Laurabelle's Blog

For the past few weeks, Jeff and I have been making our way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We have now finished the second season.

We have been getting our fix through Netflix, obviously, but after watching I Only Have Eyes for You we knew that we would have to own Buffy at some point. So why wait? I ordered the complete Buffy from Amazon; it's only $5 per DVD. Never mind that there are 40 discs...

I think it may not be a good sign that I have started to dream about the Buffy-verse. Last night I dreamed that Giles and I were climbing trees, running away from people (or things), and being upset that the tea we made didn't match the labels on the teabags.

Jeff and I went to a Giants baseball game on Thursday night (vs. the San Diego Padres) and witnessed Barry Bonds’ home run #722. (We declined the free I was there pin.)

It was a pretty good game, actually. We went with the knitting gang from work (plus a few non-knitting friends and husbands) and enjoyed the weather and the great view from the ballpark over San Francisco Bay. Apparently, according to people who follow these things, the Padres were number one this season and the Giants number two. It should have been a fairly boring game, but the Giants made nine points over the first eight innings and the Padres none whatsoever. The Giants fell apart in the top of the ninth and allowed the Padres three points, but the Giants’ win was still a foregone conclusion.

And that’s about as much sports reporting as you’ll have from me in a long time. I hadn’t seen a baseball game in years, and it was nice to find that I enjoyed it more than when I was a kid. Still, I think this is one experience in my life that is better appreciated for its rarity.

This afternoon in downtown Oakland, I approached a gray-haired man selling Street Spirit newspapers. He asked me how I was doing. I smiled at him and said truthfully, I'm having a good day. How about you?

He replied in a soft sweet voice, Better now.

As of last Saturday at approximately 3:15 pm CDT, I am now Mrs. Jeffrey A. Frasca.

The wedding was quite nice and, I think, much as I had planned it. The only thing that didn't conform to my expectations was the flowers on the cake, which was simply because we (who knew how the flowers were supposed to be arranged) forgot to do so, and the caterers took that task upon themselves. Frankly I would rather have liked to have a fit, but it would have been pointless and quite unseemly since I didn't even see the cake until the reception. So Jeff and I just cut the cake and had fun. Both cakes were quite excellent; Jeff said only about a third of the bride's cake remained and the groom's cake was completely obliterated. (For those looking for a bakery in the Dallas area, Frosted Art Bakery is excellent and fell perfectly within our cake budget.)

About a hundred people came, which was a nice crowd. Most of them were close family or people I and my parents knew from the Dallas area, but a few friends came from farther off. My French host parents came as well, which was just wonderful. My only frustration is that I didn't get to see anyone enough; weddings are not really a great time to meet or spend time with people.

Jeff is getting used to the sensation of a ring on his finger, and I am attempting to get used to the idea that my name is no longer Melton. I haven't changed any documents yet; that will come soon. (Ironically, while we were away a statement came from our dental insurance company, naming Jeff as my spouse, Jeffrey Melton.)

Otherwise, life continues much as usual. I have today off, then back to the grindstone.

My latest movie from Netflix is Peau d’âne (Donkey Skin), a French film from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale of the same name. If it were an American movie, I would have expected a complete adulteration of the story. This version was more or less faithful to Perrault’s story, but I was still a bit disappointed because it didn’t add anything more. There’s a lot to be done with that tale (witness Robin McKinley’s Deerskin).

Intermittently during the movie, characters break into song. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Python, but every time the prince started singing, I kept expecting someone to cut him off. That’s not even the only Holy-Grail-esque element; at the end of the film, a helicopter appears! According to IMDB, Peau d’âne was made in 1971 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. I have to wonder if this little French fairy tale wasn’t part of Python’s inspiration for their take on legend.

The very evening that Jeff brought home the DVD player, I signed us up for Netflix.

At first I signed us up for the one-at-a-time plan because I thought, oh, we don't watch that many movies. But of course, now that we have a DVD player and easy access to movies with Netflix, it's much easier to watch movies. So you can guess how long the one-at-a-time lasted.

