more stuff and more

No, I'm NOT going to talk about Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for stuff but I try not to be thankful just once a year, so aside from the yumminess of turkey and stuffing, there's not much to talk about there. Maybe once we move to Oklahoma one of these days it will be different.
I AM going to talk about Pushing Daisies real quick, though. Tonight was another brilliant episode. Where do they come up with such clever, unique plots and witticisms? Not only was the overall plot unique and clever, but the side bit about Chuck's aunts dealing with depression was wonderfully profound as well. Man I can hardly handle how much I love this show.
Christmas is coming and it's driving me nuts. There just isn't enough money in the pocketbook to get all of the cool things I want to get for people. And I receive too dang many cool catalogues in the mail. Like Penzey's and Patternworks and King Arthur Flour. Not to mention all the goodies you can still find at Amazon and Costco even without a temptingly colorful catalogue. So hey, you, go to those stores and buy cool stuff and tell me about it. That way I can get my Christmas shopping fix through you at least. :) Happy Holidays!

Oh and speaking of holidays, my barbershop group is performing at the Old Time Christmas pageant thingy in Kuna at the Old High School Gym on the 1st of December at 1:00. Actually -- we'll be singing solos because one of the ladies can't make it but you should come hear us sing anyway!

Chuck and What I Did This Summer

Well, first, I have to say that I love the show Chuck a little more each week. The pilot was only mildly impressive to me -- I just thought the premise of a guy memorizing tons of things simply by being flashed images in the course of a few hours, was kind of stupid. But every week the characterizations just get better, and, let's face it, when it comes right down to it I'm a sucker for the romantical. This week's was just luscious on that front; I just find Chuck's character to be so cute (am I a sucker for the geeky or what?) that I feast upon Sarah's hidden liking of him with great delight, and I relish the fact that she now has to fight for him. Woo hoo!

Now, I have to repent of the sorry sin of neglecting an exciting tale of What I Did This Summer. It was only a week, actually, but it was still interesting. I went down to Education Week at BYU in August. Originally, it was primarily to meet friends I had met on the LDS online forum at www.nauvoo.com. But once I got there I was pleasantly surprised to find that the classes offered by BYU were insightful and informative, offering handy items on psychology, teaching skills, scriptures, and gospel topics. It was wonderful! I feel like it was something I was meant to be at -- mostly because of the adventure I had getting down there. First, when I was just past Logan on I-84, I was run off the road by a retard in a little blue car. There were posts on the side of the road, but miraculously I was able to barely (and I mean by INCHES) keep between the posts and the retard who ran me off the road. THEN, when I was in Salt Lake on I-15, in the midst of construction, a huge piece of metal was flipped up from the side of the road and bounced off the top of my car, missing my windshield by less than 2 inches. It being in the middle of construction, there was no shoulder so I couldn't pull off the road, and I really couldn't even slow down from the 65 mph speed limit being in th midst of traffic the way I was. I felt very blessed to make it down to Ed Week with only a dent on the roof of my car to show for my adventures!
That was the biggest adventure of the week, but I had a great time while I was down there, seeing my brother, meeting my online friends, and getting to take some great classes for not much money, it was an awesome trip that I hope to make into an annual trek.

Scrapbooking and stuff

OK, first, I must disappoint with the fact that I couldn't find any gaping plot holes in Moonlight this week. Admittedly I wasn't paying very much attention, but siiiiiighh. I actually kind of even liked the show, though it fulfilled my lame prediction that his ex-wife was going to come back and cause trouble somehow. But it worries me that I liked it. Either the show is getting smarter or I'm getting dumber. Eep!

If I weren't so busy this week I would be even more sad that there was no Pushing Daisies this week. As it was, Wednesday was a gaping hole of sad emptiness, but I survived.

