dr4b | Entries tagged with movies

My landlady called me just as I got to the train station. Go figure. She says she'll try to get someone here on Tuesday morning. Bleh.

Anyway, I did exactly what I said I was going to do tonight:

- I went to Minami-Koshigaya and checked out Mint
- I went to Saitama-Shintoshin and ate a huge avocado burger at Kua'Aina
- I saw Gin-iro no Season at the movie theater up there

And because I suck at reviewing movies I'm just going to write my own little "abridged script". I kind of doubt anyone on my friendslist is going to see this movie anyway:

( Who needs a plot when you can have beautiful skiing scenes in the mountains of Nagano? )

I suppose it's a new year now, isn't it. Hello, 2006.

Today, Oren came over and Carl and I went to lunch with him at Chipotle. After that we came back here to my place, and played video games for several hours. They played Kingdom Hearts and some Ocarina of Time, while I worked on some Perl scripts and whatnot. (Believe it or not, that's really like my ideal work environment -- hacking away on my computer with some friends hanging out in the other room being amusing but not wholly distracting.) We also played Mario Kart 64 together for a while, and some Pokemon Puzzle League.

Zach came over and then we all sat around playing Tichu for god-only-knows-how-long. Zach and I were partners against Oren and Carl and for the most part we got annhilated, not that I mind because it was just for fun.

Eventually Zach had to leave, and we headed up to Lake Forest Park, ostensibly to go to Heidi and Cory's new years party, but we decided to stop for dinner first at Pagliacci's, and by the time we were done it was almost 10pm and Carl was falling asleep due to east coast time, so instead we came back here and put on the movie Mr. Baseball and watched that. (I love that movie! And since it is about Japanese baseball, I think Carl and Oren enjoyed it a little too.)

5 minutes before the end of the movie, we heard a bunch of loud bangs and booms from outside -- people were setting off fireworks all over because it was midnight! We went out on the balcony for a bit and watched the fireworks, then came back inside, ate some mochi, and watched the end of the movie.

So, come to think of it, this was an awful lot like last year's new years' eve -- hanging out with close friends from CMU, playing cards, watching a movie from 1992. Glad I got to spend a second New Year's in a row with Carl. This year, rather than Chris calling me,

arashink called me, though I didn't find the cellphone in time. Pretty amusing.

Happy New Year, everyone.

So, last night I was going to write a short blurb on Marinerds about Hugh "Losing Pitcher" Mulcahy, to honor Ryan Franklin's non-tender, but then when looking through books for notes about lousy Phillies pitchers, was reminded of the even worse luck and worse talent pitcher Jack Nabors, who pitched for the Philadelphia Pathetics in 1916. There's this great story about Nabors, well on his way to a record-setting awful 1-20 season, who was pitching in Boston one day, and supposedly went into the ninth inning holding a 1-0 lead and a no-hitter -- only to have a set of mishaps like walks and errors lead the Red Sox into tying the game 1-1 with a runner on third, so Nabors deliberately threw a wild pitch 20 feet over the plate, letting the runner score and ending the game at 2-1, "because these guys are never going to get me another run, and if you think I'm going to sit out here and pitch another eight innings in this summer heat, you've got to be crazy."

Great story, isn't it? Except the thing is... it didn't happen that way. Last night I noticed that I couldn't find a record of any game that came close to matching this description on Retrosheet, and my suspicion was that it was actually the game where they lost 3-2, but Retrosheet doesn't have play-by-plays or box scores for 1916, just the final scores and starting pitchers.

This morning, on the way to work, I stopped in at the library, briefly looked around baseball books with no luck, and then asked a clerk, "I need to access a newspaper that would have the box score of a baseball game played between the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Athletics on June 24, 1916. Can you help me?" Fortunately, we found the New York Times sports section for that day, and sure enough, the box score indicated that this Nabors anecdote, which I have seen in at least three books, is not factually correct, for various reasons. I left the library with a big grin on my face and a box score printout in my grubby little hands. Seeing the printout sitting on my desk at work all day, I couldn't wait to get home and write this article detailing my find. Man, I'm a goddamn dork, aren't I? On the other hand, I actually really sort of enjoy hunting down these historical discrepancies in baseball books -- only a month ago I also found several in a 1980's Phillies book I was reading as well. Something tells me that being a fact checker for a book publisher doesn't pay as well as being a software engineer...

Um, so anyway, work was okay -- at one point Rich and I were working on releasing some code, but we needed Jack's help, so we were going to call him since he was taking the day off, and I said "Wait, wait, if you call him you HAVE to say happy birthday," so Rich calls him like "Hey, Jack! We just wanted to wish you happy birthday! Well... er, actually, no, we wanted to ask you about these files."

