Monday, October 12, 2020

Still Here

 Don't forget Wednesday is short story day if you can participate. Send your story to me at aa2579@wayne.edu if you don't blog.




Still watching BORGEN, but also CRIMINAL UK, which is quite good and THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR, which is scary but not too. Reading the books mentioned above, which are also good reads. 

Had a lot of porch visits this week, which will soon wind down I fear. Had an emergency visit to the dentist-my history with teeth is a sad one. Went to Josh's for dinner and a bonfire in their yard. Don't know when this bonfire thing started, but it is nice on a slightly cool night. 

The Michigan Terrorists are very frightening. Don't call them a militia because that implies they are around to aid good causes and they are not. 

Kevin goes back to in-class school tomorrow. Very worried about that. It is going to be hard indeed to avoid Covid over the next six months.

How about you?

19 comments:

Margot Kinberg said...

I'm sorry to hear about the whole dentist thing, Patti - those issues can be awful! Glad you had some visits with friends, though. I think they sustain us. Wishing Kevin and the rest of your family well as we continue to get through this time.

Steve Oerkfitz said...

The weathers cooling down now so it looks like I'm going to be cooped up for the next 8 months. I least the movie theaters opened up but not a lot of good stuff showing.
I watched the first three episodes of Criminal UK and liked them. Am also watching The Third Day and Fargo.
Read the Writers Library from Nancy Pearl. Finished Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby whicj was quite good. Now rereading Neuromancer by William Gibson. Always loved the first two lines.
The sky above the port was the color of television. Tuned to a dead station.

pattinase (abbott) said...

You, too, Margot
Wish I was coming to La Jolla.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Started German version, Steve. It is dubbed so it seems much the same.

Jeff Meyerson said...

If they had locked those @ssholes up when they invaded the State Capitol with their guns after Trump's "OPEN MICHIGAN!" tweets, maybe it could have nipped it in the bud then.

We were back at the dentist this week too, me for three crowns and Jackie for a three-tooth bridge. We get the permanents in two weeks.

I liked RECURSION.

We have CRIMINAL UK on Netflix but haven't watched it yet. We watched the first series of THE BOYS, finished CRANFORD (too many gossiping biddies with too little to do causes trouble) and LAST TANGO IN HALIFAX (final episode was better than the rest of them put together), still watching the various half hour shows mentioned last time - my favorite currently is DERRY GIRLS, watching STAR TREK: VOYAGER first season that is showing on CBS (very not impressed so far, she may have gone to the Vulcan Academy but she is no Spock), FLESH AND BLOOD, etc. We discovered there was a second series of THE SPLIT (Nicola Walker, Stephen Mangan, Deborah Findlay), which supposedly ran on Sundance (maybe the pay version), about a family of divorce lawyers. We bought series two on Amazon.

We watched THE HIPPOPOTAMUS (2017) on Amazon/Acorn (I think), based on the Stephen Fry novel of the same name. Drunken washed up poet turned critic Ted Wallace (Roger Allam) is asked by his goddaughter to investigate supposed "miracle" cures by his 16 year old godson, at the estate of former friend (an oddly cast Michael Modine). Others in the cast include Fiona Shaw, a very over the top Tim (Lord Percy) McInnerny as a flamboyantly gay playwright, and Geraldine Somerville (Penhaligon in CRACKER, and Harry Potter's mother in several movies). While certainly watcnghable, it was nothing special. I won't be reading the book.

So, it's pretty much all television all the time, plus some books.

George said...

New York State covid cases are inching upward. Diane and I remain hunkered down. We're supposed to get a new bath tub installed later this week but having workers in our house concerns us.

I finally resolved my Medicare issues over my CPAP supplies. What a bureaucratic nightmare! I've been fighting with them since February 2020.

Western NY weather remains mild. We're getting some much needed rain.

Tomorrow night, the Buffalo Bills play the covid-riddled Tennessee Titans. Go Bills!

Jerry House said...

Happy Indigenous People's Day, Patti! (Or, as some call it, Columbus Day, or Let's Bring Smallpox and Influenza to a New Continent, Invade Said continent, and start a Slave Trade Day.)

I hope Kevin fares well with in-person classes. Jack has been doing in-person since the start of the year and, so far, all is well. His school seems on top of the guidelines and only one student registered positive for Covid. Christina works at a local high school and many of the students are blase about masks and social distancing; some classes have as many of 17 kids out due to the disease. Scary.

It's been a strange week. We found out this week that Kitty's Uncle Don died at age 94. He moved to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, after marrying and stayed there. He had always been an active man and, until last year, plowed his neighbors whenever there was a snow storm. He also loved to knit for relaxation -- we all have blankets and afghans from his dating back to over forty years ago; his workmanship was incredible. Kitty spent forty minutes yesterday on the phone with his wife, her Aunt Charlotte, 92. We expect she'll call more in the next few weeks. Don, one of eight children, was the last of his generation.

