Evil Wrapped in a Fangirl Disguise

It wasn't until Mom and I actually got to town and stopped at Costco today that I realized, hey, Saturday Christmas shopping might be a bad idea crowd-wise. A few steps through the door and I was telling Mom, "We are not going to the mall because I will go crazy."

I don't like crowds. They make me really, really uncomfortable. And, well, the only really bad part of Costco was around the electronics and the books. Other than that, it was pretty okay. Plus what we found there totally made it worth it: DVD sets of Robin of Sherwood. There was an actual moment of "OMG SERIOUSLY?!" because I loved this show when I was younger and they ran it on...whatever channel that was...PBS I think. I remember watching that and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Quantum Leap.

I want to say that Robin of Sherwood was what got EB and I into Robin Hood. Dad would build us hay houses every summer (they'd get hauled away every year when someone bought the hay) and we'd make bows and arrows out of Poplar branches and bailing twine and pick corn from the field and ride around on our bikes pretending we were having adventures. And, oh, that was so much fun.

I'm so thankful for my childhood. There really is nothing quite like growing up on the farm with the freedom to have that kind of fun.

Reminiscing aside, we bought both sets of the DVDs today because, seriously, those kind of memories? How could we not? But they're going to Dad for Christmas, so I have to wait. Which I am totally fine with.

Anyway, besides Costco we hit Big R, Target (where Mom bought square plates), and Pier 1 (where I broke an ornament, but they were very nice and understanding and didn't make me pay). Then we went to the movies and saw Enchanted which was so very sweet. I really enjoyed it, ( especially )

So I'm sitting here triple-backing up some of my writing on LJ and listening to music. I was working on my little bit of HP fanfiction and the "Can't Help Falling in Love" by Elvis came on and I just busted up. The only time I've ventured into writing anything HP-related was in high school, and you know who it shipped? Severus Snape and Petunia Dursley. And it worked in my head, and Neesha's head 'cause she totally had a hand in it. There was a big back story for them and it was angsty and not happy and kinda schmoopy and just very over-the-top-romance-novel stuff. So much fun. Anyway. It was just very ironic to be editing that and all of the sudden hear "but I can't help falling in love with you" crooned in my ear.

At the moment, I kind of can't believe I went there at all in my HP fannishness.

And now I just found out that Natasha has never been covered in mud! ::gasp!:: I thought everyone got covered in mud at some point in their lives. And not just mud from the spa. When we were little, EB and I used to change into our swimsuits and go outside to make mudpies. We would then sit in the mud and make butt-prints on the patio. Mine were always bigger because I would roll around as much as I could without actually getting up. EB just sat there.

I also remember that we used to sort of pretend that we were like the children in the first Boxcar Children book. Grandma had a bunch of old pots and pans and glasses, all kind of chipped, dinged, and dirty. We'd fill them with water and raspberries, sticks and leaves, and then pretend to be getting by.

Then there was the hayhouse every summer. One of the best things ever. If you can't have a treehouse, have a hayhouse. We'd play Robin Hood and make our own bows from sticks and bailing twine. Then we'd pick corn from the field and eat some and then bury the cobs. We'd dance around it in a circle and chant, "To the corn! To the corn!"

Oh! There was also Town. Town was fun. Town was a game about a town called Town in a county called County. Mr. Bear (as played by EB) ran the newspaper, Mr. Bear's Newspaper. I frequently changed characters and jobs, but was probably mostly Miss Panda, whose claim to fame was that she had visited the land of Oz. She was always trying to prove it and even got some pictures in the newspaper to support her claims. Sometimes they'd visit the city of City.

But the best thing we ever did? Had to have been the Jones Sisters. From an older, fandom-knowing person, I now see that we were really just Mary Sue-ing ourselves into Indiana Jones, but it was so much fun. EB and I were Indiana Jones' crime-solving younger sisters. And there was our arch-enemy, bajillionare Julian Buggies (who, if there was ever a movie, would be played by John Hannah). For awhile we fought him. But then his sister, Juliana Buggies showed up and it turned up and started dating Indiana. Turned him evil! Julian approached us and it turned out he wasn't so bad and really didn't like his sister or evil!Indiana. So we teamed up and dropped a bomb on them, which only mutated them. But we lived with Julian in happiness and solved crimes and swam in his olympic sized swimming pool.