After work I went to

samildanach and

llynecat's apartment for Jack's birthday party though. I met their down-the-hall neighbor Jason and we went and picked out some board games, and in the meantime,

spazzychic (who I had never met but knew of for a while) and

aquatwo (talk about WEIRD COINCIDENCES, though I hadn't seen him in forever!) showed up, and we ended up playing Pit for a couple of hands, during which time Jack's sister Peggy showed up. And after that there was pizza-eating and we watched the movie Shaun of the Dead, which was very funny, but I don't think I'll ever actually watch it again (I don't deal so well with all the blood and guts scenes). After that we watched the X-Men trailer, and I was feeling sort of zoned-out, so I came home.

I logged into PP and wanted to just zone out more and puzzle, so I asked Jarrett if I could sail with him -- he was doing a long trade run -- and it was EXACTLY what I needed. I'm #5 in the ocean in Carpentry again, biznatches.

Today I got up "early", as in 10am eastern, which is 7am western, and I went to Bruegger's to meet up with

jcreed, who is just as awesome as he ever is. I got him a "Reed 7" Mariners shirt a bit ago because every time Jeremy Reed does something cool (he's the rookie centerfielder for the Mariners) they put up "J-REED!" on the big board and it ALWAYS reminds me of Jason. :)

Anyway, Jason and I talked for ages and had bagels, and after a while decided to come back here. Benoit was talking about going and getting a train game, so we went to Games Unlimited, and I convinced him to get British Rails. (BTW, vkaplan apparently works at GU now, which was a bit odd, but fortunately she seems to have forgotten me, so that's good.) We came back here and played British Rails for a few hours -- it was a really close game, and usual I totally would have won if not for the board. (No, really. I had 188 in money, all the cities connected, and contracts to deliver for 33 and 43, and then I got hit with both War Tax and several train-movement-limiters AND a few blown out bridges, etc.) Jason ended up winning -- though here's the funny part -- I was up to 248 cash, and he used my rail to deliver a contract, bringing him up to 255 cash, but he had to pay me 4, so we ended the game with him having 251 and me 252, but it was his turn, so he won. Whee.

After that, I called some people, and Charlie and I walked down the hill to the theater, where we met up with

kfcrawford and

mj2q and saw the movie version of Rent. My only real nitpick is that Idina Menzel played Maureen. I dunno, she's a great stage actress and all, but her face doesn't do so well on screen, nor do I think a lot of her movement translates over right. I know they wanted to get a lot of the "original" cast -- but at times it looked like several of the cast just weren't really suited to film acting. You could tell that Rosario Dawson and Anthony Rapp were the most comfortable screen actors of the main 8, though Wilson Heredia was pretty damn good too. In general, I thought they did a reasonable job adapting it -- though a few of the songs cut, like "Halloween" and "Christmas Bells are Ringing" sort of struck me as missing, along with the awesome answering machine songs. I was disappointed in the way one of the funniest lines in the show was delivered -- "I'm a New Yorker. Fear's my life." The montage over the song "Without You" was pretty cool. So yeah, I did enjoy it overall. I've always liked Anthony Rapp, though.

Came back here afterwards; ate dinner, hung out watching ESPN sports summary shows with Rafael, and now geeking out and updating stuff. Should sleep soon. Vague plan for tomorrow as of yet involves doing work during the day, then coming to campus later on for KGB and Kiltie Band, then hopefully hanging out with Carl, and maybe Django, and whoever else is around, maybe playing board games or something. I dunno. Arr.

Oops, I guess I went to sleep last night without updating. I thought I had, weird. Friday at work, I was a bad girl and ducked out of yet another all-hands meeting, to go down to the IT guys and beg someone to make my laptop work for remote VPN stuff. They were all like "Bah, we are very very busy, file a ticket and we'll get back to you in a couple of days," and I said "Can't I just plug it in and show you the error I got since I already installed all the stuff and I'm just getting a weird message or two?" So they gave me a cable modem to plug it into, I booted it up, showed them one message which turned out to be that I needed to uninstall Norton, and the second was some arcane Lotus Notes problem, but the IT guy typed a few random incantations into it and it magically worked. I think I wasted a total of maybe half an hour of his time, so I guess I do feel a little bad, but it wasn't like I had some huge hours-and-hours-long issue to work through.

