So this morning when I got home from work, I decided to do some crocheting and put on a movie from Netflix. I actually did get some crocheting done, but only because it was a familiar pattern that I didn’t need to devote but a small fraction of my attention to — because Right At Your Door quite thoroughly sucked me in! This movie, however, held me transfixed through emotion and gritty realism, and a more intimate story (just a very few characters, instead of the whole city). Let me put it this way: I had a smoke break during yesterday’s movie, but there was no way in Hades that I was pausing today’s movie! It was just that compelling. Right At Your Door is another TEOTWAWKI movie, with a similar premise to Dirty War, but otherwise they are vastly different. I highly recommend both.

Now to go hunt down a few more TEOTWAWKI flicks that I haven’t seen yet…

And some actors I really like are in it! *squee!*

Ever since BSG ended, my television viewing has largely consisted of NCIS and House marathons on USA Network (while crocheting or cross-stitching, because I cannot just sit and watch TV), interspersed with the occasional show on NatGeo or one of the Discovery channels involving natural disasters (“Is there anything better than a natural disaster?”), death and other taboos, or really cool science shows. Let’s face it, TV mostly sucks. Thank the gods for Netflix!

Here’s hoping ABC doesn’t screw it up. I can’t remember the last time I watched a “regular” network channel other than CBS.

Go to “Your Queue.”

1. How many movies do you have in your queue? 269

2. How many movies in your Instant queue? 32

3. What movies do you have out now? 5, counting our whole household

4. What is the first movie in your queue? It Happened Here

5. What is the last movie in your queue? Celtic Thunder (not avail on IMDB)

6. How many movies are in your “Saved DVDs” queue? 16

7. What movie is #100 in your queue? The Dead Zone (which I actually haven’t seen)

Go to “Your Account” to answer these questions:

8. Member Since: April 2004

9. Plan: 5 at-a-time (Unlimited) Plan

Click “DVD Rental Activity.”

10. What was the first DVD you rented? Reign of Fire

11. How many DVDs have you rented? 533

12. What movies did you return during the month of February 2007? Snakes on a Plane, Corpse Bride

13. What movies did you receive during the month of February 2008? 300, Stonehenge, Last Stand of the 300, Ancient Mysteries: Witches, What Is Reiki? (not on IMDB, and utterly stupid anyway), Lost Treasures of the Ancient World: The Celts, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, The Perfect Corpse: Nova, The Dark Ages, Sex & the Celts (not on IMDB), Mysterious Britain, Roast of William Shatner: Uncensored, Hadrian’s Wall, Boudicca: Warrior Queen, Modern Marvels: Gothic Cathedrals, Chartres Cathedral: A Sacred Geometry (not on IMDB, but very good), Twisted

14. How many movies did you report problems on (missing, damaged)? 8

15. What was the last movie you returned? Carrier: Disc 3 (phenomenal, btw!)

Movies You’ll ♥

16. What is the first movie on the page? There isn’t one, because apparently my viewing patterns are indecipherable to Netflix. They stopped suggesting movies to me in 2006.

17. This movie has been suggested “Because you enjoyed:” N/A

18. Are you going to rent that suggestion? N/A

19. How many movies have you rated? 22,877 (including a “not interested” rating)

20. How many suggestions do you have? 0

Saturday, Geoffrey and I went to the Rose City Gun and Knife show. It strongly reminded me of the open-air swap meets my mom used to take me to in Hawaii, except it was indoors and there were fewer Samoans (sad to say — *grin*). Lyse was thinking of going along, but working graveyard shift makes daytime excursions a little disruptive to one’s schedule, and also she wasn’t feeling so great. It probably would have bored the demonspawn silly, and she’d had a late night, so she stayed home too. But it all worked out okay…I got this awesome new shirt (too bad I can’t wear it to work, but it would break the dress code in at least a couple ways I can think of!), and got Anxiety this shirt (in pale blue — and she can’t wear it to school, either…which still vaguely astonishes me, considering that I had my handgun targets hung inside my locker door for all to see when I was in 10th grade!!!). Geoffrey got himself a Mosin-Nagant M/44 rifle (well-used but came with some accessories), and I was soooo drooling over a rifle very similar to this (but more purple); I almost got it.

