Current mood:	content
Current music:	Vince Guaraldi Trio - Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal)
Entry tags:	star trek

bingo: using all seven of your letters in a turn in Scrabble
This has been the best weekend I've had in a long while. The mixture of good food, good company, good weather, and good movies, really brought it together. It's especially great because I had such a blah week, and my workday on Friday was monumentally unproductive.

On my way home from work, I browsed around some hip shops on Main and bought some Christmas cards for relatives and a Kam Kam bag for myself. Then I had dinner, settled in, and watched probably six episodes of DS9 in a row. I've just got the last two episodes left, and then I'm done. The last half of Season Seven gets really soap opera-y, so it's easy to just settle down and watch episode after episode. And Ezri and Bashir are the cutest thing ever.

After that I tried with little success to find Ezri/Bashir fanfic. But the Star Trek online fandom is dead. I belong to a handful of Star Trek groups on LJ, and they're all pretty darn uneventful. Once in a while somebody will make an icon, but that's about it. It's sad. Part of it can be attributed to that Paramount made a huge effort a few years ago to quash all Star Trek fanpages. Any images, any anything. I think I'm spoiled, too, because the Buffy and LotR and Harry Potter fandoms are staggeringly huge, and because of that, there are quite a few extremely talented people in those fandoms churning out quality fanart and fanfic all the time. Sigh.

Saturday I did laundry and then headed over to Toren's. We (mostly Toren) got to work on making candied yams for the very informal VGG Xmas potluck to be held at his house later that night. He taped a fucking RAD documentary for me called Word Wars that's about competitive Scrabble players. It focuses on four of the US's top Scrabble players and you learn about their habits and their lives. There's the old champ, Joe, who does Tai Chi and meditates and is all about focus and balancing his chi. There's Marlon, a black guy from the ghetto in Baltimore who is all into Malcolm X and black power and also smoking pot. He's pretty intense and games with him can be quite heated. The night before the national competition in San Diego, he goes down to Tijuana and gets with a prostitute. There's the part-time standup comic, Matt (or was it Jeff? I forget), who's friends with Marlon but keeps sneaking fake words past him. Matt's into taking all different kinds of brain-boosting herbal shit like Gingko, like hardcore. There's G.I. Joel. The G.I. stands for Gastrointestinal, because he has really hardcore acid reflux and he's always drinking Maalox. These guys, all they do all day (and probably many of the people at the competition) is study words and play Scrabble. They don't have jobs. They've dedicated their life to this one skill. It was such an awesome and fascinating movie - the whole culture of Scrabble. I love that for everything in the world, there is some cult of enthusiasts seriously dedicated to it. Stewey was just talking about it in his blog. I love documentaries, and the way it was done was perfect. I still haven't seen Spellbound, but I want to.

Then Stewie put on an old Christmasy movie with Jimmy Stewart in it, called Bell, Book, and Candle (I think). It's about witches (Kim Novak and Jack Lemmen) and love. It was good. Cute, and Kim Novak had some pretty amazing outfits in it. Backless dresses and the like. People started showing up for the potluck after that. Warren and his friend Jen, Chris and Kathryn, Ken, Jon Dawes. The food was grood, and our yams, unlike our Thanksgiving yams, were a major success. Other food: Warren's yummy spinach fritatta, Stewey's grilled cheese sandwiches (which totally stoked Chris Slater out, for some reason), Jen's thai noodle salad, Jon's Safeway deli potato salad (they're painting their kitchen; that was his excuse), and Chris and Kathryn's cookies. It was a fabulous evening because after the movie ended, we all just sat there snacking and talking. Listening to hilarious teenage injury stories and laughing until we cried, having a long discussion about the words "queer" and "oriental," talking about the world of marketing (Kathryn works for an advertising company, and it was very interesting), and tons of other stuff. Jon Dawes stayed a while after everyone left, and that was great because I love the way Jon thinks - he always thinks of stuff I've thought of, that I never thought anybody else thought about. Very intelligent and creative. He even gave me some ideas for resources on the comic book I want to write (which I haven't worked on in a few weeks now).

So after Jon left, we went to bed. And this morning we went to a pot luck brunch at Kate and Theo's that was also very fun. We brought a pineapple, some cookies, and some bananas. The food was really really good, and Kate and Theo are both so nice and such excellent hosts. I hadn't met most of the people there, and they were all interesting and friendly. There were quite a few little kids running around screaming, but that didn't matter much. We did listen to an awful lot of kid stories, but they're funny when you don't hear them all the time (and I don't). Again there were lots of hilarious stories that had us in hysterics - I remember one about Jeff torturing his Sims character to do nothing but sit there and lift weights (the character cried all the time because he was so unhappy, and eventually ended up pissing all over the floor). Plus, Kate lent me a bunch of Discworld books. Yay!

After the brunch we stopped at my house and Smoking Lily, and then headed to Toren's again. We watched an episode of Teen Titans he'd taped for me, a two-part episode of Voyager, and then Iron Giant, which I'd never seen and kept hearing about. It was another really really good movie. The robot is cute and endearing. It was the same old Edward Scissorhands-type story, but it was so well done. Toren and I both totally cried.

...And now I'm home, listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas album. Christmas is soon. RotK EE comes out on Tuesday. House of Flying Daggers and A Series of Unfortunate Events both come out on Friday. Things to look forward to. :) It's gonna kill me to have to wait until after Xmas to watch RotK EE, though, because I asked for it for Christmas. Oooh, maybe I can rent it, though. So many people on my friendslist are into LotR, you see.

Also after Christmas, or just sometime soon, I want to buy another knee-length skirt, some cable-knit knee socks, and some more patterned tights. And some clever silkscreened shirts. It's sad that the only tshirts at Smoking Lily are for guys. All the girls' stuff is girly-style shirts, but all I want is small tshirts.