Being married to a guy who is older than me has given me an unusual "always the youngest person in the room" series of experiences, so I can usually just chill about aging worries. 99% of the time I feel pretty OK with aches and pains, since all and all I'm pretty healthy,  and damn grateful for it. However, there are weird moments when I realize how many years have passed since I was a youngish woman, like when I read a medical report on "Wayne, Bruce's physical and MRI, DOB. 2/16/1971"

/random

I spent a big chunk of the weekend reading up on what is going on with the OTW. I love the archive, I've been using it more and more as authors have started using it more regularly. Fanlore is a great resource for me, specially when I'm dipping my toes into a new fandom. So, er, yeah. This feels BIG and I can't help but follow along as things develop.

I've been told by a masseuse that I might be suffering from a dislocated rib, which has been caused/aggravated by doing crunches. This means going to a chiropractor, which, eeeek, I hate. I've gone to one before, 3-4 sessions, enough to realize that being cracked and pulled is not something I can stand very easily. But now I'm motivated by weird aches and pains, so off to see a chiro and hope I can find one I can trust. Last guy I saw was a bit creepy and smiled too much.

As fr TVeeee, I'm almost caught up on my watching. I can do a couple of hours sometimes, but usually after an hour terribly antsy in a way my younger self would find odd. But yes, I'm now caught up on Fringe, Supernatural and (new good show, yay) Homeland. Is Dexter getting any better after episode 1? Season premiere felt so *meh* I kind of forgot about it.

So, Heaven. I've now had 3 people tell me it's fun, so I'm going to hunt it down. Right now I have no idea what network airs it or what's its basic premise.

I've moved over to Pinboard for tagging fic, but I miss the old Delicious terribly. It had been my main resource for finding new fic to read. I hope that eventually I can use it to find fics that have been tagged several times, once I have to move outside the people I follow in my network when I'm looking for new stories.

http://ask-soulless-cas.tumblr.com/

Via lithiumdoll 

Ah Tumblr, so many unexpected giggles.

No Google, I didn't mean "squirts" when I searched for the very SFW series Suits. Good thing I didn't do an image search first.

ETA: Oops, I guess you would be confused by my insistence on typing the show's name as Suirts. 

I wanted to like this movie, but damn, 20 minutes into the final battle I had enough. Also I suspect that the translation on the Netflix version is pretty bad, because that dialog was awkward in a way I remember seeing in English movies subtitled into Spanish.

Just saw "Rise of Planet of the Apes". Two three things:

1.- David Hewlett is never going to play a likable Simon Pegg kind of character, is he? :(

2.- Our future ape overlords are amazing and completely steal the movie. Humans? What humans?

3.- I'm having a hard time saying I enjoyed any other summer movie more.

Dear Lady at Henry's*:

I appreciate how you jumped to my aid when you saw that I had spilled hot soup on my hand, and that I was trying to figure out how to set down the laddle without burning myself even more. However, you applying a cheese block to my hand, making me drop the laddle onto the floor, which then splattered all over my pants and shoes, was perhaps not the best move.

Still, you're awesome to help me out and the shared giggle after the pain calmed down was a comfort,

Sincerely,

Me




*Henry's: Think Whole Foods, but 35% less expensive.

Our summer crops are coming in, with the favorite of mine being figs. They're still unusual enough that every single one is appreciated and eaten with much gusto. We have a young tree in our yard that will have it's first serious crop of fruit this year. Luckily we're getting a lot of sun, unlike last year in San Diego, although we have yet to get any seriously hot weather. That usually comes in later in the year, at weird times, like October.

It feels to me that even more so than good tomatoes, good figs can only be had when you can get to them quickly after ripening on the tree. I've had many bad figs in the past, with tough leathery skins or on the mushy end of their lives, already going off. Nevermind how expensive they can be and that organic ones are probably even more so.

I can't say how much I'm looking forward to experimenting with different ways of serving figs this season and sharing them with our friends.

I love the Miso flavor ramen with extra pork that this place sells close to the office. It's so delicious and yet everytime after I eat a bowl of their yumminess my body goes WTF ARE YOU DOING?



I wonder if they put in huge amounts of MSG into their broth or if there is something else going on. My mouth will be all puckered and salty tasting the rest of the day.

If I don't think about it too hard, Captain America was a lot of fun. The idealized 40s look is perfect eye candy, and there are funny lines, with Chris Evans looking pretty, a cool heroine played by someone I'd never seen before and Tommy Lee Jones being Tommy Lee Jones.