Now onto scrapbooking. I must mock myself. I am not typically a person who gets onto the popular craft bandwagon. And according to my husband, I have spent much time mocking those who do things like scrapbooking (a fact which I have conveniently forgotten). Spending so much time, money, and space on putting pictures onto fancy pages seemed silly to me, I guess. But as I get older and more nostalgic, I find myself SCRAPPING and LIKING it. I have stacks and stacks of photos that bring back great memories, but as I get older, more and more of the details are becoming lost to me. And so many of them are parts of times that are so important to me that they deserve to be remembered, more than just an image, but labeled and in context. I've been creating a scrapbook of my college years and it's wonderful, remembering and putting things down, and thinking of how my descendants may now look at them someday and hopefully have an idea of what those wonderful years were like to me, so much more than simply photos in a box. I only wish my own ancestors had the ability and forethought to put such things together for us for our records. It's amazing how much is lost in a single generation.

Oh, and I have to put a plug in here for Saturn. I'm not super-keen on their lower-level cars at this point (it was downright EMBARRASSING trying to get up a mountain in Utah in August of this year -- I had no power!). However, their non-commissioned sales staff are TOP NOTCH in my book and we have always appreciated their honest approach. We research blue book values before we go look at cars, and Saturn has always offered us top dollar for our trade-ins without haggling. When we have bought used cars from them, they have typically BEAT the blue book price and have been very honest with us on the value and problems with the vehicle. But the thing that clinched my loyalty this week was this: five years ago we bought a brand-new vehicle from them and purchased the warranty with it, as we were told that we would get the money back at the end of the warranty period if we didn't use it. Well, the warranty expired in September, so a little over a week ago I called to check on the status of the refund. A simple letter giving the status of our payoff was all that was necessary and we already have received the check -- a sizable sum. Now I just wish that the Saturn company sold Priuses!

Another plot hole or two

Man, this Moonlight show is just a plethora of plot holes! I love it! It gives me something to blog about like EVERY WEEK.

Ok, this week's main plot was irritatingly contradictory. Two weeks ago the rule was established that the way you are 'turned' into a vampire is by drinking a vampire's blood. Well this week, they brought out a new human drug made of, you guessed it, vampire's blood. There is no explanation as to why this doesn't turn any of the people who drink it, though we are left to assume that the silver (which is poisonous to vampires in this branch of the mythos) in the mixture somehow voids that basic rule. So not exactly completely a plot hole, but enough of a 'gee let's just make up the rules as we go along' item that it's irritating.

Another vampire 'fact' that has been established is that they cannot eat human food. Why they can't is never explained, but it has come up in multiple episodes that often vampires pine for the food they enjoyed when they were human. If this were simply a case of the food doing them no good, logic dictates that they could still enjoy the food, eat it, pass it, whatever, even if they couldn't get anything from it, but no, we are told that they cannot eat it. Dumb rule if you ask me (esp. since it contradicts all other vampire mythos I have seen, though I will admit I am no expert), but ok. It is often shown that Mick won't even drink coffee or the like. However, near the end of this week's episode, Mick is seen drinking some alcoholic beverage and sharing it with his vampire friend. Um, if you can't eat human food or drink human drink, when did alcohol become ok? Another handy rule made up on the spot? And don't tell me it was fermented blood, because this stuff was the color of apple juice, not even looking like red wine, so forget that.

The bestest show ever

Pushing Daisies is the best show on television right now. I have to say it's even better than House. This week they even featured a song by They Might Be Giants quintessential album, "Flood". This means that the makers of Pushing Daisies are TEH AWESOME. So if you haven't caught any episodes go here and catch up. Now! Do it! Doooooo iiiiiiiiit! (Might work better with IE than Firefox though, sorry. :( )

Plot Hole O' the Week

For some reason, sometimes I like to watch dumb shows. You know, the shows that are so incredibly stupid that you can find huge problems in them without even thinking about it, and you can't even say why you watch it, but you watch it anyway? Maybe it's just for a reason to complain, I don't know. But right now the show that falls under this category is 'Moonlight' on Friday nights on CBS. It's dumb. REALLY dumb. But I keep watching it. And just about every week I find some huge gaping plot hole or other dumbness to whine about, but I still watch it. Sigh.

