Bastet

I only got through two more last night, the two-parter with Starbuck having to eject and landing on a moon or something. (Both episodes had commentary, so after I watched them regularly, I watched again with the commentary, and after all that it was very much time to go to sleep.) The first one was a little slow-going for me, but the Kara/Adama stuff about Zack was incredible. And the second part - You Can't Go Home Again - was pretty much a perfect episode: Laura giving Adama every chance to wake up and do his job, then just showing up on Galactica and giving it straight to him and Lee was wonderful, and it was an interesting change to see Tigh confiding in her. Kara's adventures down on the surface were highly entertaining, and the scenes on Caprica finally got interesting to me with this one - the tension knowing the toaster (the actual toaster, not the Cylon) was going to go off any second and give them away was well done. Lee thinking Adama wouldn't have pushed as hard to find his own son as he did his quasi-daughter and Adama saying, "If it had been you down there, we'd have never left" was quite a moment. Lee looking up and seeing "Starbuck" written on the underside of the cylon raider wing and realizing what was going on was wonderful, and I practically started cheering along with everyone in the CIC. And then Kara getting the cigar of forgiveness and love at the end.

The bookends are reminiscent of your "wait, which one are you?" black kitties. Initially, my friend put different collars on each - Scully is green, Spooky is blue - but Spooky removed his on a daily basis. So, it morphed instead to Scully has the collar. Spooky is a little larger, and has a tiny little collection of white fur on his chest that barely qualifies as a patch, but depending on how they're sitting they can still look identical if not for Scully's collar. Even with the collar, I still sometimes say, "Hi, Spooky. Oh, wait, you're Scully" at a distance. Since I'm the cat-sitter when my friend and her fiancé (with whom she and the kitties live) are gone together, I made sure to come over weekly for a while after their adoption to get them used to me (Shermie already adores me <g>). Good thing - they run away from everyone else and hide until they're gone, and don't even like the fiancé, but love their Auntie Bastet. Shermie sometimes watches football (something Auntie Bastet taught him <g>) near the fiancé, but otherwise he's not really down with him, either. I'd normally think this is a sure sign my friend should run like the wind, but I've known him as long as she has, and it really seems to just be a situation where he, never having had pets, is totally out of his element, the cats know it, and their hesitation makes him even more awkward, and they pick up on it, perpetuating the cycle; they're not truly fearful of him, they just don't want to hang out with him. This results in me being asked to go check on the cats (when the house is otherwise empty) every time my friend is gone for more than a couple of days, just to make sure they're really okay since all he can confirm to her is they're alive. (And I'm "on call" when she's gone, promising to actually unearth and carry with me my cell phone when I leave the house, in case he runs into a concern.) I know how good it feels to get a proper kitty report when you're gone (my parents always cat-sit, and during the one time a year we're all gone at the same time [Thanksgiving], my friend - the owner of these three S kitties - fills in, taking care of my cat(s) and my parents' cats, so I always get a detailed report from someone who knows cats in general, and ours specifically), so within reason I am happy to do it. I do hope, for everyone's sake, they'll get used to him some day, though.

I don't think there's any need to have a 1:1 oven to cheftestant ratio at the beginning, when there are so freakin' many cheftestants. They don't issue any challenges that require use of an oven until a point in the competition when the pool has been whittled down so there are adequate ovens to go around, and prior to that I don't have any issue with a general challenge where not every single person can claim an oven in the event they all opt to go that route. First, how often will it happen that enough people opt for a dish requiring an oven that there aren't enough, and, second, if it does, oh well - adapt and move on is part of the competition. Chopped only having one ice cream machine instead of two strikes me as contrived. Top Chef only having, what, ten? ovens instead of 16 does not, given how the challenges are structured.

This thread has triggered so many happy memories of my best friend's trampoline. When they moved into the house (right around the time we became friends at five/six years old), it was left behind by the previous owners, who didn't have room for it at their new house. It was the greatest! They moved when we were in junior high, and left it for the next family, and, yeah, we were using it far less by then, but had they brought it with them we'd have kept using it occasionally - probably right up until now. There's just something about it.

