Larocque and Roll

Some last-minute Sunday night thoughts January 16, 2005

1. Spike TV is having a Star Trek movie marathon tomorrow, starting at 9am. I want to play hooky and watch this.

2. I’ve had Food TV on almost all day today. Not because there’s anything interesting on, but to keep me company. I’m not sure how I’m going to cope at work tomorrow not hearing that stupid commercial about Emril giving up a music scholarship to persue his dreams and going to France blah blah blah every ten minutes. But I guess I’ll manage somehow.

3. Tomorrow night we curl against the two guys who were rounding out our team at the end of the first session. Karen and I want to kick their asses so bad we can taste it. (They were good guys and we got along great as a team. It’s just that we never won a game with them, and we want to prove that we are capable of winning.)

4. I should make my lunch tonight so I have more time in the morning. That’s a good idea - I think I’ll go do that now.

Company and fears

Friday night a fellow librarian and I went to see “In Good Company” at the theater. It was a good movie, and I liked the ending a lot. There was a lot of growth-as-a-person stuff that was well handled, and I can’t say enough about how much I love Topher Grace as an actor. But I completely fail to see what all the fuss about Scarlet Johansson is - she’s an adequate actress, but nothing special. I also don’t find her particularly attractive, but that may be a chick thing.

And you know what’s coming. (Maybe you don’t though - the previews!)

• Cinderella Man - I can’t stand Russell Crowe. (That said, I did like Mystery, Alaska.) Like Johansson, he’s an adequate actor but nothing special to look at. And it’s about boxing. Someone made a comment during this preview about it being a “Rocky” prequel, which made me snicker.
• The Interpreter - I’m sensing a theme, because Nicole Kidman joins Crowe and Johansson in the “Meh” category. She’s the better actor of the three, but I am still ambivalent of the whole Kidman ouvre (however, I loved Practical Magic). Plus, it’s about the UN - you’d think that someone who spent half of her high school career as a member of the model UN club, I’d be more interested in this. Nope. Not even slightly. (Special note about the IMDb entry for Practical Magic - I submitted the two goofs dealing with the dead boyfriend’s body. Yes, I have an ego and am not ashamed to occasionally flaunt it.)
• Ice Princess - ugh. More dreck from Disney. This time about figure skating, featuring Michelle Trachtenberg and Kim Catrall. I don’t expect this will become the definitive figure skating movie, a title which is held by The Cutting Edge. But it is written by Meg Cabot, who wrote the Princess Diaries series, and a couple of not-half-bad romances for adults.
• Bride & Prejudice - This one looks good. It’s a Bollywood-meets-the-west-meets-Jane Austin deal.
• Hitch - I think I’ve seen this preview before. Wil Smith being handsome and charming - sound familiar? Oh, that’s right - like every other film he’s done.

We also went to see “Forces of Nature” at the IMAX at Science North on Saturday night, about volcanoes, earthquakes, and tornados. Which is pretty frickin’ hilarious if you knew me as a ten-year-old - those were my top three fears throughout most of my childhood. My grandfather delights in telling everyone who will listen about how scared I was that there would be a volcanic eruption in our area after Mount St. Helena’s erupted. I know - highly unlikely.

My fear of earthquakes was slightly more realistic. There is a minor fault line running under Lake Ontario, and we’ve had a couple of very minor tremors. As in, less than 4 on the Richter Scale.

How to read a pretty good book in an hour and a half January 12, 2005

Prep time: 7.5 hrs

Start by flexing the afternoon off (yes, I take my half days on Wednesdays or other days in the middle of the week sometime. It’s a guilty pleasure, so there.) Think about how you’d like to make chocolate chip cookies to eat while reading the book that has surely arrived by now.

Get home, retrieve the parcel notice from your mail box, go upstairs and get changed. Sew the pom-pom back onto your favourite hat. Put the calendar you bought for your mother into your knapsack so you can mail it when you’re at the post office.

