(no subject)
I'm seeking advice about a few things. Item the first: if I were to buy one Rasputina album, which should it be?
I'll be going to Convergence XII next month (for the BPAL and to spend money in NOLA, and because road trips are the thing I miss most desperately about living on the east coast). Rasputina is one of the bands playing the convention, and I've heard good things about them on Caitlin Kiernan's blog and, I think, Wil Wheaton's. I am not a concert venue sort of person... can't take smoke, don't like being around drunks, and if the bass is up high enough to vibrate my lungs, I seriously wig out. But concerts are included in the convention badge price, and I'm making the trip with an RL friend of mine, so I figure I should give us both the chance to listen to their music on the drive over and decide whether we really want to sacrifice sleep and sanity, or whether we're better off just planning touristy, non-convention things to do.
Item the second: what movies should I put in my Netflix queue?
We just signed up a week ago, and even though I had a handful of titles to add right away, it seems like 3/4ths of our list are anime movies the hubby chose. ("Those are just the anime movies," he stressed, as if that makes him a model of restraint. "I haven't started in on the episodic ones yet." Le sigh.) Naturally, rating all those has screwed with the sort of suggestions Netflix gives, so my only hope of keeping a 50/50 ratio of things I'm actually interested in is to already know the name of the DVD I'm looking for. Random searches are pretty useless (though we both agree that any website with a "More vampires" link is a good thing). I've already gotten Men With Brooms, which I liked. I'll probably buy The Sentinel Season 1 when it's released next month. I already own (but have not watched all of) due South. I also own some of Smallville, all of Buffy, and Firefly/Serenity. I'd love fannish suggestions wherein good slash or good fic in general can be found, but really anything will do, as long as it's not anime. My tv/movie checklist is:
1) Clever writing?
2) Good plot?
3) Interesting characters?
4) Hot actors/actresses?
Two of the four required; more even better. I'll suffer through a lot for the sake of clever writing, but bad dialogue will absolutely kill a movie for me -- I haven't seen Star Wars: Episode 2 since the first time in the theater, and we don't own it, and we won't be buying any box sets that include it. *shudder*
No project update this week. Let Us Not Go There. Instead, I bring pics, from the "with some things, it's better to just pay other people to make it go away" department.
This is what a year of neglect does to a planter bed in central Texas. This is also what we decided was the best possible use of our tax refund. Writing a check is way easier than dealing with that mess. Sorry for the mesh -- I took this photo about 5 minutes before the workers got here, because they only gave me 15 minutes' notice that they were ahead of schedule and would be doing the work that day, and since I wasn't even dressed yet I couldn't exactly go outside to take the "before" pics. Our homebuilder was of the "big and cheap" school of thought, so the window screens are immovable.
We have ground! And mulch! And a Texas mountain laurel (center, behind the left-most of the grassy clumps) that's not dead; it's just resting! There were some smaller flowering plants in there that got decimated by the weedwhacker and rakes, but I figure with as weed-choked as it had been before, any plant that survived is a bonus. I'll wait a season to see what grows back, and then plant some smaller things in the fall. (Fall is prime planting time here because winters are milder than summers, and it gives the plants the longest possible time to establish roots before the heat and droughts arrive.) Two guys did all that work, and a lot more that's off-camera, in one 10 hr day. Definitely money well spent.
Lily is our Turkish angora cat. She's not purebred or anything... in fact, her father was an orange tomcat, though the only part of his heritage to be seen in her is the yellow eyes instead of her mother's blue. She weighs over 18 lbs, and is too fat to reach all the way to the middle of her spine to groom herself thoroughly. Lily objects to being bathed. A lot. When her fur got too matted, we decided that cat grooming is one of those things in life that it's entirely worth paying someone else to do for you. We got her a lion cut (only the head, tail tip, and lower legs are unshaved), as seen here:
And because she'd hurt me if she found out I'd put a nekkid picture of her on the Internet, here's Lily in happier, hairier days:
I love how she's surveying the neighborhood to be sure the outdoor cats know that our house is off-limits to roving feline. I also love, with much exasperation, how the best pictures of my stained glass door always seem to be the ones where I'm trying to take a picture of the cats, not of the door itself. Yes that's a dragon, and yes, we really are that geeky.
Speaking of a plurality of cats, the others would be hurt if I didn't show them off too:
That's Muriel and Dot, respectively. Muriel we adopted at 3 yrs old and kept the name she'd had for that long; Dot is named after the Animaniacs character, because "she's the cute one". This was taken at our old house, probably in 2003, and is probably the closest these two have ever been without inciting a riot. We only have flat-screen monitors now; way less heat production. It was funny watching them discover the change... each one tried jumping on the monitor, and took a header off the other side. (Lily never sat on monitors cause she knew she was too big.) Muriel never tried that trick again; Dot fell a couple more times before it sunk in. Dot's a lot longer on "cute" than she is on brains.
Think I'm done taking up bandwidth for now... please do give DVD suggestions, with or without explanation. I can look em up and decide for myself!
Today's BPAL - testing Santo Domingo. Hubby always says BPAL smells like "flowers and alcohol", but this one really does. An exotic, sultry blend of tobacco leaf, bay rum and heady Caribbean blossoms which is, unfortunately, way nicer in the vial than on me.
