With The Lights Out, It's More Dangerous

So, just to give you all a little update on what's up with my life...

My Internet connection is still running slow as molasses in July in Antarctica. The "eCare" program my ISP provides to diagnose it requires you to download the installation program, which then downloads the rest of the program and installs it. I managed to download the installer with the help of wget, which can be set to time out after sixty seconds and continue downloading where it left off, but the installer program itself is not, of course, nearly so clever. Nor is my anti-virus update program. I haven't had the time to try to phone their support line(which would involve dragging a phone down to the basement and plugging it in to my ADSL modem), nor have I gotten around to searching their website at glacial speed to see if they have an email address. I have vague memories of having gone through a lot of this before(certainly the useless eCare installer rings a bell), but I don't remember how it was resolved that time. I probably blogged about it, but I never got around to indexing my blog entries by topic. I'm trying to download my email one or two messages at a time, which is working only fitfully; this also seems very familiar. The webmail interface isn't working any faster, of course, though I am able to access that at work, at least.

Claritin has been helping with my nasal congestion and sneezing, which may not be conclusive proof that my problem is allergy-related, but it does seem indicative. I was okay for yesterday and most of today, but now it's back. It must have been all that time I spent outside yesterday mowing the lawn, because I'm sure that reduced the pollen count by contaminating the air with dandelion seeds instead.

We haven't barbecued yet this season. I always put off the checks I'm supposed to do after winter, like checking the tubes for insect nests and the propane tank for leaks. But Nicole had a new rib recipe which involved cooking on the barbecue, so we bit the bullet and got down to it. Or would have, but Nicole noticed a wasp flying into the little match-lighting hole on the side of the barbecue. We lifted the lid, and sure enough, there's a little three-inch wasp nest inside our barbecue. No idea how long it's been there. Exterminators quote us anywhere from $50-$75 for cleaning it up, which we're not eager to spend because my tax refund hasn't come in yet. So we might sneak out tomorrow night with a can of Raid and try to gas them while they sleep. And hope it doesn't contaminate our barbecue too much.

On the other hand, we could just buy a new barbecue, 'cause this one was only about $100. But then we'd have to dispose of our wasp-ridden current barbecue anyway...

Time to put the kids to bed, and then perhaps watch the "Lost" season finale.

Combing My Hair In A Brand New Style

More miscellany...

I'd gotten the CD version of David Sylvian's "Gone To Earth" from the library. It's by far my favourite Sylvian album(including anything by Japan, though the Rain Tree Crow album is comparable), not least because of the second half of the album, with all the instrumentals. "Upon This Earth" is one of my favourite tracks, being mostly instrumental except for a poem read over the opening of the song. This is on the double-LP version I bought around the time it came out, that is. The CD, on the other hand...is a single disc which contains only the seven vocal tracks from the first vinyl disc. So where the hell is the CD version of the second disc?

The CD is labeled as "Weatherbox: Disc 2", so maybe it's a refugee from a box set...but still, the packaging doesn't list the rest of the tracks, either. I'll never be able to get my record collection on MP3 this way. <grump/>

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We watched the Hitchhiker's Guide movie last night. It was okay, I suppose. I have imprinted on two different versions of HHGG--the book, of course, and the record. This is a record based on the radio scripts(but not identical to them, because I've seen the radio scripts)that I taped a couple of decades back, and I've never seen the actual record anywhere since, but I've had it on tape for years and it's still in my audio memory ready for playback. So a lot of the voices sound wrong, but then they did in the TV version, too. The TV show's Ford Prefect looked all right, but he sounded wrong, and Trillian was even worse. Mos Def's and Zooey Deschanel's accents were still jarring, especially when they didn't bother to change the lines from British dialect. Sam Rockwell didn't bother me that much, I suppose. Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast was brilliant, completely different from what I expected but much better in his ineffectuality and weariness. The animations from the book were often hilarious, and the musical number with the dolphins was entertaining. But overall it will not become my favourite version of the story, and it mostly makes me want to reread the books(the way the second X-Men movie made me want to reread the comics).

On the weekend I saw most of the movie "Trapped", which I'd barely even heard of. Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Pruitt Taylor Vince(Vance?) play a trio of kidnappers who target doctor Stuart Townsend, Charlize Theron, and their daughter, in a supposedly foolproof kidnapping plan. Very tense in spots, mostly in the Theron-Bacon plotline; Love isn't as convincing, and Pruitt's character is obviously the weakest link. (Remember that show? Sorry.) The scenes in the small plane were perhaps the most gutwrenching.

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Currently I'm reading the fourth book in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of The Fallen series, House of Chains. The first book in the series, Gardens of The Moon, really had two sequels(Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice)with different subsets of the characters over the same span of time; this is mostly a sequel to Deadhouse Gates, it looks like. The whole first section of the book, though, involves whole new characters, but it didn't take me long to get caught up in their plotline. Now we're back with the second book's characters, and it's a constant "Now who were they again?" This is one reason I want to get all this information organized in my wiki, so I can remember, when they encounter a Forkrul Assail characters, whether any of that particular Elder Race has turned up before. Or what the difference is between the Tiste Andii and the Tiste Edur(I think I have the T'lan Imass straight, at least). It's a very rich world, but after three thick books there's a lot that's gone on.

Of course, with the Internet slowdown, I haven't been able to do much on my Wiki. I'm still in the early chapters of A Game of Thrones, where not much is going on yet, and not too far into The Fires of Heaven, but now I feel like I should be starting Gardens of The Moon, too...

Or maybe The Hobbit, which I've been reading to Simon. Yeah, I figured he'd be ready for it, and we made fair progress with it over the weekend; we're up to Beorn by this point. He's enjoying it, and he especially liked the riddle game with Gollum. Now he's making up riddles all over the place--most of them quite simple, of course, except when he bases one on Neopets or something obscure like that.

While we were at my mom's, we watched an old tape of the Grande Prairie College Theatre production of the musical version of "The Hobbit". Very bad picture quality(partly because the guy who was filming it was also playing Gandalf), and it's amazing how badly many of those songs have aged. I got tired of the endless reprises of "Eleven Mighty Dwarves". (It was supposed to be thirteen, of course, but there were difficulties getting that many, so they gave up.) My brother and two of his friends were among the dwarves, and it was fun listening for their voices--because there was no way we could make out their facial features. The guy who played Bilbo was really good--he was actually quite a large man, but rotund, and he played small and frightened quite well. And the dragon they rigged up was really quite amazing. It was done by the same guy who did the Gandalf, and who later did the Audrey II when we did "Little Shop of Horrors". A better tech than an actor, really.

I don't really have a conclusion here, so I'll just stop.