I love this video primarily because it features a well-known actor doing something you'd have never pictured him doing. Reminds me that we ought to keep in mind that our characters should never be predictable either. 🙂
Today is my anniversary. I can't say how long we've been married because then you'll start adding, LOL. But it's been a long time.
Part of being married is learning to enjoy some of the things your spouse likes. It's a give and take. We tend to like a lot of the same things, but then there are those things that we each tolerate on some level (football, me; antique stores, hubby) for the sake of the other one.
And then there's the things we discovered together. Those are the most fun of all, and I usually don't remember whose idea it was in the first place.
So, for the fun of it, here's 10 things that we love (or love to do) that we discovered together (in no particular order):
1. Listen to Tom Jones. It's been 10 years since one of us said, “Hey, what's the deal with this Tom Jones guy? Didn't women used to go crazy over him or something? Wasn't he about as popular as Elvis at one time?” Tom is way cool. Even Jordin Sparks chose a TJ song during Idol (and sang it twice).
2. Stargazing. We took an astronomy class together a few years ago, and both decided we loved spending nights under the stars, slewing a telescope toward little points of light. In Europe, we had star parties on mountain tops, complete with wine and snacks. 🙂
3. Gadgets. Hubby is the gadget guy, always up on the latest info regarding the coolest toys. Somehow, he enmeshes me in his web, and I find myself wanting to go to CompUSA just to gawk at the gizmos. Weird, huh?
4. Wine. We met in Germany. Hubby was a beer guy, and I cut my teeth on sweet German Rieslings. It took a few years, but our tastes gravitated toward reds. Now, we love to split a bottle of Bordeaux or good American Cabernet, Shiraz, Merlot, etc. We have a wine bar right down the street, and love to go tasting. Neither one of us blinks at a $25 bottle, though we don't buy that too often.
5. Independent or arty films. We still love a good Hollywood blockbuster, like those Bourne movies, but we love to watch movies about people as opposed to explosions. Movies like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Lost in Translation, Broken Flowers, Big Night, The House of Mirth, Good Night and Good Luck, The Matador, etc.
6. Food. We'll pretty much try anything once (within reason — it has to be edible in America, you know), and we're very eclectic in our tastes. I think we both love Italian food the most, but not the kind of Italian you get when you go to the Olive Garden, for instance. We love the real deal, the stuff we got in Europe, the stuff that doesn't have a meatball in sight. I don't think we're foodies in the sense that we're food snobs, but we do like good fresh food prepared simply.
7. Anthony Bourdain. He's a recent pleasure, and we both love to watch him combine our two favorite activities: eating and traveling. I'd add that he's a fine writer too, at least in the vignettes he writes for the show. Haven't read his books yet, but they're on the list. He can be a jerk, but he's hilarious as well. And he really WILL eat anything once. (Steer penis soup? I don't think so!)
8. HGTV. Probably, hubby loves the shows like Groundbreakers and Landscaper's Challenge more than the decorating shows, but he still likes Designing to Sell and House Hunters. I'm sure I tire him out with HGTV, because I will view it non-stop, but he enjoys it too (just not as much as I do). We get ideas, and we talk about what we'd like to do in our own house.
9. Fresh ground coffee. We didn't drink coffee when we first met (young enough not to have acquired a taste for it yet), so that was something we discovered together. We went through the foo-foo phase, where we bought flavored coffees. We went through the Coffee Mate phase. Now, we grind our coffee fresh every morning and drink it with half & half. 100% Kona is our favorite, but that's hard to get now. And expensive when you don't live in Hawaii anymore. 🙁
10. Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Other than a passing Star Trek fancy, neither one of us was a big space opera kind of person. Now, we've watched the entire Firefly series at least twice (and we're getting ready to do it again), and we're seriously into the new BG. We missed Season 3, due to moving and all that, but we're impatiently waiting for it to come out on DVD. And the DVR is already set to start recording Season 4.
So that's it. Ten things my sweetie and I like, or like to do, together. I'm sure I could think of more, but that's a good enough list to remind me of why this man is my favorite person in the whole wide world. As if I could forget. 🙂 What sort of things have you discovered that you like to do with a significant person in your life? (It could just as easily be a child, or maybe even a parent.) Would you have discovered this thing, or liked this thing as much, if you didn't have someone to share it with?
When I was in Madrid 3 years ago, I ate at Botin's, the restaurant that Hem sends Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes to. This restaurant is right down the street from Botin's, and I had to laugh at the sign. I guess Hemingway's books don't translate well since the sign is clearly for an English-speaking audience. 🙂
Still, it's brilliant, really. If you can't lay claim to having a great American writer get drunk in your restaurant, you can at least proclaim he never was there, right?
Maybe I should make a sign for my office that says “Hemingway never wrote here.” Hmm, wonder if that will inspire me much?
Nope, probably not. I admire some of the old boy's work, that's for sure, but I'd have probably hated to be in his circle of friends. If writers are neurotic, and we know we are, can you imagine Hem ringing you up to discuss the rotten state of his current WIP?
::shudder::
Anyway, not being a good old lush of a writer who sloshes around cafes and hunches over a creaky manual typewriter, I decided to check out this Scrivener thing that's been mentioned. (Jean mentioned it in comments, and I saw posts about it on one of my loops recently. And if anything can help me be more organized, and even get more accomplished, then yeehaw and where do I sign up?)