After work we had D&D at Cory's house. We now ACTUALLY have one session remaining. As in, our final boss to fight is in the floor above the room we're at. We've worked our way up the outside tower thing, found the ethereal plane portal, went up the other side, had a few fights, and are now there. We were going to do the shopping thing, since Cory got turned to stone (for like the third time -- honestly, he had sprung a prismatic spray trap early on and got turned to stone but Justin decided that'd be lame so instead he just got hit with a lot of damage by a ray. Then later, we had prismatic spray cast on the party and AGAIN Cory got hit by the "turned to stone" ray and AGAIN failed his save) but Josh decided to Miracle him back since I didn't have Stone to Flesh memorized, and so in theory we'll just plow through, next session. Though next session might not be until mid-December at this rate thanks to travel.

Today I meant to do some shopping and then go visiting people, but I was exhausted and slept until 2pm. Oops. So instead, I got up, called

oren, went and picked him up around 4ish, and we drove down to Tacoma.

First I stopped by Narrows because the In The Groove nationals qualifying tourney was going on and I just wanted to stop by and say hello to people. I didn't see many people I knew --

darknote and

toastercookie and Jedi and Shakespeare by the 5th mix, and

cynic573 behind the table, and

bobsyouruncle and

crackoon getting ready to actually compete, and

keevon over by the Beatmania III machine. There were bunches of other people there, but I didn't know who they were. I played a game of Beatmania so I could play 20 November just in case, and I also played a game of Drummania for the hell of it. Oren played a game of Initial D, and in the meantime Jeff had called me, so I called him back and we headed even further south down to Lakewood.

We got to

damienroc and

wooko's place, and they were there, as was Pete, and Julianne. Wooko took Pete home for some reason or another, and Jeff and Julianne and Oren and I went to grab pre-HP dinner; we ended up at Applebee's. It wasn't too bad.

islandergirlro and Brien caught up with us to give us movie tickets at Applebee's, and then we all ended up at the theater a bit later, and we saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I'll talk about that in a second.

After the movie we came back and watched a 5-minute episode of some weird anime (Magical Play?) with "The 2-D vs. 3-D fight!", and then I suggested we watch the Simpsons softball episode, which was of course vastly entertaining, and then we all headed home. Whee.

Tomorrow I might go try to play IIDX at that new arcade thing, or maybe stop by Illusionz or such, but more likely I will just go shopping for my trip and maybe start packing. I will make sure to play 20 November on some Bemani game one way or the other, though.

I guess I'll LJ-cut in case people haven't seen the movie, but is it really possible to spoil it?

( Harry Potter And The Triwizard Tournament )

Whee, so my mommy and stepfather are in town, having never been to Seattle before. (This stymies me, as my stepfather has been, like, everywhere in the world. No joke.)

Yesterday, after work, I bussed to the Seattle Center area where they're staying, and we ended up going to Ivar's for dinner. It was pretty good. I got my stepfather to drive me home, and then they went back to their hotel (still on east coast time) and I cleaned up the apartment a bit more and watched "But I'm a Cheerleader", which was amusing, but disturbing.

Today, I drove down to the Seattle Center, found a place to park, and played tour guide for a bit. We went to the center, and went up the Space Needle - it was good weather for it today. After that, we took the monorail downtown, and for lack of any better idea, I guided them down to the Pike Place Market, where we saw the flying fish. Whooosh. Eventually after wandering around a bit, we ended up at Todai for dinner, because my stepfather mentioned liking all-you-can-eat crab legs. It went over really well and they were both very happy with the food. (Stepdad ate nothing but crab legs for the most part, mom ate some other stuff but mostly crab legs. Neither of them eat sushi, so the all-you-can-eat sushi aspect of the place was totally lost on them.)

After that, we tried to take the monorail back but it was closed down - so we bussed back to the hotel, and then I drove them up here so my mom could see my car and my apartment. She seemed to like both of them, and didn't even think my place was messy. After an hour or two, I drove them back to the hotel. I stopped by Tower, since it was across the street from the hotel, and used the coupon they sent me in the mail the other week... got two DVDs and a CD. Whee.

Came home, watched one of the DVDs (Chicago. I really needed it. Trust me. The musical's been going through my head since July 1st). And whoosh, lo and behold, the evening is goon.

Yesterday I went to the east side and hung out with

bpr. I went shopping on my own first around Bellevue Square a little, and then got Brian and we went scouring Half Price Bookses -- first the one in Redmond, then the one in Bellevue. Found lots of CDs, a movie or two, and a few books as well. Brian found a Legend of the Five Rings book that he'd been trying to find for several months, so that was cool. We ended up getting dinner at Red Robin and I tried to show him Settlers the Card Game but our food showed up too fast. Hung out for a while, then came home.

