"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
You could kind of just take last year’s Thanksgiving post and repeat it again this year. Different restaurant, different MST3K episodes — well, except for “Final Sacrifice,” which is playing now — but the basics are just the same.
We had a nice meal, just the three of us, and now I’m enjoying the rest of the evening.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, or just Thursday, which ever it may be!
It rained and rained and rained all night, and although it let up quite a bit by morning, it rained and rained and rained again all day.
I was just as glad not to be at work. Our office closed early for tomorrow’s holiday, but I’d taken the day off altogether, in the same plan that’s had me burning up left-over vacation days with three-day weekends lately. This will be a five-day weekend, thanks to Thanksgiving and the Friday after, and I won’t go back to the office until next Tuesday. Just last week, we were talking to our UK boss about Thanksgiving, and he was saying, “That must be nice. And I suppose lots of people take the Friday off as well?” He was actually shocked when we told him the office was closed, that both Thursday and Friday are paid days off, and that a four-day weekend for Thanksgiving is a pretty typical American custom.
I went and got a haircut this morning, to at least try and pretend like I had some kind of schedule. But mostly I just sat around, watched an episode of Sleepy Hollow, tried to explain iTunes to my mother, and avoided going back out in the rain. I only replied to a single work e-mail. Not exactly an eventful day off, but I’m not complaining.
Last night, I watched Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which I seem to remember having watched in theaters, even if the movie itself wasn’t perfectly familiar. It wasn’t bad — not as good as Wrath of Khan or as much fun as The Voyage Home, perhaps, but I think history has been kind to the movie, and there’s a certain hokey nostalgia that hangs over it. A lot of the practical effects are dated, and there’s a fair amount of scenery chewing — Christopher Lloyd’s no Ricardo Montalban, but his Klingon and Shatner’s Kirk trade a good bit of yelling — but it’s entertaining.
Wake in Fright, on the other hand, which I watched this evening…well, it was interesting. It’s set in the Australian outback in the early 1970s and starts to feel like a horrible fever-dream after a while. I think the moral of the movie is “don’t drink so much that butchering kangaroos in the dead of night seems like a good time.” Seriously, the kangaroo hunt is bloody and graphic and awful to watch. Though maybe the disclaimer about this at the end is strangely preferable to the “No animals were harmed during the making of this picture” we often see — and which it turns out might not be worth a damn. Still, that doesn’t make the scenes any easier to sit through.
Anyway, that’s been my Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, and then I have three more days of weekend to get through. I wonder how I’ll manage.
It’s been a couple of days.
I took Friday off again, mostly just trying to make it feel like a Friday instead of a Saturday — mostly because that makes Saturday feel like a Sunday, and I don’t need two Sundays in my weekend. (I like Sundays, but I don’t need two of them.)
That evening, I watched Before Midnight, which I really liked a whole lot. While I think it can be enjoyed without having seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, it’s absolutely a companion piece to those two films, and it’s a delight to dip back into these characters’ lives — even when those lives themselves aren’t always delightful. (Watching them fight is like watching good friends, or your parents, fight and almost as uncomfortable.) I’m surprised to discover I was hoping they wouldn’t make the movie a couple of years ago. This, too, seems like a fitting end to the story…and yet I could see coming back to them again in another ten years. This film is sometimes less fun than the first two — it’s less about falling in love than struggling to maintain in — but it’s still terrific.
Yesterday, I thought about watching a movie, but ended up just watching a bunch of television. Scandal, Agents of SHIELD, the new Doctor Who. Mostly that’s because I went to dinner with my parents and aunt and uncle to celebrate a birthday and got a home a little later than I expected. (A short but furious snow squall that made driving almost impossible for a good stretch of road didn’t help any.) And today’s it’s mostly more TV, trying to avoid the ridiculous cold and wind outside.
