roxy the obscure

somehow i totally fucking forgot my mom was visiting today? like, my mom lives 1000 miles away and i only see her once or twice a year, so it isn't like.. her driving down from the suburbs or something. how did i forget !

i did not update yesterday because we had a meeting from 9am to 3pm. we had our team retreat for work. i'm sort of bummed with the format- my team is split into two halves, and each half would have their own retreat in previous years. my team's retreat was going to my boss' house, eating a ton of delicious food, going over our business plans, and then going home early. i understand the value of having both halves of the team go over our business plans together, but it was just... a six hour meeting in our conference room. totally not fun. other teams got to paint ceramics !



that said, it wasn't too bad and it went by super fast and we got to go home afterward.

yesterday when i got home i took an epic nap (bad form !) and made a card for my craft swap recipient. i'd love to show it to you guys but i'm afraid that she'll somehow see it ! i also did a little more work on my herringbone neck thing:



seriously, most relaxing pattern ever. it looks really cool and it's super easy and knits up really fast. i've probably spent less than an hour on it so far. i also want to marry sheep shop yarn. here are some other colors i'm considering buying when i'm a millionaire:


modern


lilac


royalty


lime


ocean

at $12.50/skein at loop, and with my commitment to not buying yarn without a project in mind, i'm not really likely to buy all of those, but i love them ! and i've read that the yarn is discontinued so if i don't buy it now, when can i ! but i'm a miser and a scrooge and unless i can think up some projects i'm not getting them ! you guys just watched me convince myself of that, by the way.

oh, what else? i got mockingjay in the mail today ! i can't wait to read it and most likely be disappointed by it. i'm currently reading the girl with the dragon tattoo so i can write a scathing review of it a la my twilight reviews, but it is actually too boring and dull to even... scathe.



i'm about 150 pages in and so far all he's done is

- call everyone by their last names and have the characters all each other by their last names 300000000x
- use the phrase "wennerstrohm affair" like 700000x
- describe every single piece of furniture in every room ever
- wrote the most unnatural dialogue? like in an attempt to make the main character seem cool and professional, he actually made him the rudest most socially awkward person in the universe. and yet he writes about how awkward and weird lisbeth salander is but all of her conversations with people are polite and normal?

it's just like... not compelling? at all. i also feel like i'm reading "the socially awkward guy with no defining characteristics" because the aforementioned girl with the dragon tattoo has, so far, sent an email and took a picture of a thing. maybe she shows up more later, but i'm not really that interested because so far she's just a one dimensional character written by a dude who obviously wanted to fuck a thin "goth/punk" woman.

anyway, i have to rearrange my schedule a little because of my mom's visit. i was going to hang out with mouse and kev tonight but i probably shouldn't leave my mom alone on her first day here. i'm still going to see dangerbird and red devil on friday. i may also take off of work monday and tuesday ! the sky's the limit.

i'll leave you with this picture of baby meerkats in honor of my newfound love of meerkat manor



did you know meerkats are under 2lbs and 1 foot tall??? best dudes.

a light so dim

what's up ! hey ! it's monday and i feel refreshed and totally not annoyed at work even though i had to make a stupid powerpoint ! what's up !

on friday, i got out of work at 3 and immediately came home to take a giant nap. afterward i knitted for awhile, and then got ready to go to mill creek to see mouse's band. mill creek is in my neighborhood and is a fairly cheap and large bar with good food, buttttttt they didn't uphold the smoking ban until recently so i tried to avoid it. luckily they actually started to, so i could go there and bring my knitting and not end up stinking. i had a really good time- drinks were like $2.50 and dangerbird was good. i had minimal pleasant interaction with my exbf where we acknowledged that we barely remember dating aside from watching event horizon together and playing video games.



i haven't actually gotten drunk in awhile so i was trying really hard to act serious but everything i was saying was nonsense. also when i drink a lot i can't feel my teeth and christina said i was tapping my teeth constantly. whateverrrrrr. i had a good time, and mouse was unusually funny- i think he had a pepsi or something.

on saturday, christina and i had a wonderful day out. we went downtown to see a movie at the prince music theater. i've seen lots of movies there, as part of the film fest- almost all smart people boring silent movies with organ accompaniment and stuff- but since they are sort of struggling to stay open right now (and will most likely be sold by TD bank soon), they're showing first run movies. soooooo we saw the other guys at the prince !



it was... surprisingly good? it was really really super fucking weird, so of course christina and i liked it. i can't really give an intelligent review of it because it was just a bunch of weirdos being weird for 90 minutes, but it had a surprisingly low incidence of misogynist and homophobic jokes (though it did have a few, but i guess the joke was that marky mark was an asshole). i recommend watching it for free when it's on hbo.

after the movie, we... went to ihop ! i don't think i'd ever actually been to one before, but i felt like a teenager in the suburbs (though in the suburb of my rural shithole, WE used to go to denny's ! and the rich kids went to steak and shake). i want to invent a restaurant where they serve you one half of a pancake because that's all i ever want.


