11.29.2005

Vacation to-do list

- Make appt. w/ landlord to pick up key to new apartment
- Pack for new apartment
- Move into new apartment
- Unpack in new apartment
- Get Craig Krenzel's autograph
- Run w/ dad
- Catch up on pile of magazines (Real Simple, Esquire, Cincinnati Magazine, mental_floss)
- Finish Draco Sinister
- Finish Strength of Body, Strength of Mind

UPDATE: Look how much I accomplished!

11.28.2005

Thus begins a week of vacation.

To celebrate, am reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in my old twin bed at my parents' house in Milford. How nostalgic!

Mr. Wufflekins came home yesterday. We hugged for about 16 hours.

PUMPKIN UPDATE: Four cups down; something like 10 to go. I've frozen most of it; the Internet told me it will keep that way "for a short time." How short is "short"?

11.22.2005

The ol' ball and chain


Edmund is gone for the week. He is spending Thanksgiving with his family in North Carolina.

It's sort of fun being a single girl again for a week. I get to sit around and veg out on the computer for hours and pack up T-shirts and kitchenware ... OK, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But it's kinda relaxing.

But when I get takeout for dinner by myself, I don't get showered with compliments about how I'm the best girlfriend ever for bringing over Indian food. I miss that.

Also, the kissing is nice.

It occurs to me that perhaps I should think up some sort of alias for Edmund. It seems to be the thing to do on blogs; preserving the anonymity of your significant other, regardless of whether you yourself are anonymous. Wes has Jawa Girl; Josh has Natalie Portman; Jen has Mr. Man; emma has her gentleman caller - which is what my family called Edmund before we were officially an "item," but I guess she took it first. Drat.

(I wonder if all those sites' proprietors will see that I linked to them and drop by for a visit. Hello, fellow typists!)

Anyway, I welcome any and all suggestions for an alias - preferably an embarassing one. "Mr. Wufflekins," "Schnoogy Bear" and "Honey Poo-poo Head" are front-runners right now.

11.20.2005

Gourd gracious!

If you think the title of this post sounds like a cheesy newspaper headline ... well, I get paid to think up cheesy newspaper headlines, so nyah.

I never got around to carving my Halloween pumpkin, so it has sat on the porch for several weeks as a more general "harvest" symbol. Its physical as well as symbolic longevity was improved by remaining intact, it seems, for it was still hale and hearty when I took it in this afternoon. Inspired by stories of Indians who would fill pumpkins with milk and spices and then roast them, I decided that I, too, would make something of my curcurbit.

So I cut it up into bits and stuck it in the oven at 375. When it's done, I'll puree it and ... I'm not sure what. Maybe I'll make cookies, or possibly muffins. Perhaps both; I think I'll wind up with quite a bit of pumpkin puree. After putting the pumpkin in the oven, I went to the store to pick up some ingredients that might go well with such things (chocolate chips, dried cranberries, apples, etc.), so I have several options. There's something appealing about making pumpkin apple walnut muffins. (Apples, "a-peel-ing"? Oh, dear - pun ABSOLUTELY not intended.) Anyway, if you have suggestions (requests?), do let me know.

11.18.2005

Oh, bother.

Harry Potter = fun! I still think the third movie is the best, but even if I had despised the movie, the spectacle would have made it all worthwhile.

My group took up half a row in our theater. We got there THREE BLOODY HOURS early; once we had our coats on the seats we could pretty much come and go as we pleased, so we kept making small-group excursions to Barnes & Noble.

It turns out that our idea of making customized shirts was nowhere near unique; we expected a few costumes, but nearly everyone in the show was decked out in anything from a simple striped scarf to full Hogwarts regalia. (One kid dressed as a ninja. Um, OK.) Two guys dressed as Harry and Draco staged a duel in front of the screen.

I think our theater was the first (of eight screens!) to open for ticket sales, meaning all the superfans were in with us. These kids clapped when the lights dimmed and again when the black curtain rolled down to make the screen wider. They clapped for the previews (until it became abundantly clear that the previews sucked hardcore). They clapped for the Warner Bros. logo, and again 10 seconds later for the title screen.

They screamed when Harry took his shirt off.

When I got home I was too pumped up to go right to sleep. I should have curled up with The Inferno or something else that requires enough concentration to tire me out, but no. Instead, I stayed up until 5 sodding a.m. reading Harry Potter fan fiction! (A hex on you, emma blog, for planting the idea in my head!) I got four hours of sleep; if not for my cat's plaintative mewing outside my door, I might have drowsed all day to the tune of my CD alarm clock's current selection, the not-at-all-rousing Garden State soundtrack.

And here's the interesting thing. Cassie Claire's excellent fanfic left me feeling more satisfied than did the movie. Is this a testament to C.C.'s spot-on depiction and expansion of the Harry Potter universe – or even the triumph of written over audiovisual media? (Nah; I probably just like the bits with the snogging.)