Why didn’t I? Because I decided it would be just a smidgen excessive to buy two guns at my first gun show. And I had my heart set on this darling little shiny (got it new, but didn’t pay nearly as much as that link shows, either!). Why that one, instead of something bigger? Because I’m super-picky about how a weapon feels in my hand (which is why I don’t care for semi-autos), and that was the only revolver that sat really *nicely*, like it belonged there. Okay, there were a couple of larger-caliber ones that I liked, too, but I do not need Dirty Harry’s gun! (I’ve fired a .44 without smacking myself in the forehead, but I’d rather not mess with that much recoil often. Not unless I take up weight training.)

I was terribly amused at how many vendors at the show kept pointing me toward the smaller-caliber guns with itty-bitty grips. Sure, I’m a girl — but not a small one. I’m 5’9″ and built like a Norse warbitch. I wear a size 9 ring, people; I do not have small hands! Crocheting for twenty years means I also have fairly strong and limber hands. Besides, derringers are for experts or posers; I actually want to hit what I’m aiming at, and if it’s not a paper target, it needs to go down and stay down. (BTW, I have never actually shot anything but a paper target…although one of these days I have got to try skeet-shooting.)

I wasn’t surprised that the men in attendance out-numbered the women at least 30 to 1 (in any other setting, I’d have been extremely creeped out by being in a crowd surrounded by that many guys, but everyone was so intrinsically polite that I wasn’t bothered a bit), but I was pleasantly surprised that the ratio was closer to 5 to 1 at the actual gun purchasing points. Poor Geoffrey may have been the only long-haired guy there; he was constantly referred to as “Miss.” One thing that did surprise me about the gun show was how few books there were — but we did manage to find a couple nifty titles: In the Gravest Extreme: The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection and The Encyclopedia of Country Living. Both really excellent books, that I would recommend. Also I must say that the Expo Center concession stand makes a damned good grilled chicken sandwich.

Sunday I went grocery shopping (wearing my Infidel shirt, a few people stared but no dirty looks — which surprised me, in hippie-dippie stupidly-PC Portland), did a metric butt-ton of laundry, actually cooked a real dinner (used the oven and the rangetop, even!) and watched a horrible documentary from Netflix. I don’t know why I don’t shut horrible docs off within the first 20 minutes, they never improve…but somehow I always think they might. Le sigh. Out of every 5 flicks I get from Netflix, they tend to run thusly: 1 terrific, 3 decent (or at least not worthless), and 1 atrocious. Oh well, at least I’m learning things…like how to conclusively spot utter dreck within the first 5 minutes of a DVD. Speaking of which, I just added Repo! The Genetic Opera to my queue; my eldest loved it, and I’m a sucker for any footage in which Anthony Stewart Head is singing. I hate musicals as a rule (White Christmas being the ultimate exception), but how bad can it be? I’m going to find out.

Come to think of it, most current event news coverage — of anything — is just tiresome. And often depressing. That would be why I stopped watching the news. (Does anyone really care about our Portland mayor’s sex life? *roll eyes*)

On to more fun stuff: this weekend, we’re going to the gun show! Payday is Friday…oh dear. Hopefully I can restrain myself. *grin* I just hope I don’t fall too much in love with one of these.

I’m really looking forward to the next movie in my Netflix queue…it’s called The World Without US (not to be confused with the excellent documentary called Life After People, or the similar-named book The World Without Us, which I had never heard of before today but will browse the next time I’m at Powell’s). This is a documentary about “what would happen if the United States were to suddenly remove itself from the world stage, giving up its self-appointed role as a global policeman and withdrawing into its own borders.” I’m very intrigued.

Today’s adventure: drove to Beaverton! In the snow! Without chains or snow tires!

We had to take Fido to the vet because had another prolapse of his boy parts, and this time the vet suggested making him a eunuch, which we agreed to. (I was surprised that they asked me if I planned on breeding him — I quickly replied, “No, I don’t believe in breeding pets.”)

