Your Mother we watched last night), but I started to tell John about it and immediately switched to “You Were On My Mind” by We Five.  (John, you were right.  It’s We Five.)  Maybe I can get that one back.  I’ve always liked that song. Wish me luck!

You know how it feels when you find something unexpected?  Something good.  Like last year’s $10 in your winter coat pocket.  (That one in particular hasn’t happened to me, but you know what I mean.)  It doesn’t have to be big.  It just has to be nice.  A couple of weeks ago I was writing test scripts for work, and I needed a fake name to fill in a particular field.  I picked a fairly innocuous name, familiar to me and many of you, but not to most people.  I moved on.  Today, I was helping out on that project again, setting up the test data and tweaking some of the scripts.  I got to that field and asked the guy who took it over from me what name to use (having completely forgotten what I’d chosen weeks ago).  He told me, and I laughed, thrilled with myself for setting it up that way so I could have a private little geeky giggle.  Yay me!  The name?  Harriet Jones.  (No room in the application for a title, sadly.)

It went a long way towards making my 4:15 wake-up call (to get to Baltimore today) bearable.  Not all the way bearable, but closer.

I don’t know why I expected to be productive today.  I really really wasn’t.  At all.  Nope.  The only good thing I did all day was keep the dogs company so I could put off the guilt of dropping them off at the kennel.  Something I will be doing within the hour.  The guilt is rising.  At least it’s only two nights.  We’ll be back before they know it (I hope), and they can spend the whole weekend draped over our toes as we spend lots of quiet  hours working on our schoolwork (John plans to put in some quality thesis time, and I have my last calculus quiz to work on).  We may watch the rest of Twin Peaks.  We started it a few days ago, and we’re five or six (seven or eight) episodes in.  We’re looking for stuff to put off getting caught up with Doctor Who and Torchwood.  I’m not ready to not have any new episodes of those to watch.  So I’m treating Twin Peaks like a movie, kind of.  The end isn’t far off (it wasn’t on the air that long), and I want to know what happened!  I could do without the music, though.  Truly awful stuff.

I’m not ready for Thanksgiving.  Mentally.  How did it get to be late November?  Wasn’t it August, like, yesterday?  What happened to August, anyway?  Well, crap.  I must be old.  Maybe I can find a way for the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to slow down a little so I can enjoy them.  Unlikely.  I can’t get today to slow down – how could I get whole weeks to stop rushing by?

On the other hand, no work for four whole days!  Yay!  Save some green bean casserole for me.  That’s all I care about this year.  That and sweet potatoes.  And stuffing/dressing/however it’s made – I love it either way.  Really, it’s just the turkey I can do without.

Happy Thanksgiving!

How does a whole Saturday, no, a whole weekend disappear like that?  It had productive moments, but mostly – I need a do-over.

On the non-productive front, we started two new shows over breakfast.  Grimm looks like it could be really good.  The other show, Once Upon a Time, looks interesting, but maybe not quite as good as Grimm.  I still want to watch it.

One of the things we didn’t do was buy a new flower pot to plant the remaining avocado sprout.  John said flower pot to me and all I could think of was this:

It starts a little late, but I can’t find the beginning of the scene on YouTube. Close enough.

Two sick dogs does not a happy household make.  They’re miserable, we’re miserable, and I can’t believe I’m looking forward to seeing solid dog poop again.  I mean, really.  We haven’t made it through a night without some cleanup necessary in the morning.  It’s been almost a week, but at least in the beginning, it was just one dog.  Last night I shot downstairs at 2:30 in the morning because I heard Roxy’s collar jingle.  I thought maybe she was just getting up and I could get her outside in time.  Nope.  There was already a mess.  I cleaned it up while they were outside and went back to bed.  Got up at eight this morning – another mess.  I’m fairly certain the second mess was Riley.  We were thinking about crating them tonight, but honestly, it’s easier to clean up the floor than it is to clean up the crate AND give each dog a bath.  Before work.

Enough about dog poop?  Okay.  The only other thing on my mind is my DE midterm tomorrow morning.  And Doctor Who.

[Beginning of Doctor Who section - if you're not interested (I'm looking at you, family),  you can quit reading now.]

We finished Season 4 of Doctor Who today (and Season 2 of Torchwood).  I have two things to say:

1. Rose got her Doctor!  Yay yippity yay yay!  Makes me very happy.  And maybe a little teary.
2. I am NOT ready for a new Doctor.  Do I have to?
3. Does this mean we get Martha on Torchwood?  And maybe Mickey?  I could live with that.  Don’t answer me.  I’ll find out soon enough.
4. Donna was my favorite.  She was AWESOME.
5. GREG.  The fish-head episode is long over.  Unless there’s another one even MORE literal than the one I’m thinking of.  What on EARTH were you going to tell us?

I could go on, but John is making dinner and it smells SO good.

I wish I could unsee this.  Seriously, I’m scared, so only follow this link if you are not easily freaked out.  (You don’t have to read the comments – just click on the picture at the top.)  Even John admitted it was pretty creepy.  But, you know, I had to share.  I can’t be the only person checking behind me every few seconds.

In not scary news, I know this guy!  Kind of.  He was a client at my last job.  He moved to Vegas to play poker professionally.  After winning a lot.  Good for him.  He was always nice to me.

I needed to scrub my brain after that eerie picture, so we watched an episode of Modern Family.  I love that show.  If you don’t watch it, you are missing out.

I had a dream my house was falling apart.  But you don’t want to hear about that.  Other people’s dreams aren’t interesting to anyone but the dreamer.  And maybe the dreamer’s psychologist.  I don’t have one of those, so I’m out of luck.

Love Glee or hate it, you’ll enjoy Sesame Street spoofing it.  It’s spot on (and from The Daily What, of course.).

Had a very busy weekend, but not a very productive one.  Feeling a little guilty about that.  But not overmuch (that’s for tomorrow, when panic sets in) because I just watched three hours of Doctor Who with John, and while all three episodes were fantastic, the first one we watched today (season 3′s “Blink”) was the absolute best hour of TV I have EVER SEEN.  It was a GREAT episode, totally stands alone but still captures the Doctor, and on top of that, was effectively and freakishly scary.  Creepy.  SO well done.  Lots of caps.  Sorry.  I feel very strongly about that episode.  Greg, I think this is one of the ones you mentioned – anything you needed to tell us?

We stopped after Part II of the next three-parter, but we’ll probably watch Part III before we go to bed.  I don’t know how I managed before Doctor Who.

As for the rest of the weekend, remind me to tell you about bunco, Oktoberfest, a TON of neighbors I’ve never met before (despite living here for almost 6 years), and running just under 9 miles in the rain.  No need to remind me to tell you about that last bit, actually.  That’s all there is to say about it.  Oh, except I RAN THE WHOLE THING, including that hill I hate.  But that’s all. 

I want to keep babbling, mostly about Doctor Who and some about The Guild (we’ll start watching the current season soon – finished season 4 yesterday), but since what I’m hearing in my head is not remotely coherent (a lot of squeeing and why don’t we own that? and what the hell took us so long to get here?), I’m going to spare you.  Instead I’ll see if John can hurry up with his game so we can get back to Doctor Who.  I have priorities.

Did you guys see this? Cracks me up. I sing it ALL the time now.

(I know – I need to tone down the obsession. I just can’t help myself.)