If they've gone with someone else and not contacted you, that indeed sucks. But maybe they just haven't pulled the trigger yet. I don't hire anyone between the week of Thanksgiving and the first week back after New Year's unless I absolutely must. Didn't they say they were hoping to make a decision before Christmas? It's not here yet, and they may decide to wait until the new year.

Well, go ahead, Craftmatic Adjustable Bev.

For one of the world's most dastardly people, CSM isn't a very good shot, then.

That's the thing I was missing. Without that, and given the fact he did not know cylons had evolved to look like humans, it didn't make sense to me for him finding the squirrelly arms dealer suspicious to translate in his mind to "he's a cylon," but with that, the logical leap does make sense. Thanks. Oh, okay - if only Galactica hadn't jumped in 20 years (more danger of being off target with something that humongous, maybe?), but other vessels had, then, yeah, she could easily have experienced it elsewhere. Thank you, too.

Oh, for fuck's sake, how many dead people are going to be in this thing? At least with Spender we never saw a body; if CSM can come back after being a flaming pile of bones, anything is fair game.

I hate coconut and am not fond of white "chocolate," but my mother loves both - and almonds - so I am going to get her some. Thanks for the recommendation! Costco has their usual sale on a bag of Ghirardelli squares, and I'm bummed the dark chocolate and mint is not among the four flavors this time around, but at least there are two caramels - the dark chocolate, and the milk chocolate. (I strongly prefer dark chocolate, but I don't turn down milk chocolate!) I don't like brownies, no matter where in the pan they came from. I don't like chocolate cake, either.

I'm not reading any posts until I finish season one, so I don't spoil myself any more than I already am, but I just have to gush how much I'm loving this so far. I watched the mini-series again, and then last night I stayed up way too late watching the first three episodes (and had to talk myself out of staying in bed this morning to watch some more). It really does do away with most of the things that make me dislike sci-fi, and I am completely drawn in to what these people are going through. The scene of Laura being sworn in has stuck with me ever since I watched it; it pops into my head randomly. The trembling of her hand and voice, and the way she turned her head to take advantage of the placement of her hand to wipe a tear out of the corner of her eye, made me feel, almost physically, the weight of what has been placed on her. Everyone's reactions to this huge, surreal event have been very realistic, which is so much more enjoyable than a bunch of heroes immediately stepping up to the plate and having all the answers. The relationships, both old and new, are all very interesting to me, and that's what I'm here for. If this was just the Roslin/Adama show, I'd watch the hell out of it, but I like so many other relationships, too. I find Laura and Apollo's relationship quite interesting; they went through this together, and the continued connection as a result is nice. Laura and Billy are adorable when she teases him about Dee, and not knowing anything about women; these lovely little moments of normalcy in the midst of strange, horrible circumstances. Adama and Tigh's backstory is something I don't know, but there obviously is one, and the actors perfectly communicate a longstanding relationship. The performances are great overall, which is really impressive with so many rookie actors in the cast. 33 was an incredible episode, largely because the actors did such a fantastic job projecting the characters' utter exhaustion and constant state of anxiety. Great writing, too. When the Olympic Carrier jumped back into the fleet, and I realized it was how the Cylons were tracking them and was thus going to have to be destroyed, I gasped. The scene in the miniseries when they had to leave the sub-light vessels behind was very well shot and acted (my second-favorite scene after the swearing in), and the impact of watching this decision be made and play out wasn't lessened any by having just watched a similar scenario. That's impressive. Methinks poor Laura is going to wind up with a pocket full of little notes. Two questions thus far: How did Adama realize Leoben was a Cylon? Had he already known that they look like humans now, it would have made sense to me for him to channel his "this guy is suspicious" feelings into "this guy's a Cylon," but to him Cylons are walking toasters, so it seemed like either I missed something specific that clued him in, something was revealed in one of the many deleted scenes that weren't included in the extras, or it was a rather illogical conclusion for him to reach. Had they jumped prior to the events in mini-series? Because it sounded like they'd only ever trained for it on paper, that no one had actually done a jump in 20 years because of the danger (I know no one had jumped past the red line, but the 20 years thing is before that, when Adama ordered the jump to Ragnar), but when they were prepping for that jump, Cally said, "I hate this part," meaning she'd been through one before, and she's certainly not old enough to have been in the fleet 20 years ago. So is that a continuity error, or did I misunderstand the initial conversation about jumping to Ragnar?