I'm very interested now in seeing if it's possible to pull all The Avengers characters together into one story without it being a disjointed mess.

That was a good example of going in to a movie with low expectations and coming out thinking it wasn't bad. That's the best I can say about this movie, eventhough for a while last year I was hopeful it would be good or even very good. But nah, it's too long and the dialog is predictable. OTOH, Daniel Craig being a quite believable man-with-no-name bad ass, looking incredibly good in his little cowboy outfit, was fun.

When actors show up in my dreams, it's never sexytimes, and more like awkward-weird.

Dream me was telling a friend of this one night stand I had had in my early 20s with Elijah Wood (I would explain, but I don't think I could make it less strange). Dream me was not making that up, and so my friend was properly impressed or just creeped out. Not unlike woken-up self, when I did the math and realized dream me had been bragging about having had a one night stand with an 8 year old. D:

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:

In my experience the number one thing that I hear people say after crossing the border from Tijuana into San Diego, "It's so clean!", to which I answer, "Money will do that!".

Number two, especially when they come to visit me: "It's so quiet!".

Living in Tijuana meant there was a lot of background noise most of the time, so that you kind of develop this filter, and unless it's really loud or almost standing next to you, you might not notice. When I first moved over to San Diego, after marrying native San Diegan Mr. L, I was surprised at how much a dog barking in the house next door bothered him. It has taken a long time but now I've become almost as sensitive to noise as he has, at least here at home. When I go and visit my mom and dad I can turn on the filter again, so that all the honking, dog barking and rooster crowing sort of becomes white noise.

My cousin is visiting L.A. with her whole family, and I think the quietness of it all, combined with the lack of pedestrians, is kind of freaking them out.

Normally I could be a lot more chill about LJ being down for 3 days, but I've been looking forward to a fic posting in the SPN big bang, so I've been checking in every few hours. I can't remember how long it took LJ to get over it's last DDoS attack, but was it longer than 3 days?

[please insert the frowniest of faces]

I grabbed The Last Werewolf at COSTCO, which is filling in for the kind of reading experience I usually get from fanfic. Fast and fun, with nods here and there to pop culture, without getting too cute. Well, so far. It's a quick read at under 300 pages, so I'm crossing my fingers it will continue to be as good. I'm so looking forward to reading more of it tonight.

ETA: Adding some people to my reading list, since this LJ outage is that kind of thing that moves me out of my normal reading zone. Thankfully there is also AO3, which hasn't resulted in any new fics that make me incredibly happy, but has provided a chance to reread some excellent stories. I tend to read fic way too fast, which is not conducive to my complete appreciation.

Fleshflutter's SPN BigBang fic was supposed to be posted today, but apparently Livejournal has been not working properly for 2 days now >:(

Also, I picked the wrong time to decide I should start posting to my Spanish LJ again.

The weather was surprisingly mild, although we did work up a sweat even at the slow pace we had to take in the rain forest, because some of the trails were not that easy. Machetes were out making a way for us. So we were noisy, which was not good for any kind of wildlife watching, but it did give us a chance to be inside the forest, be quiet and just hear the howler monkeys.



The only way to really see anything for us was to go on the boat excursions, which we we did most days 3 times a day, 5:50 am, 4pm and 8pm. The forest walks were at 10 am, but not every day. They should have been though, because it made us hungry for the great food the cook served up for each meal.

Before posting anything else I should link to one of the sites that are brokers for the Tucano cruise, which has photos and detailed descriptions of the boat. It was a pretty comfortable way to visit the rain forest, since we had little cabins with AC where we could relax. There were a lot of siestas taken.

Having never fished in my life, catching a piranha as my first fish ever seems to have been the most memorable touristy moment of our trip to Amazonas. I've mentioned it often enough to people around me, including the fish fry that followed, because I thought it was fun. Some people made the D: face at the idea of eating piranha, but my mental rule that 99.9999% of food, if fried, is pretty palatable, holds.

Got shots Friday and now we're taking typhoid pills this week, getting ready for the trip to Brazil. We'll only be there for a week, but it's on the Amazon and Rio Negro, so this means we're spending a scary amount of money on making sure we don't get sick. This also means getting long lists of all possible side effects of taking so much stuff, as well as other possible health hazards. Rabies? It could happen!

We still need to get malaria and cipro pills for the actual trip, along with great quantities of mosquito repellent. This is one more reason my personal preference for vacations tends towards cities, in cool climates.