27December
2007
maura @ 9:26 pm
Merry Xmas! Yes, things have been quiet around here. Because we are all playing with our toys! And eating too many cookies! And hanging out with friends new + old!
It’s a video game xmas here in our house. Gus got an old game (Kirby and the Amazing Mirror) for the Game Boy and he’s been really really into it. And I scored a secondhand PlayStation 2 for Jonathan off a neighborhood listserv.
“Wait one dang minute,” I know you’re thinking. “Don’t you already have several game consoles? Mostly made by Nintendo?” Well, yes, we do. But Jonathan’s had a few PS2 games on his wishlist for a while, and then folks went and bought them for him, but no one’d gotten him the system, and then this secondhand one popped up, so it seemed like a good time to bring yet another game console into our happy home.
While there have been a few ace PlayStation games, I am in general not a fan of the system. So let’s get the complaints out right now: the PS2 is pretty heinous, design-wise, compared to Nintendo. It’s this huge heavy brick of a thing, nothing like the lithe little Wii or even the chunky yet attractive GameCube. I guess it does have a DVD player in it, but whatever, we already have a DVD player, why do we need another one? Also the controller is needlessly overcomplicated: 2 joysticks! 8 buttons! Aiieee!!!
Phew, glad that’s out of the way. Because one of the games we have for this thing is completely incredible. The first game that I’ve really wanted to play in a long long time. You all probably know it by now, it’s been out for an age: Katamari Damacy.
OMG, it is too much, like the essence of Japan in video game form. It’s a gorgeous amazing colorful work of art, seriously. The music is insanely good — Jonathan told me that the songs were recorded just for the game by famous j-pop stars. It’s been in my head for days now, but it’s not making me crazy!
The plot of the game is that you are this little green prince and your dad is the king of the cosmos and he did a mess of trippy dance moves in the sky and broke all of the stars. So you need to make new stars for the sky for him. You do this by rolling a sticky ball (your katamari) around on the ground and picking up objects until the katamari gets big enough to be released into the sky. (Yes, you roll with BOTH joysticks, and it isn’t even that annoying! Probably because you don’t need to use any of the buttons.)
It’s completely hilarious and fun: you start off rolling up small things like thumbtacks and caramels and mahjongg tiles, but as the katamari gets bigger you can pick up bigger things. Most amusing are the living things you can roll up: butterflies, mice, cats, even people. They wiggle and scream when you grab them! When the katamari gets huge you can roll up cars, trucks, buildings, etc. Oh, the power!
So obsessed am I that the other night I was going on and on to Jonathan about the game as social commentary, how there is so much stuff in the world and here is this otherworldly being wanting to pick it all up and take it away from us. Wishful thinking? Anticonsumerist? Who’s to say, I am probably letting my admiration take me too far.
And yes, dear readers, it IS a cleaning game. Of COURSE I am obsessed with a cleaning game. Unsurprising, no?
22December
2007
maura @ 10:26 pm
With the holidays of course there’ve been cards + gifts in the mail recently, so I’ve been thinking a lot about friends + family. Sometimes it seems like so many of them are far away and I wonder how it got to be like this, that we can’t see lots of our favorite people as often as we’d like (even some of our NYC friends, though of course we see them more often than the non-NYCers).
In high school I had this vague dreamy hope that one day I would live in a big house with all of my friends. And then I went to college and made more friends, but it was no big deal because the high school friends would like the college friends so we’d just need a bigger house, right? And then the grad school friends and the work friends and…
Of course that plan is unrealistic. I mean, not everyone wants to live in NYC, and I don’t want to live in many other places. Plus partners, jobs, kids, schools — everything is infinitely more complicated now.
So then I thought, well, what we need is a really long road trip. Like 4-6 weeks or so. Then we could visit everyone. Here’s how it’d go:
Brooklyn to Philly
Philly to Delaware
Delaware to D.C.
D.C. to North Carolina
North Carolina to Orlando
Orlando to Miami
Miami to Houston
(maybe a quick stop in New Orleans on the way, even though no one we know is there)
Houston to Dallas
Dallas to Southern California
(with stops at the Grand Canyon, Mojave, Death Valley, some cool stuff in New Mexico…hey, this is a dream trip, I can go whatever convoluted way I want to!)
Southern California to San Francisco
San Francisco to Reno
Reno to Portland
Portland to Seattle
Seattle to St. Louis
(via Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, the Badlands, the Corn Palace, Wall Drug, and Minneapolis)
St. Louis to Chicago
Chicago to Indiana
Indiana to Cincinnati
Cincinnati to Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh to Vermont
(via Niagara Falls and Ithaca)
Vermont to New Hampshire
New Hampshire to Boston
Boston to Connecticut
Connecticut to Brooklyn
…plus a quick flight to London and back.
Whew! After that trip odds are I would never want to get into a car again.
19December
2007
maura @ 9:11 pm
We got our tree a little early this year. Typically we wait until closer to xmas, because the tradition of my family is to decorate the tree on xmas eve and leave it up for ages afterwards. Once it was up ’til Easter, no lie! Of course, Easter was early that year. Still, it was regularly up until Valentine’s Day, and quite crunchy + brown by then, too. Mmmm, crunchy tree.
(That never happens now that I’m a grownup, because we like to take the tree to Mulchfest the weekend after New Year’s so we can watch the trees get fed into the ginormous chipper + drink hot chocolate. Good times!)
ANYway, so we got our tree last weekend. It’s a bit bigger than we usually get, too, pretty chubby and about 7 feet tall. Thanks to last month’s Home Improvement Fest there’s even room for it in the living room.
