Sunday I saw Never After. It's cute and bouncy. Much of the music is fun; the orchestra was excellent. It pushed at my definition of 'fairy tale' -- I think it isn't quite one, to me, but instead belongs over in whatever one calls the space Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are in ( Read more... )

First spring Madrigal event happened. Final Root Maze mod happened, despite my fears about the weather and inability to do any setup pregame (due to rain). Much of that pre-game time was burned on turning my cribsheet into PC-presentable signs, so it wasn't wasted -- would've been nice to do that beforehand, but I'd been dithering about signs vs ( Read more... )

Wednesday I tagged along with a couple of lj-free friends that I don't see nearly often enough to see The Fall. It's a breathtakingly gorgeous movie. The credits tell me it was shot on location in seventeen countries, and I could see burning a whole lot of vacation time going to visit some of the places they filmed. The actress playing the ( Read more... )

A reaction of "ack, I have contaminated my kitchen and must clean everything" was not what I expected from myself in response to making peanut butter cookies. The cookies turned out just fine -- or at least, so the intended audience told me (I've never been a huge fan, and they're always crumbly) -- but now I feel like I need to scrub the ( Read more... )

Cherry chocolate chip ice cream would be better with tart cherries rather than hot pink candied cherries, and without the ice cream colored pink. Still, it's not bad, and the cherries are a definite presence, whereas the peaches and cream ice cream was short on peaches, and what peaches it had were unpleasantly icy. Also, the ice cream tasted too ( Read more... )

The museum was fun. I got to swing a mace and a sword around -- both modern reproductions, but even to handle those you had to wear gloves. (The museum had a huge box of cotton gloves for this. Apparently humans are really bad for weapons.) The thing I would've liked more of was technical data on the construction and materials and use of the ( Read more... )

The rhubarb-ginger upside down cake that claims to serve eight actually serves one rhubarb fiend and the cook. Tasty, though not nearly as intensely rhubarb-y as rhubarb pie. I may've used a little too much ginger. I also managed to hit the chicken broth jackpot, with a pot of broth rich enough that it was starting to jell at room temperature. ( Read more... )

Six Flags New England didn't seem like nearly as large a park this time as it did two years ago. It was much less crowded -- the ride lines weren't nearly as long -- and we weren't madly trying to ride all the roller coasters, so it seemed like relatively calm visit with plenty of time to do everything we wanted to do. "Aren't we missing ( Read more... )

... things happen. Sometimes I babble about them.

Most of a month ago, I finished reading Emotional Intelligence (by Daniel Goleman, on extended loan from chenoameg). Having read it, it wasn't quite the book I wanted. The book I actually wanted was the textbook (and workbook and teacher's guide) for the course(s) on playing well with others that the ( Read more... )

Apparently I hadn't read nearly as many of the Jhereg books as I'd thought, as Phoenix was new to me already. I hadn't remembered Vlad and Cawti's relationship developing so many issues so quickly. I'm also wondering who Vlad's intended audience is for his story-telling -- Devera? Much of the political manipulation in Phoenix seemed implausibly ( Read more... )