the mermaid cafe

Work is busy - it's committee week! - so have some quick takes:

- I enjoyed season 3 of Derry Girls a lot. It made me tear up a few times, though I also felt like it was broader in some ways than previous seasons (especially Erin and Clare). I really liked the long cold open for the finale episode (♥ORLA!♥) and the finale tag.

- I finally watched Thor: Love and Thunder, and have very mixed feelings about it. The humor mostly didn't work for me, and I thought it mostly didn't work with the heavier subject matter - there's uneasy co-existence and tonal whiplash and then there's whatever a lot of this was. Also, it was so fucking long and I felt that. That said, certain things really worked for me - ( are these even really spoilers )

- I also watched Enola Holmes 2 and enjoyed it, though ( spoilers )

- I did some good cooking this weekend - I made one of my favorite recipes (rustic chicken with garlic gravy), though I used apple cider vinegar in place of white wine and it was too vinegary. I'll either stick with more chicken broth next time or try it with balsamic instead.

- I also made this cheesy pasta bake (NYTimes link, see below for text of recipe), which was good but not nearly cheesy enough. I think I might use shredded mozzarella next time in addition to the fresh. Or more ricotta. But overall, it's a keeper. I'm waiting for my Penzey's delivery to bring me their sweet Italian sausage spice mix, so I can even skip the actual sausage in the future. I don't mind it but it's more of a thing I like very occasionally rather than something I eat regularly. (I also didn't have the fennel seeds, and would probably just use tomato puree going forward, but that's personal taste.)

( recipe text )

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Just got back a little bit ago from seeing Thor: Ragnarok, which I enjoyed mightily (pun completely intended).

( spoilers )

So yeah, I didn't pay full price, but having seen it, I would have done so happily. It's highly entertaining and a lot of fun. I don't know if I'd put it in my top 5 Marvel movies, but it's up there.

Also, we got the Black Panther and Last Jedi and Pacific Rim: Uprising trailers, which was great. And a commercial for The Runaways, which is going to be on Hulu. Which means I probably won't watch it, but it looked good - ( spoiler )! The other trailers were for movies that all looked awful. So fucking awful.

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in the middle of board meeting prep, about which the less said the better, but two things:

1. the weather is finally warming up to proper June temperatures yay!

2. The Chris-ening! Hee! (thanks to twistedchick for the link!)

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A Halloween grab bag:

1. Today would have been my mother's 80th birthday. I miss her. but!

2. She'd have been excited about the Mets in the World Series, and especially about David Wright (aka, Captain America) having a 4 RBI night, and Noah Syndergaard bringing the hammer down and then basically inviting the Royals to come at him, bro:

"I certainly wasn't trying to hit the guy, that’s for sure," he said. "I just didn't want him getting too comfortable. If they have a problem with me throwing inside, then they can meet me 60 feet, six inches away. I've got no problem with that." (source)

NEW YORK – In the afterglow of a World Series debut in which he threw a 98-mph fastball in the general vicinity of the leadoff hitter's head, won the game and capped that victory by threatening to kick his opponents' asses, Noah Syndergaard, the New York Mets starter with the last name of a Viking, the nickname of a comic-book superhero and the disposition of a man with no damns left to give, sneered at the fauxtrage burbling around him.

Syndergaard is 23 years old, a 6-foot-6, 240-pound Texan, stubborn as a steer. So, yeah, he said. He did throw that fastball over the dome of Alcides Escobar, the Kansas City Royals' leadoff hitter with a propensity to whack at first-pitch fastballs. He did it because the idea of Escobar standing comfortably in the batter's box, dead red on that pitch, bothered him. (source)

The Series is on now. I have to laugh at how prior to the start of the series, the Royals were all chirping about how they were going to pitch Murphy inside to make him uncomfortable, but when the shoe's on the other foot, suddenly it's "weak" and "unprofessional" and "unsportsmanlike." (Also, that pitch was not going to hit Escobar.) It was nice to hear Syndergaard own up to it, and own up to it being premeditated, even, unlike so many in the past who've claimed the ball "slipped" or "just got away from [them]." Tonight should be fun! They can tie it up, with local kid Steven Matz on the mound. Let's go Mets!

2a. I have given up on the Fox announcers - they made me want to claw my ears off - so I've been streaming the game on ESPN Radio and keeping the tv on mute, even though the radio is about 30-45 seconds behind the tv broadcast.

3. That dual media setup allowed me to watch the Rangers while listening to the Mets, and Mats Zuccarello had a hat trick last night! Woo!

4. In other sports news, I'm sad about Grantland closing down. As you could maybe tell by how often I linked to them, I enjoyed the site a lot.

5. Turning to media fandom, last night I posted quick and dirty photosets of how I'd cast the all-ladies-all-the-time Ocean's Eleven (if it's a true reboot and not just a related universe story): Part 1, Part 2.

6. Carrie Fisher interviews Daisy Ridley:

FISHER: Listen! I am not a sex symbol, so that's an opinion of someone. I don't share that.

RIDLEY: I don't think that's the right—

FISHER: Word for it? Well, you should fight for your outfit. Don't be a slave like I was.

