wow it's been a while
IT SNOWED TODAY. ALLOW ME TO REPEAT. WE HAVE SNOW. :DDDD
ahem.
and then curling was canceled (which is fine with me since my team was supposed to go on the ice at 8:30 and i HATE the 8:30 draw) because the roads were and i quote "effed". it was so pretty when it was coming down tho.
anyway. it's been like a million years. let's see what i remember.
halloween! (yeah yeah, it's a big deal on my street.) i worked from home but i had a meeting until six and i think kids started coming around before then. my roommate and i stood outside for probably two hours handing out candy and admiring costumes and, uh, giving some of our candy to the girls next door who just moved in and had NO IDEA how completely insane halloween is on our street. they were adorable but totally unprepared. for some reason there were a lot of minecraft-inspired costumes. also a lot of spidermen, a captain marvel (but no ms marvel), a black panther, a willy wonka and a violet beauregard, a gandalf and a bilbo, a carmen sandiego, a bunch of wednesday addamses, a s3 eleven carrying a box of eggos, a family where mom and dad were dressed as monkeys and the kids were dressed as bananas (so cute but also so wtf), and a small dog that looked like a stranger things demogorgon. also a dad dressed as iron man - he was wearing two giant pieces of cardboard shaped like the bottom of an iron, painted silver and with a dial and different settings on one of them. heh. the landlady's daughter briefly came outside with the new puppy (who is tiny and fluffy and barky) who was dressed like a dragon. SO SMALL AND SO CUTE. and then it was late and we were out of candy. it was a good night.
election! i voted at the church down the street where there was almost no line, and then my roommate and i watched labyrinth to distract her from the results. because you know davie bowie's crotch is very distracting. :D (i was always in it for his hair which should not surprise anyone who knows me.) and then we had to wait for a bunch of results anyway. >.< good on the voters in georgia for letting warnock stay in the senate. i don't think any of my local elections were a surprise. my favorite of the ballot initiatives was one in alabama to ratify the recompiled state constitution, which has been amended 977 times in 120 years and is the longest constitution in the world. wtf, alabama. (it passed. the state constitution can now be better organized and, you know, a little shorter.)
movies! a hollywood high which was basically a (short) duran duran concert film. man, those boys got old. john and roger look like they were ridden hard and put away wet, simon kind of looks like himself except puffier, and nick looks the same, just older. (altho let's be honest here he's had the same hair for thirty years.) most of it was a concert the band did on a rooftop across the street from the capitol records building, with some documentary type interviews beforehand on their first trip to la and how cool it was to have capitol release their albums, and after the talk about how rio was basically written about la i expected them to play it and... they didn't. hmph. it was still a good show.
also black panther: wakanda forever which i overall really enjoyed altho i think i like the first one better. *ducks* i didn't know anything about namor before the movie but i really liked him as a character, and i especially liked that even tho he was the antagonist it was a pretty women-centric movie. i'm still not 100% convinced shuri is enough to carry a whole movie, but i did like her and i liked what they did with her. a couple scenes with riri made me go "hey, i know where that is!" which is always fun, i thought she and shuri together were super cute, it was nice to see more dora milaje, i always enjoy m'baku, i wasn't totally sold on why valentina was in the movie, and it felt like there was way more backstory for her and ross that we should know. like, they'd been married once? and this was important somehow? and this is probably not stuff you're going to know unless you know about a. real estate prices in greater boston, or b. the charles river, but a. there is no fucking way riri williams who doesn't come from money and doesn't seem to have a tony stark type patron is going to be able to afford a garage/warehouse that size that raises zero suspicions anywhere near mit, and b. i cannot handwave a WHALE jumping out of the charles river. the charles does not connect to the ocean in a way that a WHALE will be able to swim through. just... no. a thousand times no. i can only suspend my disbelief so far before it snaps.
was very surprised by killmonger's appearance. i liked it! he was a great addition.
also we watched planes trains and automobiles at my cousin j's house on thanksgiving, because it's a tradition with him and his kids. it's a very sweet movie.
thanksgiving! as mentioned we went to cousin j's (of j&r) and i did not make another chess pie but i did bake a brie. it looked so good.
