The Little Review

( Money Talks )

We had a very quiet morning courtesy the Blizzard of 2010, which has left many local roads impassable and most parking lots unusable. My kids' schools have already been closed for the next two days, and since we're supposed to get another storm with another 4-5 inches of snow on Tuesday night, that may not be the end of it. My parents finally got their power back, as did my oldest friend, who sent an e-mail announcing that her family's annual Super Bowl party was on, though they couldn't get the foot long subs and chicken wings they usually serve so there would be more of an emphasis on shrimp and cheese. I would have been delighted to go no matter what we ate, but she warned that her neighborhood hadn't really been plowed, so we might have to park several blocks away and walk. The prospect of walking back and then driving home on slippery roads after dark made us nervous enough to decide, reluctantly, that we probably shouldn't go.

So we had our own Super Bowl party, for which Paul served homemade low-salt tortilla chips and cheese dip, plus veggie buffalo wings, hummus and pita, fresh bread with peanut butter, and homemade Mississippi Mud Cake. We were all rooting for the Saints here, mostly because we love New Orleans and felt that the city deserved to have something nice happen, though as Maryland residents we also have some residual resentment toward the Colts for sneaking out of Baltimore in the middle of the night. I like Indianapolis's new coach, I like Peyton Manning, I'd certainly have rooted for them over Dallas or Philly, but it was the Saints' turn. ( More Super Bowl blather. ) Now we're watching the news, warning us that local roads are still bad and will get worse when temperatures go below 10 degrees tonight...


( Morning After Snowpocalypse )

( The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor )

The snowpocalypse arrived right on schedule, starting innocently enough at 10 a.m. with some powdery flurries. The kids were dismissed from school two and a half hours early and walked home in slightly heavier snow; Adam promptly went over to a friend's for most of the afternoon, while Daniel chatted online with the members of the robotics team responsible for hardware, who are having a weekend-long sleepover at the home of one of their families so that they can get the robot built. Paul was home several hours early too to work from home. We bailed on going to my parents' for dinner when we realized there was going to be more than a couple of inches of snow on the ground and the county asked people to please stay off the roads. I worked on a bunch of projects, including a review of "Schisms".


( Yet More Snow Pics )

fannish5: ( You're Fired ) After dinner -- jacket potatoes with spicy cheese and veggie bacon, which actually crumbles better than other bacon -- we watched Smallville's "Absolute Justice" (which I keep expecting to see on a vodka bottle). I am not nearly familiar enough with superhero lore to have an opinion about the Justice Society and how it was portrayed; my major point of interest is that Hawkman and Dr. Fate were played respectively by Michael Shanks and Brent Stait of Stargate and Andromeda respectively. My favorite moment was ( this tiny spoiler, and a bit of squee. )

( Chinoiseries: Falling Snow )

Guess what? It snowed again! And my kids had no school, since half of the four inches that fell overnight arrived during the hours when the superintendent had to make a decision about whether to close the schools or merely delay them. It might not be such a big deal that they missed another entire day except that they'll have to add days to the school year if they miss much more school, and we have a huge storm predicted for Friday-Saturday -- the weather service alert says 12-20 inches! Naturally, the kids were not sorry; older son slept till nearly noon, younger son went out to play in the snow and ended up at a friend's house from lunchtime till dinnertime.


( Are You Sick Of This Yet? )

By then the streets were clear, and Paul, who had worked at home doing phone conferences all morning and computer stuff all afternoon, took them to Cici's Pizza while I went to meet gblvr at Tara Thai, where I had the fabulous seafood panang curry. Then we went to Bath & Body Works, which has a delightful new sandalwood fig aromatherapy scent, though I had gone to buy wonderful Twilight Woods shower cream while I had a two-for-one coupon. And then we went to Target to grab a couple of little things and I don't know how that dress got into my cart, honest.

( Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve )

On Monday I went with my mother to visit the Bar Mitzvah photographer, and eight months after the event, I have finally ordered an album and a couple of individual photos. I am very happy with how it looks, too -- I sent a whole list of little things I wanted and the photographer did them all. I only got home a few minutes before Adam did, so I didn't get a lot else done (the laundry is STILL not folded), but I did clean up my LiveJournal and Dreamwidth tags -- some of them had far more than 100 items and I had to make a sequel tag for each of those, then move the appropriate entries. Here are a few last photos from the New England Aquarium, including many jellies, a leafy seadragon, a representation of the pollution in Boston Harbor, and of course a penguin:


( Boston Jellyfish and More )

I'm trying to think of something meaningful to say about Heroes, which I enjoyed because it was yet another backstory episode about Noah Bennet even though it's very clear they just keep reinventing bits of his backstory as they go along and don't even try all that hard to integrate it with what we already know -- I just love watching Bennet and Claire together, though ( spoiler. ) I liked the Peter-and-Sylar storyline this week, too, despite the fact that we were yelling suggestions about ( spoilers. ) and things just went downhill from there.