I'm not going to go over past plot holes, but I'll tell you this week's, just for kicks. OK, so they are after this teenage vampire, right? And they find this clue in his apartment of a picture of him with some 19th century prostitutes. Well, in past episodes they reaffirmed the 'vampire fact' of not being able to take traditional pictures of vampires (though they can take 'digital' pictures of them. DUMB! OK sorry that was past weeks...anyway...), so we know that that picture had to be taken of the vampire BEFORE he was turned into a vampire. But later in the show, this vampire reveals that he is 197 years old. Assuming that he was 16 when he was turned, then he was born in about 1826 and the picture was taken about 1842. However, if you research photography, you can see that photography wasn't developed well enough by 1842 for widespread use (and this was a photograph, not a daguerreotype) , and certainly not common enough for taking a picture of a farmhand and a bunch of prostitutes that are obviously dressed in LATE nineteenth-century garb. IOW, big plot oops. Unless one of y'alls has a good explanation and wants to share it with the rest of the class. :)

television

Television is a guilty pleasure for me. As with most of my life, it goes very much in waves. Most of my growing up years were supremely addicted. College quickly was so invigorating that I decided that real life was much better than television, so I abandoned it for a few years. Moving to Idaho, however, was so stressful on me that I found myself turning back to my faithful friend on occasion again -- not as an addiction this time, but as an occasional stress relief it seemed I could barely live without. In the last year or two of being unemployed, I have gone through spurts of addiction and spurts of simple stress relief. TiVo, the blessed bit of genius that it is, has given me far greater control of my television watching than I have ever had before, so it's hard to compare to the earlier years, but I know I'm not as controlled by the television schedule as I once was, long ago.

It's been an interesting year for TV, though. I have my old favorites, House and Heroes. House is not always very uplifting but it is always thought provoking, which is delightful to me. Heroes is sort of a love/hate thing with me. It feels trite and cheap, but it pulls things together well enough that I can't really say that it IS trite and cheap, science be damned. But the intensity of it is stressful to me and I have the most intense, whacked-out dreams about it. Sometimes I can't watch a full episode or I miss for weeks because of a mix of stress and boredom. But I always go back to the darned thing. This year I am most intrigued by Chuck, Life, and Pushing Daisies. Chuck is somewhat lacking in logic to the point that I have a hard time with suspending disbelief (though really, I have some of that same problem with Heroes as well). But the character is very likable and the potential romance is likable so I'll probably keep watching for at least a while. Life's pilot was WONDERFUL, bringing in the Zen, and I definitely think that the unique characters and character situations will drive the show, but I am really afraid of the lingering, never-solvable conspiracy lurking in the background. I don't know if I've mentioned 'Gilligan's Island syndrome' before, but I HATE it. That's where the main goal of the show is something that everyone wants but they can never, ever have because then the main purpose of the show is eliminated. If you can find alternate goals that are equally compelling, that's great. But most don't. So they either drag on forever and get very contrived dancing around 'almost' reaching their goal, or they jump the shark and reach the goal in an anticlimactic manner, or they are canceled and leave the viewers hanging because the goal is never realized. Life may survive because it also has the focus of solving murders, but we shall see how the conspiracy plays out.
My very favorite show of the new season, however, is Pushing Daisies. It's absurd. Interesting. Beautiful, funny, witty, and intriguing. And the lead's grin is so ding-dang engaging! I LOVED the pilot ('pie-latte') and am looking forward to the show. I hope it lasts. If not, at least I have my TiVo'd episodes. What a nice birthday present! You should go look it up. It's on ABC on Wednesday nights.

And speaking of birthday presents -- another present I received was the first 3 seasons of Moonlighting on DVD. A guilty pleasure of my heavily addicted years, I was worried that my infatuation with the show wouldn't have withstood the test of time, but even after twenty years the genius holds strong, and I can still quote the occasional episode. :) It makes me feel old, which I DON'T like, but seeing Bruce Willis in all his young, follicled glory is totally worth it. It's something I will be happy to share with my children.