Weekend
Friday evening, Kam and I watched National Treasure 2. It was fun and silly; perhaps not quite as much fun as the first one, and I felt it had more slow bits and more really totally goofy bits and a couple of confusing plot holes; but then again, I may just be misremembering what I thought of the first one.
At any rate, the second one was worth seeing if you liked the first one, but you definitely have to be in the right frame of mind for it. Serious Literature this ain't.
Saturday I read a bunch of submissions and washed my tie-dyed T-shirts. Stopped by the game store (as mentioned previous entry), stopped by Andrea E's birthday party. Turned out there were more people there who I wanted to see than I'd expected (in particular, I got to meet Becky E's 1-year-old daughter, and I hadn't known Todd D was going to be there), and Geoff showed me their new rooftop solar panels (I've been vaguely contemplating getting some for my place), so I ended up being an hour late to the next stop of the evening: games with Kam and Greg L and Lori.
Well, okay, first it was dinner (where I taught them the pencil-and-paper game Black; more on that later). Then Tsuro, then a somewhat frustrating game of Carcassone, then San Juan. I thought San Juan did a remarkably good job of condensing the great dynamics of Puerto Rico into a card game, and I'm intrigued by the idea of using the same cards for everything: buildings, products, currency. It obliquely reminded me of the RPG Wraith, where (I gather) other wraiths are compressed and molded into chairs, money, and so on.
It turned out that my usual Puerto Rico strategy didn't translate very well into San Juan, but it was still fun.
Today I finally got some exercise, for the first time in a couple weeks. The cough is essentially gone, finally (the frequency dropped to only every few hours this past week, which has let me sleep), and during my WorldCon trip Kam came over and put up a shelf above my treadmill, which has been gathering dust for a couple years now. So I put my laptop on the shelf, and now I can read submissions while I walk on the treadmill. Did that for 45 minutes or so--worked pretty well. Had lunch, felt sleepy, decided to take a quick nap.
Drifted in and out of sleep for a while, woke up four hours later, still groggy.
Kam and I had talked about possibly going to the beach today, which would have been nice. I haven't really been to the beach this year (unless you count Walden Pond), and the summer is winding down. But I decided I had too much to do, so I stayed home.
So it was a little disappointing to spend the afternoon napping. But I certainly needed the sleep, and I needed the downtime too.
'Cause today would have been my mother's 65th birthday.
I was okay. Didn't really think much about her. But I definitely needed a low-key low-stress day at home.
I read some more subs, had dinner, played Dance Dance Revolution for 45 minutes, read a couple more subs, started blogging.
I think I'll read a couple more subs, then watch Disney's 1953 animated Peter Pan, which I'm pretty sure I've never seen (though I think I'm fairly familiar with it by osmosis). Kam and I watched the 2003 live-action film a week or two ago, and found it really interesting and pretty well-done; I figured I ought to finally watch the old Disney one just for general cultural literacy purposes. And it's short, and I suspect it'll be pretty fluffy, which seems about right for tonight.
It's been very nice to have a weekend mostly at home, without having to think about forthcoming travel, and without anything urgent requiring my attention. I have a long to-do list of fairly important stuff, very little of which got done this weekend, but I'm hoping I can tackle that piecemeal starting in the next couple days. In the meantime, it's really nice to get a chance to relax a little.
Of course, there are zillions of things I want to blog about. I have two or three entries-in-progress from WorldCon, and I want to ask for info about the game of Black, and I've been meaning for ages to write about DDR. And the live-action Peter Pan and other movies I've seen lately. And various political and/or sf-related things. And so on.
But all that can wait. Off to read subs and watch a movie.