Today I finally showed Jack the code I'm working on at work. I feel like I'm trying to write C++ code in Perl, which is kind of funny, and I even had to generate Doxygen-like stuff for my functions so I could keep track of them. But anyway. Jack's going to help me, which is cool.

After work I went to the gym by myself because this week is all messed up, and then I walked the 2 miles home and stopped by Safeway and did laundry and cleaned up the apartment a little bit and watched Napoleon Dynamite.

The movie was pretty funny. I understand a lot of quotes now, and why everyone at Shea Stadium had "Vote for Pedro" shirts. The scariest moment was when they played Pat Borders's at-bat music, and then the big orange van pulls up to the house and HOLY SHIT PAT BORDERS STEPS OUT. Okay, no, Lazlo Hollyfeld steps out, but it's just as disturbing.

okay, and I just had to go and do this Photoshop. I know it's awful, but...
( vote for Felix )

Today was one of those weird days where I could have been a lot more social than I was -- but instead, I think I had a pretty good day anyway. It started with running around Greenlake, by which I mean, running for about 1/6th of the time and walking the rest.

Afterwards I went on a shopping spree. I started at Easy Street Records, where I had a few things I intended to get, but they didn't have any of it (well, not in used CDs anyway, which is what I wanted to get), so instead I picked up a few Belle and Sebastian CDs (I blame

ciole and/or

mh75), and a Kirsty MacColl CD, and some assorted other stuff, among which was In Search Of The Lost Chord by the Moody Blues.

I digress for a second here. When I was a kid, this album gave me nightmares. Not because of the music, but because the cover has a somewhat disturbing picture on it. I mean, not by today's standards, but for a little kid, the picture of a skull by the picture of a baby... eh, I dunno. It just disturbed me. Now, listening to this album I'm realizing that it really is one of their best albums ever. It's just a very nicely done cohesive unit, much better than most groups achieve on their second album. There's this weird feeling of 60's-ish orchestral rock in it with sitars and flutes and horns backdropping balladic unison vocals for large parts of the album, but then it comes out with fun songs like "Dr. Livingston, I presume" and "The Best Way to Travel", and such.

Okay, well, anyway, I drove downtown after that and parked at Pacific Place, where I thought they still had the $3 for all day Sunday parking deal. I went to the Mariners Team Store down on 4th and Stewart, to see if I could get a women's-clothing-like Mariners shirt. Most of their stuff is ugly though, lots of pastel and glitter and junk, which I won't wear, I just wanted a women's t-shirt. Oh well. I did find one shirt I vaguely liked, I might go back for it. After that, I went clothes shopping at Old Navy for a while. Usually this would be pretty terrible, but I found an awesome long denim skirt on a clearance rack for $10, and it fit perfectly (wtfomgbear), and I tried on a whole bunch of other stuff and found another skirt and two tops. Holy crap, skirts. I should actually wear some. The long one I actually would wear to work I think.

After that I went to see Must Love Dogs, because I just really really wanted to see it. I think it hit home a little bit too deeply in several aspects, though, I think what it really pointed out is the utter problem with online matchmaking services: most of the guys out there aren't John Cusack. Infact, that is fundamentally the problem with dating in general. If every guy out there was John Cusack, the world would be a better place.

Errr, anyway.

Attempted to get shoes at Fred Meyer after that. Found cool Mary-Jane sneakers from Skechers, but wasn't positive I wanted them, so punted on the idea. I'll look around more some other time. Shoes are tough. Clothes is tough. Life is tough.

Gah, I should get to sleep.

I do things besides write parody lyrics. Honest.

Today I drove down to Tacoma to go see a movie with

damienroc. On the way there, there was an accident around Federal Way. Traffic was totally stopped, so I called Jeff to let him know I was running late. The funny part was, he was looking at traffic maps and cams on the net trying to figure out what the problem was, and as far as he could tell, there *was* no problem. It was very odd. But, I was on the phone and there were all these sirens and such going by... so, yeah. It turned out there was a van which had flipped over in the middle of the highway and two lanes of I-5 were unusable.

Well, I got there like 4:30, and so Jeff and Wooko and I went over to see the 5:30 showing of Dukes of Hazzard. Wooooooo, that was a really fun movie. I think it's hilarious to watch as its rating gets lower and lower on IMDB -- it's down to 3.8 as I post this -- but, seriously, it was a fun movie. I mean, you can't go into it expecting to relive your childhood or expect a quality experience -- you have to go into it expecting a goofy bunch of crap with a lot of car chase scenes and all the other usual capers of the Dukes of Hazzard. And then you won't be disappointed.

