the best imitation of myself

when last i managed to update about life in general, gjstruthseeker was on her way into town: and she got here! and she stayed for a few days, during which we stayed up until five a.m. and knocked out all the SGA we hadn't seen together (excepting, still, "grace under pressure" and "the tower") plus various sad and bizarre and adorable items from the CVs of david hewlett and joe flanigan (in re: canadian cinema: o.O . . . O.o) and for the millionth time she tried to get me to articulate what it is i love about lt. col. john sheppard; she did not emerge victorious. more on that much later. *waves hand*

family came into town after that, my two cousins with their families, and we had tea for my dad's birthday last sunday with what felt and sounded like fourteen small children bouncing around the house, but was in reality only six. cake and coffee is delicious, but not sustenance, so i crashed after all the company except cousin m. had left, while we were getting down chanukkah decorations and setting up our menorahs (we have seven or eight, most handmade, and in our house everyone present gets to light one). good times! averted the small crisis with hydration and some protein, and then we got down to the serious business of scarfing down sweet-potato latkes and playing dreidel for pistachio nuts.

special to isilya: i have not forgotten about recipes for you! curried sweet-potato latkes are at the top of the list.

i had a dentist appointment on monday (or maybe tuesday? something). the receptionist called the day before to remind me, which was a damn good thing, as i'd had no clue. unfortunately i must have misheard her over the phone, because i showed up an hour early to what turned out *not* to be a 9:50 appointment after all. *facepalm* however! this wasn't even close to as bad as the two—two!—times i showed up an hour early to my wretched 8:30 a.m. anthro of religion class. so i ended up sitting with my book (always bring a book to doctor's appointments) in the bagel shop at the other end of the plaza and had a bagel and coffee (good bagels; lousy waitstaff) before, you know, a dental cleaning. so awesome. everything looks good, still cavity-free, blah blah blah have you ever considered bleaching your teethcakes.

randomly: the dog had some kind of skin irritation on his back, which the vet duly shaved and treated him for, and then they put him in one of those lampshade collars for the next two weeks so he couldn't worry at the patch. he's pathetic in it: he keeps knocking into things and trying to fit through small spaces, and i know i shouldn't think it's ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS, but i DO.

in general this past week was characterized by the successive lighting of more and more candles, the playing of several games of dreidel (note: dreidel is an amazingly boring game), and the eating of more and more delicious fried food. chanukkah says, "they tried to kill us, they didn't succeed, let's eat!" and "fried food: it's not just delicious, IT'S THE LAW." with various company (including cousin m., my visiting cousin l. and her two daughters, and malelia_honu) in attendance on different nights, there have been three different kinds of latkes, salmon fritters, southwestern eggrolls, and—for the coup de grace this afternoon—sufganiyot, aka doughnuts with powdered sugar. and now we are putting away the electric wok and never speaking of this again until next year. after thanksgiving, the cookie-making FRENZY my mother got caught up in making gifts for colleagues, my father's birthday, and the holiday that oil built, we're calling uncle. it's going to be all whole grains, big green salads, and steamed things for us for a while. also i'm going to whip out my map and compass and try to find my way back to a regular routine at the gym. *scans horizon*

last night we had cheese and crackers and shrimp cocktail, and three of us (my mother, cousin m., and i) polished off two bottles of champagne. if it's true that whatever you're doing at midnight determines what you're going to be doing for the rest of the year, i was frantically posting last-minute john sheppard recs to rec50 with a three-glass buzz on; i don't know if that bodes well or ill.

SPEAKING of rec50, my john sheppard recs are all done, and you can find my table with links to all 46 of them here (or check out the john sheppard tag at the community here). i'm signed on for rodney for round two. things that make me cry are web pages with no self-referential url, authors who go by two or more names, and smart quotes. also fake lj-cuts (see: the part where i like to click on the link to a page, not its cut-tag, meaning i'm clicking on the WRONG THING if your lj-cut is really external) and target="_blank"—because i'm perfectly capable of opening a link in a new tab myself, kthx.

there have been, like, fourteen million stories posted on the internets, and i have fifty pages of holiday-challenge fic recs saved for sorting through later, encompassing yuletide, sga_santa, undermistletoe, shackinup_sesa, jingle bells, batman smells, ds_seekritsanta, DWNOGA, and go_exchange. the only yuletide fic i've read so far is istanbul (not constantinople), a singin' in the rain story which i recommend here without reservation. it's don and cosmo on the vaudeville circuit, and it's perfect! so well-tuned to the times and to them.

gjstruthseeker was at home for a while, then up in lakeland securing housing to go with her shiny new job, but she's here again now. she came in for the tail end of brunch at cousin m.'s today (featuring bagels and lox, blintzes, and MIMOSAS). right now she's sleeping on my bed and has been since ten p.m., when she said she wasn't falling asleep, she wasn't—maybe she would take a nap. *pets her deluded little head*

frankly, i've been waiting for wilma to bide its time over the yucatán just long enough for the jet stream to stop dipping, at which point the storm would continue on its north-northwesterly track, eventually slamming into the gulf coast. it's been that kind of year.

instead the hurricane has been over land for days now and has been downgraded to category 2 (100 mph winds), but seems to finally, finally be moving. the experts are still predicting a sharp turn to the northeast and a lot of acceleration to get to the west coast of florida by tomorrow night and the east coast half a day later. broward county schools have cancelled class on monday. my dad put up most of the shutters tonight (the ones we didn't bother taking down after the last storm failed to do much damage) and will put up the rest tomorrow morning, before brunch at cousin m.'s and hopefully before the weather gets too bad. and then she'll come over to our place with the kittens, and we'll bring over my grandmother and her aide, and it'll be a party!

on the fannish front:

a. as everyone seems to be doing these days, i have found can't take the sky and have been downloading caps and making icons from them like craaazy. you can find the finished ones from the first three episodes behind the cut.



( 30 total )

b. also i have found new atlantis; see above re: feverish downloading and subsequent icon-making.

c. i claimed john sheppard over at rec50. their motto is because reading is easier than writing, and that is so, so true. this has meant having to re-read the 499 atlantis stories i have saved to my harddrive, some of them more than once. my life = so hard. it's also meant i've been thinking more about fanon, canon, extra-canon, the magnification of canon, etc., etc.; more on that later.

d. at long last i have acquired and watched atlantis episodes 209 and 210! though i think i need to watch them again before my thoughts are anything like coherent. i'm ready for the post-ep fic i've been resolutely avoiding if anyone has recs.

e. in the absence of 1) a netflix subscription, or 2) money, i have raided the library catalog for television-shows-on-dvd, and though i found it sadly lacking, i have managed to request the first disks of arrested development, the office (BBC version), and babylon 5. on my list to see one day are also scrubs, numb3rs, coupling (BBC version), homicide, wonderfalls, wise guys, quantum leap, mst3k, farscape, battlestar gallactica, stargate: sg-1, the dead zone, and all or most of the CSIs. as i asked silentfire the other day, WHEN DID SCI-FI HAPPEN TO ME? i blame fandom. <3!

while i was in the library catalog, i also requested BOOKS: jonathan strange and mr. norrell by susanna clark; the man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales by oliver sacks; kitchen confidential by anthony bourdain; and the man who loved only numbers: the story of paul erdős and the search for mathematical truth by paul hoffman.

f. did everyone but me already know about shrift's firefly story big damn zombies, sir? jayne gets ZOMBIFIED. i laughed so hard i started wheezing. i don't even want to give away any of the lines, just read it if you haven't already.