Scribblings from the Mitchy Side

A colleague is getting married next week, so today a bunch of us from work went out for afternoon tea by way of celebration. Oooh it was lovely!

The hotel was the West Lodge Park just south of Potters Bar and it's gorgeous! Very posh, I was glad I'd bothered to smarten up :) We all had the afternoon tea and it was not only delicious, it was huge! I had *deep breath* 3 finger sandwiches (smoked salmon, cucumber and egg mayo), 2 scones (with jam and clotted cream), 1 mixed fruit tartlet, 1 shot glass of a hazelnut praline thing, 1 macaroon and a slice of battenburg cake. I had everything except the battenburg because I'm not a fan :)



My one mistake was selecting Darjeeling for my first choice of tea. Bleurg! The smell was horrific - I could have sworn I've had Darjeeling before and I don't remember it being like that! So I suspect either I'm misremembering which tea I had or it wasn't Darjeeling :P I had one cup and then switched to Breakfast Tea in relief :)

It was a great afternoon and I'm definitely taking jenni411 there when she visits in April :D

...the letters "G", "R", "O", "W", "L" :P

And tea, lots of tea!

Just swamped with work today but I got it all done because I am Ninja!Admin! The rest of the evening is being cancelled due to lack of interest. There is going to be food, silly TV and an early night :D

Talking of Silly TV, I was deeply unimpressed with last Friday's episode of "The Musketeers". I think the word I want is "lame". After building up the whole "Who is Portho's father" storyline, it gets dealt with in an episode that is so weak, it makes previous episodes look deep and meaningful. I didn't buy Porthos's relationsihip with his father for one nanosecond. I thought Treville's reasoning was feeble and made no sense and the resolution wasn't even remotely convincing.

I'll give the episode props for the last 5 minutes though - way to up the stakes. But the king's breakdown is... odd and not really being explained, it's just a massive anvilly way of keeping him out of the loop while Rochefort runs amok. I did like Milady's scenes, but then she's been one of the best characters in this series.

Don't get me started with how they wrote Constance this episode. Can I get a "Oh FFS!"? Yeh, thought so.

On the plus side of the Silly TV coin, SHIELD's back! Last week's episode was excellent and is keeping the various plots bubbling along nicely. Missing Agent Carter though :P

Well it's been a week and a half so far, sheesh! There has been flailing and temper tantrums and more flailing and (for once) none of it was mine :P (Although there may have been flailing at home from the safety of my sofa :D)

Short version of a very long story, I sent out 5 emails to senior fire types, requesting replacement of stock used on their behalf. Not a new procedure, but one that hasn't been done for a while and which I was asked to bring up to date. You'd have thought we were asking them for their first born, the fuss they made. To the point that I just handed over any phone calls to my line manager, who tolerates no bullshit and didn't put up with any of their stuff and nonsense. Emails were flung around, practically everyone from the chief on down was cc'd in on them. No-one's going to be impressed (and none of it will reflect on me or my line manager) but it got a li'l stressful there for a while. (We haven't got any of the stock back yet - stay tuned...)

The last two days have just been busy, with jobs seeming to take twice as long as normal to need sorting. I got out of work at 6pm tonight, having realised that there was a particular job I needed to do in peace and quiet and I probably wouldn't get it tomorrow. So I got it done after everyone had cleared off :)

Thank alllll the gods it's Friday tomorrow. *falls over*

It's not been a good day for sports watching. First my beloved England lost (LOST!) to Ireland in the Six Nations, being well thumped. *grumbles mightily* And then I turned over just in time to see Chelsea score against Spurs in the Capital One Cup. I probably should have stopped watching at that point but no, I had to persist until Chelsea got their second. THEN I turned off. Some days you should just accept that you're a jinx and back away :)

On the plus side, I feel much better today having got some decent sleep and finally stopped with the shivering. Harrumph.

And The Musketeers on Friday was pretty good. Some plot threads are starting to pay off, with the (ex) Captain Treville FINALLY agreeing to tell Porthos about his father, which is going to be the central point of next week's episode. Not before time, mind, they were in severe danger of stretching this out to the point it got tiresome. I'd like to check the historical accuracy of a doctor knowing to sterilise his instruments before surgery at this point in history, but I likes Lemay. I am wondering if they're setting up a romance between Constance and Lemay, given that Bonacieux pretty much cursed her and D'Artagnan :) And as a side note, reeeally glad they got rid of Bonacieux (which I'm probably mispelling but can't be arsed to look up) because he annoyed me intensely.

Rochefort appears to be galloping towards madness now, he's right on that edge. Marc Warren is playing him pretty well, stopping juuust short of over the top (just!) and keeping him interesting. In other news, if his leather trousers get any tighter, he's going to eligible for hazard pay :P

Looking forward to next week's episode!