My writing group got canceled, thanks to a friend’s car troubles, but I decided to make use of the writing prompts he posts every Saturday and do some free-writing on my own. I really do need to get back into writing more regularly, above and beyond the forty minutes of it I do most Sundays.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote:
She was staying at the cabin, the one her father bought before he died, when she saw the thing that might have been a wolf.
There wasn’t any heat or running water at the place, and only candlelight or a beat-up lantern by which to see. But she was only staying the one night, packing up the last of the old man’s books and papers because nobody else in the family wanted to. There were ten months of notes and ratty journals squirreled away up here, maybe more; and although she and her sisters were just as likely to burn it all, Karen had agreed to travel the three hours north to box and tag everything she could find. She wasn’t sure if anyone outside the family even remembered her father’s novels, and whatever he’d been working on here, it sure as hell hadn’t been another book. But maybe there were still some collectors out there, die-hard fans who would pay good money for a glimpse of his later writing.
God knew the old man hadn’t left them much of anything else. It was only chance that Karen had even found out that he was dying.
He’d come back to Chicago for some reason. She didn’t think it was to die — she couldn’t even say for sure if he’d known he was sick — but that’s how it had played out. Almost a year without contact, not even a word, and then one morning Deb called her from the hospital and said, “Um, Kar? I think they just wheeled Dad into the emergency room downstairs.â€
Karen was tempted to think of it as destiny, or maybe karma. Those were the kinds of words that Deb had used at the funeral, and like always Maggie had echoed her, but maybe there was some kind of truth to it. All Karen knew was that the man was dead, and there was a strange satisfaction in knowing that he’d breathed his last in a city that he’d always hated.
Not that the cabin revealed anything more about her father. She’d glanced at the writings she was bundling for the drive back home, but it seemed like there was more of his madness than answers in there, and the building itself anonymous and ramshackle. He’d apparently been there since last October, paid in full, but it was a lonely shack in the woods more than anything else.
Not quite sure where it’s going, but it’s something that wasn’t there before I started, so that’s something.
I arrived at the train station this morning to discover a disabled train — I prefer to think of them as handi-capable — stuck on the track where my train is usually supposed to go. Plus a whole bunch of people walking up the stairs to the other platform, where our train had been redirected.
Because of the stuck train, the railroad was promising scattered 15 to 20-minute delays all morning, and my connecting train wasn’t even an option. I stayed on — standing, not sitting — to Penn Station and caught the subway from there. It’s the exact reverse of what I do in the evening, as I’ve probably mentioned here before, and it takes pretty much the same amount of time as my normal morning commute. It’s not my preferred way of getting there…
…although, come to think of it, maybe it should be. Going to Hunterspoint Avenue doesn’t save me much time, and no money, and it really narrows my options if the subway is delayed or isn’t running. Only the 7 train runs from Hunterspoint Avenue, on two tracks, one going into Manhattan and the other going away. And once I’m there, that’s my only option, since the Long Island Railroad won’t take me back where I need to go until sometime in the late afternoon. If I go to Penn Station, on the other hand, I’m already in Manhattan. If the 1 or 2 trains are having problems and can’t get me to Times Square (where I get the shuttle to Grand Central, then walk two blocks), I can in theory try the A, C, or E — less direct, but they’ll get me in the neighborhood — or even walk. (That takes half an hour — I’ve done it once before, in the evening — whereas walking from Hunterspoint is at least an hour over the Queensboro Bridge.)
This has been “Fred Ponders His Commute Options.” This is of only limited interest even to me.
Anyway, I got the subway from Penn Station, and though I just missed the first two trains and had to wait, everything seemed to be looking up. The delays hadn’t been so bad. I got to Times Square, then to Grand Central…and that’s where I tripped getting off the subway car and fell to the platform.
I was okay, maybe surprisingly so, and while it hurt — both my leg and my pride — I don’t appear to have done any significant or lasting damage. It was much more forgiving than a fall I took two years ago, which I’m not sure my knee ever completely recovered from. I didn’t enjoy falling, and it may have made me a few minutes late for work, but after that, how can things not start to look up?
