Lotsa things

I've got a bunch of different things to put down, so this is going to be fairly hodge-podge and disconnected. Most of it's probably not going to be very interesting, anyway, so I won't think any less of you if you want to skip this one. Go on. Skip it. Then I won't have to actually write anything down...

*sigh*

All right, here goes.

--Bad news first: I had my first dental exam in some time today, and my mouth appears to be a disaster area on an order of magnitude similar to that of post-Katrina New Orleans. I've never been blessed with good teeth to begin with, and several years of erratic brushing/nonexistent flossing have taken their toll. I've got two molars that are either going to need either root canals/crowns or extraction, a chipped premolar that may be salvageable, and various and sundry smaller fish to fry (as the hygenist put it). Plus my gums are very sore from the cleaning - they were pretty inflamed in several places, thanks to my crappy brushing habits. The good news is, if I get with the program and start brushing and *shudder* flossing every day, I may yet still have teeth when I'm 40.

*headdesk*

I wonder if I can apply for federal disaster relief...


--On a much lighter note, last weekend was very fun - Brian and I went to visit my mother in Anchorage for the Man of La Mancha trip that we'd been planning. The trip was nice - I got to see my grandmother, and Emily, and the house I grew up in (which has gone from having pretty forest green trim to a nice but very bold dark blue that doesn't fit that well with the neighborhood color scheme...oh well.) The show was pretty awesome, too - the production values were quite good, and the acting and singing and such was uniformly excellent. One thing that I especially noticed this time around was that they had a very talented lighting designer - through the use of lights they managed to take a single set and suggest things such as a windmill, a church (through the use of a beautiful stained-glass-window gel), or a chessboard, as well as keeping the play-story separate from the frame-story.

As for the story itself, while I don't think it'll become my favorite musical in the world, it did appeal to the idealist in me (you know, the one that's generally muffled under a blanket of cynicism beneath my cloak of apathy). The music was very fun, and (in this version especially) there were a lot of really hilarious bits. I did read one reviewer *coughEbertcough* who thought it was a particularly uninspired musical - that the moral of the Don Quixote story was not, in fact, to dream the impossible dream, but that windmills don't tilt back. I'm not really able to say much about the original story, not having read it, but I do think that in this version, at least, there was a little more to it than that. Even though Quixote was inarguably insane, his madness made his own life more bearable, and improved the lives of Sancho and Dulcinea immeasurably. (The guy they had playing Sancho had an incredible gift for comic timing - one of the most memorably humorous bits in the show was his recitiation of the "missive" leading into the "I Really Like Him" number.) Brian and I found ourselves comparing Quixote's story to that of Joshua Norton, the self-proclaimed emperor of the United States - there are a lot of interesting parallels there.


--While in Anchorage, I finally succumbed to the "Shiny!" bug that bit me a few weeks ago and bought myself a black DS Lite. I actually managed to get the very last one in all of South Anchorage - Brian and I were going from store to store to store in the area and everyone had the white and pink ones, but no black ones. Finally we nabbed the last one at a Fred Meyer, and I've been doing the "Yay new shiny thing!" dance since then.

I have to say I'm very impressed with the difference between the systems. Aside from being smaller and sleeker, the screen quality is much, much improved. The backlight, in addition to being adjustable, is stronger, and the colors on DS games really pop (although I'm told GBA games tend to look a little washed out on the higher settings due to their relative lack of color information). It's really a noticeable difference; Animal Crossing, which is a very color- and graphics-intensive game, looks about ten times better. The sound is also a little better, and the iPod-Nano-black gloss on the outside is really pretty (albeit difficult to keep clean from fingerprints). I ended up investing in that super-nifty case I mentioned earlier too, and felt rather vindicated when BD came down, took a look, and went "I like the toy, but I really love the case!" It's not that I'm a particularly neat and tidy person, but I have a serious weakness for cases and cupboards and such that have a place for everything and that will hold it all in place so that I'll be able to open it up and see everything exactly where I put it before.

