Old B Photo because I'm Lame

sitting up, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

This last weekend Brenden and I chased a hot air balloon. Well, I chased it in the minivan while Brenden watched Spongebob in the back. I took no photos, like an idiot.

Skydive Alabama celebrated its 10th year anniversary and amongst the festivities were hot air balloon jumps. My job was to chase the balloon, bring jumpers to where it landed, and pick them up again after they jumped. Sunday morning was the easiest chase ever - the balloon went up, the jumpers jumped, the balloon came down. All in the same place.

Other than that, not much is happening. I watched Don't mess with the Zohan, an Adam Sandler movie. It was stupid, and to my shame I laughed. A lot. Wouldn't it be nice though if all of the middle East problems could be solved with hair salons and shoe stores!

Foolish Topics

Hickory Smoked Bacon, originally uploaded by moknits.

This article,, if you read far enough down, talks about vegetarians and about if they slip back into meat eating, it's usually because of bacon.

Mmmmmmmmmmm bacon. The gateway drug meat!

Spring is Sprung!

Texas Tornado, originally uploaded by michaeljames.

It *must* be springtime in Northern Alabama! Plants are blooming, my allergies are on the rise, the temperature is tolerable, and the tornado siren got its first sounding yesterday afternoon!

Whatever it was it passed south of us and no damage was reported. We got a frog-strangler along with some hail for about 10 minutes then the sun came out.

MSTified

TV 001, originally uploaded by bonniegrrl.

What I'm Watching:

UP We finally watched Pixar's latest. Yes, it's terrific and deserved it's nomination with the rest of the Best Movie choices (it won best animated feature) but I was boo-hooing 10 minutes into the movie and plenty of other scenes set me off too.

I'd really like to see Pixar do a movie where a woman (or a female character) is the central character. I'm not complaining, really: I'd just like to see one. Yes, Boo, Dora and Elastigirl are awesome, but they weren't the central characters. I can't rank it yet with the other pixar movies because I don't know if I want to subject myself to that again any time soon.

Zombieland I've pretty much given up on zombie movies, but after an enthusiastic recommendation from Helly Jon and I gave this one a shot and we laughed ourselves silly. It's violent, but not grindingly so, and had some surprising warmth to it. That's about all it has in common with Shaun of the Dead, if you were wondering - the writers of the former freely admit they were inspired by the latter. Zombieland is as American as Shaun of the Dead is British and other than funny + zombies they don't resemble each other at all. Of course I loved and enthusiastically agreed with all of Columbus's 31 rules - I insisted on pointing out some of my own (to my husband's annoyance / amusement) one of which turned out to be a major theme: There's Safety in Numbers. Also: pretending to be a zombie as a prank during a zombie apocalypse is not a smart move.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: I've been loading up my Netflix instant queue with a bunch of these shows. For the uninitated, MST3K was an original program that was shown on the Comedy Channel (later Comedy Central) in the late 80's and early 90's. When it was cancelled it was picked up by SciFi and eventually ended in 1999. I was fortunate enough to catch it from the beginning.

The premise involved a janitor who was put aboard a space station by some mad scientists who would subject him to their evil experiments by making him watch a bad movie every week. In order to survive, the guy created some robots to keep him company. He and the robots would watch the movie and offer plenty of snark along the way. So that was the show: we watch a guy and his robots watch a bad movie.

It was a great show and I miss it. I'm glad that slowly but surely they are being released on dvd. Some of the best episodes are missing because of copyright issues and I hope they will be cleared up eventually. Like a lot of MST3K fans I had a lot of eps on tape, and like an idiot I lent them out.

Is it Summer Yet?

Ilu B me, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Wow, it's been a while! I think Winter is finally on its last legs, and it's about time. We've managed to burn through a whole cord of wood this season (you yankees - quit laughing!). Jon and I got so good at building large fires we managed to melt our fireplace grate.

