Hello Boston!

WHEW.

Guess where I am! (at last!)

I”m in my shiny new office of my very own! In my shiny new house! In Boston! (Where it is cold! Ye heavens!)

My shiny new office is not yet as super-fluffy as it should be, but hopefully it will be soon. First we have to make room for couches and rugs by getting the Three Million Boxes of Books off the floor and onto the bookshelves. But luckily, in amongst the three million boxes we have put out a dog bed for Sunshine, so at least somebody is snuggled.

Among the things I have not been doing since we moved: unpacking books, planning a wedding, and updating my blog. The guilt! The guilt! My blog has even apparently enlisted members of the outside world to scold me about neglecting it (hi Mom!). So here I am! Because at least updating a blog is less alarming than planning a wedding.

Among the things I have been doing: watching a marathon of Top Chef on Bravo, a channel we finally have because we had to (HAD to!) upgrade to a more comprehensive cable package because the most basic one, which we started off with, did NOT have the GAME SHOW NETWORK, which as you know is vitally VITALLY important so that I can watch all the reruns of The Amazing Race (seasons 2, 3, and 4, which are the ones I’m still missing) quick before All-Stars begins, so I know who I really like (still Dustin and Kandice, I think, although Danny and Oswald are adooooooorable) and who should go away tout suite (hint: her name rhymes with Blirna).

And luckily, our shiny cable upgrade came just in time for me to record a whole marathon of season two of Top Chef, yet another horribly addictive reality show. I know, right? Why on earth is it so fascinating? It’s not like you can taste what they’re making, so how do you know who deserves to win? You just have to trust the exceptionally cranky judges. On the plus side, there is no way I would ever (a) get on this show, or (b) WANT to get on this show (dude, they don”t even get to sleep in airports! or skydive! or eat cow lips!) (actually, they”d probably know just what to do with cow lips). But Adam and I like to watch them making gelees and roulades and saffron paella and ginger snap ice cream and shrimp-banana-chocolate-cilantro-black bean something-or-others (I’m not making this up!) while we eat our frozen pizza. So I’m a little less obsessive about it than I am about The Amazing Race, but my goodness, season two is full of SCANDAL! Everyone is so mean! And scary! But I liked the challenge where they had to make a seven-course dinner based on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. We do that every night, except it’s only one course, and the sin is Sloth, i.e., “what can we make in ten minutes or less?” Yum. Followed by Gluttony, where we eat the entire frozen lasagna, followed by Envy, where I lie on the couch wishing I looked more like Veronica Mars or Dr. Sara on Prison Break and wondering why I don’t. It’s a mystery.

Also! I have movies to recommend! To make up for my last movie review being such an angry tirade, I am delighted to report that I have seen two absolutely fantabulous movies in the last month which helped to almost entirely erase the heinous penguins from my mind:

(1) Children of Men: It is not even remotely surprising that I loved this movie. I mean, for starters — Clive Owen! Need I say more? Oh, but I will, because also: post-apocalyptic! And not only that…[SPOILER ALERT] (er, for Avatars, I mean, not for Children of Men): It’s my apocalypse! Well, sort of. There’s a specific reason for mine (which you find out at the end of book one!), and I skipped over the whole tormented humanity years, but there’s a similar idea buried in there, and Children of Men executes it SO well. The movie is based on a book by P.D. James, which I hadn’t heard of until I got a lovely review for Avatars that referred to it (see my Reviews page, which will totally exist soon), but clearly I’ll have to run out and read it now and maybe add it to my post-apocalyptic shelf. I love seeing how people do different apocalypses — like, you can start with a premise like a worldwide plague and end up with something as different as the TV show Jeremiah, the movie 28 Days Later, and the Fire-Us trilogy by Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher, all of which are brilliant. Anyway, the movie has all these perfect post-apocalyptic details. My favorite is the fact that there are animals everywhere — almost everyone has a pet, like they need something to love because they can’t have kids. I think it’s also very well-shot and well-acted and, much to my surprise, it’s really funny. Yay! Because what most post-apocalyptic situations really need is (a) dogs, and (b) humor (both of which I promise you in Avatars).

(2) Pan’s Labyrinth: Yeah, it’s in Spanish with subtitles, and there aren’t really any hot guys in it (well, there’s the revolutionary hiding out in the hills…), but this is the creepiest, coolest, weirdest movie I’ve seen in ages, and I highly recommend it. Be warned — it’s a fairy tale in the old-fashioned, sorta gruesome sense of the word, meaning there’s a little more blood and a little more eyeballs-on-the-table and a little more sewing-up-of-one’s-own-face than I really expected. Plus some SUPER-creepy monsters. But it’s eerie and different and really cool to look at.

All right. There’s a lot more to talk about (some of it even related to writing), but I should really post this, like, ever. So…hopefully now that the shiny new office is open for business, there’ll be more blogrifficness soon!

Quote of the Day:
"If I was a trout, maybe I”d envy a salmon." – Michael explaining his Deadly Sin dish on Top Chef