Whenever we play mystery games, we're still always the Jones Sisters.

Sigh. Good times, good times.

Moonlighting is coming out on DVD at the end of May! I'm excited. When I was in high school (I think it was hs), Bravo played reruns around the time I got home from school and then on weekends. I watched the entire show that way. Young Bruce Willis! I'd forgotten how much I actually like him until I saw Sin City.

Speaking of, I have to say that I think my favorite part of the graphic novel thus far is That Yellow Bastard, although it may actually be tied with The Hard Goodbye, and that so far Hartigan has been my favorite "one-shot" character. Same goes for the movie, at least character wise. I don't know, but for me it just felt like that part, the TYB part, had the most emotion in it. Even though Marv stole the show. And that part where Marv's in the chair and the camera zooms into his eye and there's the image of the bed and, yeah, that was emotional. I guess I just like the overall Hartigan-Nancy plot best.

It's all good, though. :)

Well, I'm back from Seattle. Had a lovely time. We got to my aunt's house in the evening and went next door because David had cooked dinner and they had been just been sitting around talking for sometime. Sat around with Anne, David, Mom and Greg and talked about SU, LotR, animals in the house, Pirates, Dune, Cheech and Chong, and general things. It was a lot of fun. Also turned out that Kay and Greg's AC had broken. But that was OK because it was evening and windows were opened and it gets down to 60 there at night. Stayed up and watched Leno with Kay and got to see clip of Rimmer in the new Lara Croft movie. Yea.

Tuesday Mom went to the 6100 building for her gift show and I did stuff with Kay and the kiddos. I got to go to their swimming lesson and that was fun. Callie swims like a little fish. She's not very good at the side-breathing yet, so she pops her head out of the water and makes little fish movements with her mouth. It's so very cute. Tris has one mean cannonball. Then we got lunch at McDonald's and went back to their house where I played Mancala with Callie over and over again. I love that game more than anything else. EB and I used to play it with egg cartons and lima beans. Callie thought that was amusing. Anyway. So then we were going to go see Sinbad but when we got there the man at the ticket booth said it was no longer playing. Boo on him. We saw Johnny English instead. It was funny. AND before hand they had the trailer for Peter Pan. I was a happy girl. That night we went to dinner at the Snappy Dragon. Yum.

Wednesday Mom and I went to Third Place Books and I bought a used hardcover copy of World's End, a collection of stories inspired by The Sandman, an audio book of some of Neil Gaiman's work, as well as another Nero Wolfe book. Yea. Then we took lunch to Nana Fran and that was fun. We popped over to Barnes & Noble after that so I could look for the Pirates soundtrack, but it turned out that they had sold out almost as soon as they got them. Bugger. So we went back to Kay's and packed and left. The drive home was fun. After we were back over the Columbia we put back the sun/moon roof, put FotR on the radio, and I leaned back and star gazed to "The Breaking of the Fellowship" and "May It Be". *sigh*

And now I'm home and I want to go back. Oh well.

LJ ate my post. Bloody baskets!

I got to thinking about my obsessions today, all of them ever, and they really are sort of interesting. The big ones have been Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Anne Perry, Buffy, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings. Smaller ones have included Mary Stewart, Nero Wolfe, the musical Chicago.

You know, I think Chicago and Emma happened around the same time (such different things). I remember EB and I would swim around my pool after dinner randomly singing "All That Jazz", "Roxie", and "Nowadays". We'd go in when the mosquitoes got to us and it got too dark to be comfortable and we'd go in and watch Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow yet again. And then we'd watch it again. We kept re-renting it and eventually made a line in the tape! Oh, it was so much fun! And then, of course, there was The Cater Street Hangman. That was when we served ice cream in large purple plastic cups and EB used her fingers to stuff it in them. It was funny because half-way through the movie she turned to me and said, "Mar, what city are they in?" I think I just looked at her like she was crazy. "London," I said. We lost it after that. We had become so used to the accents that we no longer really noticed them.

Aw, now I'm feeling all nostalgic. I miss my EB!! :-( We didn't get to do anything this summer OR for our big birthday.

( Quiz )