Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the former Mrs. Nancy Sheppard. The casting info is via GateWorld's writeup for an upcoming episode in season 4. I used TinyURL to mask the links, as the actress's name is in them.
I don't know how old this news is, but it's the first I've seen of it on and off LJ, so I figured I'd share.
Ask me to take a picture of any aspect of my life that you're interested in/curious about - it can be anything from the house I live in to my favourite shoes. Leave your choice here as a comment, and I will reciprocate by taking the pictures and posting them as an LJ entry. That way you get to know a little bit about my life.
So I've been rewatching Stargate: Atlantis from the beginning of season one, and I've just finished "The Siege Part 2." Of course, now it's 4am and I have nothing else to watch.
OK, that's not entirely true. I have the first… *counts* eight episodes of Journeyman, but I just can't seem to get into that show. I don't know what it is. I'm sure once I get past the pilot, it'll get better, since I seem to be running into a lot of that with new shows this season, but still, it's annoying not to have anything else to watch. Oh! I have a DVD in my bag! Granted, it's Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, but it's better than nothing. Two hours till I theoretically have to put the laptop away and pretend like I'm doing some actual work, I can watch a bit of it.
Or I could go through the 3,000+ random Atlantis screencaps I took in the course of watching the first season and see if there's anything viable there. Although I think I will leave that till later, when I've had some sleep. Hopefully I can manage to stay up a bit longer than yesterday (I believe I was asleep within ten minutes of getting home, so about 7:25am) and not get up as early as I did the last three days (around 2pm, for some reason). I seem to be unable to sleep longer than 7.5 hours, which leaves me with being awake for about sixteen hours at the end of my shift, falling asleep as soon as I get home, and waking up early enough that by the time I get to the end of my next shift, I've been up for sixteen hours, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
So I went and bought myself an early Christmas present (and birthday, probably, too, if my budget has anything to say about it) and got a digital keyboard. I was thinking about taking up guitar playing, but I already know the basics of piano playing, so I figured it'd be easier. I have three years of actual music school, with theory classes and piano lessons three times a week and all that, and then a year of playing the piano at home and commuting in for lessons once a week.
As an aside on the commuting - back then, when I was living in Poland, I lived about 60km away from where the school was, so it was pretty much a whole day trip on the bus to go from the small town where I lived to Breslau, where the school was. Now, having lived in Canada for over 16 years, 60km doesn't seem like that far. I mean, it'd still be a whole day trip, I think, but the distance doesn't seem as horrendous as it did back then. I guess there's a reason why in Europe, when you ask how far someplace is, you'll get the answer in units of distance, and in North America, you'll get it in units of time, as in "Calgary's an hour and a half away from Banff."
Anyway, back to the piano thing. I've printed the sheet music for some scales and easy pieces (and some not so easy pieces, like Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat Major, but that's probably just my ambition making me get ahead of myself), so I can practice. I think the scales will be a must for a while, as my right-left hand coordination is pretty crappy. I mean, I can play a couple of pieces, very simple things that I will probably never ever forget, and I can read music (the treble clef stuff anyway, the bass clef is a little rusty), so it shouldn't be too long before I can start in on the stuff that's not quite "Chopsticks" level. Hopefully.
(I've been trying to find the names of the two pieces I can remember, but both of them seem to be eluding identification. Maybe I'll have to record them and post them up for you guys to see if you can name them.)
I've been surfing various "reading music" and "learn to play the piano" sites, and I'm seeing, on some of them anyway, a lot of theory stuff that I don't remember. I don't want to remember it, either, and I'm hoping that since I'm just re-learning to play on my own, I will be able to avoid most of it. I hated theory classes back in school, and the Royal Conservatory of Music's theory requirement was the main reason I stopped voice lessons. Well, actually, I could have kept going without doing the exams, but my teacher was pushing the RCM stuff fairly hard, and I just didn't want to do the theory, so I stopped. Bit silly, now that I think about it. I could have sucked it up and kept going, or switched teachers, or something. Oh well. Here's to avoiding theory.
So, the other week I stopped by the Gap store beside the bookstore where I work, because I realized I needed gloves. The small stretchy ones just weren't cutting it, and my tendency to wear short or 3/4 length sleeves often left my wrists rather cold, given my coat's cuffs. And lo and behold, they had gloves. They even fit my big hands! (Seriously, my hands are basically the same size as my dad's hands, so finding gloves that fit (and that look good) is rather hard. And then I saw the matching hat (only in red, not showing up on the website) and scarf, so I figured what the hell, might as well coordinate.
The hat was awesome, if still a bit thin for 7am walks home with the wind cutting down main street. When it's fifteen (or more) below, and the wind is blowing in your face, a hat that covers your ears is a must. But I turned up my collar, hunched my head down, and hurried home. The scarf is pretty damn cool, being long enough to wrap around my neck twice and nice and warm and non-itchy. There is, however, one big problem with it, and that is that it sheds like crazy. I wear the scarf inside the collar, because the wool of the coat is itchy, and it's covered with red fluff. The front of the coat, where I've let the scarf dangle down, same thing. The cuffs, where the gloves touch, not as much (I suspect it's because the gloves appear to be made out of slightly thinner yarn, so maybe that has something to do with it.
I washed the scarf the other day, but it came out of the dryer even more fuzzy than it was before, so I'm not too sure about the whole thing. I would have washed the hat, too, but I lost it on a bus in Calgary. I'm hoping Greyhound will find the hat and maybe courier it to me or something, 'cuz I actually liked the hat and would like it back.
