To Die. Alone. In the Rain. PLUS - Queer Eye in London and Boston!

(Live Journal is FUCKING WITH MY HEAD. I spent 5 minutes trying to put some of this entry behind an lj-cut. No matter what I did or how carefully I read the FAQ, it wouldn't do it. So I gave up, and edited the entry to slap a note on the top saying, sorry, I tried. When I posted that, IT HAD THE LJ-CUT. So I went to edit it again to take *out* the now-superfluous note. When I then hit "post"... THE LJ-CUT WASN'T WORKING, AGAIN. Now I am editing it AGAIN to pour out this tale of woe. Will the resultant post have the lj-cut, or not? Who knows?)

Last night, telepresence, my_tallest, and I held an impromptu meeting of the "Die Alone in the Rain" club. We can't entirely blame Bill for starting it, even though he was the one going on about being in a funk in his LJ earlier this week, but certainly, by Friday, Len and I were in a monumenal funk as well.

It wasn't that SG was in reruns this week (because, I don't know about the boys, but the anticipating of weekly SciFi Friday isn't an unmitigated joy this year; I tend to approach it with more of a wary caution), although that certainly introduced a certain formlessness to the night (and nothing can be as soul-sucking, sometimes, as sitting around staring at each other saying, "I dunno -- what do *YOU* wanna do?"). It might have been the letdown after the excitement of having raqs pop up spontaneously last weekend. (Judith ought to feel very flattered that we all confessed that it was about all we could do to keep ourselves from hugging her ankles to keep her from going back to Long Island.)

Whatever. We employed the following recipe to counteract our General Feeling of Overwhelming Ick:

-- dinner at a nice but surprisingly inexpensive Thai restaurant, where all the dishes that everybody had were just stupendously good. I can personally report that two glasses of wine helps with ANY funk, although it does make me sleepy.

-- a less traumatic experience in the local Blockbuster, trying to decide what all three of us could stand to watch, than one might have expected.

-- a viewing of "Shaolin Soccer", which we hadn't realized was out on DVD yet and which therefore made the choice easy. That is a very...special...movie.

-- a viewing of Bill's Tivo'ed "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: London Edition". Verdict: we don't think it's as good as the original.
( Long-winded reasons why we didn't think it was as good... )

-- then, finally, to top off the evening -- watched the repackaging of the *pilot* episode of "Queer Eye", which was shot in Boston, which I didn't know until Bill told me about it. And lo, it was good; and fascinating to see the origins of stuff they would do later in the show. Interesting of course because Carson and Ted were the only crossovers; as they put it, the other three guys "had real jobs" and therefore couldn't uproot and go to NYC to do the ongoing show. Which, in the case of Culture Guy, is a darned shame, as we thought he was *so* much better than Jai at actually talking about cultural substance. And the interior design guy? *Eerily* looked and sounded like Thom's identical-but-less-Jewish twin. The straight guy they picked on for the pilot was actually a friend of one of the producers, and VERY game, as was his girlfriend. And we got to play "spot the Boston store/location!" during the ep, which made it extra fun for us.

I think we were all in ever-so-slightly less of a funk than we had been at the start of the evening, which is good. Plus, it's a long weekend! Yay!

Wildlife update and outting equations

Went kayaking on Lake Cohituate today. Had a cormorant fly across my bow, and land moderately nearby, floating around and giving me suspicious looks. Also saw two separate muskrats, out in the water. Got to within about 2 yards of both of them.

Am now trying to do the math in my head regarding how much I am likely to be able to get out and go kayaking over the next couple of weekends, and how many places I would like to try to go, and wondering how late most of these rental places stay open in the fall, and contemplating what it would be like to kayak in cooler weather since I can't do it without getting quite wet. I want to go out on the Charles further downstream, towards the city, at least once. I want to go out on the Charles near my house, again. I kind of want to check out the Ipswich river, which my_tallest recommends. And having been out on Lake Cohituate for the first time today, I now want to go again so that I can get farther down into the South Lake.

Hmm. I think perhaps I ought to considering going out again tomorrow, somewhere. Because I'm starting to run out of viable weekends that aren't filled up with other things.