zonkered.net

I was reading The AV Club’s preview of the upcoming summer movies (and why they’ll kill the summer blockbuster model) here and also here, and it struck me that for the first time in several years there are actually several movies I want to see this summer.

I mean, just to start with, there’s Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and any Indy movie is one worth watching at least once. Then there’s The Dark Knight, and if Batman Begins was anything to go by, and it was, it will kickass. And there’s Get Smart. One of my favorite Nick at Nite series, stars Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway. Steve Carrell is awesome and no matter how much other people complain about her, I really love Anne Hathaway and I think she’s got the right look, at least, for 99. It’s a movie that’s destined to be fun at least.

Of course, this summer is also bringing us The Love Guru, or Mike Myers’ latest attempt to make me commit murder, so it’s not all great.

My cat’s latest effort to disprove this was by projectile-vomiting off the kitchen table.

Yes, he is very special.

The fair city of White Plains is holding a cherry blossom festival in one of the parks I ride past on the bus next weekend.  This particular park has no actual cherry trees, which makes me wonder how they plan on providing the blossom part, but that’s not the oddest part.  The oddest part is that there’s a rain location.  And where is this rain location? Another park.

Two blocks away.

I hate to break it to the planning committee, but if its raining in one park, its probably going to be raining in the other one.

So I have a food blog that I started last July.  It’s mostly pictureless, because I can’t take a decent food picture to save my life, and is full of my frequently and infrequently cooked recipes.

I haven’t posted to it since mid-March.  I’ve only posted to it five times since I started my new job – because I don’t cook anymore.  I get to work at 9 am, and I leave usually around 7 pm.  I might go to the gym after that, or I might go straight home but due to my commute the earliest I get home is around 8 pm.  At that point I don’t want to cook, so I end up only making myself dinner a couple of times a week.   Most of the time anymore dinner is either a Lean Cuisine tv dinner, or its a panini I bought at Grand Central before hopping on the train (and if its a panini, its always the ‘Milano,’ a tomato, mozzarella, and black olive pesto sandwich.  So good.  My addiction to brine-y olives is almost as bad as my addiction to vinegar).

The lack of cooking kind of makes me sad.  I like cooking, especially baking, but it seems like I just don’t have the time anymore.  I could move into the city and shorten my commute but then I’d have to deal with an even tinier kitchen (plus, New York City tax, which is yuck)  so I’m likely to just become a weekend cook.  I’ll probably get used to the idea in time.

Kind of want brownies this weekend though, so maybe that’ll be the goal.  I haven’t stuffed the boys at the office full of chocolate for a while.

Until I get my DSLite, the way I survive the forty minutes on the train surrounded by grumpy looking men in suits (in the morning) and half-drunk men in suits (in the evening) is by plugging in my iPod and reading.  A lot.  I read fast, so I’m usually almost finished with a book after I complete a round trip, and thus this week I have

• Read Saiyuki 8 and 9
• Re-read The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever, which is my absolute favorite Julia Quinn romance novel
• Re-read Reckless, by Amanda Quick
• Re-read both Dark Fire and Dark Melody by Christine Feehan.  The Carpathian novels are all written like crap, and yet I keep reading them
• Cooking Light magazine (well, it’s what I’m planning to read tonight)

Yeah, there’s a lot of re-reading.  I do spend a lot of money on books – A LOT -  but I also live in a small apartment and am in need of more storage as it is, so I try to reread my books as much as I can tolerate it – and some, like Secret Diaries, I just like so much I can read them over and over again.

There’s a couple of books I’m thinking of buying for my train trips that just came out:  Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner and I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley.  Certain Girls is the sequel to Good in Bed, which was probably the first book in my brief chick lit phase.   I Was Told There’d Be Cake is a book of essays, which is not usually my thing (I am possibly the only person who has tried and failed to finish a David Sedaris book) but one of them is entitled “Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day.”  This may be an essay collection I can get into.

Methinks a trip to B&N before I get on the train is on order.  Perhaps I can continue to avoid reading this month’s issue of Cooking Light.

I am so sick of the Sex and the City movie, and it’s not even coming out until May.

To be honest, I was sick of it months ago, when they were still filming, because every single day it seemed like at least three separate blogs were carrying the same half dozen new pictures from the filming of the movie, usually of Sarah Jessica Parker in some incredibly crazy outfit. Now they’ve moved on to promo pictures and gossip about who’s wearing what to the premiere, and I could honestly care less. In fact, I might have to weed out some of my blogs until about a week after the premiere, just for my own personal sanity.

