Tomorrow is the day I officially start my month o’ sequential posts. But I’ve made a resolution to make a real effort to do things as I think of them and not put them off until later, as I am wont to do. Procrastination with me isn’t a hobby, it’s a lifestyle, and it’s as frustrating for me as it is for everyone else.

So I was thinking of posting, and thus: a post. (I also thought of taking a vitamin, another task I often put off until later and then forget about.)

Perhaps what I really need to do is find one of those 20 questions memes and fill it out, because it seems like what I lack is direction. I may end up resorting to that to flesh out an entry (or three, or four…) during the month of July, so I guess I’ll refrain from it now.

One of the reasons I want to try and post once a day is to get myself used to writing on a regular basis, rather than just in fits and spurts, or on the game. It’s not that I really want to be a writer, exactly, but I do have some story ideas that I would like to be disciplined enough to get down onto paper at some point — because, to repeat myself, it’s not that I don’t write either. Even excluding technical documentation for work, emails, this blog, or informational documentation for online games, I have written a massive quantity in the past 9 years. My RP Logs folder, which contains about 90% of the activity from all my characters, is currently 31.5 MB in size. All of the logs are gzipped, which compresses them to about 25% their normal size, so unzipped they would be approximately 120MB. Further reducing the amount of text I actually contributed — it must be less than half, but not much less, since most of the scenes I’m in are usually 2-4 participants, I personally wrote about 40MB worth.

Compare that to the folder in which I have ALL of the writing I did in Junior High, High School, and my First Year required writing class at Wellesley — the folder of which the size is 614KB.

No, not writing is not the problem. It’s definitely a combination of procrastination and a lack of motivation.

I keep thinking of things I want to put in here, but I never manage to do it.

I had originally intended to try and post at least once a day in June, but it didn’t work out — I lost track of the days while Michelle was visiting, and it was suddenly June 4th when I remembered. I’m going to try and do that in July, though. It’ll be a good exercise.

There isn’t much to write about recently. For some reason I am still getting paid by a certain University. I do not want to contact them, in case it will make them stop. It is not a matter of them paying me non-existant money, either — the fellowship which I was awarded was for 24 months, and it has only been 21 — 24 months is the end of August. However, what I had to do to qualify for summer pay was a bit sketchy; it seemed it was mostly at the discretion of the department. And frankly, if the department hasn’t told the controller to stop paying me, it’s not my job to remind them. So I’m not going to spend the money, I’m going to pile it up in the savings account and wait and see what happens. Even if they ask for it back, I’ll get whatever interest there is made.

I’ve started downloading stuff again, which I hadn’t been for a while. I’m trying to watch some of what I’ve had piled up on my HDD so I can erase it.

Kaleido Star
Michelle brought the first DVD of this with her on her trip, and the second DVD came out last week. I used some of the money my grandmother gave me for graduation to buy it, because I liked the first one so much. This show follows the adventures of Sora Naegino, an aspiring acrobat, who wants to join the Kaleido Stage, a circus which is reminiscent of Cirque du Soleil. She is plagued by the attentions of Fool (Koyasu~~!), the spirit of the stage, who wants her to become able to perform the divine move (I thought that was in Go… next thing we know, Sai will show up) and also to see her naked. In the bath. With other girls. It’s pretty fun. There’s lots of gymnastics and acrobatics, which I am a huge sucker for, and the story so far isn’t too bad, in spite of the ridiculously cute baby seal they threw into the mix during episode 6. It’s different. It also made me wonder if there’s a figure skating anime. There must be — I swear there’s one for every sport.

More backdating, hurrah.

On Friday, J and I drove off to upstate NY. The long boring ride down the Mass Pike was broken only by the repetitious playing of the same 5 songs by the various radio stations we had on for the duration. It was dull. But there was no traffic and so it was not as long as it could have been.

We stopped at my grandmother’s house, where men were doing yardwork, and went inside to surprise her greatly. We sat and chatted with her for a while, and watched bits of TV shows and movies. J discovered that she might want to watch Monk (and I decided it was probably interesting too.)

She told several stories, a few of which I had heard before, and which I will try to get down here. Unfortunately I already forget the subject of one of them.

Grandma’s Action Dreams

Long ago (I’m guessing in the 40s or 50s) after my grandparents were married, my grandmother, who has always had very vivid dreams, dreamed one night that she was sailing a ship. This was not something she had ever done before in her life, but she was familiar with the motions from movies and books — the image of a man pulling on the ropes to raise the sails is one most people know. She dreamed she was sailing, pulling hard on the ropes, hauling the sail. And she woke up to discover she was standing up on the bed, holding in her hands the curtains she had ripped from the wall.