Unfortunately, thanks to the aforementioned upcoming dental work, it'll likely be my last major purchase for some time. But hey - I'm enjoying it a lot already, and I'm sure it'll provide me with hours of fun while I'm living on a restrictive budget. =)


--I picked up the first edition of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things from our local bookstore. In addition to having a beautiful cover, it's got some pretty darn good stories in there. (I think my favorite so far is A Study in Emerald, which is the first one. It's one of those stories that you tend to enjoy most if you don't know much about it going in, so I'm just going to ape the NY Times reviewer and say that it's a Sherlock Holmes story set in an alternate-universe London.) Like any short story collection, it's a bit uneven, but I'm still enjoying most of the pieces to one extent or another.


--For an early anniversary present, Brian and I bought each other matching grey wool fedoras. We'd been thinking about getting him one for a while because they're excellent hats for keeping the rain off, a property quite useful in Juneau. However, when we were cruising the Nugget Mall the other day, the outdoor-outfitting store had a whole display of nifty hats, and after trying a bunch on, we decided that we'd better get matching ones. (And of course, the weather since then has been either overcast with no rain or sunny. Go figure.)


--I still need to do a write-up of Mulholland Drive. Normally I'd just let it slide, but this is one of those movies that I've been puzzling over, on and off, for some time now - many of the theories bandied about online didn't sit well with me for one reason or another. So I do want to get my thoughts down in some coherent form (or at least get them down...I'm not sure this is one of those movies you can even talk about and remain coherent). So if that's your thing, it should be up in a few days. No promises, though.


I guess beyond all that, life continues as normal. I'd finally gotten out of "oh-crap-have-to-save-money" mode now that I've got a decent chunk stuck in savings, but it looks like I'm going to have to go right back into said mode while I figure out what and how much dental work I need/can afford (my insurance plan has a $2000 yearly maximum, and it looks like I'll need more than that). Maybe I'd better start working weekends after all...I dunno. I'll figure something out one way or another. Though I can't say I'm not disappointed - I was sort of looking forward to having a little more money to blow on things like vacations and DS games.

I suppose that's life, here in this "Real World"...

Lotsa things

I've got a bunch of different things to put down, so this is going to be fairly hodge-podge and disconnected. Most of it's probably not going to be very interesting, anyway, so I won't think any less of you if you want to skip this one. Go on. Skip it. Then I won't have to actually write anything down...

*sigh*

All right, here goes.

--Bad news first: I had my first dental exam in some time today, and my mouth appears to be a disaster area on an order of magnitude similar to that of post-Katrina New Orleans. I've never been blessed with good teeth to begin with, and several years of erratic brushing/nonexistent flossing have taken their toll. I've got two molars that are either going to need either root canals/crowns or extraction, a chipped premolar that may be salvageable, and various and sundry smaller fish to fry (as the hygenist put it). Plus my gums are very sore from the cleaning - they were pretty inflamed in several places, thanks to my crappy brushing habits. The good news is, if I get with the program and start brushing and *shudder* flossing every day, I may yet still have teeth when I'm 40.

*headdesk*

I wonder if I can apply for federal disaster relief...


--On a much lighter note, last weekend was very fun - Brian and I went to visit my mother in Anchorage for the Man of La Mancha trip that we'd been planning. The trip was nice - I got to see my grandmother, and Emily, and the house I grew up in (which has gone from having pretty forest green trim to a nice but very bold dark blue that doesn't fit that well with the neighborhood color scheme...oh well.) The show was pretty awesome, too - the production values were quite good, and the acting and singing and such was uniformly excellent. One thing that I especially noticed this time around was that they had a very talented lighting designer - through the use of lights they managed to take a single set and suggest things such as a windmill, a church (through the use of a beautiful stained-glass-window gel), or a chessboard, as well as keeping the play-story separate from the frame-story.