It’s a beautiful tree, chubby + tall as it is, but MAN is it dropping the pine needles! We water it and water it and water it and it still drops needles. It doesn’t seem to be any worse for the loss, so I’m not that concerned with it lasting ’til xmas day. But I’m tired of sweeping up needles, like some sort of xmas needle-Cinderella. Just call me Needlerella!
16December
2007
maura @ 5:02 pm
On the way to getting the TV and VCR ready so Gus can watch the Rankin and Bass classic The Year Without a Santa Claus, Jonathan and Gus have been sucked into watching Karate Kid. In Spanish. Bueno!
15December
2007
maura @ 10:17 pm
Of course the problem with home improvement is that it makes you look critically at everything ELSE in the house. The newly painted + arranged rooms look so very nice, wouldn’t it be lovely to have every room look that nice?
While we’re at it, how about some new stuff? I definitely need a new desk chair. I gave the schmantzy one that we bought for me to write my dissertation (back when we were dinks) to Jonathan, since he is the one working from home these days. And his chair is…well, let’s just call it “old” and leave it at that. It makes my butt hurt to sit in it for more than a few minutes.
There’s other stuff we could get. Our TV is 11 yrs old. Not that it’s a big deal, since we only use it for video games and for Gus to watch videos (we watch on the laptop, which is smaller but has better resolution). Al Gore could probably point us to a more energy-efficient model (not to mention smaller + lighter).
And Gus has the standard little kiddie table and chairs, and we’ve been thinking maybe it’s time to move him to a desk. And it wouldn’t hurt to get him another bookshelf, a lamp, a hamper…
Of course if we GO to Ikea we will end up buying SOMEthing (besides meatballs, that is!). It’s impossible not to! But I’m going to try and make us put it off as long as possible. There’re things we’d be getting rid of (see kiddie table, above) and it’s still a looooong winter’s night until our annual spring stoop sale.
On the other hand, winter is the perfect time for a trip to Ikea, consumerism masquerading as a wholesome family activity. The ball room for the kids! Meatballs + gravlax while watching the planes land at Newark! All the paper measuring tapes and tiny golf pencils you can carry! “Trying out” the furniture is just like going to a playground, and everyone needs a nap afterwards. Good times!
11December
2007
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.
9December
2007
maura @ 9:42 pm
I was in a pretty foul mood all day yesterday. Not really sure why — I was reasonably well-rested and even had a chance to do some cleaning in the morning. But Gus was acting bratty which was making me pissy. Plus I didn’t leave the house all day, never a good thing for me (unless I am sick).
Probably it’s the holiday stress. Now that last busy week is over I can finally get to the holiday planning, and OMG xmas is coming up fast! I fretted lots yesterday over how to get the shopping finished now that I’m working so much. Around dinnertime I forced us to get cracking on the cookie baking lest we feel like Santa’s sweatshop elves in 2 weeks time.
Maybe it’s the restorative power of watching 30 Rock until midnight, but today was better. We had crepes for breakfast, yum (though I was still shaking off the pissy until afterwards). In the afternoon we went out to get haircuts for the boys, shed our newly-paper-jammed 7-yr-old energy-sucking laser printer, and finish shopping for my niece. Then we went to the pastry shop for restorative snacks. When we got home Gus + I worked on birthday thank you notes, and Jonathan baked another batch of cookies.
Now I feel better. Really the shopping is almost finished, and 40% of the cookies are baked. Next weekend we’ll pick up a tree at the sale at Gus’s school. It’s all under control.
Hmmm…maybe that’s just all of the sugar talking. Should I be freaking out? No time now, more 30 Rock to watch. Later!
8December
2007
maura @ 9:16 pm
Howdy interwebs! It’s been a while, eh? Now that November is (NaBloPoM)over, I seem to have fallen off the daily posting wagon. Given the crazybusy week I had — 28 hrs of adjuncting plus 2 occasions for wearing trouser socks* — I guess it’s not surprising that I haven’t had a chance to blag.
But I’ve missed you, interwebs! Even though I didn’t find the time for as many long posts this year, I still feel like I got a lot out of the constant blagging madness. There’s something to be said for making yourself write every single day, even if it’s only a few sentences.
* Argh, let me take a moment to bitch about the trouser socks I got at a huge chain store that I won’t mention by name (but it rhymes with smarget). They seemed fine in the store and claimed to be my size, but then when I put them on they were too big and the heel rode way up in the back. To fix that I had to pull the extra material down and tuck it under my toes, and the end result was that after walking all of five feet I had elephant ankles. For my second event I ended up taking an old pair of black tights (that hadn’t fit me well up top in a long time), cutting them off at the knees, and using the bottoms as trouser socks, which worked perfectly fine. Chalk up one more for the stingy anti-shopper!
It’s funny: I had a whole list of blagging topics this year that I never even got to. And I won’t get to them tonight, either. I’ve got a pile of email to answer, and Jonathan’s solution to the writer’s strike is to start watching 30 Rock using the 8 million free streaming hours of video that comes with our Netflix subscription that we’ve never used. That Tina Fey, she’s a hoot!
1December
2007
maura @ 7:22 pm
Wait, yes we do:
30November
2007
maura @ 8:45 pm
Oh my golly, NaBloPoMo is over! Feels a bit anticlimactic this year. My lessons learned were pretty much the same as last year, only with more painting and less randomizing.
All in all, just as last year, it was a really good writing exercise, so I will probably fling myself back into the NaBloPoMo maelstrom next year.
Not right now though. Now I need to help with the cupcakes. Happy end of November everyone!
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