The Life Experience ~ Spring '10

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Spring Equinox

• When gardening, buy the wrong kind of soil at your own peril.
• When you do get the right kind of dirt, though, it’s possible to create self-watering containers out of Common Household Items!
• Never volunteer to close the library on Story Time days.
• Peyote: not just for crazy uncles! Also a nifty beading stitch!
• Using old shirts to make doll clothes is great because you already have hems!
• Marigolds planted with vegetables do a good job of deterring pests, and plus they look great!
• Don’t plant onion-type plants in the same container as legume-type plants, however, because the onion-type roots apparently do the botanical equivalent of pushing the legume-type roots down and taking their lunch money.
• Circumzenithal and circumhorizontal arcs are atmospheric effects caused by ice crystals high in the air—they look like rainbows on top of clouds!
• If you don’t like the ending of your book, it’s okay to go back and write a new ending, even if it goes over your self-imposed deadline, because you will feel much better if you do it right.
• It’s not just the Horrible Undead Cat who liked to sit in dirt. Our current old cats do it, too.
• The TV versions of The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic and Hogfather are pretty respectable,* but stay away from the animated Discworld movies.
• If you don’t change your razor often enough, your lymph nodes could swell up and you’ll start worrying you have cancer.
• Keeping a Swiss Ball in my closet significantly raises the chances that I’ll do strength exercises at some point in the day.
• Car accidents apparently also come in threes.
• Mormon divorces have two parts: the part where you get divorced legally, and the part where you get “unsealed” in the temple, which takes longer. As far as I can tell, you can totally get remarried to your second spouse while you’re still “sealed” to your first.
• Nitpicking is my mutant power.
• Zyrtec has withdrawal symptoms at least as unpleasant as the various brands of Fukitol I’ve tried—and yet, for some reason, I find Zyrtec a lot creepier.
• My eyes are not broken, and my glasses are not polarized: the Nyquil-Dayquil** filter every movie since the mid-90s has decided to go with is bugging other people, too!
• Gardening is actually a thing I can do, if I start small enough!

*Except that, while that dude was one hell of a character, I had a hard time recognizing him as Mr. Teatime. In my head he was a lot more … Marshie-esque.

**Alternative name: Revenge Of The Human Traffic Cones.

Comments

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Peyote: not just for crazy uncles!

Explain yourself now.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I have an uncle (okay, a lot of them) who embraced the 60s. To lasting effect. He's actually pretty cool, but he's just a little ... eccentric. I used to assume everyone had at least one uncle like that.

This particular one will probably never live down the time my cousin described a scene from a movie and he nodded wisely and said, half to himself, "Yeah, that sounds like peyote all right."

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Really? I got rather a kick out of the animated Pratchetts, and felt that, in some ways, they stayed truer to the books. Nanny Ogg was perfect! And I loved the "Soul Music" soundtrack.

As for "Colour of Magic"... I have very mixed feelings. Including the conviction that it should have been done as a miniseries, not a feature film. And I'm still pissed off that they made Two-Flower speak Morporkian-- so much of the humor of the story depends on the fact that his entire holiday experience was free from understanding everything that went on around him, while Rincewind was stuck being fully aware of every crisis.

"Hogfather," on the other hand, was downright brilliant. Susan remains my Hero.

[laughinggas13.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I preferred Hogfather too. Have you seen Going Postal yet? It's brilliant. (But I still think Hogfather pwns all.)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

I have not! I didn't know it was out yet.

[laughinggas13.livejournal.com]

Only very recently, I think. And possibly only in the UK, though I'm sure someone enterprising will have put it on youtube.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think being truer to the books was their downfall. I was impressed that they tried that, but in their attempt to fit every scene and every bit of dialogue from the books in, they sacrificed cinematic pacing. It was like they were hurrying through a checklist, rather than actually translating it to the screen. You had to have read the books to keep up.

Two-Flower's understanding what was going on was a little disappointing--not to mention how he would actually become the one to RESPOND to a crisis. But I thought it was overall pretty good. (My biggest disappointment was that they left out the afterlife bridge party, actually ...)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see what you mean. It's true, they didn't stand alone very well in the sense that a non-Pratchett-fan would enjoy them. But then again, it seems that the live-action movies didn't, either. Let's face it-- for all the many brilliant things about Pratchett's stories, his writing really is what wins it all. I loved the animated ones so much because it was like reading the books-- with pictures and sound!

[beetzart.livejournal.com]

In regards to your Mormon divorce bit: While growing up in that CULT, we were taught that only the Prophet or a disciple could unseal you. MEN can be sealed as many times as possible, but WOMEN cannot.