Whatta Fiasco

To complain, of course. Good-bye old year. Hello new. There were some good things, even some marvellous magical things, this year, but the bad stuff was not so good. I have hopes for next year. At least the dishes are clean.

Christmas part two went just fine yesterday. It was just hubby and mother-in-law and I driving down this time. Lisa is still at her mom’s house and will be for the next two weeks. And who knows where Max is. He’s been difficult to get hold of lately, but he’s now had his first Christmas away from the immediate family. I hope it was a good one and that we hear from him soon so we can get him his Christmas gifts.

The cats are absurdly pleased by how much time we’ve spent at home the past week. So much petting. So much entertainment. And I’ve been watching scads more television than normal without it even being on DVD. Today my brain apparently rebelled over too much telly and too many fluffy scifi books. I walked out of the library today with several pounds of books (but only two covers) about cognitive science and the philosophy of mathematics. Whee.
I also got the last of my holiday cards and presents mailed off today. Yes, I know it’s after Christmas and none of them are likely to get there even as soon as new year’s eve, but that I sent them at all is a minor miracle. I still didn’t send out as many as I would have liked, but I’m satisfied. There’s always next year.

Return of the King was a decent movie, but we were in the smaller theater, got seated later than I would have wanted , and thus much closer to the screen than was advisable. I still don’t know if it was where we were sitting, my damnable eyes, or the fault of the movie makers, but half the film was out of focus. Badly out of focus. I know that some of it was compensation for the CGI effects (noticeable in the previous film), but this was even worse. If I were a fanatic, I’d wait a week and see it again in the big theater. Instead I’m more likely to wait for the DVD release. It was good, but not good enough to sit through another four hours in the theater, especially if I wasn’t imagining the focus issues.

And who knew dried cantaloupe would taste so good?

Sleep in. Be lazy. Make some squash soup.

I’d picked up a kabocha squash this past week, not having any idea what it was other than a winter squash. It turns out to also be known as a Japanese pumpkin, very appropriately.

I cut it in half and found an intense red-orange flesh and a pot load more seeds than I had expected. I oiled the pan and baked it for less than an hour at three-hundred and fifty degrees. When slightly cooled, the flesh came out easily, a deep orange color and slightly sweet. It was smooth enough (as well as being less flesh than I had expected), that I decided to make a soup. A little mushroom base was added to one part squash, two parts water, and one part milk. Add a little salt, freshly ground pepper, a little cinnamon, and some freshly grated nutmeg. The squash melted into the soup without needing any blending or straining. Delicious.

Then, much to the disgust of the cats who had been trying to rifle through it, I took the trash out. It’s not even cold outside. Tomorrow I go back to work.

The power of a cow to move the markets and the world economy. One cow. Amazing. Here’s to hoping that the BSE situation here in the states is as under control as our government officials would like us to believe. But there still wasn’t any ground beef on the shelves of my local grocery store this evening, so we’re having ground turkey spaghetti instead. It’ll be fine.

Whatever you’re doing this evening, have a great holiday season.

There’s a building I see in the evenings when I’m driving to fencing practice. It has a light display on top showing Santa building a snowman. He rolls the large bottom snowball, then the middle one, and then the head to put on top. A snowman! With a hat and a nose! And a tiny Christmas tree in his hand. And that’s when the snowman starts beating Santa over the head with the tree until Santa gets disgusted, tears down the snowman and builds another one. At least that’s what it looks like when I’m stuck waiting for the non synchronized traffic lights. Maybe that’s not precisely the reading the designers of the display intended but it amuses me.

Why do I have this sudden urge to make tamales for Christmas? I’ve never made tamales, no one around me has been clamoring (or even so much as mentioning) for tamales. Even so, I found myself wandering the aisles in a local supermarket looking for masa (my urges, so far, do not include making masa from scratch) and making a conscious and deliberate decision not to buy the dried corn husks. Why tamales? I think it’s because tamales take so much time to cook the filling and a hands-on effort to make. I think I need to assemble some victim/friends after the holidays and give it a try. (And tamales are indeed a traditional Christmas food, so I didn’t make it up in my demented brain.)

The name of Wittgenstein came up over after-fencing beer last night (along with Eco and Popper and Leary, Hoffman, Starhawk, Crowley and some guy named Smith) reminding me that Witt. is still on my gosh I need to read this cat some day list. So for lunch today I decided to read about Witt. ( so as to forestall the actual reading of) and discovered why I need to read (at least some of) his work. He’s simply hiding in the wings of too many things I’ve been reading the past few years. After skimming a five minute overview, I have leads on Saphir-Whorf, Eco (lots of Eco!) and George Lakoff. All of you who suffered through undergraduate philosophy courses can quite your eye-rolling and groaning. I do understand that these ideas build one upon the other, but I don’t understand why so many philosophy courses insist upon covering the panoply of philosophers in chronological order. It doesn’t make any sense to me to try to read Descartes as if I were a contemporary, as if I hadn’t already skipped ahead in the book, so to speak. I know how it ends (or more or less where it has come) and pretending otherwise makes my head hurt. Working backward makes so much more sense to me. Hurrah for footnotes, annotations and bibliographies!

Dogma did a god job of making me wary of Kevin Smith films. And then I saw Chasing Amy. I get it now. Words. Beautiful. Jason Lee alone is worth the price of admission, and I can even deal with Ben Affleck.

Yesterday morning I accidentally continued a movie theme. Like Lost in Translation, Enlightenment Guaranteed, by Doris Dorrie. Two German brothers end up lost in Tokyo and make their way to a zen monastery. All you fans of Buddhism out there will enjoy this one.