I wanted to smack those two idiots. Since TV doesn't work that way, I just yelled a lot. They didn't want to expend one ounce of energy towards making the situation work. And the "I can't believe you said that" looks on their faces when Jackson and Zoe told them - far, far more nicely than I would have - that they failed were too much. Total denial. They have joined the guy with the rottweiler (from the episode discussed in the genre thread) on my list of owners too out of touch with reality to ever do right by their pets.

Yeah, that's the girls' old room. Which grandchild is living in there now remains to be seen (unless it's just decorated as a kids room for when grandkids stay over, but I bet they're doing multi-generational living in that house). I figure Darlene and family will have their own place, but it could be Becky and her kid since she's a single parent. Or if D.J. has a kid, maybe it's they who live there. But I bet one kid/grandkid pairing lives there.

Because Sandy's family were assholes who tried to take her son away from her? But it seems they're no longer assholes. I have been meaning to ask for weeks now what happened with that, and your post finally reminded me: How did Kerry get the kid back, and how did the relationship with Sandy's family evolve so that she's letting them see him regularly?

I don't think I've ever heard it, but I don't go to a lot of weddings, and those I do attend don't tend to have the traditional vows heard on TV. I think if I did hear it, I'd get a serious case of the inappropriate giggles, given that my exposure is via TV and there it almost always results in some sort of reaction, ranging from an "Oh crap" or "Don't you dare" look to an actual, dramatic objection (wacky hijinks ensue).

Neela was great at the gathering of military spouses. And "Is it possible to kick yourself out of a club?" was funny, as was Ray getting stood up and watching Ghost; cute roommate moment when she got home, constituting the first time I've found Ray anything other than annoying.

I'd never seen it previously, but I knew if we were bothering to go to a party with him, there was going to be some sort of mass medical catastrophe there, because that's just how things go on this show, so as soon as I saw people gathered on a third-floor deck, I knew it was coming down.

“It’s impressive how you guys can leap from misogyny to homophobia in a single bound.” Fabulous. A little moment between Kerry and Luka reminded me of something I meant to mention during the friendship discussion: While certainly not friends, there has been a recurring pattern of him being supportive of her at key moments. When she was struggling with coming out, when stuff was going on with the baby, now when she's deciding about surgery -- they are never big moments between them, but she's talked to him some, and he listens, he checks in on her, etc. It's subtle, and, like I said, not rising to the level of a friendship, but it's a nice little thing that has been going on for years. I have precisely zero shits to give about the John Leguizamo and his married lover storyline.

Sam - who was in charge of the nurses since Eve was on vacation - asked Haleh to come back when they were dealing with the huge number of patients following the plane crash, and she agreed. When Eve returned, she said that was the right call. Eve got fired when she punched and then poured urine on an unruly patient (dressed as Santa) who was verbally harassing blind kids singing carols. Kovac wanted to fire her, she said he didn't have any authority to fire nurses, he took it to the person who did, Eve refused to participate in the disciplinary investigation/hearing, and got fired. She told them "You all suck" on her way out.

I don't know if I'll make it for Christmas (although I might, because there are still some squash varieties growing here), but - minus the potatoes - I will definitely make it at some point. Thanks! Carrot souffle and Swiss chard/sweet potato gratin are out because I don't like cooked carrots and none of us like sweet potatoes, and the broccoli casserole would be too much for either of the meals because we already have a starchy side. My best friend would love it, though, so I've sent her the recipe. And the gratin reminded me I have a yummy chard gratin recipe I haven't made in a while, so perhaps I'll do that instead of the spinach gratin.