Happy Imbolc, Candlemas, and Groundhog Day, whichever one(s) you may celebrate! And hope everyone who celebrated Tu B'shevat over the weekend had a lovely celebration, since I forgot to say so beforehand.

( In a Beautiful Country )

The weather reports Friday night said that we'd get a couple of inches of snow on Saturday. "A couple" turned out to be about, oh, six. It started in the morning just as Adam was heading for Hebrew school to volunteer and Daniel was heading for robotics; both were dismissed early, and the county closed all school buildings for the rest of Saturday and all day Sunday because there was so much ice on the roads. I never even left the house, letting Paul pick up the kids while I did laundry, coded and uploaded a bunch of stuff, and made sure the cats stayed off the heating vents. Here's what things looked like from our doorways:


( White Winter )

In the evening Paul made lentil and couscous pilaf with yellow and green squash for dinner, then admitted he'd been in the mood to watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone since we got back from the exhibition in Boston. I never say no to Harry Potter, though I liked the first two movies less than the next four, and I haven't seen the first one all the way through in several years -- certainly not since I read the seventh book. I still love the adults in it but it completely creeps me out seeing pre-teen Ginny talking to pre-teen Harry, and Hermione is totally Ron's mother; I knew Harry married the popular red-haired girl with the big family for obvious reasons, but I never thought before about Ron's mother issues, which I think are more pathological than Harry's even though Harry's the one with the huge family trauma in his past. Draco is somehow much less unnerving as a little boy than the trio.

( Consumed in Grace )

The major event of my day was picking up Adam early from school to take him to the dentist for the filling of a cavity right under the band for his braces, undoubtedly caused by the braces -- it was originally supposed to be filled last week when he had his orthodontist checkup, but I had to move the time because of his math midterm, and they needed him in on a day when the ortho techs could remove and replace the band around the dentist's work. Since I had already concluded that I was going to accomplish nothing important in the morning, I got SPP spa plushies for myself and Adam (the penguins with cucumbers over their eyes are too adorable to resist -- it's so Denny Crane and Alan Shore!), made a bunch of appointments for the kids (their pediatrician is the sister-in-law of their eye doctor and I had to call both), and did some reading. I'm in a trashy historical fiction phase if you're wondering why I never even mention book titles. Have some New England Aquarium photos:


( Boston in the Water )

RIP Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger. Paul made zucchini, sweet onion and pepper tart for dinner, which was awesome (well, except the onion part but I pick those out of almost everything), then we all watched Next Gen's "Relics" -- the Scotty episode. I remember I thought it was somewhat overwrought despite the nostalgia factor the first time I saw it, but I really enjoyed it this time -- that moment when Scotty goes onto the empty bridge of the NCC-1701 on the holodeck is just so well played. I miss the days when I accepted all of Trek canon as, well, canon, even obvious inconsistencies like Scotty thinking Kirk must have come looking for him when the first Next Gen movie made that impossible...now I have entire series finales and entire movies that I just don't count.

( Sonnet - To Science )

I spent a wonderful afternoon in Baltimore with dementordelta and rubyrosered, whom we met at her new house and from whom we received the grand tour before we headed into the city. We met Delta's friend Sam for lunch at Harborplace (where I got an order of fish and chips -- well, mashed potatoes -- big enough for three people). Then we went to the Maryland Science Center, since this is the last week of the terrific Da Vinci: The Genius exhibit; we had the place practically to ourselves, so we could go through slowly and read all about the mechanical devices and art on display. (The detailed study of the Mona Lisa remains my favorite, though I also love the hands-on machines and the long film about Da Vinci's life.) Afterward we visited the Chesapeake Bay and dinosaur exhibits and saw the planetarium show on dark matter.


( In Baltimore )

After leaving rubyrosered at her house with her boyfriend, family, cats, and envy-inducing computer setup, dementordelta brought me home and apaulled fed us sweet and sour tofu. Then we watched John Barrowman and Barry Manilow singing "I Made It Through the Rain" together in this YouTube clip before she had to go home. My family watched two episodes of How The Earth Was Made -- "The Rockies" and "Death Valley" -- on the History Channel, but hearing about all the insect eggs in our food grossed us out sufficiently that we turned off Life After People.

