Tag: Television

Tonight’s Agenda

The plan for tonight is simple. First, make some mashed potatoes and fry up some ground beef for a sort of faux Sheppard’s Pie kinda thing.

After that… Stranger Things season three. The plan is to watch the first episode of season four with Bellana on Wednesday. Harry is going to watch season four with friends after he goes back to school. Bellana has already seen it but wants in on episode one… which implies that episode one must be world rocking.

Six minutes until the work day ends. Are you ready kids? Aye aye, captain!

ADDENDUM: I sure have been using the word “faux” a lot lately, haven’t I?

Movies Revisited

Okay, so the movies didn’t happen. It’s okay. It was a scheduling thing, not a fear of viral infection. We moved our tickets to Wednesday.

Instead we have continued with The Great Stranger Things Binge of 2022. We are in season two and we just watched that episode. You know the one. The one that is so terrible it makes you want to puke. Every episode of the series that I have seen (I haven’t seen season four yet) is an A+ excellent experience except for that one. That one is suck. Pure suck.

Now that we’re through it though… bring on the good stuff.

Come Home Already

I made it home from the office pretty easily. There was a little traffic jam in Waltham, but nothing too bad. It took me about an hour to get home.

I had dinner. 4.6 oz of roast beef. After 2.6 ounces I stopped. I’m not sure why. I was still hungry, I wasn’t feeling any nausea, it tasted good. I just needed to stop. I had a little sugar free pudding to try and fill my tiny new stomach, but I’m still a little hungry. I am not sure what happened. We’ll keep an eye out for any future occurances.

Bellana went to her dad’s house for a bit this evening. We are waiting for her to come home so we can watch the 1st season finale of Stranger Things. Bellana has seen all of season four so far. I was going to start watching it over the weekend, but Jen had never seen any of it and Bellana talked her into giving it a try. So Jen and I are watching it together. We burned through the first seven episodes in two sittings. I think my beautiful bride might be enjoying the show.

Okay, Bellana is almost home. Time to watch some tube.

Faux 5K

Yesterday I said I was thinking of upping my faux indoor walk game and shooting for a 5k simulated distance instead of just a 30 minute time. Welp, today that’s what I did. It took about 44 minutes to go 3.2 miles. Just about what I was expecting. My legs are beat. Not quite numb, but really tired. I’ll still try to do 15 minutes on the bike later if I can. I won’t stress if I can’t though.

Bellana made it to Germany while we were sleeping last night. Her flight home from there is still showing as on time. It should leave in about an hour. Every finger I have is crossed with every other finger I have in the hopes that she takes off and lands on time. Jen and I are going to the airport to pick her up. I don’t want to have to wait any longer. I want her home!

So television shows. I have started watching season four of Westworld on HBO Max. I’m a few weeks behind, but I’ll catch up. The funny thing here is, I’ve been trying to watch an episode a night while sitting up in bed. I’ve tried twice, and both times I have managed to fall asleep just before the episode ends. Nice, Robert. What are you, some kind of rookie? I started over this morning to make sure I didn’t actually miss anything. With this show, you sort of have to pay a lot of attention. The tiniest detail in episode two can turn out to be the thing the whole series hinges on, you know?

Okay. Going to make myself some scrambled eggs and then punch in to work. Bellana comes home today!

Tomorrow

What do I want to do tomorrow? Besides the 0.75% of a band practice. I don’t know.

Visit my mother? I could use a little of that. I saw dad today but it’s been a week since I’ve seen mom.

Work on the 50 songs in 90 days thing? Maybe. Probably not.

Get up at sunrise and mess around with cameras again? That would be fun, but where would I go? I’ve hit my favorite spots in town. Maybe downtown Lowell? Maybe the river walk in Lowell? Maybe the Shawsheen river in Tewksbury? I know a couple of good spots, but if the Shawsheen there is as dry as the Spicket here it might not be worth it. Boston? Too far away.

Stay in bed constantly refreshing eBay all day? I’m still the highest bidder but there are 22.5 hours remaining.

Pet the kitty all day?

Finish Umbrella Academy and start Stranger Things or Orville or Westworld or….

I don’t know. In the immortal words of Traffic, from their second record, Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring?

Cellar Window

The plant in the cellar window is definitely growing a new leaf. I watered all of the plants down here this morning and water leaked out of the bottom of every pot. Insert frustrated grumbles here.