Bibimbap is an excellent late morning meal when you had a wee bit too much to drink the night before.

I probably mentioned this the last time it came up, but oh well: One of my only times watching What Would You Do? was an episode where the set-up is a couple has brought their baby to a fancy restaurant, the baby starts crying, neither of the parents take the little banshee outside, and a customer complains. What would I do? Nod in appreciation to the complaining customer, and tell management they can either a) do their job by telling the parents to act like reasonable human beings and remove the crying kid, or b) comp my meal. But most of the customers they featured thought the complaining customer was the one being rude. Huh? She's not at Chuck E. Cheese, she's at a high-end steakhouse. Parents have no business bringing a baby to that restaurant to begin with (if they can afford to eat there, they can afford a damn sitter for the night), and, once they did, they had an obligation for one of them to get up and take the kid outside until it stopped crying and could thus be there without disrupting everyone else's meal.

Presumably by the time Christmas rolls around, I'll be out of my funk, but right now none of my (myriad) veggie sides are sounding like The One. I do what seems like a hundred things with Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, spinach and other greens, asparagus, etc. but none of them are speaking to me in contemplating the menu right now. So, I'm looking to spark my interest via a new-to-me twist on the usual ingredients: What are your favorite warm sides based heavily on green vegetables other than green beans or peas (or at least non-root vegetables - they can appear but not be the main ingredient - and when it comes to squashes we like the sweet ones used in moderation only)? For pairing purposes, which I don't think is all that much an issue, Christmas Eve dinner will have prime rib (or possibly beef tenderloin, but definitely beef) as the main course and Christmas will feature ham. There will be some sort of greens-based salad with each (thus the request for warm dishes as the veggie side dish), plus a starchy side - probably potato-something with the prime rib and macaroni salad with the ham, but my mom is in charge of those, while I take the salad and veggie side, and I don't think she's decided - so there need not be a huge number of ingredients involved in the dish, as there's plenty else going on in the meals, but it's also not a problem if there are. How healthy it is also doesn't matter; it's the holidays. I may very well fall back on some favorites - e.g. a spinach gratin one night, a Brussels sprouts and walnuts dish another - and be quite happy, but I always like getting ideas. (Also, I prefer to eat seasonally, which can make my yes and no list seem out of touch for this time of year, but I'm in southern CA where I can get a lot of stuff locally - meaning grown locally, not shipped from another hemisphere and sold locally - for a much larger chunk of the year than many, and we are having an incredibly mild winter, so I have a lot of options. So if you're thinking of recommending something, yet hesitating because, well, that ingredient would taste like shit or have to be shipped from halfway around the globe this time of year, that's not necessarily true; toss it out there and I'll take it from there.)

I finally saw the "what's a computer?" commercial last night, which I didn't realize was that commercial until the line came at the end, and it was disappointing because that was a pretty cute commercial - which is quite a compliment, since I don't like kids - until then. I liked seeing the variety of activities in which the girl was engaged, even though she needed to look up from her tablet from time to time.

Oh, I certainly don't think she changed her mind on the abortion because she felt like she should given her place in life, because in listing the cons (in having the baby) to Luka he raised some pros that she didn't refute, it's just the tone of that conversation with Coburn very much brought that pressure to mind and suggested Abby had absorbed it as one of her many considerations. Coburn was asking her what she wanted to do, Abby said she didn't know, then said she was at the time of her life when she could do it, and Coburn's response was to ask her if she wanted to do it, in a tone that seemed clear to me to be saying, "Forget about whether you can do it, it only matters whether you want to." I found it a nice touch for Coburn to be the one to remind her she didn't need to have what anyone else would deem a "valid" reason to decide she did not want to continue an unplanned pregnancy, that if she wanted an abortion that was the only reason necessary to choose to have one. And it got even more lovely when Coburn said she'd be happy to be her doctor either way, and whatever choice she makes will be the right one.