Remember that you have a library book on reserve, and decide to swing by there on your outing.

Go into grocery store A to see if they have jumbo chocolate chips or even mint chocolate chips. Realize they don’t and continue on to library. Pick up book.

Go to post office. Find envelope big enough to hold calendar. When you finally get to front of line, cheerful clerk tells me that she can ring in the whole thing at the same time if I’m going to send it today. Go over to counter and fill in addresses and seal envelope. Stand in line, which has grown over the last few minutes. Finally get to front of line, pay for envelope and mailing, and start to leave. Come to senses, remember why you’re here in the first place (parcel), and get back into much longer line. Collect parcel and try not to dance when you open it and see book you ordered seven months ago.

Go to grocery store B, discover they don’t have jumbo and/or mint chips either. Decide to increase baking difficulty levels by buying massive chocolate bar that can be cut into chunks for chocolate chunk cookies. Buy butter as well, because you can’t remember how much you have.

Stop at fast food place for lunch. The upshot of this is after a chicken burger and medium fries, you won’t need to eat until breakfast tomorrow morning. Even though it’s only just after 2.

Get home, put everything away and put on track pants. Pick up laundry on dining room table, do general tidy-ing things. Clean kitchen.

Decide that you are fed up with the way things are arranged in the cupboards because you can’t find the Skor chips you bought a few weeks ago. Take everything out of all the cupboards, and group it according to function (dry goods, canned goods, storage device, and plates and cups.) Put everything back into cupboards in such a way that things are grouped in a more pleasing manner.

Start cookies. Turn on oven and put chocolate bar in freezer because it’s kind of warm in the kitchen. Take chocolate bar out of freezer and realize it’s now really hard to chop up. Dig out hammer and do the best you can. Make huge mess on newly cleaned floor. Eventually get a cup of chocolate. Finish cookies.

While cookies are baking, fetch book and unleash happy dance when you discover that the book is an autographed copy. With real ink.

Take cookies out of oven and let cool. Start chapter 1, thinking you’ll have cookie at end of chapter.

90 minutes later, finish book and realize you haven’t moved at all in that time. (What can I say? I read fast, and I remember almost everything I read.) Check cookies. Mmmm! Chocolatey goodness!

Start blogging about the whole thing and realize you’ve missed Lost for the second week in a row. Feel a pang of regret, but another cookie makes it all better.

Am I really having this conversation? January 11, 2005

I was going through the checkout at the grocery store earlier tonight, when the clerk picked up my two packages of… feminine products, and asked, “Did it come early?”
“Pardon?”
“Are you early? Or,” she leans in, “are you late?”
“What? No! I’m a little early, I think…”
“Oh, that’s good. At least you’re not late.”
“Yeah….”

And I had to think about it. “It” had come as a surprise to me yesterday, and I wasn’t really prepared because I wasn’t expecting it. I mean, I’d had some cramps over the weekend, but I get those anywhere up to two weeks before the main event. I hadn’t been tired a lot, I hadn’t been a cranky bitch, and I hadn’t been craving Snickers Bars like a fiend. But then I though about it…

I’d been really mellow last week, but I chalked it up to a really good vacation. I was actually cheerful and pleasant at curling last night. The Snickers Bar craving is usually my strongest indicator to start getting ready, but I hadn’t experienced any pangs yet. But I know who’s responsible for the suppression of those pangs.

Damn you, chocolate truffles brought to the office by one of our deliverypersons! Damn your rich dark chocolate and light dusting of cocoa! Damn the fact that you were so sweet and melty that any thoughts of the sub-par chocolate bar chocolate was pushed aside like the skinny kid in front of the dessert buffet trying to ward off a hoard of dieters! Damn you for making me - nay, forcing me! - to eat so many one day that my tummy hurt! (It was like, five in one afternoon. Damn, those things are powerful!)

All of a sudden, I feel like being cranky. Excuse me while I go ride the elevator looking for someone to snap at in order to get it out of my system.

