random monday musings

You know, I haven't done a Monday Musings (or better yet, a Monday Montage) in what feels like forever... mostly because I've been doing the rambly post shopping roundup thing on a Saturday, leaving Mondays free for, well, a general sense of Mondayness really.

But since I did the Shrek movie review thing on Saturday, I just felt... I dunno... like I missed out on a good solid vaguely pointless ramble. Not that there is a whole lot of anything interesting to say, I just feel like a ramble...

We had another day of rampant cold in the office again today... I didn't notice it at first, I thought it was a little nippy, but as the morning progressed, it just kept getting colder, until I ended up having to put my jacket on again... once in the morning and again in the afternoon just before hometime. What the hell is up with that... could they just fix it already please!!! Especially since last time this happened I ended up getting sick... so I don't really want to be having a repeat performance of that thank you very much!

Speaking of cold... and jackets for that matter... it's been cold here of late, Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week it was just FREEZING! On Saturday we're talking a 1.5°C minimum at 6:30am and it only got to 3.7°C when Ma and I headed out to on Random Shopping Adventures™... it was "scrape the ice off the windshield" cold in fact... well, Ma had to before she left her place, I never went and looked at my windshield. Don't even ask about me getting up at 5:40am to go out on my walk on Thursday and Friday either... the less I have to think about that the better... I ended up wearing gloves and a very unstylish beanie on Friday...

But back to the jacket related stuff... since it was SOOOOOOO cold on Saturday and I had rather foolishly left the house without a jacket or any additional layers (I figured... house to car, car to supermarket, supermarket to car, car to house... there wouldn't be much time spent out of doors, how bad could it be), we checked out the menswear section of the Red Circle Boutique just to see if they had anything even vaguely interesting of the jacket persuasion... every other time I've looked in recent weeks I've been pretty disappointed, it's all either been Uglytown, or else there's just nothing around. Plus all the jackets I still have in my wardrobe from last year are a little bit like wearing small tents of some description (yaaay me, but boooo not having stylish outerwear).

Anyway, the Fashion Faeries were obviously taking pity on me, because I was actually spoiled with a plethora of possible choices... but in the end I culled it down to two, a black faux suedey type finish one that's a little more "work appropriate" (and thicker than the jacket I have been wearing), and a general "sweatshirt" type material one with a big design across the front of it (albeit bisected by a zipper). And because RCB were having yet another one of their seemingly neverending sales and/or price reduction specials, both jackets were about 40% (I think) off, so it almost ended up as a "two for one" thing. Unfortunately the checkout girly didn't play the "swipe the security tag" game when we were at the register, so the more expensive jacket (black and suedey obviously) set the alarm off, and when the nice doorboy came over to investigate, he just pulled the security tag sticker off of the lining of the pocket instead of just cancelling it out... the upshot of which is that I had a pocket full of sticky label residue this morning... not so nice... but it seemed to sort itself out as the day goes on. Don't even get me started on who's dumbass idea it was to PUT the sticking inside one of the two main pockets in the jacket in the first place though...

Also while we were out and about I decided that even though it was twice the price of all the others I had to get my hands on the final season of The West Wing before I ran out of job, and therefore, out of disposable income. Interestingly enough, when you do the math on it, all it means is that I paid maybe $5 more for each of the other seasons... it does make for a scary total though, so I'm not going to think about the math too much. We also won't think about how much money I spent back in the day on all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS which I haven't watched in forever, or what I paid for the full run of Buffy (although they were on sale at the time) ... why are we still talking about this?

Moving on...

Since I'd just bought two new jackets, and we had some time to kill after we got back from the supermarket but before we headed out to see Shrek the Third, and I've been lamenting the fact that all my existing jackets were too big, etc... I decided to do a brief mini wardrobe cull on Saturday afternoon... partly because I only did a halfassed one at Christmas after I got those new clothes, but also because there hasn't been a single occasion where I've gone back and worn any of the "bigger" clothes since I got ones that fit better... and if I haven't worn them at this point, it wasn't ever going to happen. So pretty much all the old teeshirts went, as did the old longsleeved teeshirts (a couple of which I still love but which look like crap when they're on me) and almost all of the jackets (including my very favourite but now monstrously oversized and sacklike green jacket with the hood... *sob*).

While I was moving things around and throwing things away (and changing over some of my older, "non matching" crappier coathangers for some of the better ones) I decided to try on my black trenchcoat, just to see how it was fitting. I might have tried it on last time I did a wardrobe cull, I honestly don't remember... but it fits again... yaaaaay... possibly still a tiny bit snug, but I could do up all the buttons again. Woohoo me. It did however need a bit of a clean (unidentifiable lapel and cuff smutt... plus I'm not sure that it ever HAS been cleaned up until this point, and I've had it for at least eight years), so that went off to the drycleaner before possibly going back into rotation.