RIDLEY: All right, I'll fight.

FISHER: You keep fighting against that slave outfit.

RIDLEY: I will.

7. I panicked a little when I saw my Yuletide assignment last night. I was like, "DID I NOT DELETE THAT OFFER? MISTAKES HAVE BEEN MADE." but when I calmed down, I found that the prompts were plentiful and inspirational, and I talked to innie_darling and snacky about it, and now I think I know what I'm going to do. I hope I can do justice to it! *crosses fingers*

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Ugh! I just somehow lost my whole write up of Thor: The Dark World, and now I'm annoyed and don't want to do it again. I enjoyed the movie. Thor is my third favorite of the movie Avengers (after Steve and Natasha), and I think the movie did him justice. Precious Asgardian, indeed. ♥♥♥

Okay, I will say a little. ( spoilers )

I also watched this week's Legend of Korra and I'm kind of amused at the similarities ( spoilers )

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This weekend was awesome! I flew out to Milwaukee to visit devildoll for her birthday, as she was having a big party. Which was also awesome! chicklet_girl, girlinthetrilby and carleton97 were also there, so there was a lot of fangirlish glee and snark.

There was also some amazing food - I had some great mac and cheese at the Honey Pie, and I attended my first Friday night Wisconsin fish fry, which was not a ritual I was aware of prior to this trip. (I had a grilled chicken sandwich that was really good, since I can't eat seafood.) The food at the party - all made by DD's mom (well, we made the grilled cheese sandwiches, which were also very good) - was awesome, and the Surrender Dorothy cosmos packed quite a punch. And were also violently green, which is something I appreciate in a cocktail. There was also a fantastic pumpkin cake with wicked green cream cheese icing, and a planetarium show. It was a very cool party!

Yesterday, DD and I went for brunch and I had the berry nut French toast, which was also fantastic. If I'd had my camera with me (my phone takes shitty pictures), I would be sharing pics of all the fantastic food, but since I didn't, I'm not.

Anyway. Then we met up with the Minneapolis fangirls and ate a raspberry sour cream pie that they'd brought from Norske Nook. Oh my god, it was pink and gelatinous and FABULOUS. SO DELICIOUS.

After pie, we went to see Thor, which I liked a lot. Surprisingly, I didn't hate the romance - I thought it was sweet and funny, though I had a moment of "Luke and Leia's mom and Jim Kirk's dad!?" but I liked Natalie Portman for the first time in a while. I also liked what little we saw of Kat Dennings, who I wish would be in more things. Idris Elba was awesome, as well. I could listen to that man talk all day. And I am expecting a lot of fic about Sif, people. Because, yes. And Thor himself was like a big puppy who needed to be smacked in the nose with a rolled up newspaper a few times before he figured out how to be a person. And of course, Agent Coulson rules all. SO AWESOME. ( minor casting spoiler? )

Anyway, I enjoyed it, and while I'm still on the fence about Captain America, I'm kind of hoping they pull Avengers off. That would just be really neat.

After the movie, they dropped me off at the airport around 6 pm and I spent the next 7 and a half hours getting home. Just so you know, the flight is 1 hour 45 minutes. The trip from LGA to my apartment is about 30 minutes (less if you don't hit any lights). SEVEN HOURS. Because of bad weather at LGA. Luckily, I'd upgraded to business class, so I had a nice comfortable seat for the whole annoying journey. Best $50 I ever spent, I tell you what.

It did give me time to read one of the books I'd brought with me - The Secret Lives of Dresses by Erin McKean - which was sweet and funny and just perfect for reading on an airplane in a holding pattern, and leaving behind when we landed. I liked the concept more than the execution, though I enjoyed it well enough for what it was, and it was easier on my head than the other book I'm reading atm, The Poisoner's Handbook. Sometimes you don't want to read about people slicing up corpses to do experiments. Sometimes you just need some soothing rom com.

We were supposed to land at 10:10 pm NY time, and we landed at 1:23 am NY time, and the thing about LaGuardia is that it basically shuts down at midnight, so the cab lines were really fucking tremendous and there weren't as many cabs as there usually are. So it took a while to get into one. Plus there was some drama when one cabbie wouldn't load one lady's bag in the trunk and the dispatcher was like, do it, it's your job, so he did it, and they all got in the car and then for some reason he got out again and refused to drive them to their destination. We were all like, dude, what the fuck? because it was holding up the line. (It was cab # 1Y97, btw.) but eventually I got in a cab and my driver was great but chatty, and I was home by 2:20 and in bed by 2:30. Sadly, I didn't fall asleep until after 3. Sigh.

I'm just glad I'd taken today off to begin with, because I don't think I could have handled getting up at 7:30 am.

Anyway, it turns out I left my phone charger at DD's - usually I forget to pack it and have to buy one at my destination, so this was changing things up a little - which means that this morning I headed out to Radio Shack, except that the Radio Shack on 3rd Avenue is gone, so I continued over to Best Buy and got what I needed. I hope. The phone is plugged in now anyway, and should be charging.

I wasn't able to do more than skim LJ/DW this weekend, and I just went back skip=60 and quit, so if there's something you need me to know, you should comment.

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