I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

Just booked tickets to Universal, with particular plans to hit all the Harry Potter stuff. I am ridiculously excited to geek out with the Zweeb over, like, everything. We’ve already got plans to get wands, and a stuffed Pigwidgeon, and to hit the candy store. My mother wants to ride the Hogwarts Express and see Hagrid’s cottage.

In other Harry Potter-related silliness … so we’re on Book 5 with the boy, reading a chapter or two every night. Scott has seen all the movies, but didn’t read the books, but of course, he’s hearing them along with Z.

So last night, I’m halfway through the chapter—Harry’s just used the shield charm on Snape during Occlumency lessons—and Z falls asleep on the couch. I nudge him a little, but he’s not moving. So I go to shut the book, and Scott pokes me and says, “Keep reading.”

"But … Z’s asleep … ?"

"I want to know what happens!" I go to hand him the book. "No, keep reading.”

My husband apparently wants to read Gilgamesh. "Do we have a copy?” he asks.

Our house is basically made of books. It’s not big enough for all the books we have. I still have books from when I was five. I have books that I love, books that I think the kid might like to read eventually, I have books I’m keeping just because I hated them and ended up having to read them, like, two or three times, so at this point it’s like keeping the mummified head of my enemy on a pike.

Honestly? I don’t remember if we have a copy of Gilgamesh. I mean, the odds are pretty good, but who knows.

Anyway, now he’s critiquing the book shelves and complaining about our lack of organization. (Three or four years ago, we put everything together by series and author, but didn’t have time to alphabetize, so our ultimate organization is something like check where I have all the Eddas or I’d probably put that near the Neil Gaiman, go look on that shelf.)

(Did I mention the entire closet dedicated to comics boxes? Because that’s on him.)

(also on my WordPress blog)

So I have a husband. He's a good husband--he cooks! He vacuums! He's smart and cool and makes me laugh, and I think he's pretty cute. We've been together for 22 years, so basically my entire adult life I've been attached, in one way or another, to this particular goofball (who is currently sitting on the other end of the couch, buried in his laptop whilst "Bizarre Foods America" plays in the background).

They tell you, when you get married, that your spouse will always surprise you. And it's true, but as the years wear on those surprises become fewer ... then when they do happen, they're just ridiculously shocking.

The last time I completely shocked Scott, it was 2010 and I tried sushi (I am a notoriously picky eater, mostly because texture is a thing for me) and I liked it!

My most recent surprise, which has been ongoing for the past few years, is Scott's crafting ability.

(Okay, yeah, I hear "crafting" and I think felt and glitter and maybe poster paint. But that's not what I'm talking about. Bear with me.)

It's not his urge to make stuff that surprises me, because he's always had that. He's dabbled in writing, he worked in radio production for eleven years, he cooks, he's a creative person. That he wanted to make decorations for the boy's room and bottle cap magnets was not the shock. No, the shock came in that his stuff comes out looking really good.

Look, he can't manage to get his dirty clothes into the damn hamper even when it's two feet away from him. He only started remembering my correct birth date when we'd been together for seventeen of my birthdays. I love him, but I was somewhat skeptical about his patience and attention to detail.

Yeah, I was proven wrong. In fact, I now have five bottle cap magnets in my office at work, and people constantly ask me where I got them.

Anyway, all of this is to tell you about my Christmas present from 2010. (Because what's a blog post by Laura without some crazy amount of backstory as a lead-in? I am the Heinz Doofenschmirtz of blogging. Someday I'll tell you the woeful tale of my time spent as my family's lawn gnome ... no, actually, I won't, that's plagiarism and copyright infringement, and I like Phineas and Ferb.)

So! Christmas 2010! I was going through a serious steampunk phase (which I am not completely out of, nor will I ever be), and I'd made some noises about Things I Might Like Were I Able to Find Them.

I opened the box from Scott and got this:



]
These are actually the ones he just ordered for himself, but they're the same basic thing. (Wow, hello fingerprints!)



They're generic welding goggles. I looked curiously at my husband, who said, "I'm going to steampunk them up for you."

Cue montage (for which I have no photos) of spray paint, brads, lots of internet searches, frantic phone calls to our costumer friend David for instructions, the use and/or discarding of said instructions, ordering things off the internet, swearing and slicing up of fingers with copper wire, and many, many detours into bottle cap magnet-making, laptop decorating, pin making, and other various and sundry projects that were not my steampunk goggles, after which there would be an explosion of progress on said goggles before the next detour project happened.