The weirdness is that Enlightenment Guaranteed was deliberately done on a small budget with a small cast and very little equipment. It was even shot on digital video. It cost a million dollars to make. Chasing Amy was also shot on a budget, for one fourth the price. [ed. One fourth the price of what? Sometimes I make no sense.]

Yesterday was the long drive to Nowhere and back again with a stop along the way to have dinner with some fencing buddies. Today was a gray, wet day off. One of these days I’ll have something interesting to say.

I thought I’d missed out on seeing yet another film on the big screen, but I made it to the very last showing of Lost in Translation at my local theater last night. Sadly, it was in the big theater that still has, and probably always will have, sound problems. It was still worthwhile. It’s not a big epic. Not very much at all happens. Two lost people find each other in a dizzyingly strange environment. You won’t need any translation to understand. If it’s still in your town, catch it before it runs away, but I expect it will be on DVD before too long and will be just as lovely then.

If you’re going to buy those disposable, faux t-pperw-re plastic containers, stick with one brand. If you do buy more than one brand, do not assume that there’s an ISO standard to which the manufacturers adhere. The lids and bottoms are not mix and match. If you get up late and sleepy one morning to pack a lunch, don’t put dressing on your salad without checking to see that the top matches the container you pulled out of the cupboard. Failing all the above, congratulate yourself for having made a low calorie, mostly vinegar dressing and having been too groggy to properly emulsify it. A little vinegar will spill into your backpack and will smell funny for the rest of the day, but most of the oil and mustard will stick to the salad greens. The iBook is just fine.

Eat your vegetables.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

If you’re not ready for the holidays by now, it’s too late to get into a proper tizzy. Reduce your expectations. prioritize what’s left, and have a good time.

For the last month or so, we’ve been struggling with getting Lisa to cook for herself. She’s used every trick in the book to avoid having to use a can opener. This has gone neither unnoticed nor unremarked, but no attempt at discussing the matter has yielded anything useful. We even followed a small red herring when she claimed concern that if she microwaved chili from a can, that she would do something wrong and the meat in it would go bad and make her sick. Yes, she has even skipped a meal in order to avoid the dread can opener. So, what’s going on?

Last night I finally maneuvered her into using a can opener and discovered the answer. She doesn’t have enough muscle strength to use one, at least not right handed. By repositioning things, she was eventually able to get the can mostly open using a right-handed can opener with her left hand. Mystery solved. Now to solve the problem. Step one was remembering that there’s an electric can opener, new-in-the-box, that we can get out. I dislike the things but it would make life easier for Lisa. Step two is to figure out how to sneak some physical activity into her routine to help build up her strength. There’s simply no physical reason for her to have so little strength. Step three is to search out a usable left-handed, manual can opener, or at least an ambidextrous one, that will be easier for her to use. But learning how to use a right-handed can opener is one of those necessary life skills for lefties unless you want to carry a left-handed model with you where ever you go. I’m just glad to have figured it out so we can address the problem.

We made it out to see The Two Towers in the extended version,. In repeat of the previous movie, the extended version was an improvement over the initial theatrical release. Up to now I’ve been wondering which studio exec to blame for the cuts, but it turns out I’m off base. According to Peter Jackson, I’m just a Tolkien-obsessed fangrrl who’d rather have a completist’s movie than one that works cinematicly. In his opinion, the extra footage destroys the momentum of the films and was rightly left out, that the original versions are simply better movies. Then he turns around and claims that if he’d released the full-length versions, he would have been pilloried in the marketplace. I may indeed be a fangrrl, but the longer versions are just flat better movies with better story telling. I wish he could just be honest about why the cuts happened. He was going to get lambasted either way, and this way he got the best of both worlds. Sort of.

In other news, my mother-in-law talked her doctor into postponing the surgery and doing some further testing instead. She came through that just fine today and we should have biopsy results by mid week, at which point I expect them to reschedule the full surgery if she’ll agree to go through with it. We wait and see.

When you get a second level help desk type person to look at your cell phone bill because it doesn’t look right, and the second level help desk type person thinks it looks confusing too, then it might just be time to rationalize your billing system. Really. Here’s a tip for the day: If you want to avoid talking to those annoying machines and the first level help desk, just get a business level cell plan. It turns out that money will indeed talk, and talk to people, if you spend enough of it. Gah. I hate phones.

But last night I got to use the stopwatch application I wrote for my cellphone. Only three of us showed up for fencing, and since all of us were epee fencers, coach decided it was time to spend the evening bouting. Footwork drills? No footwork. Just fence. Everyone fenced each other twice, first to five touches, then ten, and then fifteen. Then, just for fun, we did another round robin but instead of fencing for touches, we fenced for five minutes straight at each encounter. And that’s when I got to get my phone out and use the new applet, even if it still won’t beep. Darn it.

This morning I woke up to about three inches of snow on the ground, and it’s still snowing, if not very hard. The ice on my side of the driveway still hadn’t gone away and now there’s snow on top. So the first thing I did after I got dressed this morning was go out and shovel snow. I had the driveway about three-quarters clear before I couldn’t see out of my glasses from having them steam up and get smudged and smeared by melting snow. But we can get the car out if we need to. Although hubby is still down sick enough that I don’t think we’ll be going much of anywhere. I may make a run to the store later, but that’s about it.

The good thing about this snow? (Other than it not being a work day.) It’s light and fluffy but still wet enough to stick together so it’s relatively easy to shovel. I’ll finish my coffee and then go shovel some more.

—

Yep. Finished the coffee and made several more trips out to shovel the rest of the snow and chip away at the ice on the driveway until I was able to get my car off the street. And all of that just in time to go get the perfect food to eat when it’s cold and snowy: sushi! Normally when it’s this cold I wouldn’t be so happy about the little fish, but I worked up a nice sweat and got a good upper body workout. Time for some protein and wasabi.