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grrgoylOur excitement this weekend had nothing to do with the kennels. A couple of weeks ago I came home from a shift and noticed our elderly neighbor's dome light on in her car. Seeing her living room light was on, despite it being 5 a.m., I decided to take the chance of stopping her heart and ringing her doorbell to let her know. She didn't answer though. The next day the light was still on so I tried again, with the same result. Ah well, much longer and it would be a moot point, so I gave up.
Then we never saw her again in the subsequent weeks. Her car stayed in the same spot day after day, even when we were ordered to clear the parking lot for sewer line work. Tery saw half-full drink glasses sitting untouched on her coffee table. We tried not to think the worst, but she was very old and sickly (had a stroke last year, and is a devoted smoker). On the other hand, she also has family that visits her occasionally; surely they were on top of the situation?
So it was with great trepidation indeed that I came down the stairs on my way to work Saturday night to see three uniformed policemen struggling to get into her front door. They asked me if I'd seen her lately and I had to admit no. They asked for contact numbers, anything, so I called Tery to see if she could help them after I left. She called me regularly to keep me updated. She gave them the HOA emergency number, thinking they had to have personal information, but apparently all the numbers they had for her were disconnected. Tery said she heard them knocking on everyone's door looking for contacts, even the FCW's (Tery said, "I was going to tell them not to knock on that door unless they wanted to open a whole new can of worms," because yea verily Tracey is back to carrying things into her unit in covered plastic bins and, one memorable night with a large male friend's/customer's help, muscling some sort of very heavy air conditioner-size piece of machinery up the stairs and inside. Of course, it might have been an air conditioner).
There's a happy ending, sort of. When Tery told them her name they were able to put out an APB to the hospitals and found her in one. Not good news that she's been there so long, but certainly better than dying alone in her condo and going undiscovered for weeks.
It's very stressful living near elderly people.
~*~
My love for my dentist remains intact. I saw him yesterday. He's still hot as ever, but the point is he looked at my mouth, declared it to be in "good shape," and admitted that my bridge was still functionally sound, it was just a matter of aesthetics whether to replace the missing tooth. He said there hadn't been many advances made in bonding porcelain, and if he tried sticking the original back on I'd be back within a week after it falls out again. The other alternative is ripping out the entire bridge and starting over, and that sounds expensive and hugely unappealing. So I said if it was just a question of aesthetics, I'd live with the missing tooth. He shaved down the rough edges, charged me for the visit and the x-ray and sent me on my way (after insisting that I really should still have a yearly cleaning, which I plan on now).
~*~
Speaking of my love for older men, I finally got The Barchester Chronicles from Netflix, a very early BBC series (well, 1982) featuring the Rickman. Hoo boy, guess there's no avoiding the truth anymore: I am obsessed.
The Barchester Chronicles is about the sleepy parish of Barchester in England, circa 1855. I had high hopes for this when I saw Alan's picture prominently on the disc. Imagine then how I felt when he doesn't appear in the first two episodes at all? No, the actual "star" of the show is Donald Pleasance, as an owlish, naive, somewhat doddering priest and warden of a local hospital, who appears to have taken acting lessons from SNL!Christopher Walken. The first two episodes are concerned with the gripping drama of whether or not he's overpaid for his duties, and if so what's to be done about it?
Which is about as exciting as it gets. These people, before TV or the internet came along, had nothing to do all day but run about and fuss and stick their noses into everyone else's business. Will Mrs. Bold ever reveal the contents of her scandalous letter? Who will be named the next dean of Barchester? How ever will the Quiverfuls manage to feed their 14 children? Stay tuned for the answers to these questions and many more in the next thrilling episode of The Barchester Chronicles!
Naturally my interest picked up a bit when Alan makes his first appearance in episode three as Obadiah Slope. Given my priest fetish, I thought sexiness wouldn't be a problem. However, in Obadiah Slope I saw all the slimy, oily, conniving traits that Snape is supposed to possess, but that Alan only gets a fraction of the screen time to show us -- in fact, through the whole series my foremost thought was that no one could portray young Snape better than Slope. Two-faced, self-serving, with a towering ambition that dictates his every action, there was very little to like at all. Except of course for his lucious baritone voice, fully developed here at the tender age of...36. Oh. For some reason I thought he was much younger in this. Here's a .gif I found, which succeeds in illustrating his greasiness with varying degrees of success:
The men of the parish see him for what he is; the women are all mysteriously enamored of him, giggling and vying for his attention. Probably the most interesting thing about this series was the way most of the women seemed to be strong-willed and running the show by controlling the men who were supposed to have the power; most of the men are simpering creatures who just want some peace and quiet, and can only get it by appeasing their shrewish spouses. There's one scene where the Bishop is cowering under the edicts of his wife (played coincidentally by Geraldine McEwan, who would go on to be the crone Mortianna opposite Alan's Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). He's terrified to even lift his head in the face of her tirade. Then she leaves and Slope enters the room. The Bishop visibly relaxes, smiles, greets him warmly. Slope manipulates him just as much as his wife does, he's just far more subtle about it. I tried very hard to ignore the slashy possibilities (no, really I did -- the Bishop is decidedly notsexy).
In the end though all his machinations are his undoing, and he's publicly humiliated in both his marriage suit and his bid for the deanery. Everyone else lives happily ever after, in what seems like a very hastily put together conclusion. The end.
