a post without any angst in!
And so ends what will go down in family history as The Week Without Mum. (Right, it was ten days, but I say if the French and English can have their hundred-and-sixty-year Hundred Years War, we can have our ten-day Week Without Mum.) Weeks Without Mum, by the way, have been nonexistant until now. Dad's been gone for two weeks at least twice (three years ago when he was in Bangladesh, and last summer when he was in Colorado), and both of the parents have been gone for several days in order to attend conferences, church interviews, and (on two occasions) a marriage retreat. Mum has been gone over maybe two nights for a retreat. Working out life with Dad for over a week is weird, yeah? Especially when he isn't even cooking. (Dad's an excellent cook. I could've done with some of his calzones. Mum can't really cook yet, not being able to stand up for very long, so perhaps I can persuade some out of him this week.)
Anyway, we brought Mum home, set up the schoolroom (which has a hide-a-bed couch in it) for her to stay in while she's still mostly on bedrest, and are now trying to drag our lives back into some kind of normalcy. Leandra is in excellent condition, by the by; she's safely in Pittsburgh, but she hasn't had to go on the special respirator they sent her over for yet, and she's very active. (She's a stubborn one, that girl. Takes after me. ^-^ She's not about to let something silly like being small get her down.) If she keeps progressing like that, she could be back in our hospital this week, but they want to make sure everything's going to be okay before they do that, because it would be awful to bring her back and then have to send her away again.
Oh, and ALSO. :DD YES. Dad and I watched 'Rose' yesterday, and it was fantastic. (Also cracktastic, of course.) The editing was a little awkward, I thought, and the photography of it isn't nearly as good as what I saw of Season II, but blimey, it was awesome. Nine is kind of darling in his own way, I think. Not as brilliantly fangirlable as Ten, of course (I honestly don't know if anyone, ever, could be more marvellous than Ten, with the exception of Remus Lupin and possibly Professor Bhaer) but still awesome. And snarky. And kind of awkward. I really wanted to hug him. Also, Dad liked it. I'm still trying to process this. Dad has not liked science fiction or fantasy much since the seventies, unless it's got some interesting twist to it (Gattaca, for example, or The Abyss, because they were both character dramas before being sci-fi, and the former because it had excellent social commentary; Galaxy Quest because, er, it was hilarious.) I'm reckoning because it was clever and funny, because he did laugh an awful lot, but it's still weird. He's actually interested in watching more. (Don't know if he'd stick out for a whole season, though; the notion of serialised television is sort of alien to him, as he's lived longer without a television than he has with one, I think, and hasn't been devoted to any particular show since--high school, probably, though I don't know what he watched other than Monty Python's Flying Circus. Hee, but he also says that he watched an episode or two of Old Who, sometime back in the day, though he didn't know there was a new series and seemed pretty unfamiliar with Doctor Who in general--didn't know it went on for a few decades, for example. He thinks the bits he watched were black and white, which I'm dubious about--was some of the original Who in black and white? It was "stagey" and "sounded kind of like The Twilight Zone", which I can totally understand. Sixties television. Hee.)
Speaking of Doctor Who, I have a rather peculiar question. Are there any tie-in food products, in Britain, say? Cereal, maybe? Gummy snacks? Only Dad said something about Doctor Who cereal as a joke when we were food-shopping today, and I thought how eerily possible it was, especially as there are, somewhere, Lord of the Rings gummy snacks--either in England or New Zealand, I can't remember where. And, you know, Doctor Who cereal would be kind of awesome. I'm picturing little round sugared corn cereal bits with TARDIS-shaped marshmallows, or something. The sad thing is, I would absolutely buy some, even though my official stand on marketing exploitation is negative, and I would probably hate the taste.
Anyway, we brought Mum home, set up the schoolroom (which has a hide-a-bed couch in it) for her to stay in while she's still mostly on bedrest, and are now trying to drag our lives back into some kind of normalcy. Leandra is in excellent condition, by the by; she's safely in Pittsburgh, but she hasn't had to go on the special respirator they sent her over for yet, and she's very active. (She's a stubborn one, that girl. Takes after me. ^-^ She's not about to let something silly like being small get her down.) If she keeps progressing like that, she could be back in our hospital this week, but they want to make sure everything's going to be okay before they do that, because it would be awful to bring her back and then have to send her away again.
Oh, and ALSO. :DD YES. Dad and I watched 'Rose' yesterday, and it was fantastic. (Also cracktastic, of course.) The editing was a little awkward, I thought, and the photography of it isn't nearly as good as what I saw of Season II, but blimey, it was awesome. Nine is kind of darling in his own way, I think. Not as brilliantly fangirlable as Ten, of course (I honestly don't know if anyone, ever, could be more marvellous than Ten, with the exception of Remus Lupin and possibly Professor Bhaer) but still awesome. And snarky. And kind of awkward. I really wanted to hug him. Also, Dad liked it. I'm still trying to process this. Dad has not liked science fiction or fantasy much since the seventies, unless it's got some interesting twist to it (Gattaca, for example, or The Abyss, because they were both character dramas before being sci-fi, and the former because it had excellent social commentary; Galaxy Quest because, er, it was hilarious.) I'm reckoning because it was clever and funny, because he did laugh an awful lot, but it's still weird. He's actually interested in watching more. (Don't know if he'd stick out for a whole season, though; the notion of serialised television is sort of alien to him, as he's lived longer without a television than he has with one, I think, and hasn't been devoted to any particular show since--high school, probably, though I don't know what he watched other than Monty Python's Flying Circus. Hee, but he also says that he watched an episode or two of Old Who, sometime back in the day, though he didn't know there was a new series and seemed pretty unfamiliar with Doctor Who in general--didn't know it went on for a few decades, for example. He thinks the bits he watched were black and white, which I'm dubious about--was some of the original Who in black and white? It was "stagey" and "sounded kind of like The Twilight Zone", which I can totally understand. Sixties television. Hee.)
Speaking of Doctor Who, I have a rather peculiar question. Are there any tie-in food products, in Britain, say? Cereal, maybe? Gummy snacks? Only Dad said something about Doctor Who cereal as a joke when we were food-shopping today, and I thought how eerily possible it was, especially as there are, somewhere, Lord of the Rings gummy snacks--either in England or New Zealand, I can't remember where. And, you know, Doctor Who cereal would be kind of awesome. I'm picturing little round sugared corn cereal bits with TARDIS-shaped marshmallows, or something. The sad thing is, I would absolutely buy some, even though my official stand on marketing exploitation is negative, and I would probably hate the taste.