( What is Broken Is What God Blesses )

Daniel once again had robotics -- expect the same report for the next several weekends, until the build season is over -- so Adam got to sleep late, I got up and read and puttered on the computer, and none of us bothered getting dressed for outdoors till after lunch. We needed to visit Trader Joe's for butternut squash soup, hummus, and other necessities, and I wanted to go to Michael's to get split rings, so we made a couple of stops on the Pike and a gratuitous visit to Petco since it was right nearby:


( Petco Pets )

We thought about watching the Emma miniseries, but decided to record it instead so we don't have conflicts with the Grammys and the Super Bowl. This left us free to watch the nail-biter of a Vikings-Saints game. I will root for either of these teams over the Colts -- I'd have had more of a dilemma if the Jets had won, particularly since the host of the Super Bowl party we attend every year is a passionate Jets fan -- but we only half-watched their game around dinner, whereas we all watched Brett Favre play his heart out. The Superdome deserved a happy event after Katrina and the city of New Orleans did too, so I don't have any complaints; the fact that neither the Cowboys nor Eagles was in the NFC championship pleased me enough that I didn't mind if the Ravens weren't in the AFC championship!

( Return! )

We had a winter weather advisory this morning in the county, so even though we just had occasional fits of snow and sleet that didn't accumulate, I stayed close to home in case the schools closed early. Daniel technically had the day off, since exams finished on Thursday and he didn't have any make-ups, but he wanted to go in for robotics, and Adam had a final day of the semester -- they both have no school Monday, though Daniel will probably go in for robotics again. I wrote a review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Man of the People", one of the worst episodes ever, and we had dinner with my parents...probably the last time I will have my mother's excellent chicken piccata, since Adam has announced that he wants to be a vegetarian and I told him that I'll stop eating poultry if he does. (He's giving up seafood too, which I am not; given that I can't have much sodium or much soy, it would limit me to very few things I like that I can eat quickly.)

fannish5: ( Workplaces )

We watched the Hope For Haiti Now concert, which I really enjoyed. I'd already given money to the Red Cross, so I didn't plan to call the celebrity phone bank, which I found the most irritating aspect of the whole thing, anyway -- do we really need to listen in to Reese Witherspoon's "I'm so charitable" chitchat? But in most other ways, I thought the concert was less self-aggrandizing than the post-9/11 fundraiser, and some of the performances -- Stevie Wonder's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," Jennifer Hudson's "Let It Be" -- were really moving, as was Chris Rock reading Muhammad Ali's message because Ali's Parkinson's is so advanced. Nothing that happened on any stage, though, had the impact of Anderson Cooper's segments in Haiti. Afterward we tried to watch Spartacus: Blood and Sand, but the hot sex did not in any way make up for the excess bloodiness, cheesy camera work, and endless use of gratuitous profanity (and if you know me at all, you know I am not easily offended on that count). It all seemed much, much too frivolous and silly.

LiveJournal is always sending me status messages I don't want about questions of the day, yet somehow did not manage to get a text to me saying the site would be down tonight, so since I can't get at my photos from Boston that are in my scrapbook there, here is a gratuitous little blue penguin photo:

( Props to the Twentieth Century )

It was a day of appointments -- doctor for me in the morning, orthodontist for son in the afternoon -- so I have nothing exciting to report except that medical procedures suck even when necessary and my blood pressure was 110/70 in spite of being cranky about them, so it must be accounted a good day in spite of everything. Adam was originally supposed to see the dentist to have a small cavity filled that's directly under one of the brackets for his braces, then see the orthodontist to have the wires tightened, but his math midterm went right till the end of the school day so we ended up having to cancel the filling and reschedule. The good news there is that he's in the end stage of his braces -- they just need to straighten out two roots on the bottom and those come off -- and we rescheduled the dentist for another day.

After the orthodontist, I took Adam to get bubble tea, stopped at CVS to pick up a prescription and hair conditioner, then got home at pretty much the same minute that both Paul and Daniel arrived from work and school respectively. We had white beans with carrots and pesto pasta for dinner -- Adam has announced that he wants to become a vegetarian, and I told him a while ago that I would give up poultry if he did, so I am looking for low-sodium veggie recipes if anyone wants to share. Then we watched Pixar shorts on ABC Family...does anyone know whether that fabulous animated history of rats is an extra on the Ratatouille disc? It would be worth owning for that alone.


( In Boston )