Dept. of Sunday Afternoon
Sunday, 3 May 2015 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaffy_rStress, Strawberries, Fried Rice and Fanfic
While painkillers and bossanova help me forget the incipient back spasm that is, even now, trying to decide whether it will come to stay awhile, I'll belatedly try to catch people up on life at Casakaffy_r
We still do not have real hot water. The heating and cooling man swears the new thermostat control will arrive Monday, and that it will then be installed. I hope that is the case. I've now gotten one furious unit owner email, which I replied to with an "I utterly understand" because what else could I say? I am equally frustrated, but when people say "You have to fix it now!" they don't stop to think that if I could that, it would have been done and dusted long ago. We went to Angie's list to choose this team; we chose the method the team suggested because we couldn't afford a more traditional replacement. The one mistake I made was not insisting that the repair team overnight the new control board. Beyond that, I am trying my damnedest not to obsess about guilt and responsibility.
The stress of this, combined with the stress of work have caused an apparently unending string of physical ailments; a second outburst of mouth problems and then, just as they were clearing up for a second time, I felt my back go last night. Today, it is indeed one or two phases away from spasm.
All of this has actually made me think seriously about talking to my shrink, my internist, and my bosses about taking some medical leave, or at least taking two more weeks of vacation. It would also require confessing to some editors with whom I'm working that I'm at least temporarily incapable of working on the story series I proposed. That will be a difficult one for me. And I don't know if any of my doctors would actually say I needed the time off. I just feel ... well, BB has suggested that once we get hot water, the stress level will drop, and I will stop having the intense desire to have major time off. I'm not so sure that will be enough to erase this sudden desire on my part. We shall see.
But all is not awful. One of my top editors handed me some free tickets to see the Chicago Cubs; BB and I were able to see our first live professional baseball game in decades, and it did not disappoint. The Cubs lost spectacularly; it was the first night game of my experience; I ate vastly overpriced bratwurst and fries, and had a hot chocolate to warm up my hands (night game in April in Chicago ... yeah, it was cold.) We went with a colleague of mine who'd also been gifted with these tickets, and his daughter. She's just into teenhood, and she is such a lovely geek. She wore steampunk goggles to the game. She's a Who fan, she draws lovely anime. It was really quite wonderful.
Friday night, BB and I saw "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and we liked it a lot. I think I liked it a little bit more than BB did, but I'm a very cheap date. Here's what I said about it, slightly edited, over atselenak 's journal:
I was impressed with how well the overloaded scow managed to sail - indeed, how many times it managed to appear (with suitable tricks of script-writing light) almost elegant. My BB and I agreed that one of the biggest failings for us was technical; far too many action scenes were edited and paced in extreme close up with fast cuts. It made for a remarkably claustrophobic feel. If there had been some distancing and a slight slow-down on the cuts, each of the action scenes would have benefited greatly; cut 10 seconds off of each of the middle two or three battle scenes and they'd have benefited that much more.
Also? I hate that I seem to have lost my ability to do cuts. Just hit'em all to see what I wrote. Gah.
While painkillers and bossanova help me forget the incipient back spasm that is, even now, trying to decide whether it will come to stay awhile, I'll belatedly try to catch people up on life at Casa
kaffy_r We still do not have real hot water. The heating and cooling man swears the new thermostat control will arrive Monday, and that it will then be installed. I hope that is the case. I've now gotten one furious unit owner email, which I replied to with an "I utterly understand" because what else could I say? I am equally frustrated, but when people say "You have to fix it now!" they don't stop to think that if I could that, it would have been done and dusted long ago. We went to Angie's list to choose this team; we chose the method the team suggested because we couldn't afford a more traditional replacement. The one mistake I made was not insisting that the repair team overnight the new control board. Beyond that, I am trying my damnedest not to obsess about guilt and responsibility.
The stress of this, combined with the stress of work have caused an apparently unending string of physical ailments; a second outburst of mouth problems and then, just as they were clearing up for a second time, I felt my back go last night. Today, it is indeed one or two phases away from spasm.
All of this has actually made me think seriously about talking to my shrink, my internist, and my bosses about taking some medical leave, or at least taking two more weeks of vacation. It would also require confessing to some editors with whom I'm working that I'm at least temporarily incapable of working on the story series I proposed. That will be a difficult one for me. And I don't know if any of my doctors would actually say I needed the time off. I just feel ... well, BB has suggested that once we get hot water, the stress level will drop, and I will stop having the intense desire to have major time off. I'm not so sure that will be enough to erase this sudden desire on my part. We shall see.
