Nerdy DW tote bag for Jacey, and my undying love for Matt Smith

Jacey King (the girl whose farewell I went to today) is a Doctor Who fan, and I knew she needed a nerdy tote bag in her life. I'm not sure if this bag will be okay to use on her mission, but since it's not explicitly branded in any way, maybe it will be fine. If you haven't watched the show, the words don't mean much, but if you do, you automatically know that "Allons-y!" is a catchphrase of the 10th Doctor and "Geronimo!" is a catchphrase of the 11th.

 

 

 I've been super busy lately and didn't get around to making this till late last night. It's a little on the sloppy side but oh, well. Jaycee was thrilled and her friends were jealous, so that's all that matters.

 Speaking of the 11th Doctor, Matt Smith has left the show and regenerated a month ago ON CHRISTMAS. (Darn you, BBC!!). I cried, although it wasn't nearly as devastating as when David Tennant regenerated in his last episode. In fact, I still don't think I'm over that.

But Matt did what I (and several million other people) never thought he could do. He was able to take over the show from the most popular Doctor in history and be amazing and brilliant and I ended up loving him just as well as I did David.

Stephen Moffat, the show's writer, described Matt as, "lovely--he's a magnificent, brand new, hilarious, heartbreaking, heroic Doctor" and I think that sums him up perfectly.

 

 

 

 Amy and Rory 

 I wasn't a huge fan of his main companion Amy Pond (I thought "The Amy Pond Show" was pretty much what she turned it into) but I loved Rory, LOVED River Song and Clara.

 

River Song and the Doctor

  

 Clara and the Doctor

 

 

  

 (PS. That pirate would be Hugh Boneville, a.k.a. Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey)

Matt's on Broadway now doing American Psycho the musical (quite the departure) and I wish him all the best, even though I wish he'd stuck around DW for another year or two. He's largely responsible for the popularity the show has had in the United States and this new generation of fans. Thank you Matt!!! ♥♥♥

PS. I hit 1,000 followers for my I ♥♥ Doctor Who Pinterest board a couple of weeks ago. (It's up to 1,076 today.) YAY FOR FUN TIME WASTERS!!! It keeps me sane and brings me happiness, so there.

The Hobbit, you guys

When the last Harry Potter movie ended in 2011, Mark and I said, "Well, there's never going to be another movie to interest us ever again, on Earth, at all."

Truly.

But then word came that The Hobbit was finally being made (which had been rumored for years but was bogged down by production delays, a change of directors, etc., etc., etc.) and all last year was mostly spent in breathless anticipation bordering on fanatical desperation for the release date of 12/14/12. You don't understand just how excited I was.

The Hobbit has been my favorite book since I was a teenager, when I also first started reading The Lord of the Rings. I didn't really fit in in high school. Other girls were swooning over Leonardo DiCaprio and The Backstreet Boys, while I was busy fangirling over The Beatles and getting issues of the Star Wars Insider magazine, leading up to the new Phantom Menace episode. I remember reading the LOTR and having to go to the library to get each book and being completely blown away, especially at how The Two Towers ends with Frodo being captured and Sam getting knocked out trying to follow the orcs into Mordor (I have a bone to pick with Peter Jackson about how that was all done in the movie....) and then it just LEAVES YOU HANGING! "Sam heard and saw no more." Gah!

Mark and I went and saw The Fellowship of the Ring on our honeymoon in California and probably saw it 7 or 8 times in the theater.When I got to SUU, I took an upper division literature class on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and other fantasy writers (it was the BEST CLASS EVER), we went to see The Return of the King at the IMAX in Springdale when I was 8 months pregnant with Madelyn (I cried a lot during that movie) and I read The Two Towers while I was in the hospital giving birth to her. I remember driving Mark's manual car (which I was terrible at) in Albuquerque by myself because I was so desperate to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the big screen back in 2007.

Anyway, you get the point. I'm a nerd, I'm a geek. My Geekery board on Pinterest has 1,097 pins (not including my separate I ♥♥ Doctor Who board....which has 599....). It makes me happy.