Serendipity-do-dah January 10, 2005

I love serendipity. Witness…

1) On Saturday night, between the end of Battlestar Galactica and SNL, I flipped to Food TV. Last Monday, I’d happened to catch the original Iron Chef, and have been hooked into watching Nigella Bites at other times during the week. That night, I happened into an episode of A Cook’s Tour, which was funny and clever and candid (although, not as candid as you’d expect - this is television, a medium not known to be friendly to colourful language, after all).

2) Apparently, I’m not the only one who was sucked into the MI-5 marathon on Saturday afternoon. Wanting to know more about the handsome Mr. Macfayden, I cruised over to the IMDb where I discovered - brace yourselves Mom, Denise, Rachelle, Squishy, LibPrincess, etc. - there is a remake of Pride and Prejudice in the works. The Bad News is that Matthew Macfayden is no Colin Firth. The Good News is that Matthew Macfayden is no Colin Firth. (And while I question the casting of Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennett, I think that Dame Judi Dench will make a deliciously nasty Lady Catherine De Bourgh.)

Serendipty is a wonderful concept. I honestly believe that we need to look for moments of it in our everday lives.

A completed order

YES!!!!!

Amazon.ca sent me an email tonight letting me know that they’ve finally shipped the book I ordered last May! I’m so happy, I could dance!

Update:
I couldn’t find the original post where I talked about wanting to read this book. Still can’t. I may have imagined it or posted it on the old blog or something. Eh.

The book that’s taken over seven months to get here is The Value of X by Poppy Z. Brite. It’s the book that comes before Liquor, which was her most recent book that I picked up in April. I was in Toronto on a training trip, and went into Indigo books to get something to read on the plane home, and found it in a book display. Then I fell into one of those Wayne-and-Garth-flashback-type moments….

…. A couple of summers ago (I think three - I’m pretty sure I was at the law library at the time), I was wandering through the stacks at one of the larger local libraries (St. Catharines). Her first novel she wrote, Lost Souls, caught my eye, having heard much about it from somewhere at some point - heaven only knows where. I’d heard she was a very “Goth” writer (more on this in a sec). So I grabbed it, and another she had written called Plastic Jesus.

(Ms. Brite is not one who appreciates being labeled as a writer of a particular genre, and is rather candid on this point. She’s an excellent writer on whatever she chooses to write - she did write some horror-themed books, but she’s also written things that have nothing to do with the subject, and it’s just as good.)

Lost Souls squicked me out. I don’t remember much about it, mostly because I was hurrying through the somewhat gory bits. It involves vampires and graphic descriptions and such. Reluctantly, I started reading Plastic Jesus - and ended up loving it. It was a sublime love story, and balanced out my reaction to Lost Souls.

(Another note: I wasn’t squicked out by Drawing Blood. Actually, I quite liked it. And I haven’t been able to get a hold of Exquisite Corpse because I keep getting sent the wrong book when I order it through interlibrary loan.)

So when I picked up Liquor, I was understandably reluctant to commit to it. Maybe I could wait and see if the library got it, or wait until I read a review or two or something. But I opened the book to a random page and got sucked in by a description of a dish being prepared, and decided I needed it. I read the whole book when I got home and loved it, not knowing it was a sequel to another book. Alas, The Value of X wasn’t available at the library, and there is only one library in our interlibrary loan system that has it, so I decided to order it from Amazon.ca (it wasn’t - and isn’t - available through Chapters).

Unfortunately, there were a number of delays, and then more delays, and finally there was an email saying that the book wasn’t really in stock, just on order, and that I’d have to wait. And wait. And wait some more. And finally get word that it was in.

Thus ends the saga of the open-ended Amazon.ca order that has finally been filled.

Half a weekend January 9, 2005

Sorry the posting here was light over the weekend. It wasn’t for lack of things to write about because heaven knows my life outside work provides me with such rich fodder to write about. No, it was one of those paradoxical weekends where I have both nothing and a million things to do, and I only got half of anything completed.

