living, dead, and undecided
last night myself, my sister, and my mom (up from fla for thanksgiving) went to my cousin's kid's play, which was the addams family, the musical. i did not know there was an addams family musical. i like the barry sonnenfeld movies better. the musical was, uh, well, kinda dumb. the kids were very good, tho. excellent voices, good stage presence - especially the kid playing gomez - top notch production, altho to be honest it always is. but it was nice to see cousin's kid (the last kid still at home! this is the cousin with the four kids, one of whom is in college, one in grad school, and one freed of higher academia and out in the world) and he was really glad we came.
can we pretend it's like three weeks ago so i can talk about halloween a little bit? because halloween in my neighborhood is WILD. i haven't seen that many trick-or-treaters since i was one. they started coming around five and kept it up until about seven-thirty. holy carp. my roommate and i started out telling the kids to take two piece of candy, then we realized maybe we shouldn't do that, then we realized we were going to run out, then the landlady came home and said "oh, i have 4000 pieces of candy in the house", and went inside and came back out with a giant costco-sized bag of candy and an equally gigantic plastic bowl already full. so we handed out her candy when we ran out of ours. next year we will be better prepared! then we can be a house with two bowls of candy instead of just one.
so first you get the little kids, right, because it's still light out. there was a little girl dressed as what i thought was a chameleon, but no, she was a gecko. her grandma told us "she's a gecko because she really likes the commercials", which, i'm sorry, HOW CUTE IS THAT?? she was maybe four. SOCUTE. there was also a little girl dressed as a mini fridge, with a door that opened to reveal, like, the side of a carton of eggs and soda cans cut down the middle and pictures of jars of stuff - you know, food you'd put in a fridge - and, get this, A FRIDGE LIGHT. which she turned on for us. apparently it was her idea to be a mini fridge. there were a bunch of parents in costume and some dogs in costume (and some dogs not in costume) and the occasional baby in costume. also a kid dressed as the covid vaccine (he was a syringe), a girl probably in her early teens with a chestburster coming out of her t-shirt (i admired it because it was very cool and she said i was the only person who recognized what it was! and i never even saw alien!), two little girls dressed in nearly identical skeleton bodysuits (one of them confided "we're ten months apart so we like to dress the same except a little different" - she was intensely adorable), a boy collecting his candy in a backpack ("this is my second one"), and another boy collecting his candy in a giant black trash bag. also the guy who lives across the street from us put up a candy chute, which was basically a length of gutter with some holes drilled in it so he could tie it to the railing on his front steps. there was a stool with a big bowl on it on the sidewalk, so he could drop some candy down the chute and it would land in the bowl if the kid(s) waiting couldn't catch it in time. my roommate and i went over to say hi and admire it, and we met him and his wife and their dog, because of course we had to meet the dog.
some of the houses at the other end of the street from us decorated to a theme, which the landlady said was "games" but which also seemed to be kind of "disney". one house was all done up for the little mermaid, with an ursula and an ariel and i guess an eric (i can't remember who the guy was dressed as, if he even was in costume - they were all adults). apparently the homeowners on that block get together every year and come up with a theme, and they close off just that block to traffic. it was very fun and weirdly exhausting and the landlady and her friend who came over commented that it was a light year, and i thought holy shit if this is a light year what does a normal year look like?? i mean, it was sunday and the weather was warm and it was perfect halloween weather, and it still wasn't as big as a regular year.
and then nano started at midnight but the less said about that the better.
the next night i went out to dinner with tamalinn and friend a and friend r, and we sat outside while it was still warm enough to do so, and it was delicious and the server was adorable and accommodating and seemed to really like us and between dinner and dessert she brought out a kind of palate cleanser of peach gelato and then we all got glasses of after-dinner wine (sauterne, i think) that we didn't order and i don't know if the restaurant always does that or if it was a pandemic "thank you for patronizing us so we don't go under" kind of thing or if the server just liked us that much. (i'm guessing the first one. i'd never been to this place before so i have no idea.) it was so civilized even tho we were wearing our coats because did i mention we sat outside? and then on tuesday i met beckaandzac who was in town and we went out for vietnamese food and i had a pork chop which was DELICIOUS and we sat there for like two hours and just... *chat chat chat*. oh, it was so nice. becka's the most adorable, and it's always fun to meet up with one's fellow fangirls.
after that the rest of the week is irrelevant. :D
i had the day off for veteran's day and all day i thought it was saturday. >.< i did laundry and cleaned the bathroom and worked on my nanonovel and saw venom: let there be carnage and i think i liked the first one better. venom 2 is only an hour and a half and definitely feels like a short movie, like there just isn't that much to it. and maybe because the first one was so nuts it's hard for a sequel to live up. plus eddie and venom are kind of past the honeymoon phase and settling into odd-couple-dom so tom hardy doesn't have to be quite so balls-to-the-wall batshit. i'm not sorry i saw it, anyway. if you're looking for the heartwarming story of the love between a man and the parasitic alien who shares his body, this is your movie.
