the home with a cow in its halls
Yesterday Shobhit came with me to see the 11 a.m. showing of The House with a Clock in Its Walls, mostly just to get himself a Social Review point for the day. He's long had a knack for predicting what grade I will give a movie we see together, and as soon as this one ended, he said, "B-minus?" Indeed.
We walked there and we walked back. This was after frying up half the potatoes he bought at the Tacoma Farmers Market on Saturday, and having them for brunch mixed with a couple of over easy eggs for each of us, as we watched Friday night's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. And then on the way back we stopped at QFC to get some rosemary bread using a $1 coupon for Essential Bakery take-and-bake.
I spent a few hours in the afternoon first writing up the review, then editing, uploading and captioning the photos from Saturday's visit to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, and then writing the journal entry about Saturday (and a little bit about Friday evening, which we spent grocery shopping).
Then I helped Shobhit with dinner, doing chopping and then bread-flipping as he made a lentil dish and eggplant squash and lentil flour parathas. He made rice too; my lunch today was leftover eggplant with rice.
We ate while watching The English Patient, which he recently discovered to be available on Hulu and he had never seen it, but knew it won a bunch of Oscars (including Best Picture). I knew I had seen it before, but wanted to figure out when -- turns out, after some research this morning, I watched it on April 10, 2007. With Shobhit! I guess we both had forgotten about that. But when I checked my LiveJournal entry about it, I noted that it was part of a series of movies we watched when Shobhit asked me to add every Best Picture winner to my Netflix queue. Now I'm thinking I should list out all the winners since then -- it's been another 11 years, after all.
And by the way? When I signed into my Netflix account, I discovered they added a "download all" button to the "streaming activity" log, which opens the entire list into an excel sheet! Before this, they only allowed you to tab back in time 20 titles at a time -- and if you've been watching streaming titles since 2007 as I have, that takes a long time to figure out when you last watched something. The most amazing thing about this is that I just complained about it to them on Twitter only about a month ago! So presumably they had long been planning this change, but it sure was a nice bit of timing for me as a customer.
Anyway, I mentioned in 2007 I had seen The English Patient once even before that. So now I've seen it three times. I still don’t see what the big deal is. It's fine, but whatever. Best Picture? I should find a list of what critics most voted to be the best film each year, which would be a way different list than Best Picture winners.
I thought about seeing if Shobhit wanted me to get the rest of the Best Picture winners, but half of them he already has screeners of as a SAG-AFTRA member. The only one I'd be really interested in watching again is No Country for Old Men.
That got me to thinking, though: is there a list I can find of the most critically acclaimed movie of each year? That would be a way better list, considering how very often the Academy gets it wrong.
As it happens, I did find such a list! At least stretching as far back as 2000, anyway.
But this is the most interesting thing about that: the most recent three most-acclaimed movies are all gay movies! Carol (2015), Moonlight (2016), Call Me By Your Name (2017).
Well, so much for thinking I won't have any more days to eat lunch out on the patio! The sun is shining today, the skies are clear, it's 60° -- plenty warm when the sun is hitting you in late September. I took my leftover eggplant and rice out there, along with a little bowl of corn chowder that Lynne had prepared to share in the kitchen. And it was incredible! As I told her when I got back to my desk, when I eat corn chowder, my general expectation is that it'll be . . . fine. This was delicious. She told me a key difference with this was that it's peak corn season and so the corn itself was really good. She also used the cobs to make corn stock, which presumably made a difference as well.
Anyway, Alicia was out on the patio today too, but she sat on one of the tables -- today I went out and sat with Terry, who was on one of the comfy soft yellow chairs over on the west side of the patio. We chatted a lot, first discovering an interesting thing we have in common: we both grew up Baptists (albeit of different varieties), are no longer Baptists, but we both still really, really love Christmas music. I can't remember at all how that came up in conversation. But then we wound up talking about her having recently visited the Grand Canyon, and my recent(ish) visit to Yellowstone National Park. She's never been to the latter, and she really needs to go. Everyone does! I will sing that park's endless praises until the cows come home. Or maybe longer. I suppose cows go home a lot, so that seems like it would happen sooner than I'd want.
[posted 12:45 pm]