Cleolinda everywhere

To begin! Thanks for all the birthday wishes, guys. I am now, for the record, 32.





Secondly, Sister Girl and I were going through some old pictures yesterday, and.... well. ( Festive baby Cleo )


Meanwhile, the real reason we are here:

Previously on Varney the Vampire: Please, spay and neuter your Norwegian vampires. ( As promised, an entire chapter about matches )

Internets, I am not only dying of blarg, but I think we may be entering the Raspy Cough stage. I WILL NOT GO QUIETLY. Seriously, I will be coughing all night, there will be no "quiet."

Meanwhile, this weekend's Secret Life is shaping up to be a bit on the long side, but I don't know that anyone will complain.

Let's have a little Varney, as promised.

( What, you don't keep a crowbar in your room? )

So it took a lot longer than I thought it would. The migraines are chagrining my recapping mojo, you guys. Anyway, for better or worse, Stephenie Meyer has posted the first half of Midnight Sun on her website, for free, and I said I'd recap it once it was legally available, and now it is, so here we are. ( The erotic tension of comparing onion root slides )

So you're here from part one? Okay, before we get into this, let's do two things. Number one: If you are pregnant, do not read this section of the book. You may not even want to read this section of the commentary. I don't even plan on having kids and it squicked me the hell out. It's like David Cronenberg took over the book for a hundred pages or so, seriously.

(Another reason you can skip this? This section is kind of like the camping section in Deathly Hallows: just when you're ready to kill yourself from boredom, you find out there's another hundred pages of it.)

I would also like to state this clearly and up front before I inadvertently offend someone: ( Babies are awesome! )

Okay, second thing: ( Roll call! )


( Onward: Book Two, Jacob! )

The continued adventures of sparkly vampires and the emoteens who love them. (See also: Twilight; New Moon.) By the way, for anyone who was having trouble with the video the other day, trailer_spot has fixed us up a direct download of the five-minute Robert Pattinson interview where he politely, respectfully, Britishfully talks about how ridiculous Edward and Bella are.

Oh, and I was psychic, as I so often am, in bringing up Wuthering Heights the other day, because it's apparently a big plot point in Eclipse. Maybe Alice will let me hang out with her now? So that's what I'll be listening to while reading this time; for the first book I put the David Cook stalker-rock cover of "Hello" on repeat ("I've been alone with you inside my mind..."), and for the second, Dido's "Here with Me," because it seemed like the angstiest thing I had on hand. Although I guess I could also go with Evanescence's "My Tourniquet," complete with the Romeo + Juliet sample of Claire Danes screaming "I LONG TO DIE!!!" ( Why can't you just date the werewolf next door? He's practically family! )

So... I finally read an e-book of Twilight last night, and... I kind of love it like cake. With rainbow sparkles sprinkles. Carried in by ponies. Pink ponies. If I had a hard copy, I would snuggle it. I'm going to read the other two, but they'll have to wait until I reread the first one again. Note: I also own and have seen Van Helsing about fifteen times, so... my loving something is not necessarily the most ringing endorsement in the world. I'm just saying.

So, in a nutshell, here's what the book is about: ( I am not making any of this up )

ETA: Read a first half of Midnight Sun/large chunks of Twilight recap here; read more Twilight series recaps here.

Oh my God, Melville's Pierre. I hope to God that this is not on the exam in any substantial way, because I finally got to the end by way of a hard skim, and I really do not want to spend any more time on this book, what with the ridiculously florid style that may or may not be purposely satirical (and if it is, maybe it ain't satirical enough). Maybe it's the kind of book that grows on you, I don't know. All I know is, we were warned that it was "really weird" and "deals with incest," and I was like, "Well, you just described half the internet right there, bring it on," and then in the first chapter you find out that Pierre and his mother are a little too close. Like, they call each other brother and sister, and they're so soppy over each other that you'd be disgusted even if they were completely legal, unrelated husband and wife. And Pierre is in love with Lucy Tartan (...okay), which Pierre's mother approves of entirely, because she figures Lucy will totally roll over and basically let her (Pierre's mother) continue to be the wife in the relationship.

( And then I find out that that's not even the incest the professor was talking about )

Meanwhile, the jeans I ordered came in yesterday. They're a lighter blue than I wanted, but they fit me like a charm, so all's well. Plus, Em is coming over for Lost tonight and I am making my famous Italian chicken salad, which is not "chicken salad" in the salad-spread sense of the term, but rather a green tossed salad with sliced grilled chicken and tomatoes and pepperoncini and mozzarella and roasted red pepper dressing and, if you can get it, crusty French bread. Mmm.