Okay, so we all know I’m too lazy to do that, but nevertheless: the thought is there.

Part of it is I was never a huge fan of the series in the first place. It’s heyday was when I was in college, with basic cable. I spent most of my college years in a really geeky dorm (because I, unsurprisingly, was a geek) and the dorm tv was usually either hooked up to the PlayStation or tuned into Cartoon Network. The most mainstream show we watched was The Practice. And frankly, even if I had HBO back them, SATC probably wouldn’t have appealed. I’ve only gotten interested in style relatively recently; in college my reaction would have probably been more along the lines of “she spent HOW MUCH on those shoes?”

Still, I think I probably would have gone to see the movie if it hadn’t been hyped within an inch of its life. It’s kind of a reverse corallation with me; the more a movie or book is talked up and hyped, the less and less I want to see it or read it. The premier case in point is the last Harry Potter book. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, because I’m so sick of all things Harry Potter. It’s the same with SATC. I’ve been overexposed, and now I want nothing more than for it to just go away.

Too bad that’s not going to happen until, like, June. At least.

I saw this coming.

Faye Whitaker may actually hold the record for the most issues of any person in the universe.

I miss Chuck too.

I could write an entire post on why Chuck is awesome – there are many, many reasons – but Sepinwall distills it so nicely right here:

The producers aren’t embarrassed to have Sarah do fight scenes while wearing the skimpy German peasant girl uniform from her cover job at a hot dog stand (pictured above), or, for equal opportunity flesh-peddling, to have Casey fight terrorists in his underwear or to have Captain Awesome shirtless whenever remotely plausible. There aren’t labyrinthine conspiracy stories that will never get resolved, no major angst beyond Chuck’s general queasiness at being sucked into this dangerous world and having to lie to his friends and loved ones about it, nor any of the other pretentious, convoluted qualities that often choke the life out of fun genre shows like this.

In other words, it’s not trying to be either Lost or Heroes, two shows that are conspiracy-laden and stumble into suckitude more often than not because of it.   Chuck is Chuck – a comic spy show that doesn’t try to turn itself into Alias Part Two, or a weekly James Bond movie, but plays to its strengths: Chuck Bartowski, the kind of geeky everyman at the center of the show, and the funny.

And Captain Awesome shirtless doesn’t hurt either.

I know it’s Starbucks, and my expectations of a natural-looking beverages should be limited, but my green tea latte looks less like something made from tea leaves and more like…distilled nuclear waste.  Or something.

Next time, stick with the chai.

I’ve resisted e-books for a long time.

At first it was because the formatting frankly sucked (and still does for the most part) and because I couldn’t quite swallow the idea of reading an entire novel on my computer – never mind that, as an avid reader of fanfiction, I read extremely long stories on a regular basis on my computer screen. I used them in grad school a couple of times and once tried to read one of Cory Doctorow’s books that way, but didn’t get past the first 20 pages. In hindsight though, it may have been the book.

What’s gotten me into e-books, finally, is category romance novels. I’ve mentioned my addiction before but what I haven’t mentioned is the severe lack of book storage I have in my apartment. In short, I have one bookcase. And four boxes full of books, and several small piles sitting on the floor. We’re approaching crisis period, so clearly I needed to come up with a solution that would allow me to have my romance novels and not trip over them every morning when I got out of bed.

Clearly, I needed to try e-books again.

As with all things related to the computer, getting the software to work was the major hurdle. I don’t have a reader, so I was buying in pdf format. Which is fine, except that Adobe hasn’t updated their e-book software to work with the latest version of Mac OS X (abbreviated rant: Leopard has been out for six months and isn’t THAT serious a departure from the last version. Get with it.) so I had to pretend to be using 10.2, download an older version of Acrobat Reader, and use it with that one. Then I was in business, although its still wonky: it takes three times to successfully download a book. The first time I get a server error, the second time it crashes Acrobat, and the third time it finally works.

In any case, I currently have a collection of books on Acrobat Reader that include Australian diamond tycoons, six or seven sheiks, and overbearing Italians, and I’m not tripping over the books or providing any more of a hiding place for the cat then I already had.