years and cheers
Well Monday evening was a surprise, which gave me a whole lot to write about in yesterday's DLU, as opposed to most Tuesdays when I have little to say after a Monday packed with information about a weekend I did not update on as it was happening. (I often still write something one or both days over the weekend, however, and this past weekend I wrote a movie review Saturday and Sunday, so it's not like I'm slacking!) That's basically the case today now, since last night was relatively uneventful.
I mean, it lacked events that were very interesting, anyway. Shobhit and I went shopping, to the stores we never had time to get to over the weekend: Costco first; MacPherson's Produce second; then Trader Joe's just because Shobhit knew their bell peppers and onions would be cheaper, so yes, he basically insists on adding a second stop just to save two or three bucks, which is dumb as shit but whatever. We did wind up getting a new type of bread I find intriguing, so I guess there's that. Also Shobhit went ahead and paid at all three places, saving me not just the $100 I had originally budgeted for Costco but also the $40 I had budgeted for MacPherson's the combined effect of which was putting me well over $100 over budget, thanks to the replacement of a stolen bike seat setting me back $60 of that.
I also realized last night I had failed to budget for Happy Hour with Laney on Friday this week. There was already a fee for reserving the ping pong table at SPIN, the bar we passed downtown months ago and decided we wanted to try sometime, and it's finally happening this week. They have ping pong! Fun! It does make for a pretty expensive week, though, what with dinner with Ivan tomorrow (he arrives for his last visit for the foreseeable future late tonight) and Happy Hour with Laney on Friday. This was why I was unwilling to add dinner with Gabriel on Monday evening, and he just bought me a drink instead. I have very few expenses scheduled for next week, thankfully.
Anyway! We finally got home, around 7:30, put the groceries away, and then we made nachos for dinner, at my suggestion. The bag of samples Heather gifted the weekend before last had included three bags of chips, and the large bag of tortilla chips still had some left in it after the nachos we made from them on the 20th. I had thought one of the other, smaller bags was smaller tortilla chips but they were actually more like much smaller potato chips. But I thought, whatever, we'll still make nachos out of them. Black beans, mozzarella, onion, bell pepper, mushroom, radishes, cheddar -- all that was smothered all over it and put into the oven.
We watched the season finale of Years and Years. Honestly? Overall verdict on the six-part limited series: meh. The first half of the series is quite effectively creepy due to its near-future plausibility, but the more years into the future it went, the less plausible it seemed. This is pretty cynical of me, but I feel particularly that way about Vivian Rook winding up in jail in the end. The whole series has a specific kind of happy ending to it that, I felt, really strained believability. On the other hand, there was something I really liked about the very end, with the whole family basically delighted by the prospect of a recently deceased family member existing "in the cloud" as recorded memories. It does seem like we are likely not far off from achieving something like this, but I cannot get past the idea of digital copies of a person's speech and behavior patterns being only that -- an artificial facsimile. It's not real, and going on as though it is really gives me the creeps.
In other words, there were some things I didn't like so much about Years and Years, and other things I liked a lot. In some cases it managed to be both at once. I do respect that part of it, as a challenge to the viewer. Gran's speech at the beginning of this episode, a monologue about how the state of the world was all our own fault, was a little on the nose.
After that I made chai, and we watched an episode of Cheers on Netflix. Soon after I was in bed. I did not sleep particularly well last night, which was a surprise after I slept truly like a log the previous two or three nights in a row. On the upside, it at least got me out of bed earlier on a day that I both had my every-other-day push-ups and planks, and my every-third-day hair washing to do, all of which adds to my time I take to get ready in the morning. So that sort of worked out.
[posted 12:16 pm]