On any given Sunday, you’ll find me awake before sunrise. Old, very old, habits die-hard. I embrace being a morning person. Only causes an issue when I want to toast in the new year since I generally turn into a pumpkin around nine o’clock. Today was no different from any other weekend.
Yesterday was Twelfth Night, the official end to the Christmas season. When Dickens was a youth, Twelfth Night was ‘THE’ biggest day of the winter holiday in England. Between his Christmas Carol and Prince Albert’s importation of German Christmas traditions (namely the Christmas tree), Twelfth Night began to fade out of fashion during Dickens and Queen Victoria’s lifetimes.
I did not stay up late celebrating or hosting a Twelfth Night party. I had servers to upgrade and test bright and early on January 6th, also known as Epiphany.
I woke up before my alarm (I almost always do this; my alarm only woke me up once in the last six months) and got logged in and ready to upgrade a server. It went much smoother than the last time I tried, right before Christmas, and I was done within 20 minutes (leaving an hour forty minutes of my maintenance window unused). Server patch testing took another fifteen minutes so I was done ‘working’ before seven o’clock, still before sunrise.
I spent some time reviewing my Prime watchlist and looking for new movie gems to add to it. I found a half dozen and selected The Speed of Thought to watch before I started a batch of dough for sticky buns (a special treat for my husband today). The movie was just okay, but an interesting watch despite of itself.
While the dough was processing and rising in the bread machine, Terry and I watched The Take Down starring a stuntman-turned-actor in a hitman-with-a-heart thriller. Another just okay movie but it’s what’s usually available through any of the streaming services (NetFlix, Prime Video, Hulu, Roku, Hoopla). In fact, I see a lot of crossover in their movie catalogs outside of the exclusive or original deals they each cut with various studios.
While I wait for the final rise I’ve got to make a decision on starting another movie or just watching another episode of a television series (which is about the right length for the rolls to finish rising before baking).
I decided to watch the 4th episode of Season One of The First (Hulu Original). Towards the end of that episode my husband and I decided to make sloppy joes for a late afternoon lunch. We were inspired by our son who made hamburger buns from scratch yesterday especially for sloppy joes. When I asked him why he decided to make the hamburger buns instead of just buying some (via our family Hangout which includes my husband and I, our kids and their significant others), he said to save money. I neglected to tell him that his hourly billable rate probably defeated the purpose of saving money since it took 3-4 hours to complete said buns. For our sloppy joes, we just made open faced sandwiches with store-bought bread.
Meanwhile, the high winds in Washington State caused my daughter to lose power (again). This is the fourth or fifth time in a month that they’ve lost power at their house on the lake. It reminds me of growing up on Rural Electric Power (REP) and being without power for days. Like my daughter, we had a generator for backup power to run for a couple of hours a day to keep the deep freeze and refrigerator cold. Otherwise, it was like camping. We didn’t have central heat so in the winter it was a wood stove. In the summer, we didn’t have central air so a window unit cooled one room in the house for one to two weeks in the hottest part of the summer (usually the last week of July or the first week of August). I remember the blistering heat wave of the Summer of 1980. It was no picnic.
Mid afternoon brought me to laundry land, the country I avoid until the last possible moment each week. But chin up. I had saved a treat for our later afternoon entertainment while my clothes swished and swashed in the washing machine. Yesterday, I mentioned checking out the latest installment in the Predator films. My husband expressed the desire for some pop corn so I dug out the air popper and melted some butter before firing up the BluRay player. It was entertaining, but not in the same way as the original. More comedy action than sci-fi thriller. We laughed out loud more than once at the one-liners and off-color jokes. Once the credits rolled, I paused the film and related to Terry that three alternate endings were filmed (not shared on the DVD extras but leaked via Instagram recently) that revealed another possible Alien-Predator crossover with, you guessed it, Predator Killer Ripley (or even possibly Predator Killer Newt). Now that would have been a bad-ass ending to an otherwise mediocre Predator sequel.
Both Rotties got baths this weekend: Porthos yesterday and Lexy today. Now they’ve had their supper and will probably pass out in their usual food comas. Not sure what we will do for dinner. Winter always messes with my biorhythms. It gets dark so early. It’s not even seven o’clock but I feel like I should crawl into bed and snuggle up with my audiobook. But if I do that, I’ll be up at one o’clock in the morning and that’s never a good way to start out a Monday.
So it’s back to laundry land in the basement. And maybe time for one more movie before bed time.
