*falls over*
Today was a yardwork day ... putting together the frames for raised garden beds and partially filling them with semi-composted chicken litter (sawdust, mostly). I think I'm ready to go get a pickup truck load of topsoil in the next couple of days -- our yard is gravel tailings (old mine waste) and we have NO dirt except for the odd bit of river clay here and there. This year, for the first time in the seven years we've been here, I'm attempting an actual, respectable garden rather than a couple of containers with tomatoes in them. It's not going to be huge, but large enough to grow some tomatoes and squash and corn and salad stuff.
The weather's been great -- 70 degrees and not too cold at night. We usually figure the end of May is the beginning of the "no frost" gardening safety zone, but the weather's supposed to be up to 80 by the end of the week and I doubt if we'll be seeing freezing temperatures again this year. My little seedlings are outgrowing their bitty containers; I need to get them transplanted. The trees are barely turning green, but it feels like summer!
And we have 24 hours of daylight now. The sun sets around 11-ish (actually a bit earlier for us, since we're in a valley) and comes up about 4 a.m. By the middle of June, it'll barely dip below the horizon for an hour or so in the middle of the night. Mmm, summer.
Also, we watched the last few episodes of this season of Supernatural and ... WHAT.
It's at times like this that I'm kind of glad I don't care about the characters all that much. I can totally understand people feeling hurt, betrayed or upset by the finale's developments. But I actually think having Castiel go darkside is a really interesting move and probably the only thing left to do with him that's really different from what they've done with him before -- and I think it was done in a fairly plausible way, that his road to Big Bad and the way that the power of Purgatory seduced him is logical in retrospect ... even though I didn't, at the time, believe those segments of my flist who saw it coming from afar. *tips hat* Yeah, you guys were right and I was wrong. And it'll be nice FOR A CHANGE to have a Big Bad that the boys are at least somewhat conflicted about killing.
After not watching SPN for a while, I've been struck all over again, watching the back half of the season, at how ... mean-spirited the show is. I don't hate SPN (obviously I don't, since I'm still watching it) and I don't mean this as any sort of insult to those who really love the show, but I do feel as if SPN displays a pretty ugly view of the world. The SPN world isn't devoid of kindness or heroism, but it's a world in which the job of a hero is to torture and kill, and everyone else exists mainly to suffer and die. The violence/torture/killing is relentless and the lack of any attempt to find viable alternatives really wears on me after a while; granted, it's not 100% the characters' faults when the show sets it up so that they really don't have a choice, but then you have episodes like the phoenix one, where the phoenix is really just a guy trying to live his life, and the Winchesters basically murdered him. And there's also the way that the humor is usually at other people's expense, and even though I laugh at a lot of it, it's often in a very guilty kind of way. Complaining about the show's gender issues is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it was particularly egregious that we got two episodes back-to-back in which powerful women were portrayed as young-looking, humorless and emotion-driven (the female fate/destiny in the Titanic episode, and the female angel captain who was killed by Castiel) -- in contrast to the male power/authority figures like Crowley and Balthasar who are older-looking, suave, funny and canny. And did anyone else notice that wife!Ellen (in the Titanic episode) was a lot more prettified and domestic than ordinary Ellen? I don't know. It's not the individual instances that bother me so much as the overall pattern. SPN is a reasonably well-written, well-acted show, but it often makes me feel like I need to do a mental detox after watching it.
I haven't figured out if I'm coming back next season. I hit the point long ago (probably season three) where I didn't really care about the Winchesters' endless cycle of angst and was mostly in it for the entertainment value and for a handful of supporting characters who have all either died or lost me. I have zero faith in the writers anymore and no desire to get attached to characters who are all going to die, often after suffering some degree of character assassination first. Honestly, I think I'd've stopped watching seasons ago if it wasn't for a combination of a) the show is still pretty entertaining, b) my husband likes it, and c) I like reading other people's episode reactions and I'm apparently still interested enough in the show that I don't want to massively spoil myself if I haven't seen the episode yet.