I thought all the scenes without Alan were unfathomably dull, but there are scores of rave reviews over at IMDb, which I suppose makes me an uncultured heathen.
Then we never saw her again in the subsequent weeks. Her car stayed in the same spot day after day, even when we were ordered to clear the parking lot for sewer line work. Tery saw half-full drink glasses sitting untouched on her coffee table. We tried not to think the worst, but she was very old and sickly (had a stroke last year, and is a devoted smoker). On the other hand, she also has family that visits her occasionally; surely they were on top of the situation?
So it was with great trepidation indeed that I came down the stairs on my way to work Saturday night to see three uniformed policemen struggling to get into her front door. They asked me if I'd seen her lately and I had to admit no. They asked for contact numbers, anything, so I called Tery to see if she could help them after I left. She called me regularly to keep me updated. She gave them the HOA emergency number, thinking they had to have personal information, but apparently all the numbers they had for her were disconnected. Tery said she heard them knocking on everyone's door looking for contacts, even the FCW's (Tery said, "I was going to tell them not to knock on that door unless they wanted to open a whole new can of worms," because yea verily Tracey is back to carrying things into her unit in covered plastic bins and, one memorable night with a large male friend's/customer's help, muscling some sort of very heavy air conditioner-size piece of machinery up the stairs and inside. Of course, it might have been an air conditioner).
There's a happy ending, sort of. When Tery told them her name they were able to put out an APB to the hospitals and found her in one. Not good news that she's been there so long, but certainly better than dying alone in her condo and going undiscovered for weeks.
It's very stressful living near elderly people.
~*~
My love for my dentist remains intact. I saw him yesterday. He's still hot as ever, but the point is he looked at my mouth, declared it to be in "good shape," and admitted that my bridge was still functionally sound, it was just a matter of aesthetics whether to replace the missing tooth. He said there hadn't been many advances made in bonding porcelain, and if he tried sticking the original back on I'd be back within a week after it falls out again. The other alternative is ripping out the entire bridge and starting over, and that sounds expensive and hugely unappealing. So I said if it was just a question of aesthetics, I'd live with the missing tooth. He shaved down the rough edges, charged me for the visit and the x-ray and sent me on my way (after insisting that I really should still have a yearly cleaning, which I plan on now).
~*~
Speaking of my love for older men, I finally got The Barchester Chronicles from Netflix, a very early BBC series (well, 1982) featuring the Rickman. Hoo boy, guess there's no avoiding the truth anymore: I am obsessed.
The Barchester Chronicles is about the sleepy parish of Barchester in England, circa 1855. I had high hopes for this when I saw Alan's picture prominently on the disc. Imagine then how I felt when he doesn't appear in the first two episodes at all? No, the actual "star" of the show is Donald Pleasance, as an owlish, naive, somewhat doddering priest and warden of a local hospital, who appears to have taken acting lessons from SNL!Christopher Walken. The first two episodes are concerned with the gripping drama of whether or not he's overpaid for his duties, and if so what's to be done about it?
Which is about as exciting as it gets. These people, before TV or the internet came along, had nothing to do all day but run about and fuss and stick their noses into everyone else's business. Will Mrs. Bold ever reveal the contents of her scandalous letter? Who will be named the next dean of Barchester? How ever will the Quiverfuls manage to feed their 14 children? Stay tuned for the answers to these questions and many more in the next thrilling episode of The Barchester Chronicles!
Naturally my interest picked up a bit when Alan makes his first appearance in episode three as Obadiah Slope. Given my priest fetish, I thought sexiness wouldn't be a problem. However, in Obadiah Slope I saw all the slimy, oily, conniving traits that Snape is supposed to possess, but that Alan only gets a fraction of the screen time to show us -- in fact, through the whole series my foremost thought was that no one could portray young Snape better than Slope. Two-faced, self-serving, with a towering ambition that dictates his every action, there was very little to like at all. Except of course for his lucious baritone voice, fully developed here at the tender age of...36. Oh. For some reason I thought he was much younger in this. Here's a .gif I found, which succeeds in illustrating his greasiness with varying degrees of success:
The men of the parish see him for what he is; the women are all mysteriously enamored of him, giggling and vying for his attention. Probably the most interesting thing about this series was the way most of the women seemed to be strong-willed and running the show by controlling the men who were supposed to have the power; most of the men are simpering creatures who just want some peace and quiet, and can only get it by appeasing their shrewish spouses. There's one scene where the Bishop is cowering under the edicts of his wife (played coincidentally by Geraldine McEwan, who would go on to be the crone Mortianna opposite Alan's Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). He's terrified to even lift his head in the face of her tirade. Then she leaves and Slope enters the room. The Bishop visibly relaxes, smiles, greets him warmly. Slope manipulates him just as much as his wife does, he's just far more subtle about it. I tried very hard to ignore the slashy possibilities (no, really I did -- the Bishop is decidedly notsexy).
In the end though all his machinations are his undoing, and he's publicly humiliated in both his marriage suit and his bid for the deanery. Everyone else lives happily ever after, in what seems like a very hastily put together conclusion. The end.
I thought all the scenes without Alan were unfathomably dull, but there are scores of rave reviews over at IMDb, which I suppose makes me an uncultured heathen.
