...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

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!

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!

Thank crunchie it's Friday.

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 :)

The bad news is it's not fixed yet. The good news is garage chappie has painstakingly tracked the fault down to an obscure combination of wiring/fuses and is ordering the parts I need (via breakers yard!) to replace the faulty bits. So hopefully by this time next week, I'll have a fully working car! And for about half the cost originally thought. Bonus!

So my birthday was yesterday and I completely forgot to post but I had a pretty good day considering I went to work :) Lots of birthday wishes, both at work and on Facebook made for a cheerful day. And I gots parcels!! I got a Dalek mug an' Series 1 of The Professionals an' Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries an' "Bridge of Birds" by Barry Hughes an' "My Drunk Kitchen" by Hannah Hart. I'm a lucky girl :) So thank you halcyon_shift and doccy and jenni411 and mrorangemonkey!

In the evening I went to Stevenage's home game with Bury which I thought was pretty appalling but reading the manager's comments you'd think we'd played a blinder. 0-0 in freezing cold weather is not my idea of fun but there ya go, can't get a good game to order. I think I've just about thawed out now. Just :P

So all in all, a decent day and with the meal on Monday and the meal tonight, I've managed to spread the fun out nicely :D

Went out to an all you can eat Chinese buffet place tonight with two colleagues from work. There may have been obscene amounts of pigging out, I couldn't possibly comment. And let's not discuss my sugar levels. Below is dessert...it was basically cream with blue, red and green...stuff :)



But it was a fun night, there was much happy yakking and it was good to get out for a little while and catch up on the gossip. :)

And tomorrow there will be parcels! Eee!! *bounce*

So I have heat - for now. Engineer guesses a week at most (assuming I use it every day, I guess. I might stretch it out if I'm careful). Problem is there's too much air in the system and that's not an easy or quick or cheap fix. Yes, a sealed system might work but it would require running pipes through the kitchen. Be a lot of work and wouldn't look pretty but it should do it.

The engineer chap who came today very kindly didn't mention the air problem on his report - he simply put in a new thermostat receiver, which I did need, and that's all he put on his report. Otherwise I'd have had to pay for the call out as the air issues will no longer be covered by my Home 100 agreement with British Gas. So I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get something sorted if I don't want to freeze for the rest of winter.

Chap promised to raise a request with his manager for a senior engineer type who specialises in problems like this to come out and have a look and make some suggestions. And then i can start getting quotes and what not. In the meantime, if I bleed the radiators when the system is off, I might be able to prevent the air building up but it's going to fail again eventually, it's just a matter of time.

I am very fortunate that I can afford to do this because I have savings. I shudder to think what it would do to the average person faced with this sort of repair because it's easily going to be 4 figures. So I'm counting my blessings that I have a house and hot water and some heat at all, and accepting that when you're a home owner, you just have to deal with the bad things that happen.

Oh show, just when I think you can't ratchet up the tension any more, you get me biting my nails up to my elbows. There are show writers I'd like to get by the ear, make 'em watch and go "See? SEE?! THAT'S how it's done!" :)

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Note to self: get some Agent Carter icons!

I haven't seen any hints about next week's episode yet so I'm completely in the dark. I presume there's a trailer somewhere, in which case I'll probably see it on Tumblr at some point :)