So I saw some of the Academy awards. I was tickled Christoph Waltz one best supporting actor - he was the best thing about Inglourious Basterds. I was glad they gave John Hughes such a great tribute - the Academy can occasionally get over it's ART facade and admit that they are a large part of pop culture and Hughes' movies had a large impact on people my age.

I was happy Katheryn Bigelow won best director. As for Hurt Locker winning best picture, I told my brother this: It is better than Avatar and Inglorious Basterds, but District 9 was a better movie (these are the only nominated movies I saw. Yes, I have yet to see the Pixar movie!). Hurt Locker and District 9 both had plenty of exploding humans, but Hurt Locker didn't have any Mecha.

No, really. I thought District 9 was a better movie. Still, I'm glad for Katheryn Bigelow. Hurt Locker is a really good movie, and in it she explores a subject she is very fond of: men. Me too, Katheryn; me too!

Nothing new to report as usual

IMG_3658, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

So my computer died. I wanted to Blame it on Bill but it turns out the Windows patch was incompatible with some malware lurking on my computer. That's what was causing the perpetual BSoD. Reformatting the hard drive and upgrading to Windows 7 was the best thing to do. My computer caught a virus and turned into a zombie!

I'm watching (and digging) the last season of Lost. I actually understand what is going on even if I don't completely know why it's going on. The dichotomy that is John Locke - the pathetic, gullible loser vs. the island leader badass now makes total sense to me.

Ellen DeGeneres is actually a good replacement for Paula Abdul on American Idol. Paula was always the "nice" judge and Ellen fills that role well without slipping into drug / booze addled rambles. The final 24 have been chosen and do I have any favorites? The chick with the bad teeth is really good.

24 is 24. I'm always happy to see Katee Sackhoff, but her character is a loser with a stupid subplot attached. I kept waiting for her to shove a knife in her ex-boyfriend's belly and laugh about it, like she did so many times when she played Starbuck and was being harrassed by the eternally creepy Leobens on BSG. Speaking of, Keith Callum Rennie was co-starring on 24 for a while as well, playing a creep who got stabbed to death by a pissed-off woman (typecast much?), but without so many lives. Maybe Jamie Bamber or Tricia Helfer will show up and we'll have a BSG trifecta.

We're not getting any of this

IMG_2403, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

WTF - everyone SOUTH of us is getting blanketed with SNOW!

I received a perpetual Blue Screen of Death on my home computer thanks to a Microsoft update - that's their ultimate plan to prevent vulnerabilities - if you can't use your computer, no one can!

Instead of repairing it, I grabbed some things off the hard drive, re-formatted it, and have installed Windows 7 (I was on XP). So far I like it, even though it's a little frustrating because the user interface is quite different.

I forgot to mention that Jon and I watched a fascinating documentary: For All Mankind. Someone went through the vast archive of footage of the Apollo missions and made an audio-visual mosiaic of the moon landings. There's no narration except for some archival commentary from some of the astronauts. The documentary conveys what it must have been like to be stuck in a small rocket-propelled can for days in the eternal vacuum of space just to reach a dead alien satellite. I haven't felt that kind of wonder and awe about what we accomplished (with late 60's tech!) since I was a kid. I can't wait until Brenden is old enough to appreciate the Space and Rocket center here in Huntsville.

After watching this documentary, I totally appreciate how well Ron Howard captured the geeks in the control room in Apollo 13. They truly were a bunch of white nerd-boys who smoked like chimneys. And Ed Harris totally nailed Gene Krantz ("not on my watch!"). I need to watch it again.

The Low Crawl of Winter

IMG_3669, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Ugh. I've had a migraine for two days now. Blech. Or maybe it was because Jon and I watched the season premiere of Lost last Sunday and I'm still trying to get my brain around it. I guess I'll avoid spoilers, but it was sad to see all those dead people.

Brenden and I play a lot of the Wii Lego Indiana Jones game together. There are some tough puzzles in that one!

