Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

A Brief Ill-Tempered Review: Weird

Somehow, the Weird Al Yankovich biography Weird encapsulated everything else I saw last week. Funny like The Menu, musical like Cyrano would have liked to be, and even self-referential like Tell Me Who I Am and The Voyeur. 

And funny. I laughed out loud at least eight times. Or, perhaps that was just because I was feeling better.

Highly recommend, if you like Weird Al and/or parody. 

Thursday Paint Progress: 1/26

This week the sea went from this:

... to this.

I took too much green out of the second mountain, but I can put that back.

A Brief Ill-Tempered Review: Voyeur

Voyeur is another documentary, this one about writer Gay Talese and his efforts to write a factual book. I can never remember who Gay Talese is because he is filed under writers my Dad liked, subcategory odd names: Gay, Gore, Studs.

It's one of those documentaries where you wonder, "At what point did they decide to start filming this?" Or does Gay Talese just film every moment of his life in anticipation that things will go tits up and he'll have to explain his decisions?

The best person in the whole documentary is the voyeur's wife, Anita. She got a lot of sympathy from me, because it is her job to calm down the voyeur and to speak truth. 

Interesting. An interesting pairing with Tell Me Who I Am and the themes of trust and secrets.

A Brief Ill-Tempered Review: The Menu

This was a first class satire. The Menu was vicious and delightful. I ended up laughing, screaming, horrified,  delighted, hungry. And it builds like crazy. Just keeps getting better and better.

Highly recommend. 

A Brief Ill-Tempered Review: Tell Me Who I Am

I am torn about Tell Me Who I Am: I am happy to have watched it and guilty and ashamed to have watched it. Incidentally, this is the perfect reaction to this movie.

It's a documentary, and while I don't want any spoilers, really, there are no spoilers. That's another cryptic statement that only makes sense after you've seen it.

Every answer is right, every reaction is right, every side is right, and equally wrong. Your reaction to the documentary is perfectly in line with the documentary.Would recommend, but not for people who dislike ambiguity.

A Brief Ill-Tempered Review: Cyrano

This movie began with a good idea: cast Peter Dinklage as Cyrano de Bergerac. And then somewhere it went off the rails. (Wheels fell off, kangaroo in the paddock). They had to edit it to suit a small person without a big nose, then they edited it beyond all comprehension, then (prepare yourself) they made it a musical.

A musical. Thankfully, not Cyrano! with an exclamation point.

Seriously. They didn't tell you it was a musical in the advertisements, did they? No. There's a reason for that. It's another example of having non-singers sing in musicals.

It got a little better at the end. But still, "my white plume" is replaced with "my pride," and there isn't enough about his pride during the movie to merit making it the last line.

All in all, it seems like a good idea destroyed by committee. Do not recommend. 

Pileup: or, In Which an Old Lady Complains About Aches and Pains

I have shirked all responsibilities the last two work days and now I'll probably be ducking out on weekend responsibilities too. I've got four concurrent problems going on, ordered by when they showed up:

Tingly leg - Leg tingles in the morning. This stops about noon. This is standard issue MS stuff, predates any other problems, and frankly, expected after the stress in late October. Or, it could be a pinched nerve. 

Dizziness - This is also par for the MS course. BPPV, with the V for vertigo and one of the Ps  for positional. Everything starts to spin, I move my head, spinning stops.

Sore Jaw - Still sore after the cavity / crown. They did call to tell me my permanent crown was in a week early, and I laughed at the thought of hobbling in for more dental work. 

Sprained Back - This is the worst. I feel like garbage with this back problem. More precisely, I smell like garbage. Not like pee, which you would expect after the back problem. (Not that the back problem affects my bladder, but it does affect the speed at which I can make it to the bathroom.) No, I smell like fear, or stress, just an acrid odor. Perhaps that's a result of all the Tylenol I've been taking. 

The weirdest thing, and the reason I am tallying them, is that if one recedes another one intensifies. I suppose this is just a perception thing. Or maybe person has only so many pain receptors. But then, that doesn't align, because two of those things aren't pain related. But truly, if I calm my back pain my left leg tingles like mad that day. I randomly have either jaw pain or back pain at any one time. If I have neither it's great only the room spins every fifteen minutes.

I keep looking for connections. It all seems to happen on the left side! It could all be TMJ and stress! This is just me trying to make sense out of this aging nonsense, I'm sure. You know what would be great? If there was a covid variant with these four symptoms.

The good thing is that I have paid sick leave and a comfy firm chair and access to a number of streaming services. Prepare for a week of entertainment reviews.

YouTube Training

Last week I realized the top rack of the dishwasher is broken. Literally, the wheels have come off AND it's off the rails. (I looked to see if there might be more idioms that might apply literally to my top dishwasher rack and I find that Austrailians say “There's a kangaroo loose in the top paddock,” which is ridiculous and I don’t believe it. Big Dot, please confirm.)

It seemed like an easy enough fix: just get new wheels and snap them on. I just needed to find the right YouTube video.

Good Lord. YouTube needs to pull any video that doesn't follow basic training principles. Now, you might think I'm being picky because I work in training. No. One man mimed the entire process. Didn't say anything. Another man filmed the process from such an angle that you could only see the back of his hands. He’d hold up a part, then he'd begin to position it and his fingers would be eclipsed by his hammy hands, then voila, the part was affixed. I only found one woman: her video was remarkable because her first step was to clip off the zip-ties she used to hold the rails and wheels together. I almost stopped right there and got some zip-ties.