Three years later, this past Saturday, at the conclusion to one of those progress explosions, Scott emerged from my parents' garage with my goggles and told me to try them on.

(My favorite part of this process has been sitting in front of Scott while he measured my head for the strap. There's something very quiet and very intimate about it, like when he fastens my necklaces for me. Sigh. /end schmoop)

"How are they?" he asked after I tightened the strap and shook my head around a little.

"They're good," I said.

"Awesome. They're done."

Wait--what? Three years of work and he just ... handed them to me with no fanfare at all? This is the man who, after completing a chore I've asked him to do, has been known to enter the living room and triumphantly yell "BOOM, MOTHERFUCKERS!" Have aliens replaced my husband with a clone?!

I suppose the fanfare is up to me, then.

BOOM, Y'ALL--I HAVE GOGGLES!

They are seriously cool. Here, look:



From the front. Check these bad boys out!





From the side (not pleased with this photo, but we do what we can with the iPhone camera)



And here they are on me:



Selfie! With goggles!


(The idea is that I, the mad engineer, needed special goggles for my insane plan to take over the world using ... I dunno, dirigibles and an army of steam-powered hairless cats, so I cobbled these together out of stuff that was laying around my lair-slash-laboratory. I feel that alternate universe steampunk mad engineer me is very talented and her steam-powered hairless cats would be quite the sinister minions.)

Best Christmas present ever. Totally worth the wait.

1. I should not be bored by a show about SHIELD that involves Joss Whedon. And yet, I find myself just not caring. Well, if they promised to reveal some of Ming-Na's backstory I'd be all over it, but I can't even bring myself to get bothered over what the hell Coulson's story is.

2. It's possible that Agents of SHIELD is suffering because I just started watching Orphan Black and OH MY GOD IT'S AWESOME. (jkason! Have you watched this?! It's like every narrative kink we have in one show!)

3. Will I ever finish Broadchurch? Because I need to ...

4. I have, after 22 years with my husband, gotten to the end of my patience with shows about Bigfoot, aliens, cryptozoology, and Nostradamus. (Ghost shows are still okay, but if I could ban people from using the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, the Stanley Hotel, Myrtles Plantation, and Lizzie Borden's house in these shows, I totally would.) There is no new information! Sometimes a legend about a dragon is just a legend about a dragon--not a UFO! And, seriously, I think that chupacabra was actually just a coyote with a bad case of mange. I would love to live in a world with Mothmen and extra-terrestrial crop circles; I am down with our not being alone in the universe. I'm just bored with all this repetition.

5. (sadly) I just ... want Doctor Who and Sherlock to come back. Yes, yes, a month for the one and three for the other ... but still.

6. Oh, oh! The BBC radio production of Neverwhere is out, and I got it, and it's really, really good! James McAvoy, Anthony Stewart Head, Natalie Dormer, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sophie Okenedo, and Bernard Cribbins ... just, yeah, it's worth the $14.95.

My husband is now 42. He is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But don't tell him that; he'll get a big head.

Waiting for the family to arrive, then Jason and David. Z is currently distracted by Plants vs. Zombies on Scott's phone.

Last night was the monthly Chuck E. Cheese night for the elementary school, where they give a portion of whatever you spend back to the school. Z loves Chuck E. Cheese night. One of his little friends was there, and they ran around playing games, sharing whatever extra tickets they found, paying for each other. His friend wasn't allowed to play shooting games, and I thought this would be an issue for Z., but he just ... didn't play any shooting games.

(We don't own very many shooting games, and he doesn't play the ones we do have for a variety of reasons, so I don't get too uptight when we go to Chuck E. Cheese and he tries out the Terminator game. But I respect other parents' decisions on these things--you raise your kid how you raise your kid.)

Anyway, it was nice. We had another round of "How old is your son?" because, as usual, Z towered over his friend. There is only one boy we know who is Z's age and is taller than he is. The girls seem to be as tall as he is, but I think girls actually do grow faster than boys for a while? I remember being the tallest kid in class until about 7th grade, and being as tall or taller than a lot of boys until 9th grade. We hit high school and every guy I knew had a growth spurt. It's weird going from being called "Too-Tall" to being short.

Scott baked a Dr. Pepper cake for his birthday, and that was an adventure. It's been a while since I've baked a cake, and I don't think I've ever done one totally on my own, so I wasn't much help. One layer stayed half-in the pan. I got the other half out without totally destroying the infrastructure, so we pieced it together and Scott frosted it (I think this was supposed to be more a drizzle than a frosting, but whatever), and it's pretty good! And looks-wise, whenever Scott brings up my coco puff lump o' doom, I now have something to come back at him with.