Even though Bioshock II came out today, I'm re-playing Fallout 3 yet again. I had to try the Point Lookout add-on, and it was kind of disappointing. Mothership Zeta remains my favorite. I do like having an axe for a melee weapon, though. Whee!

Is Fox trying to kill Fringe? They show a couple of eps here and there then take it off the air for a month or so. Way to kill any momentum.

Caprica needs more exploding robots.

More of What I'm Watching

IMG_3664, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Jon and I finally saw Avatar and we watched it in 3D. Yay! It was good, but not great. I've said before I judge James Cameron harshly because he's better than most directors working in Hollywood today (plus he directed Terminator and Aliens, and I love both of those to smithereens). Someday I'll rank JC's movies but for now I'll place this somewhere between The Abyss and True Lies. It was certainly better than Titanic!

My problems with the movie were with the script. There's nothing groundbreaking here, Humans Are Bastards and they are targeting Noble Savages for their land and a Mighty Whitey is the protagonist). I'm also not certain why Sam Worthington is such a hot item right now. He's very good looking in a generic way but I wasn't impressed with his acting skills. Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana blew him out of the water.

Which is what I did like about the movie: Sigourney Weaver plays a cranky but good-hearted scientist and I loved seeing her again. Zoe Saldana was the main Na'vi character. I never undertood why she fell in love with Worthington's character but at least she had a full range of emotions. Plus she kicked butt and I'll avoid spoilers but I'll say a common outcome with the Final Boss battle was averted here near the end of the movie. Bonus: Michelle Rodriguez, whom I always love seeing. No offense meant to Jenette Goldstein (who played a terrific Vasquez), but I always thought Cameron would have cast Rodriguez as Vasquez in Aliens if she hadn't been like 5 at the time.

Oh, and the main bad guy is a Colonel Badass and much fun to watch. The special effects are amazing and Weta, the New Zealand effects company pwns George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. The fight scenes are worth the price of admission alone and Cameron knows better than to use Shaky Cam. So my final verdict: Avatar = Pretty!

More Creeping

IMG_3671, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Wow, I am such a frakking geek. I bought a couple of Bear McCreary's soundtracks from seasons 2 and 3 of Battlestar Galactica. His choices are so eclectic: you have plenty of celtic and arabic influences, plus for quieter moments piano and / or violin, and then there's of course the constant poundy, poundy drums. He likes them more than the Japanese do. That's saying something!

Anyway listening to it makes me miss the show something fierce. Yes, I'll watch Caprica, but there's no Mom, Dad, or the Twins. No Tigh or Caprica 6 or Baltar. Will there be anything on this new show like the time Madame Airlock told the chief mutineer she would use everything at her disposal, including her eye teeth, to end him? Anything as jaw-dropping insane as the mid-season 2 story arc of the Pegasus and crew? Or as nifty-cool as the Galactica jumping into New Caprica's atmosphere to release fighters? If Caprica doesn't break my heart at least once an episode or so it won't measure up.

24 has started again - yeah, I'm a masochist. Enough said about that. Less than a month to go for the next season of Lost! Yay!

Creeping January

IMG_3662, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Nothing new to report - Brenden told his first joke (that I understood):

Brenden: "This is yummy!" (referring to his strawberry flavored applesauce).

Me: "I'm glad you like it."

Brenden: "No, mama, you say 'you can say that again'! Ok? I say is yummy, you say 'you can say that again'!"

Me: "Um, ok."

Brenden: "This is yummy!"

Me: "You can say that again!"

Brenden: "This is yummy! Hahaha! Isn't that funny, mama? Isn't that funny?"

Of course it was.

Also: Happy 92nd birthday to Major Richard Winters, the only nonagenarian I have ever had a crush on. Watch Band of Brothers if you have no idea who I'm talking about.