Post edited because unequal parentheses drive me nuts even though I'm not a programmer.
I'll be going to Convergence XII next month (for the BPAL and to spend money in NOLA, and because road trips are the thing I miss most desperately about living on the east coast). Rasputina is one of the bands playing the convention, and I've heard good things about them on Caitlin Kiernan's blog and, I think, Wil Wheaton's. I am not a concert venue sort of person... can't take smoke, don't like being around drunks, and if the bass is up high enough to vibrate my lungs, I seriously wig out. But concerts are included in the convention badge price, and I'm making the trip with an RL friend of mine, so I figure I should give us both the chance to listen to their music on the drive over and decide whether we really want to sacrifice sleep and sanity, or whether we're better off just planning touristy, non-convention things to do.
Item the second: what movies should I put in my Netflix queue?
We just signed up a week ago, and even though I had a handful of titles to add right away, it seems like 3/4ths of our list are anime movies the hubby chose. ("Those are just the anime movies," he stressed, as if that makes him a model of restraint. "I haven't started in on the episodic ones yet." Le sigh.) Naturally, rating all those has screwed with the sort of suggestions Netflix gives, so my only hope of keeping a 50/50 ratio of things I'm actually interested in is to already know the name of the DVD I'm looking for. Random searches are pretty useless (though we both agree that any website with a "More vampires" link is a good thing). I've already gotten Men With Brooms, which I liked. I'll probably buy The Sentinel Season 1 when it's released next month. I already own (but have not watched all of) due South. I also own some of Smallville, all of Buffy, and Firefly/Serenity. I'd love fannish suggestions wherein good slash or good fic in general can be found, but really anything will do, as long as it's not anime. My tv/movie checklist is:
1) Clever writing?
2) Good plot?
3) Interesting characters?
4) Hot actors/actresses?
Two of the four required; more even better. I'll suffer through a lot for the sake of clever writing, but bad dialogue will absolutely kill a movie for me -- I haven't seen Star Wars: Episode 2 since the first time in the theater, and we don't own it, and we won't be buying any box sets that include it. *shudder*
No project update this week. Let Us Not Go There. Instead, I bring pics, from the "with some things, it's better to just pay other people to make it go away" department.
This is what a year of neglect does to a planter bed in central Texas. This is also what we decided was the best possible use of our tax refund. Writing a check is way easier than dealing with that mess. Sorry for the mesh -- I took this photo about 5 minutes before the workers got here, because they only gave me 15 minutes' notice that they were ahead of schedule and would be doing the work that day, and since I wasn't even dressed yet I couldn't exactly go outside to take the "before" pics. Our homebuilder was of the "big and cheap" school of thought, so the window screens are immovable.
We have ground! And mulch! And a Texas mountain laurel (center, behind the left-most of the grassy clumps) that's not dead; it's just resting! There were some smaller flowering plants in there that got decimated by the weedwhacker and rakes, but I figure with as weed-choked as it had been before, any plant that survived is a bonus. I'll wait a season to see what grows back, and then plant some smaller things in the fall. (Fall is prime planting time here because winters are milder than summers, and it gives the plants the longest possible time to establish roots before the heat and droughts arrive.) Two guys did all that work, and a lot more that's off-camera, in one 10 hr day. Definitely money well spent.
Lily is our Turkish angora cat. She's not purebred or anything... in fact, her father was an orange tomcat, though the only part of his heritage to be seen in her is the yellow eyes instead of her mother's blue. She weighs over 18 lbs, and is too fat to reach all the way to the middle of her spine to groom herself thoroughly. Lily objects to being bathed. A lot. When her fur got too matted, we decided that cat grooming is one of those things in life that it's entirely worth paying someone else to do for you. We got her a lion cut (only the head, tail tip, and lower legs are unshaved), as seen here:
And because she'd hurt me if she found out I'd put a nekkid picture of her on the Internet, here's Lily in happier, hairier days:
I love how she's surveying the neighborhood to be sure the outdoor cats know that our house is off-limits to roving feline. I also love, with much exasperation, how the best pictures of my stained glass door always seem to be the ones where I'm trying to take a picture of the cats, not of the door itself. Yes that's a dragon, and yes, we really are that geeky.
Speaking of a plurality of cats, the others would be hurt if I didn't show them off too:
That's Muriel and Dot, respectively. Muriel we adopted at 3 yrs old and kept the name she'd had for that long; Dot is named after the Animaniacs character, because "she's the cute one". This was taken at our old house, probably in 2003, and is probably the closest these two have ever been without inciting a riot. We only have flat-screen monitors now; way less heat production. It was funny watching them discover the change... each one tried jumping on the monitor, and took a header off the other side. (Lily never sat on monitors cause she knew she was too big.) Muriel never tried that trick again; Dot fell a couple more times before it sunk in. Dot's a lot longer on "cute" than she is on brains.
Think I'm done taking up bandwidth for now... please do give DVD suggestions, with or without explanation. I can look em up and decide for myself!
Today's BPAL - testing Santo Domingo. Hubby always says BPAL smells like "flowers and alcohol", but this one really does. An exotic, sultry blend of tobacco leaf, bay rum and heady Caribbean blossoms which is, unfortunately, way nicer in the vial than on me.
Post edited because unequal parentheses drive me nuts even though I'm not a programmer.