After the movie, I called back Oren, who was down at PLU for a Go congress or something, and we went and picked him up and went to Mory's for dinner. Jeff and I just ended up hanging out and talking about baseball and junk for a while; by the time I thought of maybe annoying Wooko to play games or something, he had gone to sleep anyway. Arr.

The drive home was pretty uneventful, fortunately. I listened to three volumes of Forbidden Broadway on the way down and back today. I feel very inspired. Problem is, I really sort of wish I knew which Broadway shows are "well-known" and which aren't, so people will "get" the stuff I write? Ah, well...

Oh, um, and for a real update, well, today I hung out with

oren. We went to the Mariners-Indians game, which was a real sleeper -- it was just super-hot outside, and I was tired, and the game was pretty boring after the first two innings, which took like an hour. I'd said before the game, "The Indians are going to win," and of course, they did. I think the most exciting thing to happen during the game was when a section a few down from us all got up to sing happy 100th birthday to some lady. I was like, "Wow, she was born at the end of July 1905... that's a long time ago. I mean, like, that's about when Ty Cobb started playing baseball." (for the record: August 30 1905)

Blah blah. Afterwards we went to Oren's place and watched a bit of the White Sox - Orioles game on ESPN. I really just wanted to see Freddy Garcia pitch, but the Sox had to go and bat around the entire lineup in the first inning, so it took like 35 minutes before I got to see the Orioles come up. Apparently the slugfest ended in a 9-4 win for the Sox, though Brian Roberts and Eric Byrnes apparently hit back-to-back solo homers in the 8th, which is cool. (For Byrnes. I still hate the Orioles.)

We didn't see the rest of the game, though, since we watched the first episode of the live-action version of 逮捕しちゃうぞ; it's been about 7-8 years since I saw the anime of that, so I barely remember it except "it has two crazy cop chicks named Natsumi and Miyuki", but the live-action show was actually pretty good; I've always kinda enjoyed Japanese cop sitcoms ever since we all watched 踊る大捜査線 on the international channel back in college. After one episode we went to get dinner of Taste of India. I called Carl and left a message like "Hey Carl, it's Sunday night and Oren and I just watched a dorama and are now going to ToI, wanna come?" Unfortunately, I caught him during Firefly, but we talked later while we were back at Oren's watching another episode of Taiho. Hopefully we'll actually watch all of it eventually, and hopefully Carl will come visit soon!

Then uh, I came back here and wrote another parody song because I am a dork. And now I should sleep or I'll never get up on time.

Er, yeah. Yesterday I went to the Mariners-Indians game, sat 9 rows behind the field, got to see a whole bunch of guys get hit by baseballs and clear both benches out into a crowd of confusion (not to be confused with like, a brawl). Kevin Millwood got the win; I would feel guilty for rooting against the Mariners if not for the fact that a) Millwood still holds the "Phillies don't PITCH no-hitters" soft spot in my heart and b) Grady Sizemore is a really cute kid, and he almost hit for the cycle, and I really thought it'd be cool to see.

I went swimming this afternoon at the gym. I decided to actually get a real membership as opposed to the summer membership, but they had no membership reps there today. Oops. If it turns out I can't actually get the "by July 30" special discount, I might not join after all. We shall see.

In the evening I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with the gang. I thought it was a pretty good movie, though it was *very* Tim Burton. I dunno, I liked the newer script better than the old script, but I love the musical aspect of the old one -- like, I thought it was cool that the Oompa-Loompa songs actually had the book's lyrics in this version, but on the other hand, because this wasn't a musical, the random songs seemed sort of... intrusive and random. I dunno. I did like that they had the squirrels and Veruca; it had always bugged me how they changed some of the things from the book in the original, like the geese, and having Charlie drink the fizzy lifting drinks, and whatnot. Though... adding in the "Wonka as a kid" sideplot seemed very very strange, and the redone ending... bah, I dunno.

Whatever, it was fun, that's all there is to it. Whee.

Afterwards I went to Tower Records because they're having a sale on broadway soundtracks, so I got Hairspray, Chicago, and Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit. Oh man, I'm not wishing I saw FB when I was off in New York, but the songs on this are really good. I love this stuff, you know. I wish I could like, work with these guys.

Oh, and uh, the Mariners traded Randy Winn to the Giants for Yorvit Torrealba and Jesse Foppert, and traded Miguel Olivo to the Padres for Miguel Ojeda and Natanael Mateo. And Eric Byrnes is now on the Orioles. The trade deadline is weird.

