The progress on my book continues. I’m 87% through the revisions, and am about to tackle the climax of the story. Come on, big creative push!

I got my hands on the DVD for Hawk the Slayer, and am very pleased I made the acquisition. It’s a sword and sorcery movie from 1981, and is actually watch-able, in a Beastmaster kind of way. The dialogue, characters and plot are all hilariously awful. I place the movie somewhere between average and good. It’s not “good enough” to be good, but it isn’t “average enough” to be average. This is the kind of movie you can watch with friends and have some laughs. Though nothing will beat the sheer WTF-ness of The Core. All I can say is that the universe must have taken pity on me for having suffered through The Return of Captain Invincible, and compensated me with a movie that is both bad and fun.

Just finished Season 1 and 2 of Heroes by means of Netflix. K’s new computer, plus our nifty high speed FIOS connection, equals “watch now”. Apparently, you can watch Netflix movies on your computer, who knew? Because we subscribe, we get a certain amount of free hours of viewing each month, so we’ve been draining that account dry to get caught up with the show. Maybe I’ll go into analytic detail of the show in another post, but for now all I’ll say is the show is worth watching. Lots of problems and plots that don’t add up, and Season 2 drops in quality significantly, but I’d say Season 1 was a heck of a lot of fun.

Musically, I’ve been listening to The Cure’s Wish and really digging it a lot. It comes on the heels of Disintegration, which carries the distinction of being my big breakup album. So to hear the post-breakup energy many years later after putting college way behind me, it’s very cathartic and enlivening. I’ve also been listening to Deutsch Nepal, a dark ambient sound that I’m really starting to dig. I’m going to have to get some more of this stuff. It puts me in the zone when I need to concentrate at work or hash my book revisions out.

On the cat zone, K and I got a large bath mat for the upstairs bathroom, and Frankie loves it. She uses it as a springboard to dash downstairs, then comes back up and rests on the bunched up mat. Frankie made sure to trill at K and give her the head-butt leap of affection to let her know this was approved. Meanwhile, Michael and Blink got a new soft throw to lay on. The fuzzy warm goodness does well on the couch, and when a human sits there with the throw over them, the two cats gravitate. Even independent Frankie has been taking turns resting on it. Wow!

My car was broken into the other night. I drive a bucket, and one of the doors doesn’t lock all the time. Needless to say I never keep anything valuable in there. Just a glove compartment jammed full of napkins ripped off from fast food joints, some moist towelette packets, and a pad of paper with a pencil. I could follow the progress of the intruder exactly. First, the pad and pencil tossed casually to the floor of the car. Then all the napkins got shoved out of the way and left on the passenger seat. Finally the moist towelette packets had been thrown on the ground outside of the car in disgust before leaving the door semi-closed. I had to laugh, because it’s a lot of effort to clear the compartment out for zero returns.

It may be winter for all practical purposes, but I’m still looking forward to next spring’s planting. K and I got ourselves a garden weasel finally, and aim to test it out as soon as the ground dries out a bit from the recent snow we had. The ground hasn’t hardened quite yet with the cold, but the weeds and other plants are on the defensive. I’ll give the scoop on how reliable this ding dang darn thing is when compared to the TV commercial soon enough.

And on a final note, I have yet to begin writing my Xmas cards. The beat down looms!