Sore (not Thor)

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

Baby, it’s not that cold outside

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!

I am easily amused. It helps to be absentminded. Seriously, you can tell me the same joke over and over again and I will find it hilarious every time. Ask anybody.

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.

This holiday snuck up on me

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!

At least I got an extra hour out of it

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.

Allons y, Alonzo!

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.

My eyes! My eyes!

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.

I need to watch it again. And again.

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.)

Question for Doctor Who fans

This may seem silly (it IS just a TV show), but I have a question.  We want to start watching Torchwood, but we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves or miss anything if the shows overlap.  (Do they overlap?  I don’t even know.  Don’t answer that.)  We’re in the middle of season 3 of Doctor Who.  We know what Torchwood is, sort of.  When do we start watching Torchwood the show?  (The one that started in 2006, of course, not this year’s.)  Can we start now?  Do we need to stay even, season by season, alternating episodes or does it really not matter?

All singing, all dancing, all Doctor Who

David Tennant is cute.  I miss Christopher Eccleston and everything, but I could get used to David Tennant.

I know – I promise Doctor Who and you’re hoping for substance and this is what you get?  Well, a) please re-read the title of this blog and the accompanying tag line, and 2) it’s a wonder I can put any thoughts into words when the woo-OOOH-oooh of the theme song is drowning out everything else in my head.

We can all hope for better tomorrow.

You’re all absolutely right. It DOES get better. I will never doubt you again.

We started Doctor Who a while back, but after six episodes we weren’t really thrilled, so we took a break.  I didn’t mention it because, well, because.  I knew I was supposed to like it.  Not liking it undermines what little geek cred I have.  At the urging of yet another friend (which is a reason I felt like I should like it – a large number of friends whose taste in this stuff I trust think it’s great.  What’s wrong with me?  Yeah, yeah, I don’t have to like everything my friends like, whatever…), we tried again the other night.  And all of our friends are right.  It’s better.  I’m not going to quit.  For those who are counting, we watched the 8th episode last night.

Is it weird that I switch pronouns (we to I and back again) like that?  I feel like I do that a lot.  I can’t decide if it sounds like I’m controlling John’s opinions or he’s controlling mine.  Neither of those is true, of course.  We just have similar opinions about TV.  And movies.  And vacations.  And dogs.  And friends.  And lots of things.  Mm.  We sound boring.  I swear, my mind is my own.  We rarely read the same books.  He doesn’t like spicy food.  I don’t like Sons of Anarchy.  He doesn’t like to admit that he finds cat videos amusing.  (Some of them.  I mean, come ON.  Cat videos are what the interwebs were built on.)  Etc.

To sum up, here’s a video (from The Daily What) of a mariachi band serenading a whale.

An ice cream flavor I wouldn’t order

Tonight I tried to fight the overwhelming taste of garlic with too-sweet, not very good wine, and it didn’t work out.  My tongue feels coated with something awful and I’m considering gargling salt water to scrape it clean.  I tried Listerine.  Didn’t work.  I ended up breathing minty garlic, and god, that’s gross.  Every once in a while I hear myself say there’s no such thing as too much garlic, but that’s just not true.

At least I won’t have to worry about vampires tonight.  ‘Cause you know how often I worry about vampires.  It’s nice to have a night off from that.  Of all the things that stress me out, vampires are at the top of my list.  Next to worrying about puppies not getting enough love and whether or not the New Directions will win Nationals next year.

Hopefully, this was the last punch in the mouth

Sorry about all the short posts lately.  I have the attention span of a gnat.  Also, my face hurts.  Although not as much as I was afraid it would.  This whole procedure sounds more painful than it has turned out to be.  Thank the whatever from high atop the thing.  Seems like it would have been fairly simple, right?

  1. Yank the molar that’s causing trouble.
  2. Put in a fake tooth that will forever and ever behave perfectly and not throw parties that require calling the cops and then rehab.

Not so simple.  Fake teeth don’t have roots.  They have screws.  Screws that have to be longer than the roots because, I don’t know, they just do.  And in order for the new fake tooth to be sturdy, the screw has to be completely surrounded by bone.  Can’t have the end of it sticking out in space.  It wouldn’t be as sturdy.  (What space?  Right, the space in the sinus cavity above my teeth and behind my cheek.)  The solution is to fill in some of the space with bone.  I didn’t ask where they got the bone.  Maybe I should have.  Anyway, that’s what they did.  My sinus cavity is not as big as it once was, and I have a screw sticking out of the hole where my molar used to be.  Once it heals completely (about four months), I’ll get a nice new fake tooth.