But all is not awful. One of my top editors handed me some free tickets to see the Chicago Cubs; BB and I were able to see our first live professional baseball game in decades, and it did not disappoint. The Cubs lost spectacularly; it was the first night game of my experience; I ate vastly overpriced bratwurst and fries, and had a hot chocolate to warm up my hands (night game in April in Chicago ... yeah, it was cold.) We went with a colleague of mine who'd also been gifted with these tickets, and his daughter. She's just into teenhood, and she is such a lovely geek. She wore steampunk goggles to the game. She's a Who fan, she draws lovely anime. It was really quite wonderful.
Friday night, BB and I saw "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and we liked it a lot. I think I liked it a little bit more than BB did, but I'm a very cheap date. Here's what I said about it, slightly edited, over at
selenak 's journal: I was impressed with how well the overloaded scow managed to sail - indeed, how many times it managed to appear (with suitable tricks of script-writing light) almost elegant. My BB and I agreed that one of the biggest failings for us was technical; far too many action scenes were edited and paced in extreme close up with fast cuts. It made for a remarkably claustrophobic feel. If there had been some distancing and a slight slow-down on the cuts, each of the action scenes would have benefited greatly; cut 10 seconds off of each of the middle two or three battle scenes and they'd have benefited that much more.
That cinematographic style choice baffled us, but it was definitely a technical failing, a style stumble rather than a substance problem, or so it seemed to us, and certainly to me.
And that's something I think of as positive, along with plans to make a strawberry dessert of some sort, and plans to make a fried rice dish for supper.
I'm one of those people who had enjoyed the thought of a Clint/Natasha romantic relationship of some sort; past or present - and yet, I was delighted to see Clint's family. With the exception of the "faithful wife is proud of her husband, is pregnant, and spends much of her time in the kitchen" trope - that was hard to get around, and thank heavens that the actress chosen to be Clint's wife sold herself with intelligence, and built herself as a real person. I very much liked that she and Natasha are friends; it neither negates any past sexual/romantic relationship between two very good friends who've been in intense places together, nor requires any retconning of the family out of existence. I'm afraid, however, that you're probably right; there are many fans who will be delighted to fridge the entire family, or demonize them. Natasha would disapprove. So would Phil.
Natasha's budding relationship with Bruce feels organic to me, because there were the seeds of friendship sown in the first movie; their understanding of each other's dangerous nature, the vulnerability they showed to each other on the carrier in the moments before The Other Guy took over. The only part where I rolled my eyes was when Natasha chose to illustrate her admittedly monstrous upbringing (so far, every dramatic presentation of the Red Room has been delightfully horrific, in Agent Carter and here) not by saying "I became willing as a child to kill people on orders," but to say, "they gave me a hysterectomy as a graduation present, so I can't have children, and of course, by implication, a woman who can't make babies is a monster." Gaaaaaaaaah! NOTE: after selenak pointed out that her comment had been made directly after Bruce talked about never having children, I was able to interpret it as a far less sexist comment. Still, it did raise my eyebrows initially.
Everywhere else, however, Natasha - who is, perhaps, my favorite Avenger - was her awesome, thoughtful, vulnerable, dangerous self. She and River Song are the people I want around when my world needs saving.
selenak pointed out that her comment had been made directly after Bruce talked about never having children, I was able to interpret it as a far less sexist comment. Still, it did raise my eyebrows initially. Everywhere else, however, Natasha - who is, perhaps, my favorite Avenger - was her awesome, thoughtful, vulnerable, dangerous self. She and River Song are the people I want around when my world needs saving.
I was more impressed by the twins than I thought I would be, and I found them less bland than I thought they would be.
Nearly final thoughts: This being Marvel, and especially with the constant Chekov's gun of "The Cradle," I suspect we may find that at least one character may not really be quite sincerely dead.
Nearly final thoughts: This being Marvel, and especially with the constant Chekov's gun of "The Cradle," I suspect we may find that at least one character may not really be quite sincerely dead.
All in all, I give it a B, and pop that up to a B+ when, as I said, I consider how overloaded the scow was.
And I'm continuing to write a long-delayed![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandom_stocking IOU.
And I'm continuing to write a long-delayed
fandom_stocking IOU.And that's something I think of as positive, along with plans to make a strawberry dessert of some sort, and plans to make a fried rice dish for supper.
