The Wordsmith's Forge

Still catching on details after Wednesday's storm. (See the Friday post.)  Thursday the power was still out when we woke up. That meant the refrigerator and its small freezer were losses. We already had plans for a trip to Champaign-Urbana, so we went ahead with that.


On the way up, we got lunch at Dairy Queen.

Along the way, more things happened and more news came in about the scope of the power outage, which still had no estimate of restoration time. :/ So we decided to get a hotel room for the night. We pulled into Super 8 in Champaign around 2:45 PM, solidly before the 3 PM check-in time. The manager very kindly let us in to a room which had already been cleaned, just not fully restocked, and sent a maid to stock the towels and such. I laid down another very hefty thank-you blessing. They're renovating the place, so there's plaster dust and stuff in the halls, but it was quite a nice cheap hotel room: full bathroom, viewscreen, minifridge and microwave (rare for a cheap room), one bed with two end tables and lamps, a desk and chair. No dresser or closet, just a few hooks on the wall. Crucially, the employees were calm and friendly. I get uneasy in a place where the maids are skittish; it usually means predators roam the halls looking for easy meat. There was a breakfast nook which closed early but was visibly set up with at least some real food options. I'd stay there again.

Thing is, we hadn't planned or packed for an overnight trip. We hadn't brought a change of clothes, toiletries, meds, a munchie bag, books to read, anything like that. All I had was my purse, lapstuff, and rain jacket. My partner Doug was missing a bunch of stuff too. So that required some chasing around different stores to find a few essentials.

We went to Barnes & Noble where I found several novels and a couple of magazines. Doug spotted season 5 of Dark Winds so we got that too for later. This was a way better haul than we've found in the last ... 5 years at least. \o/

Originally I wanted to check Ollie's for new cookbooks, of which we found 2, plus a novel; I need to remember to check there for novels. I wanted some sort of garden snips for my foraging bag, which I also found. We picked up a few extra personal items for the hotel stay.  "Good Stuff Cheap!" is a valid motto.  Also their signage is hilarious.  I think my favorite is still "Never criticize your wife's choices.  Remember you are one of them."  :D

The original motivation for the trip had been shopping at Costco. After some discussion, we decided to leave that for Friday morning, in hopes that the co-op would say our electricity was back on at home. It still wasn't back Friday night.

We ate supper at Captain D's. We got a terrific platter with 2 whitefish planks (quite good), 2 crab cakes stuffed into the actual crab shells (okay), butterflied shrimp (excellent), popcorn shrimp (quite good), fried okra (as good as Wood'n'Hog), and hush puppies (good even to me, and I'm not a fan of them; these are best I've had). It was about a third more than we could actually eat, so we carried out leftovers. Next time we can get a smaller portion, but it was just so delicious.

We had a whole lot of time to kill after all the stores were closed and before bedtime, and not much energy left. It occurred to me that we could knock off a big chunk of that by going to a movie theater, if there was anything worth watching. We wound up seeing Masters of the Universe, the new He-Man movie. As someone else put it, they didn't try to recreate the original; they just took the toys out of the box and played with them. \o/ The hardest thing to get right in a movie based on older canon is the tone, and they totally nailed that. Also, I'm pretty sure this is the best Skeletor rendition that I've seen. :D As much as I love villains who are right, I also enjoy those with a strong sense of self: Skeletor is a villain and enjoys it. Ya gotta love your job, or it will eat you alive. If you are at all a fan of the old TV cartoon (which I saw a little of), its toys (well designed but not something I played with), or even the 1987 movie (which I love), you definitely want to catch this one.  Don't step on the eastereggs, they're everywhere.

Worth mentioning: a lot of people criticize the cartoon as a 30-minute toy commercial. Well, kind of. In the 1980s it was popular to create a cast of characters and a setting, with backstories and plot concepts, that kids could then play with themselves. The cartoons were inspiration. They gave you ideas for setting up a play scene. But you could do something else if you wanted -- swap the characters from side to side, have them switch castles, mix in your other toys, and so on. Kids did that a lot. It was like fanfic, but with action figures. :D This is a hell of a lot better than some modern toy makers who try to create rigid roles for dolls or action figures with instructions for adults to stop children from using them any other way. Fuck that shit. Marry Evil-Lyn and Teela if makes you happy, and screw the script.

After the movie, we were kind of hungry. Most things were closed. But Merry Ann's Diner was still open. We decided to go in and check the menu. They had some good options, including a 24-7 breakfast menu. <3 diners. I got scrambled eggs and toast, while Doug got biscuits and gravy, all quite good.

Then we headed back to our hotel room, read for a while, and went to bed. The day was chaos in a lot of ways, but we got through it well enough.