also it was delicious and because almost no one ate it i got to take a lot home. :D i wanted to make a pecan pie but j's girlfriend made little pecan tartlets which were really more like little pie-shaped chocolate chip cookies with pecans on top. yummy but not pecan pie. but it was a good time. and the day after thanksgiving my mom and sister went black friday shopping as is traditional and i met them at my sister's place afterwards with bagels. as is also traditional. :D
family stuff that isn't thanksgiving! my sister and i saw kinky boots (the musical, not the movie) at a local theater way outside boston with cousin m (of j&m) and her girltwin - there are a bunch of twins among my cousins and their kids - it was theater in the round and very good, and of course the shoes were fabulous. the saturday after thanksgiving my sister had all four of them (j&m and the twins) over for dinner and i finally got to make a pecan pie. the girltwin is a little aloof and the boytwin is a bit of a nerd but they're good kids and the whole fam is fun to hang out with.
then the sunday after thanksgiving cousins m&e (aka the cousin with the four kids) had a bunch of family over so they could all see us. m&e just have one kid still at home but everyone came except the girltwin who was in budapest? i think? doing some kind of short term refugee volunteer work with her girlfriend. i think. my cousin-adjacent (because she's my cousin's sister-in-law and not actually related to me at all) has three kids who were all there. there were a lot of people. and a lot of food. kids are doing interesting things, cousins were good to catch up with, fun was had.
my sister and i saw two high school plays - seussical with m&e's youngest, and little shop of horrors with the cousin-adjacent's youngest. my sister saw someone she works with at the second one, and come to find out his daughter was the lead. she was amazing. the sets were great and they did a fantastic job on the audrey IIs and it was overall just a really well done production. seussical was just fun.
birthday! i got to celebrate like four times. :D i went out for cuban food the friday before, went out for sushi the night of, invited mom and my sister over for dinner the night after (when i got my presents), and ate cake at a group birthday party for staff at work this past week. my sister brought me a carrot cake when she came over and i still have a piece in my freezer.
nano! i validated at 50,939 words and i didn't have as much magic or as many creatures as i wanted, but the main character's bff and the bff's husband both got to be menaced by rusalkas, altho sadly off-screen. but i finished! which is more than i can say for last year.
curling! we lost, won, won on a forfeit, lost, and... lost. and were snowed out tonight. who knows what will happen next week. hopefully we win.
work! it's holiday party season and while i'm enjoying all the holiday party food i'm getting a little partied out. this past week was a random staff birthday celebration - i think they're going to do it every quarter for whoever had a birthday in the past three months - and the university wide holiday party, the week before was the department staff holiday lunch and raffle (at which i got a pair of exceptionally fluffy socks stuffed full of tootsie rolls and lindt truffles, and a tea sampler), and this coming week is the department holiday party and the admins' holiday lunch and yankee swap. i bought salt and pepper shakers shaped like t cars for the swap. i suspect i got them last year too but i can't resist them - they're SO CUTE - and a lot of people take public transportation to work. i'm also submitting a lot of expenses because that's just where i live now. but it's the end of the year and things are slowing down and honestly i'm not complaining. altho one of the admins i really like just left because she got a job closer to home that pays better, and while i'm sad she's gone i don't fault her reasons for going.
misc and nonsense! yesterday my roommate and i went to a holiday craft fair in harvard square, at which i acquired two pairs of earrings, two hanukah cards, one bag of chocolate bark with almonds and cherries, and one chocolate corgi. and last month i watched tumblr collectively hallucinate a 1973 movie about russian mobsters in italy and then proceed to gaslight the rest of the internet into believing it existed. i love tumblr. i am never leaving.
mundane halloween!
beauty queens marry in secret - miss argentina and miss puerto rico met at the miss grand international pageant a couple years ago and got hitched in october. all together now - awwww.
switzerland built the world's longest passenger train to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the country's first railway. it was 100 cars long. that's two kilometers, or a mile and a quarter. that is a very long train. O.O
the oldest full sentence written in the world's first alphabet is about lice. said sentence was written on a comb, natch. (it's not the first written language, obvs, but the first language written in an alphabet instead of hieroglyphics or another system of pictograms.)
i've had this link for a month so if you've already seen it, feel free to skip, but if you haven't already seen it allow me to share the story of a guy who built a concrete sarcophagus for a bag of flamin' hot cheetos. it's not supposed to be opened for 10k years.
have a story about the estate sale queen of dallas. there's some high end shit in there.
and finally, this is just the nicest thanksgiving story. (by which i mean, white grandma accidentally texts black teenager about thanksgiving thinking he's one of her grandkids. he's not. he comes over anyway, and has been doing so for seven years.)