As for the story itself, while I don't think it'll become my favorite musical in the world, it did appeal to the idealist in me (you know, the one that's generally muffled under a blanket of cynicism beneath my cloak of apathy). The music was very fun, and (in this version especially) there were a lot of really hilarious bits. I did read one reviewer *coughEbertcough* who thought it was a particularly uninspired musical - that the moral of the Don Quixote story was not, in fact, to dream the impossible dream, but that windmills don't tilt back. I'm not really able to say much about the original story, not having read it, but I do think that in this version, at least, there was a little more to it than that. Even though Quixote was inarguably insane, his madness made his own life more bearable, and improved the lives of Sancho and Dulcinea immeasurably. (The guy they had playing Sancho had an incredible gift for comic timing - one of the most memorably humorous bits in the show was his recitiation of the "missive" leading into the "I Really Like Him" number.) Brian and I found ourselves comparing Quixote's story to that of Joshua Norton, the self-proclaimed emperor of the United States - there are a lot of interesting parallels there.


--While in Anchorage, I finally succumbed to the "Shiny!" bug that bit me a few weeks ago and bought myself a black DS Lite. I actually managed to get the very last one in all of South Anchorage - Brian and I were going from store to store to store in the area and everyone had the white and pink ones, but no black ones. Finally we nabbed the last one at a Fred Meyer, and I've been doing the "Yay new shiny thing!" dance since then.

I have to say I'm very impressed with the difference between the systems. Aside from being smaller and sleeker, the screen quality is much, much improved. The backlight, in addition to being adjustable, is stronger, and the colors on DS games really pop (although I'm told GBA games tend to look a little washed out on the higher settings due to their relative lack of color information). It's really a noticeable difference; Animal Crossing, which is a very color- and graphics-intensive game, looks about ten times better. The sound is also a little better, and the iPod-Nano-black gloss on the outside is really pretty (albeit difficult to keep clean from fingerprints). I ended up investing in that super-nifty case I mentioned earlier too, and felt rather vindicated when BD came down, took a look, and went "I like the toy, but I really love the case!" It's not that I'm a particularly neat and tidy person, but I have a serious weakness for cases and cupboards and such that have a place for everything and that will hold it all in place so that I'll be able to open it up and see everything exactly where I put it before.

Unfortunately, thanks to the aforementioned upcoming dental work, it'll likely be my last major purchase for some time. But hey - I'm enjoying it a lot already, and I'm sure it'll provide me with hours of fun while I'm living on a restrictive budget. =)


--I picked up the first edition of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things from our local bookstore. In addition to having a beautiful cover, it's got some pretty darn good stories in there. (I think my favorite so far is A Study in Emerald, which is the first one. It's one of those stories that you tend to enjoy most if you don't know much about it going in, so I'm just going to ape the NY Times reviewer and say that it's a Sherlock Holmes story set in an alternate-universe London.) Like any short story collection, it's a bit uneven, but I'm still enjoying most of the pieces to one extent or another.


--For an early anniversary present, Brian and I bought each other matching grey wool fedoras. We'd been thinking about getting him one for a while because they're excellent hats for keeping the rain off, a property quite useful in Juneau. However, when we were cruising the Nugget Mall the other day, the outdoor-outfitting store had a whole display of nifty hats, and after trying a bunch on, we decided that we'd better get matching ones. (And of course, the weather since then has been either overcast with no rain or sunny. Go figure.)


--I still need to do a write-up of Mulholland Drive. Normally I'd just let it slide, but this is one of those movies that I've been puzzling over, on and off, for some time now - many of the theories bandied about online didn't sit well with me for one reason or another. So I do want to get my thoughts down in some coherent form (or at least get them down...I'm not sure this is one of those movies you can even talk about and remain coherent). So if that's your thing, it should be up in a few days. No promises, though.


I guess beyond all that, life continues as normal. I'd finally gotten out of "oh-crap-have-to-save-money" mode now that I've got a decent chunk stuck in savings, but it looks like I'm going to have to go right back into said mode while I figure out what and how much dental work I need/can afford (my insurance plan has a $2000 yearly maximum, and it looks like I'll need more than that). Maybe I'd better start working weekends after all...I dunno. I'll figure something out one way or another. Though I can't say I'm not disappointed - I was sort of looking forward to having a little more money to blow on things like vacations and DS games.

I suppose that's life, here in this "Real World"...