settling in, finally

We have a good sense now of when we'll have the apartment to ourselves -- meaning that we can get totally unpacked, get my work space out of the bedroom, have a guest room, etc. All of this feels daunting and excellent and like lots more space than I've ever had as an adult (truthfully, I've lived in bigger apartments, but not where I was in some control over the totality of the domain). Also Patty cleaned the bathroom. The years of debt I'm in over this? Huge.

It's still cold here but is supposed to be back up to 92 by Saturday, so we'll go to the beach. If that doesn't happen, it's off to Cold Spring (which we're doing the following weekend if plans hold). I also want to get some heirloom tomatos and expirment with her crockpot both for making some chili to freeze (using the green zebras) and some weird pasta sauce to freeze (using the yellow and purple ones).

I got very few of the things I meant to get done yesterday done, although I got the critical ones done.

We watched the As You Like It on HBO, which I thought was eight types of problematic: Rosalind was unspeakably annoying and always clearly had breasts, making the gender stuff pretty irrelevant. The Japanese setting but race-blind casting probably made more sense to British viewers who I assume more clearly saw through skin color issues to themes of alien/not-alien -- but there were constant cultural discomforts and disconnects in this for me and it seemed stupid to set it amongst non-Japanese traders in Japan if one weren't going for some sort of message about identity, but the only things I could find were pretty anti-Japanese, but again I can't even complain abut the thing being racist, it was just incoherent and occassionally thought it was Gilbert & Sullivan. I mean, trying to talk about it is making me incoherent!

Fencing today. In cold weather! I get to really fight.

domestic scenes

While in SF, fragiletender posted a link to her flickr account that included a photo of "Riverside Taxidermy" which I promptly sent to Patty for her amusement.

I had forgotten about it, but she mentioned it the other night, and in my half-asleep, jet-lagged state I proceeded to go on for about half an hour about conversations Richard and Alec would have in a taxidermy shop. It was really funny, but entirely appalling, and to be frank, I don't remember most of it, although my memory has been refreshed enough to know that it involved giant turtles, deer, bear claws and Richard saying, "please don't" a great deal.