Winter Fire

IMG_3666, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

What I'm Watching / Reading:

Land of the Lost: No Trope links because this is a will Ferrell movie which has become kind of a trope in itself. So I was wrong about my prejudgement about this movie. It was not worse than G.I. Joe. and that is damning it with faint praise. Some people consider this movie a rape of their childhood, but really: Land of the Lost? Sure, I watched it when I was a kid but even back then I knew it was a lame show. Most of the funny moments involve scenes with Matt Lauer.

9: Animated post-apocalyptic tale. Fascinating to look at, but it had some plotting problems.

Extract: I love Mike Judge and here he does what he always does - he shows us idiots being idiotic. The protagonist is a chemist and owns his own business so you think he'd be a little less stupid than the idiots who work for him, but he accidentally takes a horse tranquilizer and ends up getting talked into hiring a gigolo to have sex with his wife. See, this way he can cheat on her, guilt-free. This movie had its moments but on the whole I'd rather see Idiocracy again.

Under the Dome: This Stephen King book is about a thousand pages long and I read it in about 3 days. It's a page turner (kindle clicker?) about a small town that gets trapped underneath an impregnable force-field. I won't go into more to avoid spoilers except near the end of the book I was shaking so bad I didn't want to finish it. I'm glad I did though. I think it's some of his best writing ever. Your mileage may vary, of course.

American Idol is back, and it's Simon Cowell's last season. How the hell can AI go on? The whole reason to watch the show is to see Simon cut off some clueless contestant at the knees then dash a cup full of piss-tinged reality into said contestant's face. All with that dry british drawl. Also Paula Abdul is gone. No more incoherent drug-fueled rambling. How boring! I didn't last long last season, anyway. I doubt I'll make it past Hollywood week for this one either.

2009: The Year in Recap Form

Magic and Dutchman, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

January: Visit to Ed and Jen's place in Massachusetts. Snow! Yay!
February: Disney Cruise to the Caribbean! Yar!
March: Battlestar Galactica ended. Whaa!
April: I got a Kindle (II). Yay!
May: Life (the TV show) got canned. Boo! But, I also got to see a great movie in the theater (Star Trek). Yay!
June: Much remodeling work done around our house. Ouch!
July: I earned a trip to the emergency room due to a bulging disc. Ouchouchouchouchouch. Also new kitties. Meow.
August: Jon and I have our 10 year anniversary. Muah!
September: Great Tampa visit w/ dad and Ilu so Brenden can go to the beach. Whee!
October: We go camping and Brenden catches a catfish. Yum!
November: Thanksgiving in Oklahoma. Yum!
December: Long nothing-doing vacation at home during Christmas. Ahhhhhhhhhh.........!

So there you have my year in review. Heh.

Rabbids

Raving Rabbids!!!!!!, originally uploaded by meljpouliot.

I had a whole week off for Christmas, plus New Years. We didn't go anywhere and just stayed home. Jon did some work on the house but spent a chunk of time at the drop zone. He bought me Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas and I spent most of my free time playing it.

Like Bioshock is distantly related to System Shock II this game is the indirect descendant of Baldur's Gate. BG is an FRPG based on Dungeons and Dragons. DAO isn't D&D but it will be quite familiar to any experienced RPG gamers. At first I thought the story line was too limiting - I think I'm spoiled by the open worlds of Bethesda Softwork's Elder Scroll series, not to mention my favoritest Fallout 3. DAO's characters and story line sucked me in, however.

I won't go into details - there's a blight upon the land and your character is called upon to stop it. You meet people along the way who can join you for your quest and you can get kind of attached to some of them.

Anyone who remembers the somewhat stilted dialog from portions of Baldur's Gate take heart: the people who wrote Dragon Age apparently watch Joss Whedon shows and the conversation is more entertaining than usual. The first NPC who can join your party, Alastair, is a cross between Xander from Buffy and Mal from Firefly. That's according to the people who designed him and it's a fairly accurate assessment.