my sister and i went to ikea, altho i can't remember which saturday that was, and of course i had meatballs. it was pretty crowded but except for all the people wearing masks it felt kind of like the before times. plus which i always love ikea.
i passed the year anniversaries of breaking my ankle and having surgery on it, and did not do myself an injury! altho i did fall on my ass curling. >.< but i was impressed i managed not to hurt myself again. go me. :D this past tuesday i also passed the anniversary of being hired permanently at my job, and again, go me. :D
yesterday it was 68º, what the hell. it was like spring. the admins at work had a thanksgiving lunch, which we ordered in, and because it didn't come with dessert i offered to make a pumpkin pie. another admin brought a lemoncello cake, which was delicious, and another admin thought to bring whipped cream which was smart because i didn't. only a few people had pie so i cut the rest into slices and took it back to my floor and put it in the fridge, and emailed one of my groups to say if anyone who was in the office that day wanted a snack, there was homemade pumpkin pie in the fridge. by the time i went home it was all gone. so i think people liked it. :D it was a test pie - this one, because it has chinese five-spice powder in it - so now i know it can be served at thanksgiving. (we're going to my cousin j's house. i said i'd bring a pie.)
in japan they have something called mundane halloween, which is people dressing up in very ordinary costumes. like, the girl who started decluttering but ended up on her phone. and the person who started drinking coffee forgetting they were still wearing their mask. and the person who took a reusable bag to the grocery store except it wasn't big enough.
why did this guy find 162 bowling balls under his back patio? seriously, 162 bowling balls. what do you do with all of them? i mean, he didn't open his own bowling alley.
the (potentially) largest potato ever dug up was found in new zealand and named... doug. the couple who dug (geddit? :D ) him out of their garden built a little cart so they could take him around, because he weighs almost seventeen and a half pounds and no one wants to carry that.
check out the winners of this year's comedy wildlife photo competition. the pigeon is my favorite. the pigeon is a whole-ass mood.
this is just fascinating - meet the jeff bezos of the international drug trade. he's a middle-aged chinese dude who basically treated the drug biz as any other kind of legitimate biz, offering a good product for a reasonable price on a reliable schedule, and if a buyer's order was seized at customs, say, the cartel would send them new drugs free of charge. and he got his start in... toronto. i wouldn't have thought of canada as an incubator for drug cartels. surprise?
how did ancient romans go to the bathroom? some of this you might know already - like that ancient romans wiped with sponges on sticks, since toilet paper hadn't been invented yet, altho it's anyone's guess if they washed their hands - but also even tho wealthy romans sometimes paid for public toilets they wouldn't pee in them, and they weren't built for women. and rome had an absolutely massive and well-built sewer system, but you could probably guess that. i mean, it was a big city.
can we pretend it's like three weeks ago so i can talk about halloween a little bit? because halloween in my neighborhood is WILD. i haven't seen that many trick-or-treaters since i was one. they started coming around five and kept it up until about seven-thirty. holy carp. my roommate and i started out telling the kids to take two piece of candy, then we realized maybe we shouldn't do that, then we realized we were going to run out, then the landlady came home and said "oh, i have 4000 pieces of candy in the house", and went inside and came back out with a giant costco-sized bag of candy and an equally gigantic plastic bowl already full. so we handed out her candy when we ran out of ours. next year we will be better prepared! then we can be a house with two bowls of candy instead of just one.
so first you get the little kids, right, because it's still light out. there was a little girl dressed as what i thought was a chameleon, but no, she was a gecko. her grandma told us "she's a gecko because she really likes the commercials", which, i'm sorry, HOW CUTE IS THAT?? she was maybe four. SOCUTE. there was also a little girl dressed as a mini fridge, with a door that opened to reveal, like, the side of a carton of eggs and soda cans cut down the middle and pictures of jars of stuff - you know, food you'd put in a fridge - and, get this, A FRIDGE LIGHT. which she turned on for us. apparently it was her idea to be a mini fridge. there were a bunch of parents in costume and some dogs in costume (and some dogs not in costume) and the occasional baby in costume. also a kid dressed as the covid vaccine (he was a syringe), a girl probably in her early teens with a chestburster coming out of her t-shirt (i admired it because it was very cool and she said i was the only person who recognized what it was! and i never even saw alien!), two little girls dressed in nearly identical skeleton bodysuits (one of them confided "we're ten months apart so we like to dress the same except a little different" - she was intensely adorable), a boy collecting his candy in a backpack ("this is my second one"), and another boy collecting his candy in a giant black trash bag. also the guy who lives across the street from us put up a candy chute, which was basically a length of gutter with some holes drilled in it so he could tie it to the railing on his front steps. there was a stool with a big bowl on it on the sidewalk, so he could drop some candy down the chute and it would land in the bowl if the kid(s) waiting couldn't catch it in time. my roommate and i went over to say hi and admire it, and we met him and his wife and their dog, because of course we had to meet the dog.