Whee, today Nick and I went to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where I had made arrangements to meet up with some LJ people who I'd never met before --

jiggery_pokery, who has been on my friends list for like 3 years? and is super-duper-cool,

dezzikitty, his girlfriend, who has never been on my friends list but who is super-duper-cool,

amuzulo, who has been on my friends list for all of a week or two, and his friend Stacey, who as it turns out also went to CMU, was class of '97, and we have some friends in common.

So, yeah. We met up and went to some park a few blocks east of Times Square and hung out for a while. It was a really nice day out. We played a card game that Chuck had brought called Hat Trick, which was really pretty spiffy and I liked it, although I think it needed a bidding phase. We also played a few games of Fluxx (which should be a testament to how cool I thought Meg was, because I despise that game). After that we departed to some restaurant (er, Old Devil Moon?) down in the East Village and had dinner, which was very good. Unfortunately at that point Chris and Meg had to depart to thar nor'eastern village o'Boston, and Nick and I wanted to see about seeing a show or something. So everyone went their separate ways after that.

By the way, Chris, I didn't get to properly thank you for buying dinner for everyone, so THANK YOU! Next time I owe you one! (Or at least some ducks or something.)

Anyway, Nick and I didn't succeed in seeing a show tonight, sadly :( We walked all through Times Square, and eventually came back here to look at movie times and get ice cream. And yay, he let me convince him to go see Bewitched with me, and I really enjoyed it! Shirley Maclaine was awesome, I mean, everyone was fairly awesome, but I still kept thinking "Huh, that's supposed to be Meg Ryan up there, I swear."

Yay.

I guess that's the day in a nutshell.

Well, today was a pretty good day, even with the last part of it.

I went to the Mets-Phillies game in the afternoon to see Pedro Martinez pitch against Jon Lieber. I sat in a section full of Mets fans. There was this one super-newyork-lady sitting next to me who was really nice but totally talked the accent. "Heeyah, look in da binawkyooluhs, look at Michael [Piazza], ain't he gawt the best smoile? He's so gawgeous." I had specifically asked for seating under the cover, because I figured it would rain. Because I did that, it didn't rain for the whole game. And the Mets won. I spent the game pretending to be a Mets fan instead of a Phillies fan -- I was wearing plain clothes, so there was no team commitment there. I kept score, and the people in the section kept saying things like "You must be a big fan. Look at Pedro! Were you here when he almost gawt that no-hittuh?"

The highlights of the game included Todd Pratt getting himself thrown out early on (it was a 1-2 pitch and Lieber threw what honestly looked like a third strike, but the ump called it a ball, and Pratt must have said something because next thing we knew Pratt was walking off the field and Charlie Manuel was walking on to argue, and shortly after that he was also thrown off the field. Lieberthal came in to catch and the game continued. Unfortunately, shortly after that Lieber walked the bases loaded and soon enough the Mets were up 5-1. Even Pedro managed to get a single.

The funniest moment was probably late in the game. Carlos Beltran got himself walked, and then stole second base -- I'm not even sure Lieberthal tried to throw him out. On the very next pitch he stole third base! So of course the Mets fans start chanting "STEAL HOME! [clap clap] STEAL HOME! [clap clap]"

Yeah.

After the game I got Nick a birthday present of a Pedro shirt. He's such a Mets fan and he didn't have any Mets shirts. What a shame!

I went to meet up with

rkane after that. I got lost trying to get to where he works, but fortunately, he had more work to do. First I got lost by going the wrong way on the subway, and then I got lost in Bloomingdales, which is attached to the subway stop by his workplace. Bloomingdales is SCARY. We stopped by Neutral Ground after that to pick up some card holders, and it was full of Magic the Gathering players, who are also scary.

Mark, however, is not scary. Mark is awesomeness, and I really wish I got to hang out with him more, but that'd require being in the same city more often, which would also require things like me coming to town sometime when he isn't leaving town the next day. We went for pizza at a place called Lombardi's, which is in or near Little Italy. It had reeeeeeeally awesome pizza. Then we walked around town for a while talking, and for lack of anywhere better to go, headed back to his and Mike's place. There's a joke about how Mark kept getting bigger and bigger TVs all through college, culminating in this gigantic screen TV that barely fit through the door when they were in Doherty. Well, Mark's TV has grown even bigger now, as it's pretty much the ENTIRE WALL of the living room, with a projector.

We ended up watching Stuck On You, that movie with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins. It was really really Farrelly-awful for a lot of it, and somewhere along the line it became entertaining. We were both shocked it got a 6.1 on IMDB, but as it went on I could sort of understand why. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it, but I enjoyed watching it and getting to comment all the times it was just like "aggh! this is so BAD!"

