![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Post Holiday Lull
Dec. 30th, 2013 08:09 pmHope everyone has had a great holidays. Mine has been pretty good. We had Christmas Eve at my mother's and Christmas day at my sister's. Lots of turkey, wine, cheesecake, etc. I'm so going to need to go back on my diet in the worst way. (And I've been 'bad' for the last week now.)
We lucked out with very nice weather for the actual holiday, but then it rained like a sonofabitch this weekend.
My parents gave me PJs and pearl pendant, which is quite pretty.
My computer experience has been quite hellish. First, I was trying to finish my Noel_of_Spike story, then just trying to finish one chapter of it. Neither happened because on top of my being slow (and busy), my computer got a virus.
When I finally got that straightened out... I don't know, either yahoogroups had updated or something, but it would not allow me to log in (and that's where my betas are). Kindle wouldn't allow it either as, although Kindle would log in, it wouldn't bring up the keyboard once I was in. It was all quite frustrating. From what I could read it was because I was running Internet Explorer 8 on my computer, but because I had XP as an operating system I couldn't update to anything more recent than IE8 (and I've known for months that starting in April 2014, XP will no longer be updated, so I knew that I was on borrowed time to begin with.) For the record, my computer dates back to 2001 so, yeah, it's 12+ years old. Which is all a long way to say that I had sorta-kinda planned to replace my computer in the near future, but just hadn't got around to actually doing anything about it. My complete inability to make my computer work properly over the holiday (actually for the vast majority of the last month but especially oer the holiday) and yesterday I finally broke down and bought a new computer. So...
My gift to myself this (after) Christmas is a Sony Vaio. Since then I've been updating the operating system from the new 8 to the 8.1 (if you have the Windows OS 8 you can upgrade free to 8.1. I gather that 8.1 fixed the bugs in 8.) That's taken a while and the whole interface (and it's need for 'aps' is quite different) but all in all, I've been quite pleased.
So, anyway, during all of this, I've never gotten my Noel_of_Spike story done (though I do want to finish it. I'm torn on whether to post it now though. Will anyone read a Christmas story after Christmas? Or should I wait until next Christams to post it then? Though I'll have to finish it now before I forget).
Other than that (and dog walking and removing Christmas decorations) it's been random cable TV viewing, mostly in the form of cable channel movies (not new but whatever was playing).
Watched:
Some Norwegian rom-com. It was rather unusual because most of it took place in Italy, and it starred Pierce Brosnan (who never spoke a word of anything but English. Strange when another character is speaking...Danish? Swedish? Norwegian?) to him and he responds in English. And that's exactly the way it was filmed -- all of his dialog was in English. Some of the heroine's dialog was in English but it was very rare, most was in... well closed captioning said Swedish one time and said Danish another.) Oh, and since it took place in Italy, there was a fair amount of Italian in it as well, so basically unless someone is tri-lingual English/Italian/Danish-Swedish-Norwegian you were going to end up having to read subtitles. Basic plot was the heroine was a middle-aged housewife who had breast cancer, had a lumpectomy and had just finished chemo at the start of the film and who walked in on her husband diddling the young blonde from accounting... on the weekend of her daughter's wedding in Italy. So she heads to Italy, where she runs into the groom's father (Pierce Brosnan) before they arrive at his villa in... they never say where, but I'm thinking it was Portofino. Heroine's husband shows up to the wedding with the bimbo from accounting, and Pierce Brosnan's son turns out to be gay. I mentioned it was a comedy, right? At any rate, heroine falls in love with Brosnan in multi-lingual flick.
I enjoyed that one.
Second wedding catastrophe rom-com (that now that I think about it, has been a theme of my random movie watching. Huh. Have no idea why) starred Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Susan Srandan, Amanda Seyfried, Katherine Heigl, etc. Keaton and De Niro are exes who broke up over his affair with Sarandon, who he now (some unknown number of years later) lives with him but who he has never married. It's the weekened wedding of Keaton and De Niro's adopted son, and rom-com wackiness ensues. Enjoyable enough, though if you stop to think about it, De Niro's character as much of a douche as his resentful daughter played by Heigl acuses him of being. Enjoyable, but the Norwegian rom-com was better.
