personal

Saturday or a close approximation

I have completely lost track of what day it is.

Presumably it’s Saturday, but I’ve been off from work for more than two weeks now, and one day has kind of blended into the other.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day working on getting the Winter 2013 issue of Kaleidotrope up and running, and contacting my hosting company to get this site back up. (Migration to a new server had a temporary number on my WordPress installation.)

I also watched a couple of movies. On Thursday night, I watched Midnight Run, an enjoyable if lightweight ’80s action comedy starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Then on Friday, I re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, though I swear I only meant to watch maybe twenty minutes of it while eating lunch. I got the Blu-ray boxed set of the four movies for Christmas and…well, come on, Raiders is just a really great movie. It also looks really great in Blu-ray. Later that night, I watched The Descendants, which is both very good and very odd. I’m still kind of mulling over what I think about it, but George Clooney’s never uninteresting in it, if nothing else.

Today, there was more Kaleidotrope, which will go live with the new issue on January 1. It’s a really good issue, I think, and I hope you’ll check out the stories and poems in, particularly if you usually don’t. It’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and I know a sizable number of my (not sizable number of) readers like that.

I also re-watched GoldenEye, the first Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie. You know, in for a penny, in for a pound. It’s actually not too bad, and more or less exactly as I remembered it. Brosnan is actually quite good, Judi Dench is terrific (albeit criminally underused), and Famke Janssen is painfully ridiculous. I think this is less her fault than her character’s. (Her name, Xenia Onatopp, is perhaps the least ridiculous thing about her.) Parts of the movie are great, parts are actually, rather dull, and a few parts are just too silly for words. Which is more or less what you want out of most Bond movies. (Though I’m personally leaning more towards the grittier Daniel Craig version following Skyfall.)

And that was Friday and Saturday, I guess. Meanwhile, the heat has gone off in the house, thanks to a busted motor on the furnace. A work crew came out, but they won’t be able to repair it until Monday. Despite some snow on the ground outside, it’s actually not too cold in the house. And downstairs, where it is warmer, we have the dining room open — it’s heated separately, electrically, and it seems to be helping a little. I don’t think we’re in any real danger of freezing.

Happy holly-daze

Tucker seems to be feeling much better today, back to his old self. The blood work came back negative for Lyme’s disease, and the anti-inflammatory seems to have renewed his energy. He even started playing with some of the toys he got for Christmas, and the stairs haven’t proved any real challenge. We’re keeping an eye on him, but we’re hoping he’s over the worst of it and we won’t have any more trips to the vet anytime soon.

Meanwhile, I spent most of the day fiddling around with the upcoming new issue of Kaleidotrope, which will go live sometime next week, and watching some more movies. First I re-watched Cabin in the Woods — for the second time, actually, after having listened to the commentary track yesterday — and tonight, Midnight Run, which was enjoyable.

And that was…I don’t know. Thursday? That can’t be right, can it?

On the second day of Christmas…

I had a mostly very lovely Christmas.

I received far too many gifts, from my very generous parents, sister, and brother-in-law. My father, in particular, seemed determined to deplete everyone’s Amazon wishlist in one fell swoop this year. I also, very unexpectedly, received a membership to the Online Writing Workshop from Heather and a knitted hat from Tammy. Truly, it was an embarrassment of riches.

We had a late start to the day but a very nice dinner, too much food but all of it good. All the snow from the night before had melted, and it was mostly just cold and, by the end of the day, kind of dreary, but it was a really nice day nonetheless.

The end of the evening, however, wasn’t exactly perfect. Tucker, our dog, has been getting over being sick for the past week or so, and while he seemed to lack much enthusiasm, or at least energy, for getting any new toys of his own for Christmas, he seemed a lot better by the end of the day. So we were really worried when he had difficulty standing up, and then fell when trying to go up the stairs. He could walk, but was definitely having trouble putting too much of his weight on his back legs, or getting any traction lying in the non-carpeted front hallway. We managed to get him to the living room couch, after getting him off the stairs, and my mother spent the night watching over him there. Then this morning, my father and I took him back to the vet, where they took some blood, prescribed a new antibiotic, and also gave him an anti-inflammatory to help. He’s still running a slight fever, and the blood work’s to check for things like Lyme disease. He’s a ten-year-old dog and probably does have arthritis, so this may just be the fever (and whatever its underlying cause is) making that worse. He does seem better on the pain reliever the vet prescribed, and tonight on the anti-inflammatory. He didn’t have any trouble getting up the stairs, for instance, whereas this morning, my father and I had to help lift him into the car. He does seem better, but I have been worried about him, and that’s not exactly how you want to spend Christmas night.