ahem.
and then curling was canceled (which is fine with me since my team was supposed to go on the ice at 8:30 and i HATE the 8:30 draw) because the roads were and i quote "effed". it was so pretty when it was coming down tho.
anyway. it's been like a million years. let's see what i remember.
halloween! (yeah yeah, it's a big deal on my street.) i worked from home but i had a meeting until six and i think kids started coming around before then. my roommate and i stood outside for probably two hours handing out candy and admiring costumes and, uh, giving some of our candy to the girls next door who just moved in and had NO IDEA how completely insane halloween is on our street. they were adorable but totally unprepared. for some reason there were a lot of minecraft-inspired costumes. also a lot of spidermen, a captain marvel (but no ms marvel), a black panther, a willy wonka and a violet beauregard, a gandalf and a bilbo, a carmen sandiego, a bunch of wednesday addamses, a s3 eleven carrying a box of eggos, a family where mom and dad were dressed as monkeys and the kids were dressed as bananas (so cute but also so wtf), and a small dog that looked like a stranger things demogorgon. also a dad dressed as iron man - he was wearing two giant pieces of cardboard shaped like the bottom of an iron, painted silver and with a dial and different settings on one of them. heh. the landlady's daughter briefly came outside with the new puppy (who is tiny and fluffy and barky) who was dressed like a dragon. SO SMALL AND SO CUTE. and then it was late and we were out of candy. it was a good night.
election! i voted at the church down the street where there was almost no line, and then my roommate and i watched labyrinth to distract her from the results. because you know davie bowie's crotch is very distracting. :D (i was always in it for his hair which should not surprise anyone who knows me.) and then we had to wait for a bunch of results anyway. >.< good on the voters in georgia for letting warnock stay in the senate. i don't think any of my local elections were a surprise. my favorite of the ballot initiatives was one in alabama to ratify the recompiled state constitution, which has been amended 977 times in 120 years and is the longest constitution in the world. wtf, alabama. (it passed. the state constitution can now be better organized and, you know, a little shorter.)
movies! a hollywood high which was basically a (short) duran duran concert film. man, those boys got old. john and roger look like they were ridden hard and put away wet, simon kind of looks like himself except puffier, and nick looks the same, just older. (altho let's be honest here he's had the same hair for thirty years.) most of it was a concert the band did on a rooftop across the street from the capitol records building, with some documentary type interviews beforehand on their first trip to la and how cool it was to have capitol release their albums, and after the talk about how rio was basically written about la i expected them to play it and... they didn't. hmph. it was still a good show.
also black panther: wakanda forever which i overall really enjoyed altho i think i like the first one better. *ducks* i didn't know anything about namor before the movie but i really liked him as a character, and i especially liked that even tho he was the antagonist it was a pretty women-centric movie. i'm still not 100% convinced shuri is enough to carry a whole movie, but i did like her and i liked what they did with her. a couple scenes with riri made me go "hey, i know where that is!" which is always fun, i thought she and shuri together were super cute, it was nice to see more dora milaje, i always enjoy m'baku, i wasn't totally sold on why valentina was in the movie, and it felt like there was way more backstory for her and ross that we should know. like, they'd been married once? and this was important somehow? and this is probably not stuff you're going to know unless you know about a. real estate prices in greater boston, or b. the charles river, but a. there is no fucking way riri williams who doesn't come from money and doesn't seem to have a tony stark type patron is going to be able to afford a garage/warehouse that size that raises zero suspicions anywhere near mit, and b. i cannot handwave a WHALE jumping out of the charles river. the charles does not connect to the ocean in a way that a WHALE will be able to swim through. just... no. a thousand times no. i can only suspend my disbelief so far before it snaps.
was very surprised by killmonger's appearance. i liked it! he was a great addition.
also we watched planes trains and automobiles at my cousin j's house on thanksgiving, because it's a tradition with him and his kids. it's a very sweet movie.
thanksgiving! as mentioned we went to cousin j's (of j&r) and i did not make another chess pie but i did bake a brie. it looked so good.