Meanwhile, I'll have to make do with other hats. I just got the Uptown Knitting booklet of patterns in the mail yesterday, so I'll be trying out the red cabled earflap hat pattern. It'll be dark blue instead, to match my Ravenclaw scarf, which will probably be my default winter scarf if the red one continues with the unacceptable shedding. I'm trying to figure out how to work a couple of grey stripes in there as well, but I'm thinking I might just go with plain dark blue and leave it at that, unless I abandon the cables and just go with plain stockinette, maybe double-knit or something.
Anyway, moral of the story: if you're buying hats/scarves/gloves from the Gap, be aware that if you have a coat that attracts lint and other fuzzy things, you'll have to invest in a lint brush as well.
When I went to Calgary on Wednesday, I got back at around 8pm, and then managed to stay up until 1am. After that, I'm not quite sure how long I clung to consciousness, since my new comforter is very comfy and warm and generally sleep-encouraging. Of course going to sleep at that time encouraged waking up before 8am yesterday, which then led to staying up most of the day with the exception on a two hour nap in the afternoon.
I could have slept longer, but my stepmom made cabbage rolls and invited me to come over. I could have left the cabbage rolls till today, but I really wanted some, so I've now been up for about 20 hours (22, actually, but there was a nap in there). I'm so horribly tired right now. Tired and nauseous, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure it's related to that bottle of Coke I had, which didn't actually do what I hoped it would do, that is, get me hopped up on sugar and caffeine. This makes me rather miffed, as I just broke my almost five month long stint without drinking any pop. Well, carbonated pop anyway, 'cuz I've been drinking iced tea.
I'm pretty sure that not drinking pop is the main reason I lost the weight I did this summer (and which, according to my parents' scale, I've managed to keep off). Now, if I could only manage to lose some more… A couple of the roommates bought an elliptical a while back, maybe I'll talk to them about letting me use it.
So does the fact that Beowulf scoring a 7/100 at the CAP Movie Ministry (only one movie has scored less than this one!) makes me want to see it even more (despite the bad reviews) make me a bad person? I could quote the bits that made me laugh out loud, but I'd have to quote most of it then. I'll go with the one that's used to sum it up: "quite probably the most heinous culprit for stealing childhood from children ever made," and this one: "Nudity is rampant. Full nudity. Male. Female. Frontal. Side. Rear. All angles. Though the male-specific anatomy is always kept in the shadows all other tissues and anatomy associated with it are seen in amazing anatomical detail." Which, you know, makes me go "woohoo! nudity!" It's like those warnings before TV shows. "The following program contains scenes of violence, nudity, coarse language, and mature subject matter." And my reaction to that is usually "yay, all the good stuff!" OK, so maybe I'm not the ideal audience for those reviews, but seriously?
It does seem rather reaching to say the parent poem (text) presents nudity. I have read lots of poems but never have I seen nudity in a poem. Even the nudity in some Bibles was not there when the inspired pen was put to paper; man put nudity in the Bible, not God. That some church approved nakedness in the Bible does not make it acceptable to God. Indeed God speaks darkly and shamefully of nakedness (the display of nudity) more than 40 times from the Old Testament to the New Testament. His Word even advised priests not to build an altar with steps lest the wind expose their nakedness to the people below. (Exodus 20:26, which reads "Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon." What wind? Hunh?)
I wasn't going to quote any of it, but man, I just can't help it. It's so ridiculous in its earnestness, and yet oh so completely and utterly fucked up. Oh well. At least the site is good for some laughs, you know?
I had an interesting conversation with my dad about violence in the media, and we both pretty much have the same attitude towards it. It's up to the parents to monitor their children's exposure to violence, but once people are adults? Isn't it better that someone go to see a movie where Bruce Willis or Samuel L. Jackson blow the shit out of some bad guys, rather than go out him/herself and blow the shit out of some innocent people? It's a safety valve that lets us release the more violent impulses (like, say, by shooting some aliens on the computer screen, thank you Master Chief), and get back to living whatever passes for a normal life these days.
I honestly don't understand this. I mean, with a movie like Beowulf, why would you even consider letting your younger kids (the movie is rated PG-13) see it? All you have to do is look at the trailers, and you'll know that there'll be lots of stabbinating and burninating and possibly even engaging in a little pillage and plunder. It's a movie about Vikings, for crying out loud! They weren't exactly known for their good manners and Christian attitudes. *facepalm*
*deep breath*
This morning, the temperature was -14C (uh, about 7F), and I discovered that sadly, my lovely wool coat is not going to be enough to get me through the winter here in Banff. It's already starting to not be enough for the cold evening and morning walks to and from work, and when the temperatures drop another 20 degrees, it definitely won't be enough. So I added a proper winter jacket to the shopping list for Wednesday's trip to Calgary.
Something's happened to my tolerance for cold, I think. I've never liked the heat, prefering something more temperate, but I've always been able to laugh at the "cold" of -10, when tourists from warmer countries are all "OMG HOW DO YOU PEOPLE LIVE LIKE THIS?!" and I'm laughing and walking home without zipping up my jacket. Now, though, I'm noticing my comfortable range has narrowed, because dude, it's only -14, it's not actually that cold, and here I am, bundling up in hat and scarf and looking for warmer jackets and pants to wear. You'd think having lived in Alberta for so long, I'd be used to it by now. Unless it just takes time to adjust and I'll be fine next week.
I'm still buying a new jacket, though.
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