long ago

hello dogs. i'm sorta bummed to be at work because it's raining and i love sleeping while it's raining !

on friday, christina, mouse, and i went to vientiane to meet up with nate and anna. the wait was pretty long because the restaurant is super super tiny, but we ran into brian v. while we were waiting and it was really nice to see him ! i got tofu lad na (and will probably only get that there for the rest of my life) and everyone else got neat looking stuff including homemade beef jerky (which is apparently amazing, but i've only had real beef jerky once and it was nothing to write home about). mouse went home after dinner because the wait was so long and he had to work in the morning, so the rest of us got treats (percy jackson flavored airheads?) and went back to my house, where we watched beavis and butthead music videos



and um, that hbo documentary about magic johnson and larry bird? nate and i are both really into larry bird highlight reels and i think we were hoping the documentary would just be a 90 minute highlight reel but it was actually the touching story of their rivalry and friendship. oh also larry bird is autistic or something. what the hell.


larry bird's daughter who he DENIES IS HIS DAUGHTER. also it's hard to search for magic johnson and larry bird without finding pics of lady bird johnson

on saturday, christina and i went to green line and i got a delicious apple lemonade which gave me the idea for all these lemonades i didn't actually make ! we went to whole foods and trader joe's after that and both stuck to our lists and got a bunch of cool groceries. then we came home and christina defrosted our gross freezer (it was seriously like 50% ice since we moved in) and i finally sewed a button on the hat i made for mouse's nephew.



then we went up to mouse's mom's so i could meet his super small nephew, scott. holy crap, he's cool ! he's like six weeks old so he's not at the stage where he... does anything but he was a really cute tiny little loaf and he slept on me. mouse looooooooooves him



and scott obviously looooooooooooooves the hat i made him:



heh heh ! it was also nice to see mouse's family, because i haven't been up there in awhile. his grandma gives very good grandma arm hugs.

on sunday, i made sweet potato salad which i'm proud to say was pretty delicious. i roasted small/thin sweet potatoes cut in half (but cut unevenly so some pieces would be super soft and some would be firmer) with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then cubed the slices and mixed them with carrot ginger dressing and green onions.


it basically looked like this but i left the skins on, and um, those aren't green onions

i also got stuff to make delicious hoagies (tofurky slices, munster cheese, avocado spread with lime and garlic and salt, cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula) and jeanne and mouse came over to have lunch. we watched the bear, which was a very beautiful movie:



it's about a baby bear whose mom dies who is taken under the wing of a big male grizzly who is being pursued by hunters. it's notable because there's almost no dialogue and the actors are just like.. real bears and it's almost like watching it really happen in the wild (but with a few claymation dreams added to give insight into the bear's psyche). the story promotes kindness to all creatures and ends with the line, "the greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live". aw. also it's like 2 hours of a baby bear doing shit so if you like that, you should rent it !

what else ! oh, the third episode of the pacific. i really really hate to say it, but despite this being the best episode so far, it really hasn't grabbed me yet.



this episode found the marines in melbourne after guadalcanal and before peleliu. most of the episode was about robert leckie falling in love with a greek australian girl but the pacing and sense of time is so off that i have no idea if they knew each other 3 days or 3 months. the characterization was a little better, and the guy playing leckie is a legitimately good actor (and he was good at sex scenes ! but the unrealistic sex scenes where the lady is psyched that the guy comes in 30 seconds and then hops off after unprotected sex and doesn't need to take care of anything is so distracting !), but the dude playing basilone totally sucks. like, he was supposed to be anguished because his good friend died, and torn between excitement at getting to go home to sell war bonds and guilt over abandoning his fellow marines/his best friend, but he just seemed vaguely grumpy? he's just so so so wooden. i also think they're trying to cover up the fact that the show is not about one unit, and not about men who ever know each other? because the lines are super blurred and they even show the characters in the same rooms.

i don't know. i wish they could've found one unit with good stories and not just used the three famous stories/memoirs about the pacific theater.

oh, what else? i finally finished tender morsels.



so many people told me this book was good and i'm convinced that they were lying or the author paid them to tell me, because it was terrible in ways that i was totally unfamiliar with? the book starts with a father repeatedly raping and verbally abusing his daughter and violently forcing her to have abortions. once her father dies, the author moves on to a violent gang rape of the main character. then she's sent to a magical land where no one can hurt her (just like what happens to real rape victims...?) with her two babies and is totally psyched and happy, because having babies from rape is totally the best thing to ever happen to a woman (because women love babies).

had that been the last rape, it still would have been a little over the top, but next a man makes his way into their dream world (since he was wearing a bear costume in the real world, he's an actual bear in their world) and... sexually assaults one of her daughters as a bear and chases her with his bear dick out with the intent to rape her. at this point you may be saying, "there's no way this author could get more rape into this book !" but you'd be wrong, because one of the daughters uses magic to conjure up five men with HOT POKERS FOR DICKS to violently rape her mother's rapists almost to death in retribution. and at no point is anyone like, "that was totally not the right thing to do" or "this sends a really weird message about rape" or anything?

aside from that, the writing was pretty bad. the whole thing reads like snow white rape fan fiction. it takes place in Ye Olden Tymes and the Olde Tymey writing is super inconsistent and tedious, and the author also introduces 293920832 characters whose stories go nowhere and barely spends any time on the characterization of the main characters. and then the ending is like, "having daughters is great". cool message...? anyway, terrible book.

aside from that, um, i'm going to try my hand at making a sock.



this is the sweet socks pattern from knit picks, and i'm going to make it in those colors (the yarn is stroll sock yarn). it should be fun, despite the fact that i don't wear socks. anyway, back to work !

p.s. i also happened to watch part of kristie alley's reality show and it was equal parts boring, depressing, and funny (maybe slightly skewed toward boring). i think i'd really like her if she wasn't a scientologist and asshole who owns exotic pets.