Another night she had a nightmare. There was a stone bridge across a creek, the kind with a small arch underneath just large enough for a person to crawl under if they had to. She dreamed she was crawling under, but when she reached the other side, she discovered it had been boarded up. She could not get out, and so she began to shove at he wall, trying to break through. She woke up to find she had pushed her hands right through the closed window at the head of the bed, shattering the glass. (Luckily, she did not sever an artery or a vein; she only had scratches on her palms.)

A family tradition

Our conversation briefly touched on sleepwalking, and grandma related two very similar tales. One was about my grandfather’s brother Hank (I think… maybe it was her brother.). When he was a little boy, he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. But he was not quite awake, and so when he got to the top of the stairs he stopped, pulled it out, and peed right on down the steps.

This performance was repeated later by another little boy. I want to say it was my Uncle Bill, but I have already forgotten exactly who it was.

Bonus Tale

This is not a story she told me and J, but she told it a while ago and I will include it. My grandparents got an inground pool well before I was born, back while some of their kids were still young and living at home. One night, when my Uncle Bill was in high school, he was out with some friends, and no one else was home either. Grandma decided to take a swim. And, since it was a rare opportunity, she decided she would do it naked.

So she got in the pool without her suit, and she’s enjoying herself, when into the driveway rolls Uncle Bill with a bunch of his friends. Of course, they must be polite and say hi to his mother, so they come over to do that. Meanwhile she is busily churning the water so they can’t see anything.

Luckily her suit was nearby, and after they moved out of sight, she snatched it up and escaped.

On with the Tale

Grandma wasn’t feeling hungry yet, so after the extremely cute guy doing yardwork left, we departed as well. (Says Grandma: You should see him! But he’s married, so the girls are out of luck.) We got up to J’s parents’ house in record time — they were surprised to see us; we are never on time to get there, usually rolling in around 9 or 10, even if we had anticipated getting there by 6 or 7. But for once we were early, and so J’s secret plan was put into action — she got her parents to take us to Olive Garden for dinner. It was good, though the waitress was mildly flaky.

Back at the house, I got online for a bit while J fell asleep on the couch. Got a pile of bbposts written on AF and put them up, then went to sleep. Everyone had left in the morning by the time we got up, but we headed over to Great Escape with our free tickets.

This day we had returned to our usual late mode; we were supposed to meet her family at 11, but we didn’t get into the park (due to a gigantic bottleneck at the entrance) until 11:15. Then we went off on our own into the park, going on rides and looking at things. I hadn’t ever been to Great Escape before; my family had gone several times during visits to my grandparents, but never on trips that I was able to go on with them — we only ever sat around the house when I went with them :P — so it was all new to me. The park was, like Six Flags New England, a renovation of an older park that had already been there. But this one was done a while ago, and the renovation is starting to become dated.

However, it was nice, in spite of the utterly confusing parking (the lots are not contiguous, they are poorly marked, and they are free, all of which combined to confuse me greatly), and I had a good time. J proved her 1337 whiffle ball throwing skills, managing to win 3 stuffed animals at that game. I didn’t get any, which is just as well, as I really have no need for them. There were no rides I really wanted to go on which I didn’t get to go on, and I ate rather more than was good for me. (Mmm, funnel cake)

Since we didn’t go into the water park at all, we’d covered most of the interesting rides by around 4:30. (The lines were not very bad either, which helped.) So rather than hang around, we left. We picked up our stuff at J’s parents’ house and were back on the highway before 6pm. Even with a stop at the rest stop to get gas and some food, we managed to arrive home again before 10.

In this now massively backdated post, I will now attempt to resurrect my memories of the visit that is now nearly a month ago. (!!)

With the help of my handy dandy Windows Date and Time Properties dialog box, I can see that Michelle arrived on the 29th. This was a Saturday. Of course, we stayed up much too late the night before, and so were quite tired as we dragged ourselves to the airport to pick her up around 3:30 or so.

After a stop at McDonald’s to purchase some much needed sustinance, and another stop at the grocery store to pick up even more, we arrived back at the condo and promptly flopped out in front of the TV to watch the first DVD of Kaleido Star (See review in a later entry).