I’m off again this Friday, so this has really felt like my Thursday, though I suspect it still is only Wednesday. The went by very quickly, since I have a lot of work to do, in a year that seems to be rapidly running out. I’ll be out for a lot of December, and next week I’m only in for two days thanks to…well, Thanksgiving. (Plus the Wednesday. I’m taking the Wednesday.) I’m having a difficult time believing 2013 is this close to over.
So it’s been a couple of days. I wish I could say I did anything more productive than watch a couple of movies, fail to finish the Sunday crossword, read some comics, and go to my writing group, but that would probably be lying. Why is it that when I take off on Friday, I feel like I’m getting an extra Sunday, and not an extra Saturday? Believe me, I think I’d prefer the latter.
I did buy a new television, which was something. I don’t have cable, but the TV has an internet connection (for Netflix, YouTube, etc.), which I can combine with my Roku and Blu-Ray player and more than enough entertainment. I picked it up at the local Best Buy, which made me glad I hadn’t gone there to buy a PlayStation 4. They were answering phones with “Thanks for calling Best Buy. We’re all sold out of the PS4,” and lots of people with me in the long pick-up line were worried their own purchases wouldn’t be there.
If and when there’s a Portal 3, I’ll consider buying a gaming system — maybe for a new Bioshock — but I haven’t actually had one in years, the original Nintendo. I think I sold it at a garage sale, which is a shame. I never did figure out how to get that robot to work.
Anyway, the movies were Kiss the Girls and Jack Reacher. The former wasn’t great, and then was unbelievably bad in its last twenty minutes, while the latter was entertaining but very forgettable, with more talk about how amazing Tom Cruise’s character was — “Who the hell is Jack Reacher? Well…let me tell you…” — than action.
And then there was my writing group. I wrote this, from a few randomly chosen writing prompts:
In the past, I’ve tried to kill this woman. It was nothing personal, mostly politics; I was just a hired gun, doing a job, and most of the times our paths crossed her name could have easily been any of a hundred others. That doesn’t make it any easier, realizing in the heat of battle that you’re only there because some bureaucrat flagged her name a little higher on that week’s kill list — some Congressman wanted to make a point, or more likely just stumbled on her name at random — and I’m sure it wouldn’t have made her feel any better about the whole damn thing. My intentions were still the same. But it wasn’t built on anything specific, no personal feelings. If anything, I kept accepting the contracts because I respected her too much, respected her skills, wanted yet another chance to match them against mine. I could have walked, or let some other agent tangle with her for a change. Sometimes I wonder why nobody ever forced me to do that. A hundred times we must have met, squared off either face to face or across the divide of rifle scopes, and there we were, both of us still alive. There’s no honor among thieves, they say, but maybe there’s too much among assassins. Maybe you shouldn’t send one killer to kill another. Sometimes I wonder. They had super-soldiers and black ops programs that might have settled the account more quickly and completely than my own self-taught skills, but I guess no one in charge ever learned the power of no. Let’s just keep sending her out, these senators must have said — just as they must have been saying about her on the other side — and eventually it’ll sort itself out. Law of averages. That’s if they even thought about it that far. After all, these were the same men who’d built the Abomination Project — actually called it that, like that wasn’t just asking for trouble — then tried burying it and the evidence when it all went predictably south. I’d tied up a few of those messy loose ends for them myself. The pay was always good, and their checks cleared — you couldn’t always say that in this line of work — but thinking far ahead wasn’t exactly my employer’s strong suit. After all, they hadn’t told that this time me she would be…
And that was my weekend. I also spent some time on Friday coordinating a meeting for tomorrow morning at the office — is it good or bad that I can do work from my phone…on my day off…while on line? — which I’m not exactly looking forward to. But we’ll see.