Meanwhile, my cat looks just like Mrs. Norris - except for the red eyes. Anyone know of a good feline cantact lens dealer?

11.17.2005

Not that anyone will even read this tonight ...

... because just about everyone I know is going to the premiere of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tonight. Yeah!

There is a large group of us. We will be wearing customized T-shirts and not causing a spectacle at all, oh no.

I think I heard Stacie pull up - gotta go!

11.15.2005

A public service message

To whom it may concern:

DO NOT get your black-and-white photos processed at Meijer.

Meijer does not have the equipment to process B&W (gee, in my high school's darkroom you just had to make sure all the color dials were set to 0. Or 100. Whichever. It was like 8 years ago), so they send the photos off-site. This means they take like 10 days to come back - and when they do, you will be charged $15 for a single set of prints.

Learn from my mistakes.

11.09.2005

"Sponge-O Sponges: They taste damn spongy!" or, A backhanded compliment for THC

Popsugar reports that my beloved Thomas Haden Church is lookin' all buff for Spider-Man 3. (The movie's official site has a bigger version of the same photo - yay!) He certainly is looking better than he did in Sideways.

Of course, Popsugar also reports that she thought Church's mid-'90s sitcom Ned and Stacey was horrible. Gasp!

Of course it was horrible, dear Pop! All sitcoms are horrible - it's part of their nature. There are only so many witty observations you can tell about three to six people who hang out in one house, one restaurant and one office before the jokes become stale. The test of a sitcom's quality is if it can rise above its inherent predictability and genuinely surprise the audience.

Seinfeld did it with its almost stream-of-consciousness sensibility. Arrested Development does it with a complex, intertwining plot. And Ned and Stacey did it – albiet somewhat less consistently than the first two examples – with its absurdist humor. If the show had taken a chance and forgone the predictable "let's make ironic comments about extramarital sex" jokes in favor of the completely off-the-wall lines usually delivered by Church or seen in the closing credits, the show would have been an unqualified success.

Wow. It's way too early for Media Theory 101. Maybe I'll come back to this post later with some of my favorite lines from Ned and Stacey, or perhaps more THC love.

UPDATE: It's been brought to my attention that the letters THC, besides being the initials for, like, the bestest actor EVER*, are also the initials for a chemical found in something called "mari-juana." If you thought I was making a drug reference before - shame on you! My love for THC is pure and unsullied by any of your human addictions.




*OK, that was hyperbole, but he's still awesome.

11.08.2005

Making time for video games

I walked into Electronics Boutique on Saturday.

I looked through the shelves for used copies of Beyond Good and Evil (did it even come out for the GameCube?) but didn't see it. I wondered if Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix comes bundled with the dance pads. I actually picked up Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life.

And then I put it down. How can I spend even $20 on a video game when I've played maybe once in the last month? How can I start a new game when I have 8 or 9 unfinished ones?

It's odd to think of having to "make time" for video games, as though they're an old friend or an improving activity. But it's a hobby I enjoy. I don't want to give it up, but I feel I can't justify continuing to invest in it when I devote so little of my time to it anymore.

So it's 12:30 a.m. I ought to go to bed. But I think I'll spend a few minutes doing odd jobs in Animal Crossing first. Maybe once I pay off my house, I can invest in Harvest Moon.

11.07.2005

In the van

"Guess what I found today, Curse Girl????"

My mother had twisted around in her captain's seat so she could look at me. Next to me, a block of dry ice was quickly chilling the three large pizzas we were bringing to Indiana; by the time we reached Bloomington, the pizza closest to the ice would have frozen solid.

My mind raced. Curse Girl? OK, so my mother found something where I curse. What was it??? She didn't sound mad - there was that over-the-top joke-yelling tone in her voice where I've done something she doesn't approve of but isn't truly upset, like if I stay out until 3 a.m. when I have to get up at 7 - so at least I wasn't in any real trouble ...

She answered her own question. "I found your blog!"

Whew. The image of some repository of filthy words attributed to me evaporated. "I've cursed, like, twice on there!" (Wow, I'm getting sick of saying the word "curse.") "How did you find my blog?"

"I Googled you, and there it was. There are a lot of Kelly Hudsons, but you're, like, the second result that comes up!"

"That's because I'm the most famous." Most of the other Kelly Hudsons in the world are college students. "Except for that Kelly Hudson who's a TV anchor in Columbus." Funny story; I attended an SPJ banquet where the other K.H. received an award. I almost stood up myself to collect it.

"I read about your trip to Kings Island, and I saw a picture of your cat."

So the cursing is bad, but the updates on my life are good! I'm starting to see where this is going.

The upshot is, my mom reads this now, so perhaps I'd better keep it down to a PG-rated roar. Hi, Mommy!

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