But now I want to bake a cake myself. And we don't need another cake. And I promised Scott some hot sauce bread tomorrow as a birthday gift, so ... no cake baking for a while.

I "watched" Glee live on Facebook with my good friend gnadige , which basically meant I missed about half of it. So I re-watched it last night. Scott was installing stuff on his laptop, and periodically we'd stop the playback and have to discuss stuff.

What I find interesting about Scott and I discussing Glee:

1. Scott would tell you he doesn't watch this show, and yet there he was, making comments about how Rachel's character has been portrayed for three seasons, now. Um.

I pointed out to him that this was how I got sucked into Deep Space 9. Scott would watch it while I read on the couch, and then two seasons later I'm all Oh my God, Sisko left the baseball!!!

2. Our discussions of Glee tend to be way more meta than our discussions of Lost or Doctor Who or Sherlock. There's way more talk of what the fans think, what Ryan Murphy's said on Twitter, and things like, "Do you think Darren Criss would have a music career if he wasn't on this show?"

3. We both found "Chasing Pavements" as a last-song choice more ominous than inspirational.

Anyway, I have lots of thoughts. It was a really solid episode, and I think it inverted a lot of typical teen-movie/TV show tropes (as Glee usually does). Oh, and "New York State of Mind" was not popularized by Barbra Streisand. Fifty thousand Billy Joel fans just asked, "What?" at the same time.

BUT. Not talking about those things today. No, I am going to talk about something else. Because that episode last night cemented the fact that Glee is going to end up on the list with Buffy and Lost as a show I'm stuck with forever in terms of emotional touchstones; while I loved Twin Peaks, it doesn't echo for me like Buffy; while I enjoyed Firefly, it doesn't have the emotional resonance for me that Doctor Who does.

But now this problematic piece of musical television has shoved itself into my psyche and will have a moment, like the baseball on DS9, that I can point to and say, "That's what did it." And that moment is:

Burt Hummel tells his kid, "You can always come back." And Kurt gets out of the car, and Burt says, "But you won't."

And it finally, truly hit me that one day, thirteen or fourteen years from now, that's going to happen. My kid is going to go out into the world without me, and that's the point, and he won't come back. Not really. Not forever. Not like it was.

My head was filled with this vision of Burt going home to his empty house, and sure Carole will be there, but Kurt won't. And neither will Finn, but they've had a few months to get used to that.

AAAAARRRGGGHHH.

So what's going on around here?

Currently, the boy is taking a really long nap, which I think he probably needs. His allergies are acting up a lot this week, so he's sniffing and coughing, especially at night. We've been doing the Vicks on the feet thing, which seems to help, and found some 4-year-old friendly cough suppressant that is a bit more iffy in its helpfulness. With any luck, he'll manage to sleep tonight for more than four hours (and so will I, whew!).

Scott is feeling antsy and bored on his winter break from school. I think we need to find him some recipes and a good book, because otherwise his brain is going to get swallowed whole by the internet.

Actually, now that Z. is also on winter break, I'm hoping we can do a couple of Big Adventure Days and head to the beach or the Imaginarium or something.

I am really enjoying my winter break so far, aside from a couple of crabby afternoons recently. The house is slowly getting organized, I'm working on a story, I sent out a bunch of submissions today, and I've been reading books. I've also got Xmas about done, finally. Just one more thing to order, as a gift for someone we won't see until after Xmas, so hurrah for that.

Okay, I was going to write more, but Scott is looming over me looking bored, so I shall return later on when he's occupied with some godawful TV show.

... well, okay, not exactly, but when we went back to try and figure it out, the whole flirtation-to-courtship-to-relationship was so gradual we weren't sure what the actual start date was, so we decided on December 1st* because by then we were definitely the Laura and Scott (or Scott and Laura) Show.

Twenty freaking years together, and we haven't killed each other. (Yet.)

I love my husband. He's the coolest. (Possibly literally today; it's 46 out!)

*and I still start rounding up in October, anyway.

TV

So I started this TV season the same way I do every season: noting when shows that sound cool, and shows I already watch, start. The past two years I've had the DVR and can set it up to tape the new shows--woohoo!--and watch later. This year there were quite a few.

Ringer: Okay, taped three episodes, never got the motivation to watch them, deleted them and the timer. I dunno, it sounded okay, I like Sarah Michelle Gellar, but ... meh. If I hear good things, I'll watch the DVDs.