i got these without all the shit on them !

i got the harvest grain and nut pancakes which were pretty good, and they also watermelon lemonade which was cool. after we ate we were stuffed, so we came home to try to entertain ourselves without cable. we watched serenity, which i surprisingly didn't hate (i am Not a Joss Whedon Person) ! it was funny and entertaining, and redbelt from the movie redbelt is in it. he's super handsome and a wonderful actor and i really wish they'd chosen him to be the doctor instead of matt smith (that was a rumor for awhile)



i also finally finished my craft swap scarf ! i even blocked it, which i've never done before. the only thing that makes me feel weird is that like... it emitted a gross sulfur smell when it got wet and i still think it smells weird? anyway, it flattened out beautifully and is definitely long enough (which is what i was worried about). i just have to make a card for it and get it in the mail tomorrow. blocking really makes a huge difference, i feel stupid for never doing it before.


please ignore the dirty underwear and lampshade

on sunday, mouse and i were originally going to swim somewhere, but the weather was shitty, so we went to the mall. i saw two movies in one weekend, which is unusual cause i almost never go to the movies ! we decided to see the expendables because we're both meathead jocks.



what a surprise that my idea of what is cool and sexy does not match up with a 60 year old man's idea of cool and sexy? the women dressed like sylvester stallone got their costumes from kelly bundy's estate sale and the men dressed like... well, old douchebags. lots of the scenes were super tight shots of peoples' faces (rough when the cast is mostly like... plastic surgery disasters whose faces look like the dumpster behind the leather and ham factory) because some of the actors were never in the same room as others (there's a whole scene with stallone, arnold, and bruce willis where it's obvious they were never all in the same place) and the dialogue was full of super awkward one liners delivered poorly by stupid musclemen or thoughtful stallone-written dialogue sputtered out by people whose action movies never required them to learn english.

randy couture (mma fighter) played the crazy one and they kept talking about how crazy he was and how he sees a THERAPIST, but randy couture is like a bowl of oatmeal who can wrestle and was totally bland, but they did put a hawaiian shirt on him to indicate how zany he was. overall, i think this may have actually been a slightly better movie if stallone hadn't tried to shove every action movie star ever into it. the plot was mildly interesting and some of stallone's intelligence and sensitivity accidentally leaked out at some points. i also appreciate that stallone didn't actually get to kiss his love interest because she was super young and gorgeous and he was older than her father (a character in the movie).

speaking of her, what does it say about modern film that when the bad guys capture her, i was relieved when they only waterboarded her instead of trying to rape her? i've never seen a movie with a female hostage or prisoner where she wasn't raped, assaulted, or nearly raped and assaulted, so it was refreshing that they... well, used some other kind of torture? of course like 20 minutes later some prison guards try to rape her, though, but at least stallone saves her (um, spoiler?).

overall it was terrible, of course, but i appreciated that everyone got their moment to shine- randy couture got to wrestle steve austin, jet li got to karate dolph lundgren, mickey rourke gets a sort of touching soliloquy (he's such a good actor, too bad he looks like a hot dog you microwaved too long), jason statham got to beat up 2 different groups of guys, "crews" (the... pepe le pew of the movie white chicks?) got to blow people up with a gun, etc. plus i have a weird boner for dolph lundgren that i've had my entire life, so it was nice to see him wearing sleeveless shirts and picking on people who were smaller than him again. i do feel bad that eric roberts and steve austin were such BAD GUYS though- eric roberts is a soulless businessman who exploits a whole nation because of his greed, and steve austin is a thug who likes hitting women. luckily they both meet an end that involves guns, swords, AND fire (spoilers !!!!!).



jet li and jason statham were pretty fly too.

after the movie, we walked around the mall for a bit, which was fun because like what the fuck are me and mouse doing at the mall? we gawked at the rich people and how expensive all their stupid shit was, and i got some body butter at the body shop on sale (strawberry, satsuma, and moringa). then we went to su tao, the vegan chinese buffet in malvern. that didn't go that well because neither of us were buffet hungry, but i really wanted to go there cause i haven't been since my... 25th? birthday.


featured: spring rolls, fried vegetables, lemon chicken, some other chicken, steamed dumplings, fried rice

thennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn i came home and was very quiet while christina watched 'true blood' (which was excruciating because i kept wanting to go 'true BLEHHHHHHHHHH' in a dracula voice ! but i didn't !) and started my herringbone neck warmer with the sheep shop one i bought last weekend.



the pattern is super easy and fun to knit- i had a hard time making myself put it down to go to bed ! but eventually i did, and then i woke up and came to work, and now i'm going to eat lunch because it took me forever to write this.

p.s. when these aging action movie dudes get plastic surgery, why do none of them get their broken noses fixed? they all go right for lip plumping.