You know how you get cravings for particular food items at certain times? Well, for some reason, I've been craving really good gingerbread men for a while now... actually it might not even be "really good" ones... I think I'm actually craving the ones that Pizza Hut used to do (they may still do them, but I haven't been inside a Pizza Hut in YEARS)... and for whatever reason, the ones I keep finding are never quite right... so this week I took matters into my own hands. We were wandering through the cooking supplies aisle (I think we might have been reviewing the soup choices on the opposite side) and I noticed that Nature's Selection have brought out a range of "Kids Cooking" cake mixes... and yes, one of them was for gingerbread men... and came with it's own little cookie cutter and a little piping tube to add the icing. So at some point in the next week or so (maybe next Friday night) I'm going to try my hand at quasi homemade gingerbread men... scary.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before in so many words... but Heroes ROCKS! Ma and I have been watching it together on Saturday afternoons (since I watch House and tape Heroes and she's out on Wednesday nights and just tapes House)... and usually at some point in the proceedings I end up talking to the teevee. Part of me wishes that I'd gotten Ma hooked on Lost way back when... I think she could have been addicted to that right along with me... but for the moment, Heroes is enough. I'm not actually sure how far behind the States we are, I know that they've already finished the season, and I think we have like three episodes left... which is just annoying, because I don't want to look online for anything in case I fall across some spoilers (because spoilers are BAD m'kay!)... but last week's episode was the "five years in the future" episode... and obviously the key to living five years in the Heroes future is that you slick your hair back... everyone was doing it (okay, not EVERYONE, but there was a lot of it going around). And how hot was Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) with the scar and the slicked back hair... plus all the additional superpowers. NUMMY!

Big Brother Season 7 continues to be the most vanilla and bland season thus far... I don't know why they couldn't just have come up with an "Adults Only" show that wasn't quite as full on and filthy as previous years (and honestly, with this season's crop of housemates, I don't know that they would have had to worry about anything resembling controversy) and didn't get the morality police all hot and bothered, but still gave us some idea of what was going on in the house in a non-6:30 time slot. And this whole concept of putting it all on the website and calling it "Premium" and charging money for it, BORED NOW... I don't want to pay to watch online what should be a free teevee show... in fact I don't want to watch any kind of teevee show online, that defeats the purpose of both my computer and my big beautiful teevee. This is the first year in a long while where I haven't seen any of the male housemates naked... granted I haven't gone looking (although I think somebody was looking for shots of Thomas showering on here the other day, since I got a search engine hit from it), but I shouldn't have to... they should just be around (having said that I might have a dig around later, see if anything turns up). Either that or they should sell Big Brother to SBS, I'm sure we could see all the nudity we wanted then.

I'm not sure whether it's just the rampant beigeness of the shows in general or just the vanilla flavouring of the housemates, but I'm rapidly loosing interest... I'm still watching, but I'm not always paying attention (or even in the room if it comes to that)... in previous years I've been addicted to Friday Night Live... but at least twice this season I've just given up and gone off to watch other things instead (especially when it looked like the people I really didn't like were going to make it past the second round)... although whether that's because I have six seasons of The West Wing that I can watch (have I mentioned I'm just a little tiny bit addicted to that at the moment, even on my second viewing of the fifth season) or the fact that the winners don't seem to be as random as they have been in previous years, I don't know. On that note, how good was it that Jamie took it out from three time winner Andrew this week... viva le nerd!

This morning, when I was doing my usual stats check I noticed that a hell of a lot of the traffic seemed to be coming in from Best Gay Blogs... which as at yesterday morning had been on hiatus for almost two months (although I just realised maybe not, since I've been checking the .net site rather than the .com site, so it could just be me), but it seems like they are back with a vengeance. And at the top of the list when I stopped by to take a look at the new and improved site was... *insert fanfare* ME (see pictorial evidence and everything)! They sent out an email to everyone in their database (I assume) saying that if you wanted to be a featured site, to fill out the questionnaire and send it back... so I did... and there I was (and still am, at least as I write this), front and center. Yay me! I'm not sure how I feel about their new layout just yet though... it will probably grow on me over time, but I kinda miss the old version.

And just as a random musing to the universe... if you were going to send a bunch of workmen to work on scaffolding between the building I work in and the one next door, do you think you could have seen your way clear to providing a few more pieces of worthwhile eye candy? Or don't they let the young and the pretty up on scaffolding these days? Actually, it was probably better that there weren't more, since that could have been far too distracting, and I KNOW I would have gotten busted perving. It was a little creepy to have them THAT close to the window though... we could see them, they could see us... it was a whole world of less good. Fortunately they put up some boards later on this afternoon, so now we can't see them at all...

TORCHWOOD DEBUTS TONIGHT! Bisexual, time travelling, Captain Jack is back! No, not THAT one, the OTHER Captain Jack... it better live up to all the hype... and Network Ten better not pull it off the air after half a dozen episodes... I can almost guarantee that they WILL move it to some godawful timeslot between now and then though... the sooner the ABC can buy the rights (like they did with The West Wing when Channel 9 didn't know what the hell to do with it), and show it back to back with Doctor Who, the better...

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