some of the houses at the other end of the street from us decorated to a theme, which the landlady said was "games" but which also seemed to be kind of "disney". one house was all done up for the little mermaid, with an ursula and an ariel and i guess an eric (i can't remember who the guy was dressed as, if he even was in costume - they were all adults). apparently the homeowners on that block get together every year and come up with a theme, and they close off just that block to traffic. it was very fun and weirdly exhausting and the landlady and her friend who came over commented that it was a light year, and i thought holy shit if this is a light year what does a normal year look like?? i mean, it was sunday and the weather was warm and it was perfect halloween weather, and it still wasn't as big as a regular year.
and then nano started at midnight but the less said about that the better.
the next night i went out to dinner with tamalinn and friend a and friend r, and we sat outside while it was still warm enough to do so, and it was delicious and the server was adorable and accommodating and seemed to really like us and between dinner and dessert she brought out a kind of palate cleanser of peach gelato and then we all got glasses of after-dinner wine (sauterne, i think) that we didn't order and i don't know if the restaurant always does that or if it was a pandemic "thank you for patronizing us so we don't go under" kind of thing or if the server just liked us that much. (i'm guessing the first one. i'd never been to this place before so i have no idea.) it was so civilized even tho we were wearing our coats because did i mention we sat outside? and then on tuesday i met beckaandzac who was in town and we went out for vietnamese food and i had a pork chop which was DELICIOUS and we sat there for like two hours and just... *chat chat chat*. oh, it was so nice. becka's the most adorable, and it's always fun to meet up with one's fellow fangirls.
after that the rest of the week is irrelevant. :D
i had the day off for veteran's day and all day i thought it was saturday. >.< i did laundry and cleaned the bathroom and worked on my nanonovel and saw venom: let there be carnage and i think i liked the first one better. venom 2 is only an hour and a half and definitely feels like a short movie, like there just isn't that much to it. and maybe because the first one was so nuts it's hard for a sequel to live up. plus eddie and venom are kind of past the honeymoon phase and settling into odd-couple-dom so tom hardy doesn't have to be quite so balls-to-the-wall batshit. i'm not sorry i saw it, anyway. if you're looking for the heartwarming story of the love between a man and the parasitic alien who shares his body, this is your movie.
my sister and i went to ikea, altho i can't remember which saturday that was, and of course i had meatballs. it was pretty crowded but except for all the people wearing masks it felt kind of like the before times. plus which i always love ikea.
i passed the year anniversaries of breaking my ankle and having surgery on it, and did not do myself an injury! altho i did fall on my ass curling. >.< but i was impressed i managed not to hurt myself again. go me. :D this past tuesday i also passed the anniversary of being hired permanently at my job, and again, go me. :D
yesterday it was 68º, what the hell. it was like spring. the admins at work had a thanksgiving lunch, which we ordered in, and because it didn't come with dessert i offered to make a pumpkin pie. another admin brought a lemoncello cake, which was delicious, and another admin thought to bring whipped cream which was smart because i didn't. only a few people had pie so i cut the rest into slices and took it back to my floor and put it in the fridge, and emailed one of my groups to say if anyone who was in the office that day wanted a snack, there was homemade pumpkin pie in the fridge. by the time i went home it was all gone. so i think people liked it. :D it was a test pie - this one, because it has chinese five-spice powder in it - so now i know it can be served at thanksgiving. (we're going to my cousin j's house. i said i'd bring a pie.)
in japan they have something called mundane halloween, which is people dressing up in very ordinary costumes. like, the girl who started decluttering but ended up on her phone. and the person who started drinking coffee forgetting they were still wearing their mask. and the person who took a reusable bag to the grocery store except it wasn't big enough.
why did this guy find 162 bowling balls under his back patio? seriously, 162 bowling balls. what do you do with all of them? i mean, he didn't open his own bowling alley.
the (potentially) largest potato ever dug up was found in new zealand and named... doug. the couple who dug (geddit? :D ) him out of their garden built a little cart so they could take him around, because he weighs almost seventeen and a half pounds and no one wants to carry that.
check out the winners of this year's comedy wildlife photo competition. the pigeon is my favorite. the pigeon is a whole-ass mood.
this is just fascinating - meet the jeff bezos of the international drug trade. he's a middle-aged chinese dude who basically treated the drug biz as any other kind of legitimate biz, offering a good product for a reasonable price on a reliable schedule, and if a buyer's order was seized at customs, say, the cartel would send them new drugs free of charge. and he got his start in... toronto. i wouldn't have thought of canada as an incubator for drug cartels. surprise?
how did ancient romans go to the bathroom? some of this you might know already - like that ancient romans wiped with sponges on sticks, since toilet paper hadn't been invented yet, altho it's anyone's guess if they washed their hands - but also even tho wealthy romans sometimes paid for public toilets they wouldn't pee in them, and they weren't built for women. and rome had an absolutely massive and well-built sewer system, but you could probably guess that. i mean, it was a big city.