But, like I said, he does seem a lot better today. (That may be, in part, because Chloe, my sister’s somewhat hyperactive dog, has gone back home.)

Today was definitely a dreary day, turning to freezing rain and sleet by the evening, what I think is yet another in a string of noreasters. I spent it mostly watching movies, the quite disappointing V/H/S and the surprisingly quite enjoyable Ruby Sparks.

That and taking the dog to the vet. Beats going to the stores the day after Christmas, I guess.

Christmas Eve will find me

Another day, another Bond film: this time, the second of the two Timothy Dalton movies, License to Kill. It’s maybe less of a James Bond movie than a lot of its predecessors, full of some particularly gruesome deaths and a hero who’s gone rogue, looking for vengeance. Dalton’s Bond probably has more in common with the grittier Daniel Craig version than the suave, pun-dropping Sean Connery or Roger Moore, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I rather liked this one, actually.

Then this evening, a very nice Christmas Eve dinner out with my parents, sister, and brother-in-law. (An aunt an uncle were all set to join us, but were feeling under the weather.) While we were eating — scallops, then duck breast for me — it started snowing. It has the look of snow that will all be melted by morning, but we may just have a white Christmas yet.

Sunday

Today was my regular free-writing group. This is what a few writing prompts and forty minutes netted me:

“I don’t want to alarm you,” says One, “but I think the planet is talking to us.”

“It’s not a planet,” says Two. He adjusts a flashing green knob, then another, on the small console in front of them both, then flips a series of switches in what might be carefully timed precision or might be random (and meaningless) choice. He stares up at the screen pinned to the wall above them, gray and crackling with static, then throws One the sort of look usually reserved for the village idiot.

“It’s a moon,” he says. “That’s what Three has always been. We’re on a moon, in orbit of the planet below, not the other way around.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that it’s talking to us,” says One. “A talking moon isn’t any less strange than a talking planet, you know.”

Two stares at him again, although this time his anger is tempered with might be concern or compassion, or maybe just mild surprise. In the dim light of the control room, One has trouble reading the other man’s face. Two flips another series of switches — the console is a jumble of levers and switches and gauges, none of which make the least bit of sense to One — then whacks the side of the console with the back of his hand. He throws his whole weight behind him as he pushes against a heavy dial that doesn’t budge, and One has the sudden image of a man trying to paddle off from shore, his boat run aground in the rocks of the riverbed, all his efforts wasted and exhausting just to watch. The screen on the wall is still nothing but static, but One thinks there might be a shape underneath all that gray hiss, some kind of image trying to resolve itself, come into focus; but he also thinks Two is likely to collapse from exertion before either of them have any clue what that shape is supposed to be.

“You’re saying you really don’t remember?” says Two. There’s sweat on his brow, and he mops at it with the back of one hand. “You don’t remember coming here a year ago, or anything that’s happened since? You don’t remember when I got here, or when Three downloaded himself into the moon?”

One just stares.

“No,” he says. “Am I supposed to remember that? As far as I know, I just got here.”

Now Two is obviously worried, and seems about to say something, but suddenly the dial spins around madly, a bank of lights starts flashing on the console, and the shape on the screen becomes a large and grinning face.

And there’s no time to explore any of the things One is curious about.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

This evening, I watched Carrie, which I’ve been meaning to watch for a good long while. It’s a strange movie to be watching in 2012, almost forty years after it was first made. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a little dated, occasionally silly, and frequently way over the top, Brian De Palma style. Or that it’s so entered the lexicon of film, particularly of horror, that it’s all but impossible to be surprised by anything that happens in the movie. Its most indelible scenes and images — the opening in the girls’ locker room, the prom, the ending — are so familiar even to those of us who’ve never seen the film, that sometimes, watching it, it can feel like we’re just filling in a few of the lesser missing pieces. And yet…there’s no denying that some of those images are incredible, or that Sissy Spacek is really great as Carrie White. (She and Piper Laurie were both nominated that year, for this film, for Academy Awards.) The film is far from perfect, and I think the decades since have maybe only helped to underline those imperfections, to turn it into a few effective clips rather than a full-length movie. But it’s still, maybe surprisingly, worth watching.

And that was my Sunday. Is it really the Sunday before Christmas already?

Oh, and the dog is obviously feeling much better. He’s maybe a little put out by the fact that my sister’s dog is suddenly here — will apparently be here for Christmas, of all things — but he’s otherwise back to his old self.