 So anyway, somehow we made it all the way to December (having discovered Doctor Who in the meantime helped) when The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opened. Mark and I got a babysitter--which we hardly ever do-- and went to go see it on December 18th because he'd had to work the previous weekend.

I wore my Hobbit t-shirt that I got at Target. I chopped off the neck and sleeves because it was a men's shirt. Men always get the best t-shirts.

The movie was so awesome. I had to get up to pee halfway through the movie, because it's almost 3 hours long.
 

 Our movie theater had a hobbit hole!!

Check out the hand drawn map!! I was dying.

 

The Hobbit is my favorite book because it's easier to read, funnier, shorter and more quirky/British than The Lord of the Rings. It was written in 1937 and was J.R.R. Tolkien's first book, geared more towards a younger audience. It takes place 60 years before The Lord of the Rings and involves Bilbo Baggins (Frodo's uncle) getting roped into an epic quest with 13 dwarves and Gandalf the wizard. The dwarves lost their homestead of Erebor to Smaug the Dragon 100 years previously and want to go back to try and reclaim it, along with all their gold.

It is a short(ish) book, but Tolkien wrote a ton of additional material that took place at that same time in the Appendices of The Return of the King, which Peter Jackson has utilized. So it is a little slower paced than The Lord of the Rings, which I've heard a lot of people complain about. What they don't realize is that in The Fellowship of the Ring, they cut out whole decades in order to speed up the story. I like that they have more time to explore backstory and characters this time.

 

 Mark and I thought that Martin Freeman was fantastic as Bilbo--he was so perfect for the role. He has serious geek cred already, having played Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dr. John Watson in BBC's Sherlock. Apparently Peter Jackson saw him in Sherlock and he was the only actor he even considered to play Bilbo. He rearranged the entire movie shooting schedule around his availability. Martin was completely brilliant. Loved him.

Also completely brilliant:

Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield.

Now, I never liked Thorin in the book--he comes across as a big jerk. He's still stubborn and haughty in the movie, but he's just so dang MAJESTIC. He's a prince and the leader of the company and kicks some major butt. There's a flashback in the movie that shows him battling with an orc named Azog in front of the gates of Moria, and it is the best sequence in the entire film. Balin (another dwarf) is telling the story, and he says, 

"We were leaderless, defeat and death were upon us. That is when I saw him; the young dwarf prince facing down the Pale Orc. He stood alone against this terrible foe, his armour rent, wielding nothing but an oaken branch as a shield... Azog the Defiler learned that day that the line of Durin would not be so easily broken. Our forces rallied and drove the Orcs back; our enemy had been defeated... but there was no feast or songs that night, for our dead were beyond the count of grief. We few had survived and I thought to myself then, 'There is one I could follow. There is one I could call King'

...and Megan and I were squirming in our seats, trying not to shout out, "I WILL FOLLOW YOU, THORIN!" Sorry, there's a lot of caps in this post.

Oh yeah, so my sister Megan.

Well, I've mentioned this before...she's possibly even more of a geek than I am. More prolific, anyway. So I invited her up a couple days after Christmas to come watch it with me (again). Notice the matching outfits!! Ah, we had so much fun.

And then of course, I had to have Mark take Madelyn to go see it:

 She was already a fan of LOTR and my nerdy little heart couldn't be more proud that she wanted to see it. 

I also bought the soundtrack from iTunes and it is awesome--I've listened to it so much that Mark has started to get annoyed. "The Misty Mountains" is a track that Thorin and Co. actually sing (one of two songs in the film) and it's superb. Richard Armitage has a very deep, manly voice.

So if you haven't gone to see The Hobbit yet, GO!! It's being made into a trilogy, and granted that's stretching it a bit, but like I said you get to find out what Gandalf was off doing when he kept disappearing and you see lots of familiar faces and places from Middle Earth (I nearly burst into tears when I saw Frodo). The music is grand and sweeping, the battles are fierce, the visuals and special effects are first class, New Zealand is beautiful and it is a great big adventure story. There's still lots to tell and now all we have to do is wait for December to roll around again for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug!

