Heat Wave

Today's Forecast...

75 degrees already, and it’s only 8:30 in the morning.

An expected record-setting high of 96 degrees.

Y’know, I thought I moved to Seattle…who snuck up on me and shipped me to southern California (or the midwest, or south, or East coast…I wanted someplace warmer than Alaska when I left, but there’s a reason I stayed in the Pacific Northwest!)?

Ah, well. We’re coping the best we can: fans all over the apartment, daily dunks in the pool, occasional cool showers, spritzers of cool water by the bed, and so on. We keep daydreaming about A/C, but given Seattle, we’d only need it for maybe one week out of the year, so it’s really not worth spending money on. Better to just be wusses and whine our way through the occasional heat wave.

Boy in the Pool

Boy in the Pool

Boy in the Pool, originally uploaded by Prairie Brown.

Prairie took a bunch of pictures of me dorking around in the pool with my snorkel equipment the other day.

Since today’s heading up into the 80’s, we’re thinking heading back to the pool sounds like a really good idea….

Live Free or Die Hard

In short: as far as summer blockbuster entertainment goes, Live Free or Die Hard was everything that Transformers should have been. Big, loud, funny, and — and this is a key point — believable in its implausibility. I’m honestly not sure how exactly they do it (though I’ve got a few guesses, and right at the top of the list are three things: decent screenwriting, decent direction, and a reliance on good old-fashioned physical stuntwork instead of a constant barrage of CGI), but no matter how silly the stunts get…and they do get silly…LFoDH manages to sell them and keep them just believable enough to hold onto the audience.

Prairie and I both came out of LFoDH with big grins, having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. This one’s worth seeing.

Transformers

So last night, giving in to our inner 12-year-olds, Rick and I went out to see Transformers, Michael Bay‘s latest assault on good moviemaking, good taste, and childhood memories.

Mini-review number one: It was glorious, incredible, over-the-top, in-your-face, enjoyably bad.

Mini-review number two: Moments of “holy shit, that was cool,” buried in a whole mess of, “what the fuck?”

In other words, it was exactly what I was afraid it might end up being: a bizarre combination of seeing the coolest toys from my childhood on screen as if they’d been ripped right out of my prepubescent imagination, and Michael Bay’s crack-addict-on-a-caffeine-IV approach to moviemaking. The man is such a hack, but he’s just so good at it that you end up walking out hating yourself for actually enjoying the dreck that he puts on screen.

More thoughts (some quite possibly spoileriffic) after the jump….

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Fremont Solstice Parade and 10,000 photos!

Okay, so it’s not the most interesting or artistic shot I’ve ever taken. However, there are two good (or at least good enough) reasons for me to toss this up…

  1. I’m finally finished with the Fremont Solstice Parade photos! Since many of the photos are deemed moderately unsafe (naked bodypainted bike riders and such) and may not be visible by default, non-Flickr users can use this guest pass link to see the entire set.

  2. This photo was my 10,000th photo uploaded to Flickr. Ten thousand photos (and more, now). Wow. Impressive and scary, all at the same time.

I like summer (and happy 4th of July!)

I’m really enjoying this summer so far.

Prairie and I have wheels! Foot-wheels, that is — traditional rollerskates for her, and inline rollerblades for me. She’d brought up the idea a couple times in the past, and we decided to give it a shot a couple weeks ago. Our initial plan was to strap ’em on and go scooting around Greenlake, but then we figured that perhaps we should start smaller, since neither of us had been on wheels in ages (or at all, in my case). We found a cute little park a short ways north of us (Paramount School Park, in Shoreline) that has a short path looping around the park, strapped on our skates…and decided that it was a really good idea not to start with Greenlake! We’re both a bit wobbly at this point, and it’s such a different workout that neither of us would have been likely to make it all the way around the Greenlake loop without wearing out. We’ve been back up to this little park a few times, though, and we’re going to keep doing laps there whenever we get a chance until we feel up to graduating to something else.

Also good: living in an apartment complex with a pool. There’s not much better on a hot summer day than coming home from work, skating, or whatever, and slipping into the pool to cool off. Some days we just go to splash around a bit, and some days we take our snorkel gear with us to get more pre-Hawaii snorkeling practice. Much fun! I am going to have to start experimenting with my face fuzz, however…I’m just not getting a good seal on the snorkel’s face mask because of my mustache. Looks like that’s going to have to go in order to get up to speed on snorkeling. It’ll be worth it — how many times am I going to get a chance to go snorkeling with sea turtles, after all? — I’m just hoping I can come up with something that doesn’t look too terribly goofy.

So far, this has been a very pleasant Fourth. Slept until we felt like getting up instead of worrying about an alarm, walked down to the grocery store and got some donuts, came back here and sat in the shade by the pool and ate the donuts, then camped out to relax in the apartment for a bit. I made coleslaw (using a rather loose definition of ‘made’ — I dumped a bag of coleslaw salad into a bowl, added a bottle of coleslaw dressing, and stirred) and Prairie made potato salad for later in the day, and now we’re both puttering away with our blogs.

If you’re reading this on the site rather than through the RSS feed or the LiveJournal feed, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve changed the design a bit. It’s nothing major — thanks to WordPress’s theme support, I didn’t have to do any real work other than finding a theme that I liked enough to use — but it’s at least something of a change from what I’ve had for a while.

Along with the change, I’ve taken the ‘eclinkticism’ section out of the sidebar, and have instead set up a daily automated post that will add anything I toss into my del.icio.us account each day and post it around midnight or so. This way the links show up both on my main site and on my LiveJournal mirror, and mom doesn’t have to squint at the tiny text in the sidebar. ;)

I’m still trying to get through photos…as often happens, I’m running weeks behind. I’m getting closer to the end of my Solstice Parade photos, after which there will be some blurry shots of a Rat City Rollergirls bout I got to go to on Pride weekend, and then a chunk of shots from the final weekend for the Blacklight. It’s slow going, but I’m making progress….

And, I think that’s about all that’s falling out of my brain at the moment. Have a good fourth, don’t blow any fingers off, and so on!

Me and Prairie

Me and Prairie

Me and Prairie, originally uploaded by djwudi.

…as seen on the Simpsons. If we were ever on the Simpsons, that is. Courtesy of the character generator in The Simpsons Movie website.

Rataphooey

Given that Ratatouille has just hit theaters, I feel compelled to revisit a question I asked just over a year ago: Is Pixar a ‘boys only’ club?

Just where are the girls in Pixar films? To date, there’s not a single Pixar film that has a female main character: The Incredibles comes the closest, but even there, both Helen Parr/Elastigirl and Violet are supporting characters, and it’s Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible that’s the hero.

Come on, Pixar. You’ve done superheroes, bugs, cars, cowboy and space toys…isn’t it time to take the ‘NO GIRLS ALLOWED’ sign off of the clubhouse door?