I thought two would be enough, because Jeff and I could each have one. But then I bumped us up to four, so we can each have two. After all, there are a million and a half movies that I haven't seen, and I don't want to spend a million years getting through all of them.

It also makes me feel less guilty about watching my movies at home while Jeff is away at band practice.

Jeff brought home a DVD player on Friday.

We had both been wanting a DVD player for quite a while; I even went so far as to buy a few DVDs (starting with the extra-special ninja extended 12-disk Lord of the Rings for Christmas), but we couldn't play them. We tried once with the DVD drive on Jeff's computer, which used to work, but this time it didn't.

A few weeks ago Jeff mentioned that one of his co-workers had an old DVD player he might be willing to part with, and I authorized the purchase of the player for a reasonable sum. I was thinking $50-$100 depending on the condition of the player; Jeff bought it for $20.

As I said, Jeff brought it home on Friday; we tried to hook it up and discovered that our TV (a Freecycle freebie) didn't have the necessary RCA cable jacks. (Damn the connector conspiracy!) So, in order to use our $20 DVD player, we went out that night and bought a $200 TV.

Much of this weekend was spent in front of our new TV, watching Firefly and then Serenity. I am sad that I completely missed Firefly while it was on television, so that I couldn't be one of the fans pestering stupid television mucky-mucks who couldn't recognize quality storytelling if it bit them in the ass, but I am infinitely relieved by the fact that I live in a time when TV series are released on DVD and it isn't necessary to hope for reruns that will never come.

And, of course, I am very glad to have a DVD player. I think it's worth much more than $20; we'll just have to owe Jeff's co-worker a favor.

Today we finished Serenity, but I'm not quite ready to stop playing with the DVD player yet. Even though it's getting a little late, I want to break out The Lord of the Rings and visit Middle Earth for a little while. I said to Jeff, I just want a little Bilbo.

He said, You always get a little Bilbo.

Last week Jeff and I checked out Total Recall from the Oakland Public Library. Jeff thinks this is one of the few passable movies involving Schwarzenegger (if not the only one); I’m not sure I would be so generous with my praise.

In any case, the point of this post is not to critique Arnie’s acting. The point is that this is a movie about humans on Mars.

By chance I ordered Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra at the same time. And I do mean chance; I had absolutely no idea what these books were about when I ordered them, only that they were written by C. S. Lewis, that Jeff had read and liked Out of the Silent Planet, and that we owned the third book of the trilogy and thus that I was obligated to lay my hands on the first two before opening the last.

Out of the Silent Planet is a member of the first, classic generation of science fiction, where almost nothing was known about the conditions in the deep ocean or on the other planets in our solar system, and therefore fantasy was allowed to roam freely where it is now lamentably restricted by fact. For example, the hero of Lewis’ novel simply pokes his head out of his spaceship and breathes freely of the Martian atmosphere.

Anyone familiar with the premise of Total Recall cannot fail to be struck by the contrast. Still, I would be hard pressed to concede that the post-moon-landing movie is any more realistic than Lewis’ seventy-year-old tale.

I ordered a couple of books from Amazon the other day (C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra), and when they arrived I happily unpacked the box and organized the books on the shelf, because that is what I do with books, besides read them of course. This was Tuesday.

It wasn't until yesterday that I actually looked at the packing slip and realized that although the books' covers said C. S. Lewis, in fact I had received a bird watching guide and the second season of Leave It to Beaver. Furthermore, my name is not Laura but John (last name omitted to protect the guilty).

It gives me some amusement to reflect that John, wherever he is, must have received my packing slip. I wonder if he has noticed yet?

Today I wrote a shell script for work. (No, I'm not at work today, but I wanted to solicit Jeff's help.) The script uses seven good traditional Unix utilities: cat, comm, cut, grep, sed, sort, and tail; it contains 20 lines of real code (excluding blank lines and comments). I am quite proud of it; it is the first semi-complex shell script that I have ever written.

My satisfaction with this little shell script made me think about how happy I am to work in a Unix shop, where my experience with the command line, Unix utilities, and scripting is useful and appreciated. Not only that, but I now have a Linux computer on my desk at work. I am much more productive now than I was on Windows, and I am happy to be hard-core.