The drive out was astonishingly easy. I drove Lyse’s car without chains or snow tires, and it went quite smoothly. Sure, the average speed was about 20 mph (and about 15 mph coming back, since a lot more snow had dumped by then), but it was for a good cause. I wanted to do something helpful for Lyse, because all the gods know that she’s done tons for me. Her kitchen and downstairs bathroom are now spotless, and we’ll work on the upstairs bathroom and vacuuming the whole house in a few days when the weather eases up. I might even go crazy and organize her garage. *gasp!*

After getting home from the Wintry Drive Adventure, I realized there were several Yule pressies yet to be purchased (as well as grocery needs), so Geoffrey and Anxiety and I headed out to Freddy’s. That drive was terribly unpleasant, compared to the previous drive — about 5 times farther out — to Beaverton! But I think I got all the major shopping done (finally!). Geoffrey was terribly sweet and grabbed a DVD of White Christmas when I mentioned that I really love that movie; I try to watch it every year during the holidays, but missed out on it the last year or two, and have no idea if/when it will be aired this year. But we get to watch it tomorrow!

So tomorrow I will be making the spiced beef recipe that calls for marinating in spices for a week prior to simmering in water & Guinness to cook it. I really, really hope it doesn’t suck…while I often get very lucky with new recipes (even when I don’t follow them precisely), sometimes the dishes I try just bomb. It doesn’t exactly encourage me to try cooking something new very often, especially as I pretty much consider cooking to be a big waste of time.

Then again, Geoffrey made chicken and dumplings from scratch tonight and it was scrumptious. (Well, truth be told, I look upon almost any food favorably if I didn’t have to cook it. But tonight’s dinner truly was yummy! I loooove dumplings.)

Hopefully tomorrow will be a good Yuletide for our family. I’m pretty sure the pressies I picked out for people this year will go over very well. We’re going to have an Irish dinner, watch White Christmas, light up the fireplace with a Yule log, and listen to Bing Crosby sing while opening pressies. And we’ll try to stay warm, as the wind chill factor has it feeling like zero degrees out there!

I am SICK AS HELL, and work has actually made it worse. Due to a lovely fubar by the IT department, the “operator saver” has not been working for the last 3 days for anyone in our department. (It’s a prerecorded greeting that kicks in at the beginning of each call, because the average number of calls we take each shift is 700-ish, and sometimes more than a thousand! If any of us had to repeat the greeting for every single call, our voices would be toast in no time.) I started the week already sick, with seriously horrid coughing, and congestion of both head and chest. By the end of the day on Wednesday, I was drinking codeine cough syrup like soda and it felt like the inside of my throat had been scrubbed raw with sandpaper. By the middle of my shift today, although the coughing is significantly reduced, my throat felt like I’d been gargling glass shards; no matter how much I babied my voice and sucked on honey throat lozenges, by noon I had to take a Vicodin just to be able to talk at ALL. In the hopes of helping soothe my poor abused throat, I’ll be talking as little as possible this weekend. (Undoubtedly there will be some who will find that state of affairs utterly delightful.)

Tonight was, infuriatingly, the second Friday in a row I couldn’t spend time with my Number One Internet Fanboy, because I don’t want — and he doesn’t want! — him catching what I’ve got (and no way to tell when I’m no longer contagious, until I’m all better again). I’m too sick to do much of anything, really, except the bare necessities. Okay, there are a couple of non-necessary items on the weekend agenda, but only because they were commitments I made before getting so aggravatingly sick: I have to pick up some books I have on hold at Powell’s (did you know you can order on the website and they email you when the order is ready to be picked up?!), and… I have to take a couple of 16-year-old girls to see Twilight. Oh joy and rapture. <—sarcasm!!!

At least it’s not animated. And there might be some sort of redeeming eye-candy in the flick. I hope. *sigh*

It has a button on it that will upload clips straight to YouTube.

Clearly this is Not Okay.

Because now there are (thankfully) short silly videos of my family on YouTube. *shudder*

You can see my Lap Fungus, Hasani, here (and hear me admonish the videographer at the end). Four seconds of my eldest being a giant dork is here. Twenty-two seconds of my eldest being an even bigger dork (with commentary from younger sister) is here.

There’s more, but those are the least wince-worthy. Le sigh.

My eldest does photo shoots now and again, sometimes of the R-rated variety but certainly not always (she posts them on her MySpace, if you want to see the racier ones). Recently she and her little sis had some purely G-rated pics done by one of Angst’s photog friends. I thought this one was really lovely:

And I really like this one because it’s something of a role-reversal, the younger sister being taller and posing rather protectively of the older sister:

For those of you who are similarly blessed to be out of the loop, this is a very silly PG-rated series of books about twu wuv between a klutzy (but otherwise Mary Sue perfect) girl named Bella and a (OMG!) vampire boy who sparkles. Literally.