Mark walked me back to the subway, and we had a conversation about how real life sucks. It made me pretty sad and deep-in-thought as I was riding the subway back here, which may account for what happened next.

I took the yellow line to Times Square and went down to the platform where the red lines go. I got on a red train. I went to 116th. Normally I'd get off at 116th and Broadway and walk over here to 120th. Except, uh, I got out of the train and I was at 116th and Malcolm X Blvd. Well... I didn't remember seeing that road before but I figured maybe I had gone through a different exit. So I walked to 120th and started heading west. Except, uh... I was nowhere near any streets I had seen before. It was really confusing. I walked around for a while and started panicking since I also didn't see any cops, cabs, or white people anywhere.

I called Nick. He goes, "Uhhh... I better come pick you up. Think you can wait there for ten minutes?"

Turns out I was in the middle of Harlem wandering around alone at 1am. It was a pretty nerve-wracking ten minutes, but eventually Nick got there and got me and we got back here okay. I suppose it should be considered a testament to NYC being more safe nowadays that I was lost in Harlem alone for around 20-25 minutes total in the middle of the night and nothing happened to me.

Turns out I'd taken one of the wrong red lines. Sigh.

The other funny thing is that I had been thinking earlier in the day that I'd probably like living in NYC... now I'm sort of re-thinking that.

The B'z are such good car music. I think I'm on a kick for a bit.

I went today to find boxes to put baseball cards in. I tried to go to the card shop in Fremont but they were having an auction or something with lots of scary people. Instead, I got sushi from Blue C, and stopped by the Game Wizard on 65th for boxes.

There was a big antique car show going on, on my street, this morning/afternoon. I walked through it for a bit to go to the post office. I don't care about cars but it's neat to see thousands of people in my neighborhood.

I went to one round of the Wrasse blockade because Carl couldn't be there. Nyah.

I tried to go to

animegothgrrl's beach party, but I drove to the park and the guy said I couldn't park in their lots because they were all full, and then I drove around the other lots and the area looking for a parking space, and eventually found one but thought "do I really feel like walking almost a mile there and back, given I'm not even sure how long I'll stay?" and so no, I wussed out. If Julie actually reads this, I apologize for wussing out.

Instead, I went down to Tacoma and hung out with

damienroc for the evening (and occasionally

wooko when I went and annoyed him too). Originally we were going to Chris's house for a bbq, and then a movie, except Chris got stuck in Seattle, so instead Jeff and I wasted time for an hour (he played PP, I read a book) and then we went down to PLU and got mexican food for dinner at a place called Rayna's (well, Reyna's, but since I know a Rayna, that's funnier), and then we saw the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

I know the movie got somewhat bad reviews, but I really liked it. You could either call it a mindless action flick with pretty people, or you could call it a romantic comedy with lots of guns, and either way you'd be right. I enjoyed how clever it was, though. Pitt or Jolie would utter a line totally deadpan and about 5-10 seconds later I'd get it and start laughing. Yeah, the lines themselves were dumb sometimes, but the setups were nice. I thought it was really well done and just really enjoyed it.

I still need to see Bewitched, though. And having seen the preview for it again, knowing that it's directed by Nora Ephron and the main character is a blonde, the mind wonders: why is Nicole Kidman starring in it instead of Meg Ryan?

On that note, I'm going to sleep.

As an aside, yes, there is a very big difference between wasting an hour reading a book here alone and wasting an hour reading a book when someone else is wasting time nearby. Call it "presence" or whatever.

Today was a pretty good day. I got up really early to meet Megan and Heidi at the gym at 9:15am. We did leg exercises today. Because my knees are so screwed up from my years of DDR, I have a lot of trouble with some of their leg exercises, so they taught me how to do some of the curls and squats on a machine instead of with their freestanding versions, which stresses my knees less.

After the gym, we went to Cyndy's for breakfast, which was pretty good. Megan and Heidi went off plant shopping at that point, and Josh said, "well, I'm gonna go watch baseball, you're welcome to come along," so I went and watched baseball for a while. Eventually they all went outside to work on the fence and garden. I was mostly useless but I did yank a few weeds out of the ground and help measure fence stuff. When Cory and Justin showed up, I ducked out and stopped off at home for a bit.

Then I headed down to Tacoma... hung out at Jeff and Wooko's place for a while talking about Transformers (and we even watched an episode of it, because Jeff is a dork), then we went over to the movie theater, where we met up with Chris and two of his friends, and we all saw Batman Begins, which was, god forbid, a Batman movie that didn't totally suck. Well, Katie Holmes is pretty retarded in it, but most of the movie was actually good. Honest.