Eleven months to go...............

Painting.........

So, here I am with pictures to prove why we needed to paint this place. It has splotches of paint colors I was testing before we went out and bought 8 gallons.

Item 1:

When I finally figured out why I hated the color that every room in our house was painted (demonstrated by the wall on the left), it was because it was flesh colored. Think about it. Ew. Floor to ceiling in every room--and the carpet and tile were the exact same color.

Mark said it was more like "zombie flesh", and when I asked Madelyn to describe the color, she said (without knowing what we had already said), "It's like skin with no freckles on it." So there you have it folks! Skin walls!

Over time, we had painted the bedrooms and bathrooms, the laundry room, the garage and a couple of accent walls with better colors. But the beige beast had yet to be totally vanquished.

Item 2:

Almost two years ago, in a desperate effort to do something different with at least one of the walls, we got this darker paint. I really wanted Flagstone (a Martha Stewart color), but couldn't afford it, and we found a gallon of this "oops" paint at Home Depot for $5. It was close to the color I wanted, so we went with it. However.....in certain times of the day, it looked forest green--not the gray/brown I was going for.

 

Plus, that wall is right next to where we eat, and it was kind of a disaster. Luke (especially when he was a baby) is known for leaving 9-foot swaths of pudding and noodle splatter when he eats, and even though the paint we got was Martha Stewart brand and semi gloss, the paint would rub right off when we had to scrub the wall! You'd THINK it would be high quality paint!! It totally wasn't. The only good thing I could say about it was it had low VOC (no fumes when we painted with it).

 

Oh, you noticed the pathetic looking baseboards?? Yeah....so Mark took them all off when he ripped out the tile in the kitchen and put in the laminate floor. Then he put them back on and caulked them, but never repainted them. That was 2 1/2 years ago. Pretty classy. Also:

Item 3:

 Our front door (ever since we moved in) has been badly scratched by the St. Bernard dog that used to live here.

The reason we hadn't painted everything sooner was because every time we'd get a little time/money, it would go straight into the back yard. But now that it is finally finished, it is MY TURN! (The back yard was Mark's project--the inside is more mine.)

So, after waffling over paint colors for literally 3 1/2 years, I decided on Sandpiper MSL257 and Flagstone MSL247 (Martha Stewart paint colors) although all the paint is Behr Premium Plus Ultra paint. Home Depot can color match--just give them the paint chip you want of any brand. Premium Plus Ultra has primer in it and is really thick so you only need one coat. It does stink, though. Sort of like pickles. Pew pew.

And it turns out that we bought about 2-3 gallons too many of the Sandpiper color, so if you want to buy the extra from us, let me know!

Every time the ladder comes out, the kids are all over it. Those little monkeys!!

 Painting the front door

 I just love the mess.

Just kidding I don't. 

By the way, if you ever come over and we have our Led Zeppelin concert DVDs playing (or any of their albums), there's like a 70% chance that we're painting. It's necessary for a good result.

 I got put in charge of painting all the doors and trim, and I decided to go for Ultra Pure White in high gloss.

Because whoever originally painted the trim decided to go for dingy blah off white. (WHY?!)

The doors take forever because you have to use a small brush to paint inside the grooves and borders, and then roll with one of those little no-nap sponge paint rollers. Doorways with all their trim and casings take like an hour a piece. Mark and I have put in approximately 14 hours into them already, and still have 8 more doors to go!

To save time, instead of taping off the baseboards, I use a stiff folder to push the carpet down as I'm painting. On the top border, I just have to be deliberate and careful not to get it on the wall. I still do tape around the door frames where they meet the wall, and in places hard to reach, like behind toilets and such.

So this has been going for a couple of months now. Like I said, I am still not technically done, but have taken a break to focus on the holidays. Tune in for the carpet extravaganza and the big reveal!