This evening Ms. S. works, as usual; she left before the game was over in N.O., which means she luckily missed any of the post-game insanity that has surely started up in this city. The Tide survivied — alas — a close one against LSU. At his hour BSU still plays.
I. On the Road!
We had to stop by a local big-box store before heading out of town to Birmingham. Not a great road trip, I admit. We needed a small cooler or two, and a bag of ice, so we could by refrigerated and frozen items and bring them back more or less unmolested by the warmth.
Not in ‘camping’ supplies or near the other coolers did we find them, oh no, for that would be too easy. Instead, after walking back and forth a bit and heading out of the store we found them next to one of the freezers full of bags of ice. I say ‘one of the freezers’ because there were two of them, and only one of them had the right type of inexpensive cooler stacked next to it. Not very well marked, but we made do.
Now better equipped we got on the 20 and headed east.
And Ms. S., in what she swears is a first, forgot to take the right (right as well as proper) turn and instead drove us about ten miles too far into Birmingham. We turned around, made our turn, and got our delicious Moe’s-centric streaker lunch. Streaker at Moe’s, naked at Qdoba, a burrito bowl at Chipotle, I think. The same but different.
From there it was some backtracking and the like, and ignoring Earth Fare, on our way to Whole Foods. It’s not the fanciest of outings, but they’ve got one of the better bulk sections around, a decent beer selection — an improvement now that bombers are legal in the state (as of the beginning of last August, I guess) –, and there’s good meat and cheese to be had.
They had both the Rogue Chocolate Stout and the ‘Dirtoir’ black ale, so I took a bottle of each; I can probably get them in town, too, as all sellers of beer around here purchase from the same distributor, but just in case I don’t get to a store anytime soon …
II. Back on the farm!
If only a farm. Or a garden.
I finally decided to do something with the bit of pumpkin I had from the lantern carved last week … more pumpkin pudding! But vs. the canned stuff a drier, spice-roasted puree added a richness and depth that previous incarnations had lacked.
My culinary adaptation these past months has been my constant consumption of greens, it seems. I’ve always been a fan of spinach, even if for the longest time I only ate it when picking through salad bars, but now I rotate through bags of kale, collard greens, turnip greens, mustard greens, and spinach on a regular basis. This week it was kale … it doesn’t really do to keep too many in the fridge, as they’ll go bad before I finish them. And frequently bunches of whole leaves and stalks are available. Now that I’ve acclimated myself to them, I really ought to start looking for the nuances in preparations … seeing where one shines over another, what makes this leaf or that particularly tasty, which flavors can be brought out when this or that spice is applied …
… I know: I’m talking about leaves.
III. And it comes to an end …
After dinner we got in a rotation-analog of sorts.
It must have been around January or February when we began, I guess still watching TNG: flipping through DVDs led to watching the mid-90s Stargate movie, which then led to watching the pilot episode … and then another episode and another, all of which I’d seen multiple times. Soon Ms. S. was hooked, and after TNG finished it became the anchor of our rotation.
We finished SG-1 in October.
But to begin November we watched the two made-for-TV SG-1 movies, ‘The Ark of Truth’ and ‘Continuum,’ the latter being much better than the former in most regards.
‘Ark of Truth’ wraps up the Ori storyline introduced at the beginning of season 9; in truth, while the end of season 10 left that plot a bit unresolved, it wasn’t necessarily crying out for bows, knots and the like to tie it up. It feels like two episodes smushed together and labeled a movie, but not two regular episodes, rather two that had already been condensed from a larger five or six episode arc. Merrick seems like he was designed as a foil for Mitchell. There is no good reason to resurrect the Replicators. The stand-off with the Ori ships, the threat Earth’s solar system, bringing back Julian Sands, and how long it takes to finish matters feels like padding. There’s no single, clear through-line; there are two somewhat related A and B plots.
Or in the parlance of our times: it’s a hot mess.
Then there’s ‘Continuum.’ Not an Oscar-contender, of course, but it has its focus and heart in the right place. As with ‘Ark of Truth’ it’s a plot resolver, but unlike its predecessor it does not introduce new mythology in order to solve its issues; it’s the opposite, in fact, consisting in plot and casting of callbacks. Remember ‘1969’ and time travel? Remember Maury Chaykin and his satellites? Combine a network of the latter with the ‘science’ of the former, and you have a Gate-punk time machine. Remember all those gao’uld we’ve encountered and dispatched over the years? In an alternate timeline you can resurrect them. Remember Cam going to his reunion and spending time on the farm? You revisit that, too. It’s a different kind of hot mess, one with pacing and attitude, much of the latter provided by Michael Shanks, whose Daniel Jackson snarks his way through the movie, as if removing his leg was equivalent to popping a cork and letting his inner diva out.
Whereas ‘Ark of Truth’ felt like a condensed version of the beginning of planned season 11, ‘Continuum’ is an alternate season and series finale.
But we already had a series finale in ‘Unending,’ one of the best such finales to any show I’ve watched. I thought Ms. S. would find it boring, might disapprove, etc. Her response this end of October?
“It was perfect.”
IV. Asides
- The dishwasher is making noises again; I recorded some of them on my phone as ‘evidence.’ I’ll likely be back at the main office on Monday.
- It appears the AC unit needs to be looked at, too … it’s possibly running out of fluid. It’s freezing up a bit, though still pumping out cold air.
- So-so historical novel (vaguely a thriller) that you speed-read without missing anything, but which is at least competently written? Christopher Remy’s “Fifth Column.” You won’t need more than half an hour.
- Those un-tasty Halloween candies we bought precisely because we wouldn’t eat them?
I’ve been eating them …