I’m not really sure who or what to blame, but I’m certainly casting a dirty look at the MI-5 marathon on A&E this weekend. (Note: in the UK, it was called Spooks.) I’m not sure what time it started, but I got sucked in around 2ish, and it ran until 8, and then there was a new episode at 10. Of course, by that time, Battlestar Galactica was being shown elsewhere, and since the show starts next weekend sometime, I started watching that too. It was 3 hours long, so at 10, I flipped back a forth for a while until I knew that Tom was innocent (looooooooooong story) and kept watching BG.

My laundry is mostly done (didn’t get to the sheets and towels) and mostly picked up (except for the stuff on the drying rack). I finished the Dandy scarf but not the ribbon scarf. The sink and the tub are clean, but I still need to vacuum in there. All the boxes I had sitting around are now in my storage locker, but not the Christmas decorations. All the yarn that was on my dining room table has been bagged and picked up, except for the mystery yarn from Yarn Factory Outlet, which I’m still trying find out what it is. I walked a little, I started working on a new project, and was, in general, semi-productive today.

TSF (or, that new button)

Tricoteuses Sans Frontières/Knitters Without Borders

You’re probably wondering what that button to the right is all about (or maybe you haven’t noticed and I’m drawing it to your attention now). It all started after the tragedy in Southeast Asia when the Yarn Harlot asked her loyal readers to make donations to Doctors Without Borders, where her brother-in-law volunteers. Once we had made our donation, we emailed her the amount and she’s been keeping a tally of it on her web site.

Go look and see how much has been raised by everyone who reads her blog. Seriously, go check it out.

As of Sunday night, it stands at over $35,000. That’s just in the last week.

Stephanie, you have awesome readers. And you rock.

Book Club Verdict: Life of Pi January 6, 2005

The overall verdict was that it was better than both Wicked and Englishman, although it was a bit slow. There were parts we liked, and parts that weren’t believable, and parts we didn’t understand how they fit into the overall story. Basically, there were three areas that got the most attention:

The beginning, pre-lifeboat. The first part of the book describes how Pi goes to different religious institutions to find and worship God, and feels comfortable worshiping Jesus, Allah, and the Hindu gods equally. The confrontation between Pi’s parents and the priest, Imam, and the ascetic was pretty amusing. However, it wasn’t clear to us how it fit in with the whole being-stranded-on-a-lifeboat, except in a grand-scheme-of-things-metaphor way. I enjoyed it, though.

The floating island. Karen and Steph thought it was weird and strange, while I though it was cool in a surreal way. How did those meerkats get on there in the first place, and how had they survived long enough to thrive? Should Pi have stayed there or was he right to have moved on before the island killed him?

The *SPOILER ALERT* two versions of his account. We all found it sad, and somewhat disturbing. How did he survive, and which version was true? We spent much time discussing which version of events was the true one, and why he would have made it up.

In the end, we decided that it had been a hard book to get into, and was generally likeable. It wasn’t beloved, and it wasn’t anything I would have finished if I was reading it on my own. But a good read if you put in the effort.

Wow! A Poll!

Hi! Wait… I just remembered something…. I’ll get to it in a minute…

So we had book club last night (I’ll write about the results in a sec - that’s what I remembered), and we finally got around to firming up our cycle. Or who gets to pick the next book, because we had a near-controversy yesterday at work when Karen said our new co-worker could pick the next book, when CLEARLY it was my turn again. So, it’s been straightened out - I go next, then new co-worker. I am not a control freak. Shut up!

There was also some discussion about whether or not we’d actually go with Devil. Ultimately, we’re going to go ahead with it because we’re not adverse to reading stuff and tearing into it at the meeting (see Wicked and Englishman.)

Anyways, I have a couple of books I could choose from, so I posted them in a poll on the left. If you don’t see anything you like, but think we might like something else, go nuts and email me your suggestion.