Afterwards we went to Mory's for dinner, and played a starting game of SPANC, this new game Wooko picked up, which is pretty silly (but like many other recent Steve Jackson Games, has a reasonably popular artist (Phil Foglio, in this case) doing the cards, so if nothing else they're funny to look at). Ro and Brien joined us at Mory's, and afterwards everyone went back to the apartment to play board games, except by that point I realized it was midnight and I should drive home. So I did. And now I am here. And going to sleep soon.

By the way, I think the Mariners have somehow activated an Infinite Improbability Drive, as they managed to actually beat the never-lost-to-the-Mariners Pedro Martinez, with Ryan Franklin pitching for us, and with Sexson ejected from the game, so our infield was Hansen - Lopez - Morse - Bloomquist. WHAT THE HECK?! I don't get it, but... wow. Just, crazy. If the improbability drive stays on, maybe Ichiro will hit four home runs tomorrow and Mike Cameron will be miraculously healed and get to play.

Arr.

Yes, I skipped the Fremont Fair... I just didn't feel like dealing with a hundred thousand people. I might go tomorrow, I might not. We'll see.

Wednesday I hung out with my friend Casey in the afternoon because I hadn't seen him in forever - we got Blue C for lunch, and then saw Howl's Moving Castle. (Yes, twice in two days.) I think it was slightly better the second time, actually, but I'm not sure I want to see it again for a while.

Then I went to the Phillies game, by myself. I've written up the last few games on Seattle Marinerds and I'm too lazy to LJ-ify them, so, here's Wednesday's game.

Today I ran errands, including getting a new driver's license with my current address (I figured that's the sort of thing I should take care of while I have my daytimes free). I did some shopping, and some working on my project for "Shanty Raid-io" in Puzzle Pirates; yes, you might all get to hear me sing at some point. Then I walked down to Fremont and went to tonight's Phillies game with Megan and Josh and Ficus. And you can read about Thursday's game as well.

My writeup of Wednesday's is much funnier and includes a "silly captions for totally random candid shots I took" part, too... but at least the Phillies finally WON tonight! Woooo.

Mets game tomorrow night with my brother -- that should be pretty fun too. Still no idea exactly what I'm up to this weekend, though.

damienroc came up to Seattle today to hang out. We went and saw Howl's Moving Castle. It was pretty good. I think I liked it better than Miyazaki's other recent stuff at least, though some of the characters were a little confusing to me.

After that we did some car shuffling and went downtown to go to the Mariners-Phillies game. I made Jeff come there super-early with me, and he basically sat around in the stands for an hour while I stood with all the other crazed Phillies fans watching batting practice and hoping to get autographs. My mission was to get Pat Burrell, Bobby Abreu, Jim Thome, and Mike Lieberthal to sign the scorecard I have from May 18 2004. Well... I did get Bobby Abreu! He was super-nice and came out and signed stuff for like ninety billion people. Very nice guy. Very good player, too.

I also went and took pictures of Meche warming up (though I'm not sure they came out well enough to post) and of the Lieber-Lieberthal battery.

( Been caught stealin'... er, Boone caught stealin' )

I went to the gym to watch the Mariners game for a bit today. It was kinda funny. I walked on the treadmill for like 40 minutes and left when Meche gave up that home run to Carlos Delgado.

Jeff and Eric came over around 6:30-7ish, and we walked over to Pagliacci's and got dinner, then went down to Cap Hill to the Seattle Film Festival, where we saw the movie Hana and Alice, which was pretty good. We didn't stick around to see what was going on afterwards -- the director, Shunji Iwai, was actually there and came out and said a few words beforehand.

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Deanna

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February 2019

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Every Day an Adventure

Entries tagged with movies

銀色のシーズン (Gin-iro no Season, the Silver Season)

明けましておめでとうございます！

Being a history nerd is fun. Also, Shaun of the Dead was weird.

10,080 minutes - how do you measure a week in the 'burgh?

Weekend Update

Because parents like to visit

Napoleon Who?

Shopping Sunday

Yeeeeeee-haw

Mariners lose, the weather's too hot, Indian food is good, and so is japanese TV

downtime?

Meeting up and being witched

Adventures in NYC, both good and bad

この声が聞こえるかい？

gym, fences, movies, etc

Forget the Pat Borders Fan Club, I'm starting the Billy Wagner Fan Club

Phillies!

film festival an' stuff

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February 2019