— पाँच हजार सात सौ अट्ठाईस —
I don't think anyone else uses the phrase, but for years comedian Doug Benson has been calling the week between Christmas and New Year's the "Holiday Taint." I have never forgotten it, and even if he didn't continue using the phrase once or twice every year when promoting shows he has upcoming during this week on his podcasts, I would still be thinking of it after Christmas but before New Year's every year.
So here we are. In the Holiday Taint.
This includes a weekend, which this year landed square in the middle of the two holidays. Christmas Day was Wednesday last week; New Year's Day, which is an office holiday for us here, is on Wednesday this week. Jennifer and Matthew, plus Ian and his Alaskan girlfriend Bella, are coming up to stay the night tomorrow and we will all go down to Seattle Center to watch the drone and fireworks shows at the Space Needle. Weather remains a slight concern; the forecast shows 50% chance of rain tomorrow but that could be only during certain hours. The National Weather Service does say about tomorrow:
Rain likely, mainly after 10pm. Well, crap. I really want to be near the Space Needle but, if the weather is untenable, we can still watch from my office. It'll be the last chance I ever have to do that.
Anyway. Back to this past weekend. With all the major movie releases being held until Christmas Day (or in some cases Christmas Eve), I had not gone to a movie since Sunday, December 15—two weeks ago yesterday, in fact. I had three notable releases to catch up on, and thus went to a movie all three days of the weekend: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
I went with Laney to the first and third movies. We saw
Babygirl at Pacific Place, and it was without question the best of the three movies. I have it a solid A, and I even ranked it #6 in my top 10 movies of the year, which I
posted yesterday morning.
The second movie I saw with Laney was yesterday, and that time we saw
A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet (and a bunch of other people). Hardly a masterpiece, but better than most biopics. Laney and I both enjoyed it a great deal, and the music in it was great.
In the day between those, on Saturday, I managed to take myself to a 10:45 a.m. matinee of
Nosferatu, which was just about as fucked up as you might expect. I had slightly mixed feelings about that film but still landed on a B+ grade, just as I did the next day for
A Complete Unknown.
These were all three wildly different movies, but I really liked them all.
On both Friday and yesterday, I met with Laney at the corner of her block on Broadway and Pine, we walked downtown together and then we walked back home after the movie. I actually saw all three movies at this same theater, and took that exact same round-trip walk each of the three days.
— पाँच हजार सात सौ अट्ठाईस —
— पाँच हजार सात सौ अट्ठाईस —
It was otherwise an incredibly busy weekend for me. I should note that, with each of the three movies I saw, I came home and needed to spend roughly an hour, maybe slightly more, working on the reviews I wrote for them. Nearly any other time I had any spare time over the weekend, I worked on my typical year-end posts. I spent most of the late afternoon on Saturday working on that Top Ten Movies post I shared yesterday morning. I did take a break from working on stuff Saturday night to watch what is likely the last of my Christmas movie watches of the year, the 1974 slasher flick
Black Christmas, which I had on my list for a while. It had one shockingly offensive line; the first half was surprisingly funny; I kind of started to lose interest in the second half. I won't ever need to watch that one again.
It did round out
ten movies for my "Christmas Watch List" this year, though. A couple of them weren't really that Christmasy, just happened to be set at Christmas.
What I spent virtually the entire last afternoon and through the evening on yesterday was my requisite "2024 in Ten Minutes" video, which I plan to share tomorrow morning as usual. Some years I'm really making things tight with how late I really manage to get going on that; I had it about half done the day before. I will need to spend a fair amount of time finishing it up tonight, but at least I have all the music tracks I want, with the video clips, still photos, music and sound editing all done. All I really need to do now is edit how the photos either slowly zoom in or zoom out, do a once-over on the broader editing, and then I can call it good.
I had a few unusually long clips of live music playing that actually works pretty well for soundtracking clips before and after the few-second video clip I actually included from it. That alone probably covered about half the video run time, cumulatively, and I find it to be a pretty clever editing conceit. I really like how it turned out.
Shobhit, of course, is in India, and I've only seen him briefly even on FaceTime. I will likely be able to connect with him for some more time this evening. His being out of town has actually been useful for the work I've needed to get done, as otherwise we'd be going out for this or the other thing and potentially watching this or the other thing, and I'd probably have to tell him I need time to work at my desk in the bedroom.
Shobhit has reminded me to get gas from Costco multiple times, to the point that it has gotten annoying—but it was actually good that he did, because I'm realizing I may have fogotten otherwise. I need the gas tank full for when I go down to Olympia again on Wednesday for the New Year's Family Gathering at Dad and Sherri's house. This made me incredibly busy before meeting Laney yesterday morning at 11:30 on her corner before the movie: I had gotten locked in with the video editing on Saturday night, and was up until 1 a.m. before I finally realized I should probably call it a night. I thus woke up at maybe 7:40 yesterday morning; was in the bathroom to get ready by roughly 9 a.m.; was headed out to Costco at 10 a.m.; I went to PCC Columbia City directly from there to make use of the final of four weekly dollar-off coupons (this was $15 off $30); and I made it home with only barely enough time to make myself hot chocolate with peanut butter whiskey to take with me to the movie, and I met up with Laney right on time at 11:30 to walk the rest of the way downtown.
I posted my review for
A Complete Unknown shortly after 4:30. And as I said, I spent the rest of the evening working on the video. So here I am.
HQ, the item maintenance system we use at work, is down as I write this. It's taking an unusual amount of time to get fixed, and I'm a little concerned about Gabby telling me tech companies often take this week off, so I don't know how long it will take for the vendor to come in with the assist on the help ticket our IT department has sent them. There is virtually nothing I can do for work without access to HQ, but hey, whatever: it gave me time to write a draft of this post!
— पाँच हजार सात सौ अट्ठाईस —
[posted 12:30 pm]