Another crappy night where I couldn't get warm and spent far too many hours shivering before finally getting some sleep. I don't know what triggers this but it's annoying!

Luckily I had nothing planned today except watching the rugby :)

In other news, was very upset at the passing of Leonard Nimoy. I know it's inevitable but damn, we're losing all the good ones now :( I've ordered Season 1 of the original series and will watch it in his honour next week.

I went and saw this today, as it was the last day it was on at the Cineworld in Stevenage. It was also a subtitled showing, which I was interested in seeing as there are rarely subtitled performances at times I can go. For future reference, if I have difficulty with a movie's dialogue, a subtitled showing would be excellent, assuming I could get to one. We had a slight technical problem at first, with the bottom line of text being partially obscured by the frame of the film. We lost picture for a minute while something technical was done and then when it came back up, the subtitles were displaying properly. Overall, I found them helpful, as musicals can be tricky to follow if you're not familiar with them. And it had been 25 years since I saw Into The Woods in London, with the original London cast, so my memories of specifics were hazy, to say the least.

The film is a perfectly good adaptation of a stage show, characters adjusted slightly and trimmed a smidge, to fit a movie's running time. The cast surprised me - well, not Streep, I expected her to be brilliant and she was. The rest of the cast were excellent, particularly the two youngest cast members playing Jack and Red Riding Hood, who had a lot of presence for their tender years as well as kick ass voices. I am not a huge fan of James Corden but he was very good here, bringing the Baker to life with all his flaws perfectly well. Also has a decent singing voice, which helps in this show, as Sondheim is not a forgiving song writer. More about this in a bit. Anna Kendrick and Emily Blunt knocked my socks off, although I was very distracted earlier on by thinking Emily looked a dead ringer for Felicia Day. :) Chris Pine clearly had far too much fun as Prince Charming and nicely played "Agony" for the overwrought song it's supposed to be. And there were good turns from Tracey Ullman (whom I nearly didn't recognise) and Christine Baranski, who is a delight in any musical. Depp is only in this for five minutes, which seemed a bit of a waste but he had fun with it anyway.

My issues with "Into The Woods" are nothing to do with the movie which, as I've said, I thought did a great job of translating a tricky musical to the big screen (and keeping it kiddie friendly as required by the Disney overlords). My issues are with the musical itself. 25 years ago, I came out of the theatre thoroughly unsure about what I'd just seen and complaining that it wasn't a musical with songs that you could go around humming absently. I thought it was a confused mess of themes and songs that frankly felt half baked and short and incomplete and wondering why the hell Sondheim had such a great reputation. The movie does a better job of streamlining the plot but it's still a confused mess when it comes to themes - it's very unclear what message it thinks it's sending, there's more than one choice - and the second half is painfully slow. Although to be fair, a lot of musicals have that problem, "Wicked" comes to mind here. So while it's a perfectly good movie that I'm glad I saw for the cast, it's not a good musical. And while I don't despise Sondheim quite as much as I did, I'm still not sold on him. Give me a Rice/Lloyd Weber show any day!

Stevenage 4 Southend 2

What a game!! *bounces* THAT'S the reason I go to 23 home games a season, and why I put up with being cold, wet, occasionally bored, angry and frustrated. Games like this make it all worth while!

We took the lead in the first half and played pretty well, but I thought Southend were always dangerous. Proved it in the second half where in the first 20 minutes they scored 2 goals to take the lead. I'm going to have to see the penalty they got again because I'm not convinced it was (I thought the ball was long out of play and it was more of a collision than a tackle but I didn't have a great view.) At that point, most of us were shaking our heads glumly and I don't think anyone thought we looked capable of clawing a goal back.

And then the boss made some substations, key amongst them bringing on our wonderkid, Ben Kennedy. This boy is going to be special, you read it here first! (Although EVERYONE is saying it, I'm not the first!) He signed his first professional contract only last week so to say he's young and inexperienced is an understatement. However when you're young and talented you know no fear and he doesn't give a monkey's, he just gets stuck in and terrifies defenders. He won a penalty about five minutes after he came on, which was calmly slotted home by our skipper to make the score 2-2. And then he scored a beauty to give us the lead and set up the 4th to seal the win! In between all that, he had to be hauled out of an argument with a 6'2" large central defender before he got booked. Full of beans this one! We loves him :)

Anyway, the entire ground was rocking and even though there was a sudden intense hailstorm as we left the ground, no-one cared :D

And even before I went to the game, I was a happy, squeaking football fan, as I got to see Leeds beat Middlesborough on TV! Woo hoo!

Damn, I love my football!

Thank crunchie it's Friday.

I must flail about this week's episode before I forget! Honking great spoilers under the cut: you have been warned! (Also slight spoilers for next week's ep!!!)

( FLAIL! )

I'm sorry, I missed your birthday! Stupid internet connection was down all evening! Many happy returns and I hope you had a fantabulous day :)