covenant

— छह हज़ार इक्यासी — Another chill evening last night . . . I rode my bike home from work; I made chai; Shobhit and I went shopping. We went to the QFC in the U District, specifically at University Village, just because it's so much nicer and pleasant than either of the ones on Capitol Hill. Shobhit had a potato-baked dish at home which we ate with rice and baked frozen naans. And then I spent a good chunk of the evening watching Alien: Covenant, which until then had been the only film in the Alien franchise I had only seen once. (Now it's only two of the seven films I have only seen twice. And no, I'm not counting the two stupid Alien vs. Predator films, only one of which have I seen at all.) This franchise has been on the mind lately for two reasons. First, Prometheus, which I watched on Monday, kept showing up on my HBO Max account as available but leaving soon, which was why I was compelled to rewatch it. I had not seen either that or Covenant since the latter was released in 2017. Second, this week's Rewatchables podcast covered the 1986 James Cameron film Aliens, which was really fun to listen to. (This was how I learned the wild detail that Vasquez, a Latina character, was played by Jenette Goldstein, a White woman, wearing darkened contact lenses and darkened skin.) Anyway, I have not watched the primary four movies from the original series through from start to finish in about ten years; I last watched Alien in 2016 and Aliens, like the two prequels, in 2017. I only just realized when looking it up that the last times I watched both Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection were actually standalone viewings outside of a marathon through the franchise as usual: I watched Alien Resurrection as a Jean-Pierre Junet double feature with Amelie in 2021, July 18; I actually watched Alien 3 by far the most recently, on New Year's Eve 2024, with Jennifer and Matthew and Ian and his girlfriend Bella, because Ian had never seen it and had only recently seen the previous two for the first time. So, having just watched Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, I think I'm ready to go through the "quadrilogy" again, this time doing the whole franchise in timeline order. I have long had a boxed set of the so-called "Quadrilogy," with lots of special features, so I may watch them on DVD again for the first time in eons. I think there are versions you can watch with triva popping up and I may watch that. My only issue is that DVDs play with distorted pictures on the TV, which drives me batshit crazy, but maybe I can get my DVD player extension to work on my computer. The last time I tried it I couldn't get it to work though. — छह हज़ार इक्यासी — — छह हज़ार इक्यासी — I bought a bag of small stroowafels in Amsterdam to bring and share at work, but I really wanted to share with the Merchandising Enablement Tea and not just the whole office. The problem is that we never have a meeting with all of us physically together, so I never really had a good moment for it. I went ahead and just brought the bag back home recently. I had three of them with my chai last night and they were delicious. I think I'll put the cashew cookies on hold until we've burned through those. We're also down to the bottom layer, of three or maybe even four, of the 50 chocolates we had at home from Leonidas. These chocolates are generally amazing, putting most chocolate truffles you can get here in the States to shame. Shobhit often wants to go into Fran's Chocolates at U Village for a sample, but we didn't bother yesterday. I don't know if it crossed his mind, but it did mine, but I knew we had better chocolates at home. And Fran's is a pretty high-end, quality chocolate maker. But authentic Belgian chocolates are still better. Maybe it's just the novelty, I don't know. I'm going to miss those chocolates when we are finally done with them, though. Laney has asked more than once how "transition back to regular life" has been after returning from Amsterdam. I have explained that I did worry a little about it feeling like it was all over too quickly, with the trip itself over in just over two weeks after months of research and planning. What I did not think about was the long tail of ways the trip still kind of lasts, weeks after returning: the time I still spent on tagging the photos on Flickr, organizing them; we still have Alexia coming over next Monday to watch a slide show I have assembled. And there are still the Belgian chocolates, and now the stroopwafels, which continue giving us a flavor (quite literally) of the trip we went on. It's turned out to be a very effective way not to make it feel like the trip was over too quickly. Besides, two and a half weeks was actually long enough: I was ready to come back home by the end of it. I discovered an interesting detail about Cape Town, South Africa, where the next World Pride will take place, in 2028. It's actually in the same time zone as Amsterdam! So the time difference will be the same, where day and night basically flip. It's going to take us longer to get there than to Amsterdam, though, because not only is it nine time zones away, but it's in the southern hemisphere. Cape Town is about as far south of the equator as Phoenix is north of it. I just realized the trip to Cape Town may not be extremely longer than that to Amsterdam, since we can just change the average angle of the trajectory. With an 85-minute layover in Reykjavik, our trip from Seattle to Amsterdam was right around 12 hours. ...Oh, well, I guess I take it back: spot checking Expedia, it appears we're looking at a 22-hour travel itinerary at minimum, probably more. Yikes. Oh well; that's basically how it goes with Australia as well. Anyway, I was thinking it might make a difference to go through Atlanta as the one layover stop, but it looks like at minimum we'd be looking at a 13-hour layover there. That sucks. All this could change by the time we're booking that trip, of course. We have both Boston / Provincetown in June of next year and Asia / Australia in December of next year to worry about first. Of course I've already started check lists of points of interest at nearly all of these places, because I have a sickness. And I want to keep planning our travels until climate catastrophe makes it impossible to keep doing it! — छह हज़ार इक्यासी — [posted 12:34pm]