And I'm rather wooed by the idea of seeing the Winchesters go up against a Big Bad that they truly don't want to kill, and having to try to come up with a non-lethal alternative rather than just finding a bigger gun. (Or maybe they'll just go looking for a bigger gun anyway. Oh show.)
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/344513.html with
comments.
The weather's been great -- 70 degrees and not too cold at night. We usually figure the end of May is the beginning of the "no frost" gardening safety zone, but the weather's supposed to be up to 80 by the end of the week and I doubt if we'll be seeing freezing temperatures again this year. My little seedlings are outgrowing their bitty containers; I need to get them transplanted. The trees are barely turning green, but it feels like summer!
And we have 24 hours of daylight now. The sun sets around 11-ish (actually a bit earlier for us, since we're in a valley) and comes up about 4 a.m. By the middle of June, it'll barely dip below the horizon for an hour or so in the middle of the night. Mmm, summer.
Also, we watched the last few episodes of this season of Supernatural and ... WHAT.
It's at times like this that I'm kind of glad I don't care about the characters all that much. I can totally understand people feeling hurt, betrayed or upset by the finale's developments. But I actually think having Castiel go darkside is a really interesting move and probably the only thing left to do with him that's really different from what they've done with him before -- and I think it was done in a fairly plausible way, that his road to Big Bad and the way that the power of Purgatory seduced him is logical in retrospect ... even though I didn't, at the time, believe those segments of my flist who saw it coming from afar. *tips hat* Yeah, you guys were right and I was wrong. And it'll be nice FOR A CHANGE to have a Big Bad that the boys are at least somewhat conflicted about killing.
After not watching SPN for a while, I've been struck all over again, watching the back half of the season, at how ... mean-spirited the show is. I don't hate SPN (obviously I don't, since I'm still watching it) and I don't mean this as any sort of insult to those who really love the show, but I do feel as if SPN displays a pretty ugly view of the world. The SPN world isn't devoid of kindness or heroism, but it's a world in which the job of a hero is to torture and kill, and everyone else exists mainly to suffer and die. The violence/torture/killing is relentless and the lack of any attempt to find viable alternatives really wears on me after a while; granted, it's not 100% the characters' faults when the show sets it up so that they really don't have a choice, but then you have episodes like the phoenix one, where the phoenix is really just a guy trying to live his life, and the Winchesters basically murdered him. And there's also the way that the humor is usually at other people's expense, and even though I laugh at a lot of it, it's often in a very guilty kind of way. Complaining about the show's gender issues is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it was particularly egregious that we got two episodes back-to-back in which powerful women were portrayed as young-looking, humorless and emotion-driven (the female fate/destiny in the Titanic episode, and the female angel captain who was killed by Castiel) -- in contrast to the male power/authority figures like Crowley and Balthasar who are older-looking, suave, funny and canny. And did anyone else notice that wife!Ellen (in the Titanic episode) was a lot more prettified and domestic than ordinary Ellen? I don't know. It's not the individual instances that bother me so much as the overall pattern. SPN is a reasonably well-written, well-acted show, but it often makes me feel like I need to do a mental detox after watching it.
I haven't figured out if I'm coming back next season. I hit the point long ago (probably season three) where I didn't really care about the Winchesters' endless cycle of angst and was mostly in it for the entertainment value and for a handful of supporting characters who have all either died or lost me. I have zero faith in the writers anymore and no desire to get attached to characters who are all going to die, often after suffering some degree of character assassination first. Honestly, I think I'd've stopped watching seasons ago if it wasn't for a combination of a) the show is still pretty entertaining, b) my husband likes it, and c) I like reading other people's episode reactions and I'm apparently still interested enough in the show that I don't want to massively spoil myself if I haven't seen the episode yet.
And I'm rather wooed by the idea of seeing the Winchesters go up against a Big Bad that they truly don't want to kill, and having to try to come up with a non-lethal alternative rather than just finding a bigger gun. (Or maybe they'll just go looking for a bigger gun anyway. Oh show.)
This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/344513.html with
comments.