I had thought we might manage to leave the house and do something that night, but we did not, instead sitting and watching more DVDs. This far removed from the week, I no longer remember exactly what order things were watched in, but I fancy that Velvet Goldmine was among those we hit on the first day. It was during this watching that I thought I’d finally figured out what it is about Jonathan Rhys-Meyers that I don’t like — I admit it: subjectively, the man is cute, but I simply do not find him at all attractive to me personally. And I thought it was his eyes. The color is too light for his lashes and it makes them look pale and washed out. There’s an actress with this problem Meg Foster and looking at her creeps me out a bit too. But since then, I’ve looked at some pictures of him, and his eyes aren’t that light. So it’s got to be something else.

So, movies watched, we went to bed. Sunday, the 29th, Bob had to work, so the three of us trekked over to Salem to walk around and visit the Peabody Essex Museum, which I had wanted to go to for a while. We had a bit of an adventure finding a place to park, since it wasn’t clear if several lots were free on Sunday. We ended up down near the post office and had to walk a bit up to where the houses and shops were. Stopped by the museum and paid our admission fee, as well as getting tickets to go into the Chinese house they had assembled on the grounds. Then we left and went to have Thai food for lunch. Mmm, chicken pad thai. J had tempura, of course; the woman who served us was quite energetic and pressed different sauces upon J all through the meal, very concerned that she would find the tempura dull without sauce, I guess.

We looked at an old graveyard, then walked around the town, contemplating going into several of the small novelty museums that fill the area. They had to do without our money, except for the Witch History Museum (different from the Witch Museum, to which we did not go). It was amusing, if not quite worth the price of admission; the people working there were bored, you could tell, but it resulted in a cynical, almost snarky attitude which was directed at the subject and not the patrons.

Our return to the museum was well before our ticket time, and so we wandered the galleries for a while, looking at the large collection of Asian and maritime art that they’ve amassed. But it did get tiring after a while, so it was a relief when it neared 4 and we had to hurry down to join our group.

The house was pretty nifty. Creaky and old and with architecture different from the old houses around here that I’m more used to visiting. People had been living in it up until the very recent past, which was surprising to me, considering its condition.

After watching a quick documentary about the house and looking at some exhibits associated with it, we left, stopping on our way back to the house to go into a very very overstuffed bookstore (floor to ceiling books — with no good way to extract a book from the center of a pile) and a candy shop (wherein I made a comment that shocked and horrified Michelle).

Then we came home, very tired, but happy that Monday was to be a day ‘off’ from doing things. (And we stopped at McDonald’s for more NeoPets) And had a Quidditch game on AF.

Monday was Memorial Day, and the first day Bob had had off in about two weeks. We didn’t do much that day — we’d intended to try and go out and do stuff, but what we ended up instead was renting some movies and hanging out, aside from our one foray into going outness, which was to go to a Japanese restaurant. I had tried to do some online research into this before Michelle’s arrival, but it was difficult to turn up much beyond the names of restaurants. So I picked one at random because it had a menu that looked diverse enough to suit everyone. It turned out to be pretty good — they easily accomodated J’s request for ONLY sweet potato tempura, they did not force Michelle or I to try and eat shrimp, and the fried ice cream was tasty. Our grill chef was, however, quite lackluster in his performance, seemingly half asleep and missing quite often. A shrimp tail came flying at me and J. But most of Monday is a bit of a blur, to be honest, perhaps because we didn’t end up doing much.

Tuesday, we had plans to go to Chunky’s, which is a chain that combines dinner and a movie. However, before that, the three of us got up early and drove down to the T with Bob. From there we went into the city and, after a stop at Harvard Square where books were purchased and a cell phone strap was not, we hiked from the red line to the Aquarium. It was a cool day, so the walk was not as miserable as it could have been, but it was long and displeasing to several of the party. The length was interrupted at points by the discovery that the Mickey statues from Disney (which Bob and I had seen on our visit in January) were visiting Boston.

The Aquarium was as expected. I confess that I’m really not a big fan of the aquarium. I think it has an odd smell and after you’ve seen a few fish swimming in a tank, you’ve pretty much seen them all. The main redeeming qualities, for me, are the penguins, the gift shop, and the sea lion show. So I spent a very long time sitting and watching the penguins, sometimes with company, sometimes not. It was very amusing — one penguin had a piece of blue nesting material and spent at least 30 minutes putting it in different places, then leaving, coming back and moving it again. With dialogue provided by us, it was quite a compelling drama. At the gift shop I got a cool cup that had penguins floating in the bottom.

After a stop at Fanueil Hall for food (I had gelato, which I had never managed to try before) and a quick run through a toy store (where we made fun of Harry Potter who was wearing a sign that said ‘muggles break me easily’) we hustled back to the station to be picked up by Bob on his way home from work.