OMG.
I downloaded it immediately. Scrivener (and I'd love to link to it, but that's something I've yet to figure out with Mac — control c and control v don't cut it anymore) is this cool writer's program that features word processing, outlining (not that I do), a corkboard for research, and then you can export your draft to more popular software, like Word, for final editing and printing (if you want). It is SO cool. There was a program being sold somewhere that was far more expensive, and far less cool, that I tried on my Toshiba a couple of years ago.
Scrivener is $34.99. You get to try it for 30 days free. I haven't bought it yet, though I probably will. First, I wanted to see how long it would take me to learn some of the features, like the outlining. Will I really use it? OTOH, I love the look of the manuscript in the Scrivener edit mode. You can scroll through it seamlessly, and in the statistics portion of the program, Scrivener will actually tell you how many BOOK pages your manuscript would be in comparison to how many mss pages it is. You can change the parameters, too. The default is 350 words to a printed page, but you could make it anything you want.
Want to know if you're on target for Desire? Count how many words are on a Desire page and plug it in. (You'd have to be really anal retentive, but still. You could do it if you wanted, and that's cool.)
So far, so darn cool. Now, the goal is to actually write the book, not play around with toys and computers. Would Hemingway have gotten anything done if he'd had the Internet to goof around with? I don't know. He managed to drink like a fish, party like it was 1999, and gamble away his living money (in the early days) while still writing for a newspaper and hammering out ground-breaking fiction.
I think I have no excuse. Any cool writing toys (computer or otherwise) you've discovered?
I've been assimilated. I have trod the Apple lane and been converted surprisingly quickly. I didn't want to be converted. I was perfectly happy with PC. I didn't see why I should spend more money to get less computer and then have my new less computer not be compatible with websites and programs, etc. (It really isn't less computer.)
Here's the Mac experience thus far: open the computer, plug it in, it works. That's it. The darn thing works, right out of the box, without a lot of wrangling. We have the MacBook and an iMac. They both work, they both set up the network, they go online, they get their updates (the first time you turn them on), they're done. No configuring needed. No fighting with DSL. When I changed to DSL, I had to put BellSouth's stupid software on my PC. When I set up the iMac, we plugged the DSL in and it worked. No software needed. And then we set up the Airport Base Station. No software (other than what came with the base station). It just frickin' works. I still can't get over it.
My Mac doesn't have lots of little icons for junk software I don't want either. No free AOL trials, no Quicken teasers, no junk that sits there and can't be gotten rid of. I can't stress that enough — NO JUNK.
If I had to use one word to sum up these two computers, it'd be CLEAN. They're clean, they work, and they make sense. The learning curve is slight, though PC does some things better in my opinion (usability things primarily, which might be things I just have to figure out and set preferences for with the Mac).
It's true that not every website will work with Mac. I just went to Amazon.com and saw their new unboxed thing for downloading television shows. Turns out they only support Windows, which disappointed me since one of the reasons I held out against Apple was this very issue of not being able to do things I might want to do. But if I really want to watch these shows from Amazon, both my computers will run Windows. So even switching from Windows is no longer an issue because I can still have it if I want it.
Money wise, Apple still isn't cheap. They are less expensive than they used to be in comparison to PC though. My MacBook was 1099, and I still had to pay 149 for Microsoft Office (have to have Word). If you want to run Windows on your Mac, you have to buy it. It's 299. Apple also sells various programs, such as iLife and iWork, that you may want. The computers come with cool stuff already though. iTunes, iChat, iMovie, iPhoto, and who knows what else (still exploring). Safari is okay, but Firefox is better (and free). The free widgets are awesome. You could download a million of those.
Back when my PC crashed in February, Mac wasn't an option to me. Expense was a big part of that. I didn't want to spend so much on a new computer, and fortunately PC recovered anyway. But my hubby's been campaigning for months, especially since we needed a new desktop and since my laptop has been having more glitches (keyboard losing power to certain keys, IE locking up, bluescreen). He insists that the Unix platform on which Apple is built is more stable and more secure. So I finally gave in.
I did not expect to be so comfortable so fast. Another plus on the MacBook is the battery life. When I got my PC, I bought a Centrino laptop because I wanted extended battery life. The most I ever got was right under 3 hours. This Mac has gone around 5 hours before I plugged it in. It didn't give me a warning, but I just decided I better plug it in. I suppose I could take it to the limit and see how far it will go, but I was impressed that it would last 5 hours.
For people who like to play with their computers, who like to tinker with things and change things, maybe a Windows PC is better. I don't know. But if you want to plug the computer in and not think twice about it, then maybe Apple is the way to go. As someone used to tell me, “You will be assimilated.” Yeah, I guess I have been. Darn it. Now if only I wasn't so comfortable with that fact…..
Please excuse the mess while the author of this blog is forcibly dragged kicking and screaming into the world of Apple. Hubby insists.
I am on a very cute MacBook and hubby is buying an iMac to replace the desktop. It's different, and there's a slight learning curve, but it's pretty intuitive. So far, not too upset, but things look different. And my home network is refusing to cooperate, not because of Apple, but because we were switching to DSL from cable. The phone company sucked me in and lied about the money they were going to send me. I may have to send the DSL modem back with a note about where they can put it, but we'll see. 🙂
In the meantime, hope everyone is writing and getting lots done! I hope to be back to normal soon!