I know, it sounds ridiculous. It’s like fanfic run amok. How could such a silly thing become so huge, and make in the neighborhood of a bazillion dollars? The answer is simple: people (especially teen girls) are heart-breakingly stupid. The upside is that this is all terribly entertaining, in a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash kind of way.

Anxiety’s friend Kate made her borrow the first book and read it, which naturally led to Anxiety demanding to buy the second book. On our most recent trip to Powell’s, we obtained the third book. Just so I’m not a totally-clueless mom, I read the first & second books, but after reading the hilarity that is Cleolinda’s take on Twilight (thank you Karel for the link!), I no longer feel the need to read the last 2 books. I certainly couldn’t enjoy it as much as Cleo’s synopses of them! (“The pillow-biting will never, ever stop cracking my shit up. Ever. OM NOM ROUGH SEX NOM.”)

Actually, there is ZERO sex in the first 3 books, and the only sex in the fourth is “fade to black” scenes after they get married. It’s no surprise that these are written by a devout Mormon (who thought hand-holding was mind-blowing when she was 16 years old, OMG), and adored by suburban moms everywhere because of the zero sex content. (Reading the first couple of books did give me flashbacks to my own teen angst over boys, leaving me with just a touch of outrage that I never had a boyfriend who sparkled.)

The movie comes out in November, and I will definitely have to see it, mainly so I can take Anxiety and her boyfriend of several months, who looks vaguely like the actor who plays the bad guy in the movie. Also I want to enjoy the lulz of the whole ridiculous thing. (Oh crap, I just realized this means I’ll have to be in a movie theater with 300 girls under the age of 15: ***My personal version of Hell.*** Well, perhaps some of them will mistake Anxiety’s boyfriend for James, and hilarity will ensue. Oh yeah, that would be lulz-tastic!)

Honestly, the books are so simplistic and repetitive — if accurate regarding teen angst run amok (sometimes so stupidly it makes you wonder how the hell humanity became the dominant species on the planet) — that it’s almost painful to read. The author’s writing style can be most charitably described as casual. Kudos to Stephenie Meyer for having gotten published, but geez lady, take some writing lessons already! If nothing else, the Twilight phenomenon will provoke thousands of people to realize, “Hey, I can write better than this crap!” and perhaps a whole new slew of authors will be born.

When I found out that neither Anxiety nor Lyse had seen Rosemary’s Baby, of course we had to watch it. Not only because it’s an entertaining movie, but because it’s fun to watch a 15-year-old become confused when shown such things as people dialing rotary phones, using a phonograph player, smoking indoors, and using a television clicker (what they called TV remote controls back when they actually made a clicking noise when you pushed a button). The movie is only a year older than I am, but it sure is interesting to see the changes in daily life that have happened in only 40 years.

(I remember when I was 6 years old, and postage stamps went from 10 to 13 cents — and you had to lick them, as they weren’t self-sticking. I wrote a lot of letters to my grandparents, as they often stuck a dollar bill in each reply. Candy bars were 15 cents or two for a quarter. The TV Guide and the National Enquirer — which, in addition to Sesame Street, were how I learned to read — both cost 25 cents. The Tooth Fairy usually brought me either 25 or 50 cents. I can’t remember what anything else cost in 1975, so you can see exactly where my 6-year-old priorities were.)

Anyway, for a gal who doesn’t like classic films, I heartily recommend Rosemary’s Baby. There’s no gore, the single scene with “blood” looks exactly like red paint, and it has only a few minor curse words and a couple of very brief nude scenes (Mia Farrow had very cute boobs, btw). All in all, nothing that would garner more than a PG rating these days. It’s certainly not a horror flick by any stretch, although I suppose it could be considered a psychological thriller. Anxiety was terribly disappointed that you didn’t get to actually see the devil-spawned baby. Poor child had to use her imagination (which is another thing that apparently has gone the way of the 13-cent postage stamp).

Hopefully tomorrow Geoffrey will watch his newly-arrived Netflix movie with me. Yes, it’s a totally awful horror flick, but hey, it’s got a devil-spawned baby in it…and I just can’t resist those movies. (I have got to get ahold of It’s Alive and It Lives Again on DVD!)