We got home in good time to discover that the website had been a bit misleading and there were no shows at Chunky’s that night later than 6:45. So the idea was nixed (it was already 7) and instead we went to a local place, Pizzico, to eat. They weren’t bad; it was low scale Italian, not quite so low scale as Papa Gino’s, but not really approaching Olive Garden. Then we returned to the house and watched even more movies. (Over the course of the week we saw: Kaleido Star, Level C, Boku no Sexual Harrassment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Welcome to Mooseport, Velvet Goldmine, Master and Commander, Bend it Like Beckham, Raising Helen, Freaky Friday, Prisoner of Azkaban, Grease 2, Daredevil and possibly another one whose name escapes me.)

Wednesday was another day off. We lounged. We watched movies. I believe we hit the bookstores. We attended an event on AF.

Thursday the original plan was to repeat Tuesday’s adventure and go into the city when Bob headed to work. But as a result of Wednesday’s lounging, we had stayed up too late and were exhausted — not even close to being ready when he departed at 8:30. So instead we decided to head in another direction. We chose Strawbery Banke, which is similar in idea to Plimoth Plantation and Sturbidge Village (and, for that matter, Colonial Williamsburg), but different in that they have not attempted to make all of the houses they’re preserving be from the same time period. Instead, they’re returned to a variety of periods, ranging from about 1695 to 1920. There are not a lot of roleplayers, though there are a few, and most of the houses are empty, just filled with exhibits to show you how they were built and the different techniques used by the builders and architects. But some of the houses are furnished, and some others have people there to talk to in character. It had been a long time since I’d been there — going on 20 years, scarily enough! — so it was all fresh and new to see.

Strawbery Banke closed at 5, so we left around that time to return to the condo. To my own amazement, I did NOT end up in Maine while trying to leave Portsmouth, I managed to find 95 in record time and we arrived back at the condo quite early, even making a stop in the middle. This stop, at Panera Bread, was necessitated by our final house visit of the day — to the Tavern, where Michelle remarked that stew in a bread bowl sounded extremely appetising. Since stew was our intended dinner, all that we required were the bowls.

It turned out well and very filling. We ate and rested until about 10, when we departed for the IMAX at Jordan’s furniture, where we had tickets for Harry Potter at midnight. Our departure was delayed a bit — we left about 15 minutes later than I’d wanted — partially through my own fault. We’re lucky that we were not much later than we were, and I regret those 15 minutes a bit, because our spot in line found us in the second section of seats, the ones much closer to the screen and lower down than the prime section. 15 minutes would have made the difference, since the people in front of us managed to snag seats up in the upper section. But — we weren’t later, and our seats were not bad, just a tiny bit too close. It could have been much, much worse.

The movie was excellent, as evidenced by my squee’ing post when we got back. I’ve seen it a second time now since then, and there are a few things I could see that could stand improvement, but it has not aroused my loathing like the first two films — this will be the first Harry Potter movie that I buy the DVD for and watch again.

We didn’t get home until nearly 4 (though the car ride was hysterically funny — I dearly wish we’d had a tape recorder!), so not surprisingly, Friday was another day of sloth. I don’t even remember if we did anything at all that day, other than sit around and watch movies. Maybe we went to the mall?

Saturday we finally went to Chunky’s — with E instead of Bob, who had to work again. It’s a great idea very poorly executed. The food was only barely edible — my hamburger was dull, the cheese was congealed and there wasn’t much by way of mushrooms; the fries were so so; the sundae was nothing special. The appetizer was only passable too. And the service was abysmal — the waitress took forever to come and take our orders, then J’s sandwich was completely the reverse of what she’d ordered, we asked for ketchup and didn’t get it for quite literally a half an hour — as I said: a great idea, very poorly executed. Aside from the restaurant portion of the place sucking, the movie part was all right. The chairs were far more comfortable than normal chairs, and the space was very uncrowded. And Raising Helen was a cute fluff movie reminiscent of Uptown Girls.

Sunday, Michelle had to leave. And leave early. We hauled ourselves up at (for us) the crack of dawn and drove up to the airport to send her off. We were a bit early, so we went in to wait with her for a while, but after milling around for a bit in the food court area, she decided she may as well go wait at the gate and get the Dreaded Security Check(TM) over with. So we said our goodbyes and headed back to nap.

And thus ended the visit.

I have a lot to write about. Michelle has been visiting us this week, and we have actually managed to go out and do some interesting things.

However, this is not to be a post which discusses substantial activity. Neither will it be a post which explains my internal musings, or even one of the frequent mini review posts.

No, this is a post to squee.

We went to see Prisoner of Azkaban tonight on the IMAX at Jordan’s.

Squee. XD

More later.