I finally found someone with my exact dishwasher, who showed me where to find the part number, then after I had it shipped, said, “make sure the new wheels are the same size as the old ones,” then after I ordered a better set, walked me through all the steps. I am quite pleased with myself, chuffed one might say, now that the wheels are on the rails, and the kangaroos are out of the top paddock. 

Thursday Paint Progress: 1/19

This week the sea went from this:

... to ... the exact same thing,  because ... well, even through I've spent the week fixing up basements and dishwashers, I haven't been well.

After last week's dental appointment, my jaw did not recover from all the stretching as I would have liked. It left a visible lump that got progressively bigger and hotter and harder. After a week of ice packs and setting my alarm every four hours to wake up for more Advil,  I called to make an appointment with the dentist just to check and see if this was expected. 

Turns out my jaw is inflamed, but not infected. I was walking out with a referral to see a chiropractor who works with jaws, when my back -- that I had tweaked that morning -- went almost entirely sprained. I could still hobble, but that's all. So, forget about the jaw, and the way my legs had been falling asleep every time I get out of a chair, because all there is now is the sprained back. 

So, no painting this week. I wonder if I could go see the jaw/back chiropractor, just for the new experience of seeing a chiropractor. I also wonder if I could stop taking the Advil and just start drinking.

Basement Complete

I really should wait for the spring floods before I set the basement to rights again, but I can't take the chaos. 

Evidently I rearrange the basement once a decade. See here for how little I had in my basement in 2013.

In 2013, Gary's ping-pong table took the prime spot in the center of the basement. Now that it has lay fallow for ten years I have claimed the excellent light and put my painting table there.

On a whim I took a bite of Gary's drum area and made a shelf for the Christmas reindeer. 

I appropriated Gary's drumming TV for this little exercise nook, where I fantasize Gary and I will exercise together.

Essentially, the basement was Gary-centric and it is now Ellen-centric.

Gary seemed resigned. The only complaint he had was that he had wanted to re-purpose the new Reindeer Central area as a "trash corner," and I pointed out all there were many other well-illuminated corners that could collect trash. 

My guess is that the next time I go into the basement the reindeer will have been repositioned, and that's fine. I took up a lot of his territory, he can get some back. 

Rewriting the Novel: Soft Heart

Right now I am tweaking the phrasing and ignoring the elephant: the climax of the book is a mess. The tension doesn't build, it just ping pongs. Problem, solution, another problem, another solution. 

I know how to fix it, too, but I don’t want to. I am tired of torturing this imaginary woman. So I’ll spend some more time on the fun stuff like word choice, until there’s nothing left to do but give her an unsolvable puzzle. 

I guess it’s like throwing a party: if the guests are having fun that’s because the hostess isn’t, she’s getting drinks and storing coats. I’ll need to suffer so the readers can have fun. 

Easter Egg

Recently I read a Facebook post on secret messages that some fun-loving companies have put on packaging. 

This led me to my pantry, where I pored over all my items.

I only found one.

It was on the bottom.

Above the expiration date Bear Naked granola printed, "Don't hibernate. Get your paws on it before this date."

I am a sucker for this type of thing, but it is impossible for me to love this granola more than I already do. 

Car Hunt Continues

What did I tell you? Gary is back to square one in the car hunt.

He found a seven page list of nothing but electric vehicles. So here we go again. I've given up mentioning the government tax debate; they made that way too complicated, and all the rules change in March anyway. And now Toyota says they are going to just take old cars and pack batteries in them and that’ll work. And then yesterday Tesla reduced all their prices. The target needs to stop moving.

I remember buying the latest Mini when the old Mini broke. 

Me: “Car is broken.”

Gary: “So, electric Mini next?”

Me: “I’ll get my shoes.”

Usually he works best with a limit. We set a price limit, and a lower range limit, and he’s ignoring both. Maybe if I demand the new car must be red he can focus.

The Beauty of Forgetting

A few days ago I tried to make homemade pork egg foo young.

I got all the elements, except for the sake for the gravy. “Like I would have sake,” I scoffed. “But I know I have mirin.” And then while hunting for the mirin at the top of the liquor shelf, what was there? Huge bottle of sake. 

It made me happy to have forgotten it. So happy that I started to look forward to senility. I’ve already had the pleasure of finding the perfect Christmas decorations forgotten in the basement. Perhaps old age is just like that, all the time. I can easily see forgetting that I can play the guitar and then picking it up ‘for the first time’ very easily.

I made the gravy first, and it was a dream. Tasty, full of sake, thickened perfectly. And then of course I found I had forgotten the most important thing about Chinese restaurant food, it is a fool’s game to try to imitate Chinese restaurant food.

My recipe called for me to put 2T peanut oil in my wok and sautee and I would be fine. No. After a very disappointing outcome I researched what I had done wrong, and what I should have done was to fling the egg batter into my industrial deep-fat fryer. Because THAT is how you make egg foo young.

The gravy saved it, though. Ordering Chinese for lunch anyway so I can get the yen for egg foo young out of my head.

Rewriting the Novel: Editors

I am now friends with someone who has almost had a book published. I was surprised to learn some of my assumptions about publishing were very wrong.

The editor doesn't necessarily edit. I don’t know when they changed this, but her agent does the editing. I can see the agent suggesting improvements so it would be met with kindness when it gets to the publishing house, but if the agent is editing, what do the editors do?

Evidently the editors have meetings and determine how marketable your book is, and if it is not, it is killed in committee.

So that sounds awful. I would rather have dozens of cold rejection letters than to get an agent, get his approval, find a publisher, and then get the rejection there. 

I asked if she’s going to try again and she’s currently too busy. I don’t know if I would.