annathepiper | The Holiday weekend in review (Reply)

+0: Although we did not have our Annual Murkworks Homeless Waifs Thanksgiving Day Turkeyfest, we did nevertheless have a small gathering at MurkNorth. The featured cast, aside from yours truly and

solarbird, included

mamishka,

spazzkat,

kingchiron,

darthhellokitty, and our not-on-the-Net-to-speak-of friend Liz. Special guest star was George the Third, 12 pounds of turkey goodness. Also of exceptionally tasty note were Mimi's garlic mashed potatoes and her pear pie, which was like apple pie except with pears. And Liz brought port, which I had never tried before, and which I deemed tasty. Especially after I took Liz up on her suggestion of sampling some dark chocolate along with said port.

Other highlights of the evening included the watching of Eddie Izzard's Definite Article, which was good to see again, and an episode of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for those who hadn't seen it yet. Jenga was played, which was almost as fun to watch as to actually participate in. Liz and I compared notes about how often (read: not often at all) she and I both keep up on our email, which is funny given that I'm on the Net constantly and she is hardly ever

And Layna indulged me in pleasant chatting about the Patrick O'Brian books, which she has not yet read, and which I heartily recommended. As Layna is into slash fandom, and once remarked to me that Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin pretty much slash themselves and are a labor-saving device, I had to share with her that Stephen does in fact regularly call Jack "my dear" in the text. She has apparently already heard of this, and replied that in the branch of the slash fandom community that's all over Jack and Stephen, they commonly note, "It's not slash, it's CANON!" Hee.

I also got to indulge in something I don't get to do often, too: expounding on Elvis movies. Mimi and I shared our lore on the Secret Way to Tell If an Elvis Movie Is Going to Suck; for those of you who have not yet learned this lore, the quality of an Elvis movie is inversely proportional to the number of songs on the soundtrack. ;) There are exceptions to this rule: King Creole has 11 songs, and is Elvis' very best movie! However, by and large, it is a very reliable indicator. Especially on any Elvis movie made after 1963.

Layna says we should have an Elvis movie viewing party. I think I shall, indeed, have to do this. Perhaps in January, to celebrate not only Elvis' own birthday, but my own as well!

+1: On Friday, Dara and I did pretty much what the lovely and talented Mr. Izzard would describe as "fuck all". Well, okay, I did fuck all. Dara spent a good chunk of the day indulging in research that has seized her fancy enough that it may in fact prompt her return to grad school. We'll have to see where this goes.

I attempted editing, but really didn't get much done. Mostly, I blew Friday working on updates to the Two Moons News File, which is still sadly out of date in many areas. (But then, arguably equally sadly, the MUSH is staggering hard enough that the laggardly News updates don't impact much.)

And as a consequence of working on the News File, I also added a new section to the Two Moons web page for the various defunct tribes of the game--all the tribes which were either once in play and are now idled out or destroyed, or tribes which only ever existed as part of people's character backgrounds. We used to have this information on the MUSH itself, but it became inaccessible after the overhaul to the OOC Complex, so I figured it should be housed on the web page instead. The information is still very useful for historical reference and for the occasional character who would like to reference one of these tribes in a new background--but by and large it won't need to get used often. So there's no real need to have it in the OOC Complex, where it might confuse newbies.

+2: Saturday morning, Dara and I went to Pancake House in Kirkland, a.k.a. HUTT, to gather with assorted folks for the consumption of tasty breakfast food. This was prompted by

poodlgrl putting out a call for folks to get together for a Christmas Tree purchasing expedition to follow--but since Dara and I do not plan to buy a tree for assorted reasons, we decided to just show up for the gathering for pancakes. Present, aside from Dara and myself, were the aforementioned

poodlgrl and her spouse Eric and daughter Violet (who happily occupied herself with the crayons on the table),

spazzkat, and two more friends from the ExRvL crowd from Microsoft, Debbi and her husband Chris. Definite plusses for the place now serving several of their dishes with smaller-sized portions available. Also definite plus for their mandarin orange crepes. Yum.

Much amusing conversation was had, and it was in general a great time.

Not too much longer after that, Paul came over to MurkNorth, and he and Dara and I walked down to the Lake Forest Park Town Centre by way of getting out of the house for a while (and to also walk off the meal had at HUTT!). Dara had a bunch of books she wanted to take to Third Place to try to sell so that she could get a book on Java, and while she was taking care of that, I wandered through the Mystery/Suspense section and the Science Fiction section. I saw a couple of books in the former section that I'd like to get--if they weren't books further on in their series. Grf. I hate starting a series in the middle.

On the way out of the bookstore we discussed what to have for dinner for the evening. Pizza is our traditional Saturday evening thing, the one day a week we usually order out. But we also had lots of leftovers still, and so Paul asked whether we wanted to just get into the leftovers vs. having pizza. "Turkey pizza!" I joked.

But then we all went, "Hey..."

And we wound up going to Albertson's and purchasing a pizza crust, red onion, and cheese for pizza makings. It turned out that the pizza crust was actually out of date (grr); Dara and Paul wound up having to make a pizza crust from scratch, but fortunately making the dough was pretty trivial with our breadmaker.

Paul channelsurfed and found Galaxy Quest on TBS, so we started watching that, which was giggleworthy even if it was on a station with a lot of commercials. In a most excellent choice of double feature programming, this was followed by Men in Black, which was also giggleworthy even with commercials and with the naughty words dubbed over with not-naughty words. (But look, you folks at TBS: the line is "a 9.0 on my Weird-Shit-O-Meter!" 'Weird-Stuff-O-Meter' just DOES NOT have the same ring to it, even when still delivered by Will Smith.)

Also, the homemade turkey pizza didn't suck.

+/-3: Most of Sunday was devoted to me trying without much success to edit. But I've already lamented at length about that under my writing filter, so I will just say here that yeah, the editing is still slogging along.

And I still don't have a rejection letter yet. One more day, and I'll be at the month-and-a-half mark! Go me!