Mark was highly insulted this week when his ball python bit him. She's generally a fairly non-aggressive snake. Mark has been gearing up for an ultramarathon this coming January and has been wait-listed for a marathon in Birmingham in February.

We finally beached! The bridge to Pensacola Beach (not the Three-Mile Bridge that was taken out during Hurricane Sally -- that one will be out of commission for at least six months) was finally opened for non-residents, so off we went yesterday. The boardwalk was completely destroyed and piled up like kindling and the Gulf have (for the time being, anyway) gobbled up about 50 yards of beach. The waves were as wild as I have ever seen them and some fool was wind-surfing for well over half-hour. But it was beautiful and relaxing. If there were any dolphins, they would have had to breach about 20 feet in the air for us to see them.

The girls are going camping this weekend, so we will be babysitting Jack and Anvil (the aged pug who is now blind, deaf, and senile), as well as other assorted pets.

Still reading short stories, so I can participate this Wednesday. Television has consisted of late night comics and rewatching episodes of Poirot. We watch the latter with captions and make fun comparing them to what the actors are actually saying.

Have a great week, Patti! Halloween is coming! What are you going as? Kitty and I have our costumes all ready -- we'll be dressed up as two lonely, shut-ins.

Jeff Meyerson said...

Jerry, us too! Those are our favorite costumes, year in and year out.

pattinase (abbott) said...

That is the costume of the year.

Rick Robinson said...

No TV, just some reading. We did watch (rewatch, I think) Ken Burns Empire of the Air, a 2-hour documentary about the invention of and early days of radio up to television. Interesting but not great. It was made in 1991. Burns has done better. As you may have seen on the blog, I stopped reading GRANT and moved on. I'll get back to it someday.

I also read CAREFREE CALIFORNIA: CLIFF MAY AND THE ROMANCE OF THE RANCH HOUSE, a thick coffee table sized book but dense with small print and tons of architectural plans and sketches. I loved it.

Three weeks to the election. We got our voters' pamphlets Saturday, our ballots will come in a week. Then we'll fill them out and drop them at the library drop box. Oregon is an all mail-in state. I'm nervously hopeful.

Rick Robinson said...

Do you still have the link for my short story post, or shall I resend it?

pattinase (abbott) said...

Please send it, Rick, although it won't go live till your post goes live.

pattinase (abbott) said...

Rick-subscribed to Atomic Ranch for a while as I have a mid-century house. Love looking at them.

Gerard Saylor said...

I made another trip to assist my parents last week. A 16-hour day to drive down, assist, share dinner, and drive back. I ended up missing Boy #1's Senior Day for his H.S. cross country team. I missed seeing the event in the calendar or otherwise could have arranged a different day.

But, I did get to go mountain biking on both Saturday and Sunday. I'm not very fast or skilled but the riding is a lot more fun when I'm not behind a student athlete kid having a rough and pokey day. If I'm not going fast enough or get stuck behind someone I'm always fighting gravity going both uphill and downhill.

I need to get Boy #2 out of the house. His classes are all virtual but never sees anyone in person. Last night his mother was encouraging him to meet classmates after school but he gave a grouchy teenager response to that parental guidance. The thing is we don't know how much communication he has online with other kids through his school's online set-up.

TracyK said...

I will have a short story post. I have been reading some short stories, still reading the Ross Macdonald bio, and reading THE NIGHT MANAGER by Le Carre. We watch something every night but a very mixed bag: NCIS, Person of Interest, Elementary, Rush Hour 3, Animaniacs, Poirot.

We bought two (dwarf) citrus trees to plant in our tiny back area. The lemon tree we planted twenty years ago (not a dwarf) is huge now with tons of lemons, but I am not so sure of our success with these.

pattinase (abbott) said...

So worrisome about our teens. Kevin had lunch at 9:20 at his first day in class.
How wonderful to have a lemon tree. I miss CA so much.

Todd Mason said...

Recovering from lost sleep on the weekend. I'll have a combined Wednesday short fiction post (I'll have to look to see the last time I reviewed a novel) and it will also be part of #1956Club.

Todd Mason said...

Wow. It was a review last July of ANARCHAOS by Donald Westlake using the Curt Clark pseudonym, advisedly. Terrible short novel. And even it was in a review of his collection of better work wrapped around that daft long novella, TOMORROW'S CRIMES.

Todd Mason said...

If you've never seen INTENT TO KILL (1958 UK film with London or some city closer to Pinewood trying and not quite making the grade as Montreal), based on one of Brian Moore's pseudonymous novels, Jimmy Sangster script, Jack Cardiff directing, is pretty solid. The longest stretch I remained awake yesterday was devoted to watching this film on TCM, so my recommendation might be best considered that I was Not in my most critical mode. (I thought a rather bad if famous horror film as better than it was under slightly more half-asleep circumstances.)