In the meantime, I get several days on the couch.  I’ve watched movies (Whale Rider – good, Saint Ralph – good), lots of TV (catching up on Scrubs and The Good Wife), started watching Harry Connick, Jr’s latest concert DVD (In Concert on Broadway – my good buddy Geoff Burke is in it!  Very exciting.  (I realize that seeing him play from 3 feet away for an hour and than talking to him for a grand total of maybe 15 minutes at the bar does not a best-friendship make (wait – I haven’t told you about that yet), but don’t think I won’t use every connection I can think up to get backstage the next time Harry is in town.  Besides, he was cool.  And really good.)), and played on the internet.  A lot.  And I finished my book (The Forever War).  It was very good (as expected).  I’d been looking for it in used bookstores everywhere I went, but couldn’t find it, so I finally bought it new.  I’m glad I did.  The latest edition has a foreword by John Scalzi, who has quickly become my favorite contemporary science fiction author.  And blogger.

I’m rambling, so I’m going to quit here and soak up some of this sun before it dissolves into more torrential rain (yesterday was CRAZY with the rain) and read my book on the deck.

Where’s Phoebe when you need her?

John got up around 4:30 this morning.  I assumed he was just getting up to go to the bathroom.  I certainly didn’t hear anything, but I did wake up.  I heard a strange sort of beep when he closed the door, but I assumed it was the hinges.  I heard it again when he came back out.  So, definitely hinges, right?  But not your normal hinge noise.  I blinked and realized that John was now in the room across the hall with the light on, and the noise was getting louder (or maybe I was just more awake).

Sleepy and confused me: “What is that?  What’s going on?”

Wide awake and thoroughly irritated John: “It’s the smoke alarm.  It’s not hooked up to anything, and I’ve removed the battery, but it won’t stop beeping.”

It was our very own re-enactment of a Friends episode.  Except I’m pretty sure John just replaced the battery and came to bed.  I think.  I didn’t ask.

An evening to myself

John is in class tonight, so I have the evening to myself.  What have I done so far?  I’ve watched TV.  TV John isn’t interested in.  Two episodes of Glee and the Valentine’s Day episode of Cougartown (which, if you can get past the stupid name, was really good last season – not quite up there this season) later, it’s 8:30, and if it weren’t for the laundry, I’d be able to say I haven’t left the couch since I got home.  Sounds lazy (I’m not a couch potato!), but that’s what I wanted.  After last night’s class and this morning’s workout, I can barely move my shoulders.  Feeding myself hurt a little.  Good hurt.  Ooh, a bath!  I’m totally taking a bubble bath.  With candles and music and my book.  If I only I could figure out how to hold my book so I can see it without having to use my arms.

The dryer is buzzing at me.  Must go.

Well, I thought it was funny

The internet conspired to make me laugh today, which is good ’cause my workday left me feeling irritable.  First, The Bloggess.  Naturally.  Time-share ponies = awesome idea.  Then, John and I watched an episode of Castle on Hulu tonight (we’re maybe three episodes behind – it was the one with Donna from That ’70s Show), and there was one scene we laughed so hard at we had to pause the show and go back.  Then, I read an email from last week (I’m not that behind – I must have missed this one) that’s a compilation of winning Style Invitational entries and alternate definitions of words.  I can’t find the actual list online anywhere, so I think it’s just an email thing that was put together who knows how long ago (I’ve seen some of them before) and by who knows who, but it’s really funny.  My favorite was lymph: to walk with a lisp.

Maybe you had to be there.

http://www.hulu.com/

I’m pretty sure there aren’t any vampires in this book – not entirely certain yet

I don’t think I should be awake more than about 16 hours in a row. Yesterday, we were up for 20 hours, and I’m completely worn out and was pretty much useless today. We got up way too early for a Saturday to meet Jess at a book sale in Annapolis (which was awesome – we came home with over a hundred books for a little over a hundred bucks), came home home in the early afternoon and sorted those books for a couple of hours, and then went into DC to meet John’s mom and sister for dinner. I think it was around 1am when we got home.

I spent about half of today in front of the fire with my book and the dogs. I’m getting better at keeping the fire going; I don’t always have to call for John when it dies down a little. I’m still not that great at it, though. It’s all trial and error – poke this log, turn that one over, move the other one over there. Reminds me of learning to sail. I never could figure out when I was supposed to tighten or loosen lines. I just tried it one way, and if that didn’t work, I tried the other way. I didn’t actually learn anything. I’m surprised I ever managed to bring the boat back to the dock.

I’m done with winter, I think.  Much as I enjoy days in front of the fire, I’m really not okay with nights where the low is 7 degrees.  7!  I just revised my exercise plan for tomorrow.  Inside, inside, inside.

For those of you keeping an eye on what I’ve been watching, we finally finished Firefly (we’d put it on hold because we didn’t want it to be over) and then watched Serenity (which I think wouldn’t have made sense to anyone who hadn’t seen Firefly, but we liked it), the BBC version of Life of Mars is really good (I’ll watch anything if it’s got DCI Hunt in it – we haven’t seen the US version yet), and TRON: Legacy has no plot.