also it was delicious and because almost no one ate it i got to take a lot home. :D i wanted to make a pecan pie but j's girlfriend made little pecan tartlets which were really more like little pie-shaped chocolate chip cookies with pecans on top. yummy but not pecan pie. but it was a good time. and the day after thanksgiving my mom and sister went black friday shopping as is traditional and i met them at my sister's place afterwards with bagels. as is also traditional. :D
family stuff that isn't thanksgiving! my sister and i saw kinky boots (the musical, not the movie) at a local theater way outside boston with cousin m (of j&m) and her girltwin - there are a bunch of twins among my cousins and their kids - it was theater in the round and very good, and of course the shoes were fabulous. the saturday after thanksgiving my sister had all four of them (j&m and the twins) over for dinner and i finally got to make a pecan pie. the girltwin is a little aloof and the boytwin is a bit of a nerd but they're good kids and the whole fam is fun to hang out with.
then the sunday after thanksgiving cousins m&e (aka the cousin with the four kids) had a bunch of family over so they could all see us. m&e just have one kid still at home but everyone came except the girltwin who was in budapest? i think? doing some kind of short term refugee volunteer work with her girlfriend. i think. my cousin-adjacent (because she's my cousin's sister-in-law and not actually related to me at all) has three kids who were all there. there were a lot of people. and a lot of food. kids are doing interesting things, cousins were good to catch up with, fun was had.
my sister and i saw two high school plays - seussical with m&e's youngest, and little shop of horrors with the cousin-adjacent's youngest. my sister saw someone she works with at the second one, and come to find out his daughter was the lead. she was amazing. the sets were great and they did a fantastic job on the audrey IIs and it was overall just a really well done production. seussical was just fun.
birthday! i got to celebrate like four times. :D i went out for cuban food the friday before, went out for sushi the night of, invited mom and my sister over for dinner the night after (when i got my presents), and ate cake at a group birthday party for staff at work this past week. my sister brought me a carrot cake when she came over and i still have a piece in my freezer.
nano! i validated at 50,939 words and i didn't have as much magic or as many creatures as i wanted, but the main character's bff and the bff's husband both got to be menaced by rusalkas, altho sadly off-screen. but i finished! which is more than i can say for last year.
curling! we lost, won, won on a forfeit, lost, and... lost. and were snowed out tonight. who knows what will happen next week. hopefully we win.
work! it's holiday party season and while i'm enjoying all the holiday party food i'm getting a little partied out. this past week was a random staff birthday celebration - i think they're going to do it every quarter for whoever had a birthday in the past three months - and the university wide holiday party, the week before was the department staff holiday lunch and raffle (at which i got a pair of exceptionally fluffy socks stuffed full of tootsie rolls and lindt truffles, and a tea sampler), and this coming week is the department holiday party and the admins' holiday lunch and yankee swap. i bought salt and pepper shakers shaped like t cars for the swap. i suspect i got them last year too but i can't resist them - they're SO CUTE - and a lot of people take public transportation to work. i'm also submitting a lot of expenses because that's just where i live now. but it's the end of the year and things are slowing down and honestly i'm not complaining. altho one of the admins i really like just left because she got a job closer to home that pays better, and while i'm sad she's gone i don't fault her reasons for going.
misc and nonsense! yesterday my roommate and i went to a holiday craft fair in harvard square, at which i acquired two pairs of earrings, two hanukah cards, one bag of chocolate bark with almonds and cherries, and one chocolate corgi. and last month i watched tumblr collectively hallucinate a 1973 movie about russian mobsters in italy and then proceed to gaslight the rest of the internet into believing it existed. i love tumblr. i am never leaving.
mundane halloween!
beauty queens marry in secret - miss argentina and miss puerto rico met at the miss grand international pageant a couple years ago and got hitched in october. all together now - awwww.
switzerland built the world's longest passenger train to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the country's first railway. it was 100 cars long. that's two kilometers, or a mile and a quarter. that is a very long train. O.O
the oldest full sentence written in the world's first alphabet is about lice. said sentence was written on a comb, natch. (it's not the first written language, obvs, but the first language written in an alphabet instead of hieroglyphics or another system of pictograms.)
i've had this link for a month so if you've already seen it, feel free to skip, but if you haven't already seen it allow me to share the story of a guy who built a concrete sarcophagus for a bag of flamin' hot cheetos. it's not supposed to be opened for 10k years.
have a story about the estate sale queen of dallas. there's some high end shit in there.
and finally, this is just the nicest thanksgiving story. (by which i mean, white grandma accidentally texts black teenager about thanksgiving thinking he's one of her grandkids. he's not. he comes over anyway, and has been doing so for seven years.)