Person of Interest: Just watched episode 1 Saturday night, the episode 2 on Sunday. I'm mostly interested in Michael Emerson's character, though Jim Caviezal is some serious eye candy and the thing with the dump truck was awesome. He's like a mix of Clint Eastwood doing Dirty Harry and Henry Winkler being Henry Winkler.

Anyway, episode 2 started delving into the backstory for Finch (Emerson's character), and if they keep doing things like that ... well, we may keep watching. Neither Scott nor I are very into procedurals (unless we get sucked into the crystal meth that is a Law & Order marathon ... shudder), so it better get weird and twisty pretty quick. (I also think it would be awesome if the person Finch lost was the partner guy we saw in episode 2, and if that guy was, in fact, his partner ... but I doubt they'll go there.)

Glee: Well, much like last season, I am being horribly sporadic. Ignored the premiere, watched the musical numbers for ep 2, and watched all of ep 3. Holy cats, Mercedes as Effie. That whole sequence was freaking spectacular. And go, Mike. Though I didn't think "Cool" popped quite enough, it was still good.

And good grief, Will Schuster is one of the worst teachers ever. Also, was I the only one who wanted to tell him it wasn't his damn place to fix Emma?

American Horror Story and Bedlam: Okay, only watched the pilots for these so far. AHS isn't working for either of us. I think it probably will work for people with a different kind of horror story taste, though. Bedlam is probably more to my taste, but it wasn't really scary at all. I'll watch it again, though.

Scott and I are both getting into Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and, of all things, Top Gear. Well, maybe I shouldn't be surprised at that--I got mildly addicted to "Car Talk" on NPR and managed to mildly addict Scott, so there is a precedent here.

Scott's still giving Terra Nova a shot, but I'm pretty well done with it.

Books

Reading Ready Player One. Having massive flashbacks to my adolescence. Also irritating my husband because I checked it out of the library and he wants to read it, so he was hoping I'd buy it with my credit card points ... except he didn't tell me that, so I bought Z and myself some books instead. The guilt tripping has commenced.

Podcasts

That's right, podcasts. I am dipping my toe in. I am entering the first decade of the 21st century just in time for the 2nd. Go me.

I like NPR, but I rarely tune in at the right times to hear the stuff I want. And sometimes I just want something besides music--like when I'm washing dishes or coming home from work. (I have a tendency to run my day back over and over, which makes it harder to wind down, and I can tune music out too easily. I'm hoping Kevin Smith being vulgar and hilarious will keep me from doing that.)

So I got a Kevin Smith podcast, some stuff off NPR, and a couple of HowStuffWorks podcasts about little-known history. We shall see.

Miscellany

Reddit is swallowing my husband's soul. The boy has started Nintendogs. The Amanda Palmer cover of "Polly" is awesome. Strange Horizons made their funding goal (yay!).

I think that's it for now. Do I read, or watch more TV?

Yesterday was our last Big Adventure Friday for a while (I have to keep reminding myself that there will be other BAFs, or even BATuesdays, or whatever; it's just going on hiatus), so we asked Z. what he wanted to do, and he said the beach and DQ. So we hauled out towels and sunblock and went to the touristy beach.

Let me tell you, the time to go to the beach is before noon during the regular school year.

We had a really nice time. Z is getting a lot braver about the water, which is both good and bad. No sting ray sightings, though we did see some guys catch fish off the pier, and Scott found a live conch for us to marvel at. Oh, and the DQ is open-air, so a bird flew into the dining area and tried to cadge fries off Z.

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I'm having a hard time working my head around my schedule, probably because for the past couple of terms I've been teaching Monday nights. I like having Mondays off; in my mind, it gives me a little cushion of time to get last-minute stuff done, and for some reason, doing the same thing Sunday night feels frantic and rushed. Anyway, right now I keep thinking I have to get everything done by tomorrow night, and that I have to get Z home from school and then rush around to get ready to leave for work on Monday ... which, no, that's Tuesday. (Actually, it's worse Tuesday because Scott will be in class, so my backup won't be here. But let's not think about that.)

I'm hoping we get into a nice routine within a week or two. It would be good to have routine.

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Also, my husband knocked the passenger side mirror off my car when he accidentally sideswiped a garbage can.

Seriously, this damn town needs sidewalks, because on trash day the roads are hazardous. Even if the homeowner hasn't put the trash cans right into the road, the garbage trucks use robotic arms and half the time the emptied cans wind up laying on their sides in the street (this happened before the robot trucks, too, actually).

All of that said, I am still teasing Scott mercilessly about my car. The new mirror should come in today. And speaking of my car, it needs cleaning before the day gets crazy hot.