alien autumn

— छह हज़ार अस्सी — It seems we're back to a pretty standard Tuesday this week, in that I have very little to catch you up on. Last night I took myself to see Finding Emily, a British romantic comedy I was utterly delighted by. I was originally supposed to see it with Alexia, but she had to pivot to a trip to Boise this week to assess the resale potential of her rental property there. It's too bad, because I think she would have really enjoyed it. I rode my bike home from there, wrote the review . . . and then I watched Prometheus on my computer. It was the fourth time I had seen that movie, but it had been since 2017 that I last watched it. I watched it then in preparation for seeing its sequel released that year, Alien: Covenant, which is to this day the only film in the entire Alien franchise I have only seen once. But now I want to finally see it again. Too bad it's not readily available on any streamers right now. (My attention was caught by Prometheus, a thrilling movie with a stupid plot, because it's on HBO Max but leaving at the end of the week.) I'm actually thinking about just renting it for four bucks, which may be worth doing rather than getting the DVD from the library just to have the picture stretched on our Smart TV (I'm not sure I'll ever be able to fix that without buying a new DVD / Blu-Ray player). But according to my review from the time, I actually liked it better than Prometheus. — छह हज़ार अस्सी — — छह हज़ार अस्सी — I also had a couple of phone calls with Gabriel. The first was 10 minutes and the second wound up being 42 minutes. In the first one, he was inviting me to his coordinated celebration of Lea's birthday on the 11th (yes, her birthday is September 11), which I might have considered, except it's her with a bunch of friends going to see Pracrical Magic 2, which I'm already planning to see with Alexia the following Sunday, right after we watch the original Practical Magic together at the Braeburn condos theater (hopefully reopened by then; Action Movie Night hasn't even happened since June 24). I'm looking forward to that movie, but am pretty confident I won't need to see it twice. Plus I don't want to have seen it already before going with Alexia. That first call came when I was in the middle of writing my review. The second came when I had about 21 minutes left of Prometheus. Gabriel was searching archives of the Daily Evergreen, the student newspaper at WSU where I wrote weekly opinion columns for a couple of years—largely deeply embarrassing stuff that today I'd just as soon have burned. He says I once wrote a disparaging column about Tupac Shakur and it was shortly before his death in 1996. I have no memory of this whatsoever, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. He's certain the column was racist, and honestly it probably was, but I'm not sure what the urgency is of dredging it up again now. We did both come across a couple of archived issues with my columns in them though that were kind of amusing. He found one that had been given the title, Stop beating me, says the dead horse, and he started reading some of it aloud. No, thank you. — छह हज़ार अस्सी — I can already feel the shifting of the seasons happening, even though it's technically still summer until the 22nd. But, after wearing shorts not just every day on our trip to Europe, but every day since we got back on August 11, I'm back to jeans this week. The highs are barely breaking 70° lately, only occasionally getting as high as 74°; we've actually got rain in the forecast and highs only into the sixties the next three days. I'll have to leave my bike home and walk instead due to weather for the first time in months. Of course, dipshits will try to say this disproves the fact of global warming, because they are morons who don't understand how averages work. I'm finally going to see The Odyssey a second time tomorrow after work, and Shobhit is coming so he can see it a first time. I would have been leaving the bike home so I could walk home with him anyway. Still, even bearing in mind that we could have another warm spell clear into October (this is increasingly common), it does feel a little early for summer to feel like it's quickly slipping away. I usually don't mind, but honestly I'm going to miss the constant comfort of shorts. I guess it's time again to embrace the cozy comforts of fall, as I usually do. — छह हज़ार अस्सी — [posted 12:38pm]