I may go ahead and post the Lost discussion entry early, but postdated, so I won't forget. Also, if you have previously commented anon, please consider taking two seconds to get a free LJ account, because anon commenting will still be off. And if someone does decide to make trouble anyway, please IGNORE THEM ENTIRELY, I am begging you. If you still feel like I need to know about it, email me at cleolinda @ livejournal.com, because I turn off email notifications on Lost entries (for reasons that will be obvious if you look at the average comment count).

Hmm... what else... Out of curiosity, is anyone else going to the midnight Goblet of Fire screening at the Vestavia Rave tomorrow night? The temperature has dropped beautifully, so I probably will be able to wear my Ravenclaw scarf. Not that this will help you identify me, I'm sure, but if anyone else is going, I'll post a more helpful identifier closer to time.

(The last time I went to a midnight or opening night screening: Two Towers in 2002. Because yes, I have to trot this piece out every year. Some people have pieces they post every Christmas; I have the time we nearly died at the movies. P.S. It is almost entirely true.)

Fun Triwizard Challenge games at the official site.

CRUCIO!

Another Memoirs of a Geisha link, this time from la_sonnambula: You too can be oppressed by societal standards of beauty, just like a geisha!

drpeprfan: "I found this online and it made me laugh, I don't know if it would interest you or not, but it's called 'If Dr. Seuss wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation.'"

Celebrity Rent wank!

And in more serious news, from anniesavoy: "I read an article recently that said up to 5,000 people are still missing with regard to Katrina, and I was shocked. I can't imagine why that is not front page news! Ai yi yi."

You guys? I thought George Lippard's The Quaker City, etc., was the pinnacle of awesome trashy 19th-century lit, with its Tarantino-esque brain-splatterings and constantly heaving bosoms. I was so, so wrong. George Thompson's Venus in Boston (and apparently you have to be named "George" to write antebellum porn) is spectacular. ( Yeah, you know why the wine's so great? COME OVER HERE AND TAKE A LOOK )



 

Holy crow, what a day. I was so tired that I basically came home and slept for five hours after I finished checking my email, which would bring us up to... now.

Rewind. I finished my paper about an hour before the exam, mostly because I just hit this point where the paper was still a couple of pages short, but... I'd said everything I wanted to say. You know? So I just called it a day.

I did get to the point where I start making up words. Like "paganinity."

Random thought: I hate "Proserpina" and vastly prefer "Persephone." Stupid Romans.

And I read all of Samson Agonistes! (...she says, in that slightly smug, very self-satisfied tone reserved for the accomplishment of things you were supposed to do anyway. Possibly two weeks ago, in fact.) By the way: Samson is an idiot. ( YOU ARE SLEEPING ON THE COUCH, MISTER )

I think I rocked the exam, though. ( Read more... )

(Am officially done with class for the semester. The frantic book-writing begins NOW.)

Then Mom and I went out to Sol Azteca for lunch, since she'd taken half a day off to get errands done. We came home and packed up Vladimir's Christmas Package #1, and he told me to send it to Croatia via "plain U.S. mail," but Mom was like, "Oh, right, UPS." ( This did not turn out well )

So after we choked down our bile of shock, we paid the nice UPS people for their superb packing job ($7.50) and fled. And then we had a mild argument about whether there really is a difference between UPS and the USPS. I'm pretty sure you can imagine how this went. So there at the post office, we mailed off a shitload of letters from Mom's office and bought Christmas stamps and... (drumroll)... got me a PO box! So if you ever need to send me anything (I'm talking, like, letters here, not "your firstborn children" or anything), address it to:


Whee!

ETA: I totally forgot to finish the saga of the Christmas package. We got to USPS to send it air mail for $60. Not bad for a twenty-pound box.

Knitting: I found an awesome scarf pattern that's like, "Knit so many stitches to a row, and then knit rows until you're tired. The end." I will be using this one to start off with, once I get my needles and my yarn.

Still to do: the Lost recap. I haven't had dinner yet, but I think this one will be fun, so once I've made a sandwich or something I'm coming back up here to knock that out.

Fundraising: Please, please, please, if you have donated (and if this is a bad time for you, that is totally, totally okay--don't worry about it), please go log what you gave here, so I can add it up. No one will see the answers but me (and my mother, who has generously offered to calculate the tally for us so I can get on to writing the book and the recap, and she doesn't know any of y'all from Adam's housecat). What I had discussed doing with iczer6 is, once we have an updated tally, setting a goal above that, and we meet that goal, I'll post Lemony Snicket or Phantom of the Opera or something in Fifteen Minutes, which I normally might not do just because I won't have time this month (we'll have to see if I can do anything else not related to the book). I'm not saying that a "Fifteen Minutes" is all that thrilling a prize, but it's something within my power to offer, so... yeah. (Also, because it's straight parody, not fanfiction per se, I don't think we'll have any legal complications.) Let me know if that sounds all right with y'all, and if no one has any problems with that, I'll take it to m15m, which is a whole new pool of people, and we'll get started.