the future and the south pacific

maura @ 7:35 pm

This has been a weird day. I woke up with a sore throat and a headache and the sinking feeling that I may be getting sick at what’s really not the best time of the semester for it. (Though is there ever really a good time to be sick?) So instead of using this partly sunny + fairly warm day to go for a bike ride with Gus in the morning and maybe schlep us all to the Bronx Zoo in the afternoon, I sat on the sofa and read 400 pages of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and drank herbal tea.

I always feel kind of guilty when we spend the whole day inside if it’s nice out, even when there’s a good excuse. Gus played video games and read nearly a whole book (The Great Cheese Conspiracy, a refugee from my ’70s childhood) and played D+D with Jonathan. Over dinner Gus asserted that he didn’t want to go for a bike ride today anyway. But it still seems somehow wrong to spend the whole day inside. Maybe I am also feeling a bit guilty that I just read today rather than tackling all of the other stuff on my list, much of which can be accomplished perfectly well from the sofa with my laptop.

We did get out yesterday, and in far more inclement weather. We went to Manhattan to see Fantastic Mr. Fox (surprisingly only playing in 2 theaters), which was a good time for the adults + the kid. Gus <3s Roald Dahl, and for the adults the movie was pretty much standard Wes Anderson fare with puppet animals instead of people.

Cloud Atlas is really good. I’m still in the middle of the other Cloud Atlas, which is a bit surreal. And the Mitchell book has a sticker in the back with the correct author information that’s covering a sticker that mislabels the book as the Callanan book. Woah, meta.

I could get to those other tasks now (Gus + Jonathan are playing a little Super Mario Galaxy before bed), but there’s only about 50 pages left in my book and I’m dying to know how it ends. Later, gators.

assorted tasty nuggets

maura @ 3:24 pm

It should not be 90+ degrees and 90+% humidity in June.

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What’s worse than spending 2 nights (because we started too late for one night) watching a movie that had all of the ingredients to be hilarious but ended up being a total dud? The same PLUS awful-yet-catchy songs that get stuck in your head for days afterwards! That pretty much sums up Music & Lyrics, which we watched last week. It looked so good on the outside: funny cast (Hugh Grant, Drew Barrymore) + promising set up (what could be more fun than mocking Wham!?). But something went horribly, horribly wrong with the writing or direction or something because it was just BORING. And the songs are driving me crazy.

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The kittehs are great, thanks for asking. But it appears that Mr. & Mrs. Fastidious are having a somewhat rocky transition to kitten ownership.

It’s funny, if you’d asked me a few months ago what housekeeping task worried me re: cats, I’d have said sweeping, of course, because of the fur. But you know, these little guys do not shed so much, and the fur is not bothering me at all.

However, both Jonathan and I are having a hard time with the litterbox. I hadn’t realized that a bit of litter tends to come out of the box when a cat exits (even despite the little footmat thing in front of the box), and am finding myself sweeping the bathroom about 10 times a day. Jonathan’s bugbear is the stinky poop, which he rushes in to scoop the very instant that a kitten has exited the bathroom. We are both freaking ourselves out with the thought of poopecules: the (probably imaginary, but what if not?) microscopic fragments of poop that give us pause whenever a kitten jumps up on the bed or sofa. Quel surprise!

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Yesterday was stoop sale day, yippee! We took in a decent amount of cash, and got rid of a ton of stuff between the sale and our now-traditional hauling everything that didn’t sell directly to the thrift store afterwards (nothing comes back upstairs – nothing!). I’m proud of our steely resolve this year: we didn’t even buy much from our neighbors.

This year’s bang-up stoop sale innovation: the quarter bin (i.e. everything in the big plastic bin costs 25 cents) and the free bin (ditto but free). These ended up being a great way to get rid of all of those little toys and doodads (ay dios mia, plastic party favors!), while drawing in potential stoop sale victims. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

her husband of nineteen years danced madly at her feet

maura @ 9:15 pm

Lately I am really jonesing to go the movies.

Movies (in the theater) are something that we’ve mostly given up since Gus came along. Tickets are so expensive and babysitting is so expensive that we’ve only seen a handful of movies in the past six yrs. Less than ten, certainly.

We do use Netflix, but even our enthusiasm for that seems to wax and wane. Movies are so loooong these days, not served in bite-sized chunks like TV. Of course, while I realize that if you watch 4 episodes of a show (cough, 30 Rock, cough) in a row then you could have watched a movie, for some reason we still find ourselves gravitating to TV more often than movies.

But I read the paper and the New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly, so I know what time it is with the movies, sorta. And right now there are three movies that I are really making me want to plunk down the ca$h:

1. The Golden Compass: This book, it is so amazing. I haven’t read it in a few years and am rereading it now and MAN I’d forgotten how amazing it is, miss-your-subway-stop amazing. The previews look lush, but the reviews are lukewarm. After reading a this review that Jonathan sent me I am chomping at the bit somewhat less, but I still want to see it.

The drag is that I think Gus is still a leetle bit too young for this, so we can’t bring him along. Plus I am going to have to play the snooty librarian card here and insist that he read the book first, esp. if the reviews are accurate.

2. Juno: Thinking about this movie always puts the Throwing Muses song of the same title right into my head. This cute little movie is also being reviewed every which where recently. BUT, these reviews have been completely positive. Jason Bateman! Michael Cera! Jennifer Garner! What could be bad about that? No CGI, so it’s not big-screen-necessary, so we will probably wait on it. But it’s on the list, oh yes it is.

3. Control: Here in NYC this movie is still playing in a few places, though I’m sure it’ll be leaving the theaters soon. Again, good reviews. Poor Ian Curtis (though I must admit to mixed feelings because I like New Order at least as much as Joy Division, sometimes more, and who knows how things would have turned out had he not died?). The aged music geek in me requires a screening of this film (pronounced FIL-um). Would be nice to see in the theater, all theatrical-like, but I guess not required. Another for the Netflix queue.