Also watched the David Tennant-Kelly Macdonalt "The Decoy Bride" which was yet another wedding rom-com (told you that it was an unintended
We lucked out with very nice weather for the actual holiday, but then it rained like a sonofabitch this weekend.
My parents gave me PJs and pearl pendant, which is quite pretty.
My computer experience has been quite hellish. First, I was trying to finish my Noel_of_Spike story, then just trying to finish one chapter of it. Neither happened because on top of my being slow (and busy), my computer got a virus.
When I finally got that straightened out... I don't know, either yahoogroups had updated or something, but it would not allow me to log in (and that's where my betas are). Kindle wouldn't allow it either as, although Kindle would log in, it wouldn't bring up the keyboard once I was in. It was all quite frustrating. From what I could read it was because I was running Internet Explorer 8 on my computer, but because I had XP as an operating system I couldn't update to anything more recent than IE8 (and I've known for months that starting in April 2014, XP will no longer be updated, so I knew that I was on borrowed time to begin with.) For the record, my computer dates back to 2001 so, yeah, it's 12+ years old. Which is all a long way to say that I had sorta-kinda planned to replace my computer in the near future, but just hadn't got around to actually doing anything about it. My complete inability to make my computer work properly over the holiday (actually for the vast majority of the last month but especially oer the holiday) and yesterday I finally broke down and bought a new computer. So...
My gift to myself this (after) Christmas is a Sony Vaio. Since then I've been updating the operating system from the new 8 to the 8.1 (if you have the Windows OS 8 you can upgrade free to 8.1. I gather that 8.1 fixed the bugs in 8.) That's taken a while and the whole interface (and it's need for 'aps' is quite different) but all in all, I've been quite pleased.
So, anyway, during all of this, I've never gotten my Noel_of_Spike story done (though I do want to finish it. I'm torn on whether to post it now though. Will anyone read a Christmas story after Christmas? Or should I wait until next Christams to post it then? Though I'll have to finish it now before I forget).
Other than that (and dog walking and removing Christmas decorations) it's been random cable TV viewing, mostly in the form of cable channel movies (not new but whatever was playing).
Watched:
Some Norwegian rom-com. It was rather unusual because most of it took place in Italy, and it starred Pierce Brosnan (who never spoke a word of anything but English. Strange when another character is speaking...Danish? Swedish? Norwegian?) to him and he responds in English. And that's exactly the way it was filmed -- all of his dialog was in English. Some of the heroine's dialog was in English but it was very rare, most was in... well closed captioning said Swedish one time and said Danish another.) Oh, and since it took place in Italy, there was a fair amount of Italian in it as well, so basically unless someone is tri-lingual English/Italian/Danish-Swedish-Norwegian you were going to end up having to read subtitles. Basic plot was the heroine was a middle-aged housewife who had breast cancer, had a lumpectomy and had just finished chemo at the start of the film and who walked in on her husband diddling the young blonde from accounting... on the weekend of her daughter's wedding in Italy. So she heads to Italy, where she runs into the groom's father (Pierce Brosnan) before they arrive at his villa in... they never say where, but I'm thinking it was Portofino. Heroine's husband shows up to the wedding with the bimbo from accounting, and Pierce Brosnan's son turns out to be gay. I mentioned it was a comedy, right? At any rate, heroine falls in love with Brosnan in multi-lingual flick.
I enjoyed that one.
Second wedding catastrophe rom-com (that now that I think about it, has been a theme of my random movie watching. Huh. Have no idea why) starred Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, Susan Srandan, Amanda Seyfried, Katherine Heigl, etc. Keaton and De Niro are exes who broke up over his affair with Sarandon, who he now (some unknown number of years later) lives with him but who he has never married. It's the weekened wedding of Keaton and De Niro's adopted son, and rom-com wackiness ensues. Enjoyable enough, though if you stop to think about it, De Niro's character as much of a douche as his resentful daughter played by Heigl acuses him of being. Enjoyable, but the Norwegian rom-com was better.
Also watched the David Tennant-Kelly Macdonalt "The Decoy Bride" which was yet another wedding rom-com (told you that it was an unintended
