Author: Kelson Vibber

Halloween

Thursday night we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater.  We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.

There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults  Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest.  Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children.  It’s animated, right?

The movie was good, as always.  It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be.  In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.

Halloween itself was a bit of a bust.  alenxa had made herself up as a vampire, and we’d bought three bags of candy, but I was so exhausted when we got home that I flopped onto the bed for “10 minutes” that turned into an hour and a half.  But the entire evening, not a single trick-or-treater knocked on our door.  Katie saw groups tromp up and down the stairs right next to us, but they passed us by entirely.  She figured there must be some sort of signal you’re supposed to put on your door to say, “We accept trick-or-treaters,” and no one told us.  So I figure I’ll just take most of the candy into work on Monday.  It’ll go pretty quickly.

Saturday we ran some errands down in Lake Forest (among other things, checking for post-Halloween sales at Costume Castle) and drove through a No On Prop 8 rally on the corners of El Toro & Rockfield.  We waved, honked the horn, and Katie woo-hooed.  [Edit: forgot to mention, there was at least one person holding a handmade sign that said something like “Christians voting against Prop 8.”  Nice to be reminded that not everyone falls for the false dichotomy.] We had lunch at the original Peppino’s (a bit expensive for lunch, but the leftovers will feed us for 2 more days) and realized that we hadn’t been to one since the restaurant in Tustin closed.  Then I spent the afternoon doing laundry catch-up, while Katie got started on Nanowrimo.

Highlights

Windswept CoupleLast Friday (Oct 3): attended alenxa’s cousin’s wedding, held on a boat that cruised back and forth in Newport Harbor. Lots of people I’d only met once before — at our wedding.

Most of the week: fixing Katie’s computer. Drive dying. Needed to (a) verify that it was the drive, and just the drive. (b) get a new drive. (c) install it. (d) install Mac OS X on the new drive. (e) Transfer all the data. (a) and (e) took the longest.

Tuesday: Finished watching entire series of Blake’s 7. The good episodes hold up quite well after ~30 years. (The bad ones… well, they were bad to start with.)

Yesterday: Checked out the restaurants at the new “Diamond Jamboree” center at Jamboree and Alton. Decided to try Tokyo Table sometime when we weren’t wearing funny T-shirts.

Friday: Finished reading Gateway. About to start on Neil Gaiman’s latest, The Graveyard Book. (I skipped the reading in Santa Monica on Monday, but my brother and his fiancee went to the one in San Francisco last week…and were kind enough to send us the extra copy of the book!)

Don’t ask me questions, just fix it!

Last Wednesday. Customer sends email to complain about spam. Asks, “Is spam filteirng even on this account? It’s getting 100s of spams a day!”

Actually, it isn’t. But they won’t listen to that. And they won’t give me the info I need to be able to cut down on the spam that does make it through.

Catching Up

1. Finally took the time to finish reading Victory of Eagles. Very good — on a level with Throne of Jade, which had previously been my favorite in the Temeraire series.

2. Also took a bunch more boxes to storage, including 4 comic boxes. I’d intended to put half my comics in storage when we moved back in May, but I wanted to catalog them all first so that I could find them easily. Then my arms fell off after we moved, and I didn’t want to carry the boxes, and then I just kept putting it off. Now we’ve got a chance of clearing a patch from the co-ax outlet to the TV, so…

3. Arranged for cable. I’d been hoping we’d be somewhere more permanent by the time the fall TV season started, but we haven’t had much luck.

They’re coming on Thursday, but we’ve made arrangements for the second ep of Bones and the premieres of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles (try typing that three times fast) and Fringe (that was easier!). Seriously considered Time Warner’s DVR package, which is only around $10/month, but it’s only available with their digital cable package… which starts at around $50/month. And there isn’t really anything we’d be watching that isn’t on the $15/month broadcast-only package, at least not until BSG comes back sometime next year.

4. Finally saw Wall-E, in a theater with 4 other people, including a kid who kept making comments and hadn’t yet learned the art of moderating his volume. And a sound system that went wonky during the second-to-last preview and stayed that way through most of the film, even after I went out to report the problem during the short. Fortunately it was just an undercurrent that sounded kind of like a high-pitched refrigerator warble, and not distortion of the soundtrack. Also, the print was rather badly scratched in the middle third of the picture. Despite all that, the movie was still quite enjoyable.

Klotski and Labyrinth

Started moving boxes and furniture around so that we can actually have someone install cable. Moved some boxes into bedroom, made room in the closet for others, and dug out my corner desk from the corner of the living room where it’s sat since May. When we set up our computers in the bedroom, we left enough space for the desk, but never got around to moving it.

As it turns out, the desk won’t fit through the bedroom door.

It took both of us carrying it and rotating it about 3 feet in the air just to get it into the hallway, but there’s no way to get it from the hallway into the bedroom without removing the corner leg… and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without breaking the thing.

