"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
It’s maybe worth pointing out that when I declared 2012 the Year of the Meeting I was, in fact, kidding. But the universe heard me and, boy howdy, has it ever delivered. I spent all of this morning in meetings, and a big part of the take-away was just how many more meetings we can expect to have in the coming year. I may escape tomorrow without one, but that’s not for certain, and that’s maybe it.
Meanwhile, the temperature was almost 60 degrees all day, which is just ridiculous.
I find it very difficult to believe it snowed only a week ago. You would not have been uncomfortable walking around, even outside, with your sleeves rolled up or at most a light jacket. It’s colder and windier now, but the weather was weirdly pleasant all afternoon.
Not that I did an awful lot with it, beyond watching a few more episodes of Red Dwarf, reading a little Tintin, and helping my father put the screens back on the kitchen windows. Exciting times, no doubt.
It snowed today, really only a couple of inches before it turned to ice and rain, and between shoveling and scraping and salting, between taking the dog out in the yard and walking to the deli for lunch and helping to fix a garage door that suddenly and surprisingly broke, the day didn’t turn out exactly like I’d planned. But it was a pleasant enough day, even after the snowy weather turned cold and nasty.
This evening, I watched Underworld. I saw the trailer for the fourth movie when I went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it looked interesting. Of course, I’d made that mistake before with the Evil Dead sequel and, to a lesser extent, Doomsday (which escapes ridicule just by being so unrelentingly ridiculous). Underworld wasn’t great, by any stretch, but it had its moments and a pretty decent, scenery-chewing (and -clawing and -rending and -fanging) cast. It’s got Bill Nighy in full glam goth rock badass mode, and I quite liked this little exchange between the two ostensible leads:
“Lycans are allergic to silver. We have to get the bullets out quickly, or they end up dying on us during questioning.”
“What happens to them afterward?”
“We put the bullets back in.”
Then again, it’s also full of characters who disappear from the action entirely, whose motivations are never clear, and who say things like, “Mark my words.” And I was never really sure what city it was supposed to be taking place in. Supposedly it was filmed in Budapest, but it feels very much like a corner of The Matrix where all that weird vampire and ghost stuff from Reloaded was going on.
Still, entertaining enough, I suppose.
I had some weird dreams last night, nothing that I remember too clearly, but a string of dreams that seemed to be chasing one another into the morning. I wound up oversleeping and didn’t get my early train like I’d planned/hoped.
It wasn’t raining when I left this morning, so I can maybe be forgiven for forgetting my umbrella. But the rain was well underway by lunchtime. I ducked into the local Duane Reade, a couple of blocks from the office, to buy a new umbrella…only to have it break on me the minute I walked out the door. First it wouldn’t stay open, and then the little plastic button that’s supposed to keep it locked open snapped off. I was tempted to go back inside and ask for a refund — it wasn’t expensive, but it was still ten bucks, and it was still raining — but I’d for some reason tossed my receipt in the garbage can just inside the door before I left. I maybe could have still made a case for a refund or exchange — “I was just in here” — but I managed to get the umbrella working, more or less. It won’t win any design awards, and I should probably swap out my regular umbrella for it, but it’s not like it’s being held open with masking tape or anything…yet.
Beyond the rain and the dreams, it was a pretty ordinary Monday. Thank goodness it was actually a Tuesday.
I spent the whole day — well, 10:30 to 4 — in a meeting with our sales reps talking about some of the new and important books for the season. There was a free lunch, but I’m a little wiped. I’ve spent the evening mostly watching the end of Aliens and doing a crossword puzzle. Dinner was from the local Azerbaijan grill restaurant, and the crossword was from the New York Times.
It’s a long weekend here, which is nice, although it’s turned quite cold again, which is less pleasant. It snowed for about five minutes this morning — blink and you might have missed it — but right now it’s just really windy.
Did I mention I was in a meeting all day long?