Brenden got loads of toys besides the way-cool brain-sucking space aliens. He received a Wii game that he's addicted to: Ubi-Soft's Rabbids go home (it is spelled "rabbid" and for good reason). He was entertained for almost an hour when he discovered a portion of the game where one of the rabbids gets stuck in your controller. You shake the controller and the rabbid makes lots of noises while on screen you see a little cartoon rabbid careening of the interior of a Wii remote. The rabbid is pretty happy about it. Anyway Brenden squees and laughs his little buttocks off when he plays.

Which is great, because it gives me more time to fight blood mages, darkspawn, and the occasional archdemon.

Things from Outer Space

IMG_3672, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Merry Christmas, everybody! By happy accident, Brenden received the best toy I have ever seen. On my recommendation his abuela and grandpa sent him the Imaginext Space Station. It included these horrible looking octopoid aliens as you can see above. Well as you can see in the picture below, they sit nciely on the play figures' heads. Brain-sucking space aliens for your preschooler! Fischer-Price FTW!

We Suck!

District 9 Bus Bench MNU Sign Teaser, originally uploaded by district9pics.

What I'm Watching:

Because of the enormous amount of time I've spent perusing Tv Tropes I'm afraid my reviews will never be the same. That site has become an enormous time waster resource for me. For instance, when I rambled about Kirk/Spock and Hector/Achilles I really, really wanted to do some quick Google searches to confirm my suspicions but didn't want to lose my remaining eye. Tv Tropes, thankfully, provided me with information about Rule 34 of the Internet without going into too many gory details. Their linktastic pages lead me to Ho Yay (which I find amusing and entertaining - I just don't want to read 40 pages of pr0n about it) and No Yay, which I will not link to because while the image on that page is SFW, I found it deeply, deeply disturbing. If you go to TV Tropes and search on that term, you will not be happy. You have been warned. Don't do it!

So anyways. I watched District 9 (the link contains spoilers!) last night, and while I don't particularly like Humans are Bastards stories, this one tells its story in a palatable manner (for me. I want to see Avatar sometime next week and I just know Cameron is going to beat me about the head and shoulders with the same Trope, which is why I didn't try to see it on opening night). It was palatable because the bastardry was mostly believable and because there's a scene when someone does their very best when things are at their very worst (That's a trope exemplified in John Carpenter's forgotten Starman - Big Damn Heroes might be the closest trope I found.) Collectively yeah we suck but we're not condemned to suckage at an individual level.

I just realized I haven't given a plot synopsis. An alien space ship hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. The inhabitants come across as stupid, ugly insectoid aliens who quickly get sent to a JoBurg ghetto and cause problems. Finally after 20 years the aliens are to be rounded up and moved away from the city and most of the action takes place when a private company (an evil one, natch) sets out to herd them up and move them out. The protagonist, Wikus Van Der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, and I am on the give-him-an-Oscar bandwagon though it will never happen because this is SCIENCE FICTION), has been put in charge of this operation and this bland little Afrikaans twit has himself an interesting time. See the movie it's awesome. F-Bombs and splattage ahoy, though. Oh! and an awesome Macross Missile Massacre! SRSLY!

If you have seen it, here's a great review / examination from a South African's perspective.

FEET

PictureOK3 087, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Random bits:

Fringe had numerous Re-Animator references last episode. Considering the bad guy was someone whose head was re-attached they were hilariously appropriate.

I have read over 50 books since I got my Kindle in March. When I was in high school and college those numbers would have indicated a slow year. I think that's the most I've read in the last 5 years put together, and yes, I'm sad about that. I've totally fallen in love with reading again. The Kindle has 3 features I love: 1) Instant downloads, 2) book samples, and 3) large font sizes. Yes, my eyesight is going to crap again.

Brenden really loves cooking. We made cookies from scratch last weekend and I'm always looking for recipes he can help me with. I envision many holiday treats this coming holiday break.

While Christmas shopping I found the 1st season of Veronica Mars for $20 so I snagged it. I'm actually going to start re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer this weekend though. The reason is this website: TV Tropes. It contains many BtVS references (which made me want to start a rewatch) and is a huge timekiller. Don't say I didn't warn you though.

