One for Sorrow

Is it Saint Swithin's Day already?"

Yes, it's Saint Swithin's Day! Patron Saint of The Simpsons, to me anyway, for inspiring this, my favorite Simpsons line (once quoted in an HP movie review so there's a fandom connection there as well).

To celebrate teasel wrote this amazing essay on Sam. It not only gets into Sam's character, but Tolkien's use of free indirect discourse and thoughts on language in general. It's just great.

Did I have anything else? Oh yes, I'm going to do that meme because I've read everybody else's with interest. ( Meme: Right Now: )

You know, I'm watching I Love the 90s, and I lived through the 90s but I thought it was a really sucky decade. I used to think, "The next decade's got to be better." So the trouble with this is that I remember everything but most of it didn't mean anything to me. Like the annoying songs were just annoying songs, not annoying songs that sparked nostalgia or made me laugh at liking them. And beyond that they just don't seem as fabulously stupid as the stuff from the 70s and 80s. However, it is worth it finding out that Hal Sparks played a drunk and angry Cheyenne youth on Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. That's one thing from the 90s I really did/do love, though I Love the 90s couldn't really plunge the sublime depths.

Ugh. Got no sleep last night. I might as well have gotten up and written this at 3am because I could not sleep. Is there anything more depressing than lying awake all night and then hearing the garbage truck rumbling down the street to tell you it's almost time to get up?

Anyway, this gets back to Frodo and Sam in ROTK. There's certain interpretations of the way these two are in ROTK that I see all over the place--in fact, before I saw the movie this is the way their characters were presented to me. It's frustrating not only because it's inaccurate, but something else. Figuring out the "something else" led me to an idea I never thought I'd arrive at, which was that ( in some ways slash can really suck. )

Thanks to everybody's sympathy for my hot water problem! To continue the saga, the hot water came on last night around midnight so I jumped in for a quick shower. Good thing too, as this morning it was ice cold. I called the super and got dressed, then it came on again at something like 8:20. So I had a dilemma...could I actually get to work somewhere in the vicinity of not-too-late with a shower? I decided to do it, which was kind of an interesting experience, making the shower the last thing of the morning instead of the first thing. Ridiculous but amusing for a day. I'd already put on make up and dressed and eaten and all that, so I just had to dry my hair (as quickly as possible). Seems like this is the way characters must do it on soap operas, so they can step out of the shower with wet hair but also lipstick.

The super called a mechanic, I'm happy to say, so this will hopefully be fixed. We went for about a five days last winter with no heat or hot water (after it had been iffy) because the boiler finally died. When they got a new one I figured this was not something I'd have to worry about for a while. Grrrr.

( Thoughts on Trilogy Tuesday )

I was in the middle of updating yesterday when all the lights went out. (I was also listening to the excellent Scarlet Pimpernel tape from conniemarie sent me. Thanks Connie!!!

This is far too many times I've had to walk home from work. It doesn't kill me but my shoulder hurts again because of my bag. Gripe gripe gripe. PT kept running in to the office where we were hanging out with updates: "The whole block is down!" "The whole east coast is down!" and my personal favorite: "PEOPLE ARE COMING BACK TO LIFE AND EATING THE LIVING!" PT is a great person to have around when these things happen. His black humor about the situation and our imminent death was better than anything I was missing on TV.

At the time I got cut off I was whinging about things in the kitchen. Not my kitchen--Frodo's kitchen. I went in there yesterday and almost ran screaming away. Okay maybe I'm exaggerating. ( The thing is, I was a little creeped out. )

Edit: Running off for the weekend now, be back in a few days!