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I think there might be new leaves on the other two cellar plants too, but there is also a lot more signs of distress. This pic shows one leaf turning brown at the tip. The other two are showing a lot of that, and it’s all much worse. I am hoping I won’t need to redesign the window arrangement to fit the other two plants.

I don’t want to move my desk swag. I just brought the Devil Dawg here from my parents house where it sat forgotten on a shelf…

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Also, Mabel Pines may be the greatest character in television history. I can’t displace her.

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What to do, what to do.

Strange New Worlds

I just watched the season finale of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. I can’t overstate how good this show has been. It blows Discovery and Picard and Enterprise and Voyager and chunks of Deep Space Nine and portions of Next Generation out of the water. Even the best of the spin off shows (Next Generation and Deep Space Nine) were really slow in their first seasons. They took into seasons three and four to really find themselves. Strange New Worlds is already there after only 10 episodes.

The season isn’t perfect. There are a couple of episodes that don’t really hold up against the others, but over all? It’s the best Star Trek we have had in decades. I can’t recommend it enough. And the finale? It was spectacular. It was perfect.

I read somewhere that filming for season two just wrapped. I’m really looking forward to it. I can’t wait.

Star Wars Thought

We are watching the entire Obi-Wan Kenobi series in one shot today. Think of it as a 4.5 hour movie titled Star Wars Episode 3.5.

It begs the question, what is the best light saber fight?

My usual answer is Darth Mail/Qui Gon/Obi-Wan fight in episode one. The Anakin/Obi-Wan fight in episode three is my other answer. I’ve always felt it was one of those two.

The Kylo/Rey/Snope’s guards fight in episode eight is in the ballpark too. I’ve also always had a soft spot for Luke/Vader in episode six. Those are great, but for my money it’s generally been the big two.

Now that we have the Kenobi series…. No spoilers, but it’s safe to say the big two is now the big three.

Go watch the series. It’s friggin’ amazing.

Sort of Back to Normal

It’s amazing how going into the office used to be the norm, and now going in one day just murderlizes my entire routine.

Wednesday night I packed up everything I needed for the day in the office (except my headphones, damn it) and put out my clothes for the next day and all that fun stuff. On Thursday I got up super early and did my 30 minutes of exercise, made my lunch, did the rest of my morning stuff and left (without my headphones).

That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it really is. It’s like throwing a giant monkey wrench into the whole day.

Fortunately I am back in my home office today. I’d like to say I feel like everything is back to normal, for the most part it is, but I slept really late today. Not late enough that I didn’t have time for my morning exercise and all of that, but I did start work before I made breakfast (scrambled eggs, yum). I generally prefer not to do that.

Today is going to be a little weird here at the home* too. I went in to work yesterday, and Jen is going in today. Actually… not to the office? Not sure of the details, but she’s going to see people today. After work we’re planning on doing some grocery shopping. This is going to sound selfish of me, but I really enjoy that Jen and I have been doing that together. It’s silly, but I like it.

Best of all, on the Friday front, Harry will be coming over after work and he’ll be here for the whole next week. Excellent. We are still a few weeks away from Bellana coming home from Europe, but it’s one step closer to having the whole family together.

On unrelated notes, I am listening to the new Porcupine Tree album, which was finally released today, and I’m giving it five stars and two thumbs up and all of the accolades. It’s a great record. CLOSURE/CONTINUATION (yes, the album title is in all caps), check it out. I am planning to visit my mother a couple of times over the weekend. I’m not sure if I will get over to see my father too, but we’ll see. We talked about watching the Obi-Wan Kenobi series in its entirety in one sitting this weekend. I think maybe after Harry comes home from work on Sunday? I came up with a goofy project for the film camera. I’m thinking of trying to take the same picture with Dad’s camera and my camera and comparing the results. I’d like to use exactly the same settings, but my camera can be a little bit of a bitch to setup manually, and Dad’s seems to have a different labeling system for the aperture settings? I’ll have to consult the manual on that.

Okay, ladies and germs. Time to get to work. Those customers aren’t going to support themselves!

*Here at the Home is the title of the first album by one of the great Boston bands from the late 80’s/early 90’s, Tribe. When I went to my parents house the other day it was to pick up all of my old records that I hadn’t brought to the house already. There were a whole bunch of Tribe records in the pile.