Abbie's Real Life Blog

It has been rainy and chilly for the past couple of days, but it is supposed to be warmer and sunny this weekend.

My fall clothes have been getting a workout, including a new pair of knee-high boots that I bought a few weeks ago. I just love them. I’ve been wearing them at least twice a week since I bought them because they go with all of my black and gray trouser pants, they’re completely warm and comfortable when it’s wet and they dry quickly, and I can wear them all day even with a rather substantial heel. Score one for the big black boots! I am already dreading the day where they start to wear out and need replacement, because I think I will probably wear them almost daily once it’s really cold.

It is Homecoming weekend for Mizzou, which means a busy weekend in Columbia.  Unfortunately, we’re (for unfathomable reasons) playing the Texas Longhorns (currently ranked #3 in the country) for our Homecoming game, which puts a sad and depressing pallor on the meticulously crafted decorations that the frat boys and sorority girls put up all around downtown this week.  They look even more gloomy in the rain.  I could be wrong, and I hope I’m wrong, and I hope we pull off a crazy victory, but I’m not much of an idealist and it’s pretty unlikely, at best.  It’s sad when a Homecoming game results in a big loss for the home team.

Tomorrow, other than avoiding the crowds around the stadium and watching the game in the evening, I plan to go hiking in the morning and do a family photo shoot in the afternoon.  On Sunday, I have no plans but possibly working around the house and taking some autumn leaf photos (if there are still some left over after this week’s rain).

Last night, I went to see the movie It Might Get Loud at Ragtag.  I didn’t love it.  It was kind of a biographical documentary about guitarists Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin), The Edge (of U2), and Jack White (of The White Stripes, etc.).  I guess these three are supposed to represent the best guitarists of their respective generations, but I don’t know if I agree with that assessment on its own.  I did enjoy the music, of course.  I consider myself a fan of Jack White’s various endeavors.  I have a couple of Led Zeppelin albums, but I wouldn’t consider myself a fan, really, and I don’t think I own any U2 albums or even any U2 songs.   (Is that true?  Maybe I have a couple of old mp3s around somewhere.)  The biographies were interesting, but unfortunately the whole thing was edited pretty badly, and I wasn’t very clear on the narrative arc.  If there were striking similarities between the life stories of the three guitarists, they weren’t terribly obvious.  I felt like they retreaded over the same material several times in the 90 minutes, so the whole thing seemed about 30 minutes longer than it needed to be.

I really should go see more movies at Ragtag, though.  There are a lot of them that start right after my workday is finished, and I could get into the habit of seeing one every week or so.

In other what-kind-of-media-am-I-consuming news, I finally gave up on ever finishing Northern Exposure.  It’s sad, too, because I was halfway through the fifth season with only the sixth season remaining, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to finish the episodes.  I think I had two DVDs for about six weeks, and I hate that.  So I stripped the rest of the NE from my Netflix queue and sent the last two discs back, and I’ve got some random movies on my Netflix list right now while I finish watching Battlestar Galactica, which I’ve been renting from Ninth Street Video.  Maybe I’ll return to Northern Exposure after the fifth season of Rescue Me, which will probably be true shit.  Maybe the rest of the fifth season of Northern Exposure will look good after that.

I am also perpetually on page 50 of David Simon’s book Homicide, which I really like, but which feels like a long slog.  I think I’ve read two other books while still reading this one, and I’m definitely in danger of getting another quick read because I’m not terribly excited about going home to open up this one.  Which is too bad, because I do like it.  It’s just pretty slow going.

And let’s just round this all out with a comment about that super clock I bought a few months ago.  It really is pretty super.  I have two alarms set, one at 5:30am with a buzzer and the other at 7:00am with the radio, and I love that.  But I can also put my iPhone on its little iPod dock and play the Tom Waits Pandora station every night before I go to sleep.

(I was listening to Top 40, but if I have to hear that Taylor Swift song one more time, the one about the tomboyish music-loving dork wanting to date the high school boy who is, surprise surprise, more interested in dating the super girly cheerleader, even though she is kind of bitchy, because, you know, he’s a high school boy, well, I might have had to write Taylor Swift a VERY STRONGLY WORDED LETTER about how high school boys have their collective heads up their collective asses and she should consider writing a lot of melodramatic poetry like all the other nerdy high school girls do instead of whine-singing about it so much.  UGH.)

I really love Tom Waits and I seem to love all the music that Pandora picks to go with Tom Waits.  But I think I’ve discovered that I love blues music.  I know that shouldn’t be such a recent discovery, but I’ve often lumped it in with jazz, and I don’t love jazz.  It’s okay, but I wouldn’t choose it.  I like blues.  (Which circles back to that fandom of Jack White in that documentary, because it was really obvious how much blues music influences him, and how much of that comes out, especially when compared with U2.  But then again, I don’t love U2.)

Anyway.  Rock on, you crazy super clock of mine.  I hope you last for awhile.