So the desk is back in the corner of the living room, under a slightly smaller pile of boxes than before. I guess I’ll put some of them where I intended to put the desk.

Also: Watched Labyrinth. I still like most of the movie, but I can no longer take the goblins singing and dancing with David Bowie.

Catching Up

1. I’ve been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s.  They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes.  Some of them are total crack, and there’s a web archive with snarky commentary.  I got the idea to profile the villains that the Flash fought (even though there’s still a bunch of minor villains and supporting characters from canon to add), so I’ve been looking for pages to get higher-res scans.  I found 2 of 4.

The funny thing?  It turns out that the Omnivore’s 100 list I posted includes Hostess Fruit Pies because the author was nostalgic for those ads.

2. Dinner with MIL Saturday, after alenxa went to a cousin’s wedding shower.

3. Majorly dehydrated on Sunday, or something.  Tried to start going through the piles of boxes against the edge of our living room, but ended up spending the afternoon on the couch reading, sipping water.  Read sections from The Flash Companion and a comic book trade, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War.  I’d picked it up months ago, before we moved, since it was a sequel to a story I’d liked that came out in 1989 (Invasion!) but hadn’t gotten around to reading it.  Not bad, but didn’t wow me either.  Fortunately felt better in time to…

4. Hit the Orange Street Fair on Sunday evening.  Passed on Abelskivers (sp) this time.  Was in line, but realized I just didn’t want them.  Agreed we have to explore Old Town Orange sometime when it’s not a fair and businesses are open.  I think the last time I did that was more than 10 years ago.

5. Responsible day today.  Groceries, Laundry, etc.

6. Interviewed the outgoing writer on The Flash last week!

Goals for this week:
1. Locate cable outlet.
2. Arrange for some sort of TV service.  The fall season is starting, and we’ll actually be watching stuff live and not just off of DVDs.

Bees and Cheese

1. House-hunting continues. Just about every place we’ve put an offer in on has gone for ~10K over the asking price, so we’re starting to factor that in. Looked at yet another condo in a complex we’ve looked at repeatedly: fantastic condition (except for the door, which looked like it had been kicked in — alenxa figures it was probably a forced repo), but right in front of the pool. A place that needs work can be fixed up more easily than a place in a bad location can be moved.

2. We have bees again. This time they’re setting up shop in the bathroom wall, crawling in through the handle in the plumbing access panel in the back yard. One actually made its way into the bathroom through the bathtub overflow before we taped it over.

3. I spent the weekend watching the new DVDs of the 1967 DC super-heroes cartoons by Filmation. Fun in a cheesy, over-the-top way. Only ~2 hours (18 episodes at 7 minutes each), but had to spread them out. Plus I was trying to do a write-up of the Flash episodes, which meant re-watching, taking screencaps, etc. I’ve posted a review on another blog.

4. Speaking of cheesy, we finally watched Aztec Rex. We’d been warned, and it was only because some of the Farscape production people were involved It actually wasn’t as bad as I expected (even if the first ~40 minutes were interminable), though that may have been the sidecar talking.

Tuesday Morning, 3AM

After realizing I was still way behind on sleep debt, I decided to go to bed early last night. I think it was around 10:00. Then in the middle of the night, my phone got an alert from our monitoring system at work. I dragged myself out of bed, checked whether I could get onto the system remotely, and saw that it wasn’t responding to anything but pings.

Whee.

So I threw on the first clothes I found and drove in to the office at a quarter to three in the morning so I could get the server running again.

I never assume that I’m going to be the only one in the office anymore. Some of my co-workers tend to keep late hours (though none so late as the guy who actually slept during the day and came in around the time everyone else went home). And once I was in around midnight to deal with another server crash, and another coworker walked in with a bunch of his friends. They were on the way back from somewhere and he’d stopped to pick something up.

I didn’t see anyone last night, but this morning I got asked by another coworker, “So, what were you doing in so early this morning?” He’d been working late and just crashed at the office instead of going home. Apparently he woke up just enough to see me when I walked by.

The Horton Grand

comment on the post “San Diego Comic Con Reflections, Part One“:

My wife and I were also at the Horton Grand. I absolutely agree on that hotel — it’s fantastic.

Except for the fact that we were in a second-floor room that looked out onto Fourth, and the windows didn’t block much sound, so we could hear drunken revelers, motorcycles, and stretch Hummers idling below our window into the late hours of the night.

I wasn’t aware it was supposed to be haunted. I think I would have preferred the ghosts to the street view.

Writer’s Block: Your First Record

What was the first music album you ever bought or owned? Do you still listen to it or have you moved on?

If I remember correctly, the first album I bought was the soundtrack to Glory. I haven’t listened to the album itself in a long time, but the music’s on the instrumental mix.

Current Music: Charging Fort Wagner (in my head)