We watched Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night. I thought it was a pretty good adaptation of the movie despite all the missing scenes. Mrs. Damian Lewis, Helen McCrory, has a small part in it playing Narcissa Malfoy. There was no sign of Jason Isaacs or Ralph Fiennes, though. Pity.

What I'm Watching

PictureOK3 136, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

Jon wanted to rent a movie and here were our choices:

Transformers II
G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra
Terminator: Salvation
Year 1
Land of the Lost

I voted for G.I. Joe. Even after watching it I still feel I made the wisest choice. The plot involved Chris Eccleston sporting a scottish accent that would make Mike Myers blush and he's a weapons dealer who is evil. And then there's Team America: World Police who trash Paris. Or was that a different movie? Paris does get trashed but the Joe team is multinational. I think - all the main characters were American. I was distracted by all the explosions. Pretty!

Headaches for Mama

PictureOK3 171, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

I cleaned the house Saturday and sunday to prep it for Christmas decorating. When I pulled the white christmas tree from the attic Brenden and both evil kittens were ecstatic. My blood pressure went through the roof trying to keep a small child and two large cats from climbing the tree. So far 11 or 12 ornaments have been broken and when I go replace them I'm going to buy plastic ones.

To top it off Brenden broke the screen on my Kindle Sunday. Fortunately it's still under warranty and the cheerful helpdesk guy at Amazon is sending me a new one and they're even paying the postage for when I return my old one. So Amazon's customer service gets a big "Hooray!" from me.

Oh Noes! Mom is rambling again!

PictureOK3 135, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

While watching the new Star Trek, the good chemistry between Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto(Spock) got me thinking, and scared, and I really don't want to go a-googling, but I'm betting that movie launched a billion slash fanfics. If you don't know what slash is, congradulate yourself and go look at some funny kittys. If you do know, and you read it (or even write it), hey - it's your thing and that's fine by me. I on the other hand accidentally read the beginning of one and an eye popped out of my face kind of like that scene in Friday the 13th 3D. I'm totally fascinated by the idea that people feel the need to write out and share certain scenarios but I have no desire to read them. Just - EWW!

That doesn't mean I don't understand the urge to write fan fiction. I don't write but I've read some (I've learned to look for sites that vet the material first). I understand the urge to change something or add something to a story because I understand the desire to make the story better (or at least less sucky - ask me someday for my very short version of Alien 3). For instance I've been reading all the Trojan War permutations I can find. I have disliked the fate of Troy ever since I read the Iliad, so the Aeneid at least makes up for their fate a little. I've been bothered by the death of Hector's son, Astyanax, so I was glad he gets to live in a movie variation, Troy. Hector still gets killed by Achilles though.

That leads me to David Gemmell's almost uniformly excellent Troy trilogy. It's biggest flaw is the hero, Helakion, A.K.A. Aeneas. He is nowhere near as interesting as Odysseus, Andromache, and an assortment of nifty made-up characters that populate the story. I was kind of put off by Andromache falling in love with this shmoe for unexplained reasons (other than he was hot). And, as if sensing his hero wasn't that great, Gemmell made Hektor an almost nonentity who people talk about but we rarely 'see' in action. But the narrative and the rest of the characters make up for the books. Hektor and Achilles' battle is pretty nifty with a twist I liked, and I could tell the legend of the trojan horse bothered Gemmell enough that he just had to change it. (SRSLY - any town stupid enough to let a hollow horse into their city walls after 10 years of battle pretty much deserves to be destroyed).

Then there's Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos which has to be read to be believed. I'll spoil just a little - Hector gets to live! Finally!! And Achilles' fate is well deserved and I'm still giggling about it.

So going back around to slash fanfic - are there any slash pieces about Hector and Achilles floating about? I would place money on it especially after Eric Bana and Brad Pitt got to play the characters in the movie but I'd rather cut out my remaining good eye with a dull spoon than go find out.