It figures something like this happens on a night I can’t watch tennis: the Alcaraz/Zverev match has been suspended due to swarming bees. Is the ghost of Gloria Swanson haunting this year’s BNP Paribas Open? Is Iga Świątek their new queen?*
While we’re asking questions, when will I post a new review? There’s a slight chance one will be ready by tomorrow night, but sometime over the weekend is more likely. I have no excuse; everything’s getting away from me this week. This seems to happen like clockwork five to six weeks after Botox injections, something the doctor’s addressing by gradually increasing the dosage. As my neck and shoulder worsen, so does my already spotty sleep. It’s annoying.
Trying to mix a decent shade of green earlier was nearly as irksome; this dried darker than it looks here but I’m not sure it’s dark enough. Mixing and painting took several messy hours due to clumsiness. The siding should go faster and once that’s painted I’ll select a varnish for the wooden floor planks I’ll lay over the less attractive flooring that’s etched into the kit. If you think that’s crazy, I’m also replacing the kit’s cheap shingles with premium roof tiles and have tentative plans for wainscoting, wallpaper and crown moulding. The cottage may be small and cheap but it’s going to be tastefully appointed.
I’m glad to be doing this now since I’m not sure how practical it will be in the near-future. As Crankenstein and I recently discussed with some unease, we’re starting to wonder if a couple of my symptoms are atypical or if this was just so advanced by the time it was diagnosed that it’s skewing our perception. It’s not fun to talk about and it’s even less fun to write about, but the long and short of it is that I’m going to loosen the purse strings now that the student loans are gone and start having a bit more fun.
It’ll mostly be dorky fun for the time being. There are dioramas I want to make, models and LEGO kits I want to build, things I’d like to paint (including a barn quilt for my laundry room), and I’m eager to learn more about printing or painting resin 3D figures so I can create horror movie tchotchkes for Felix. I want to feel useful, which has been hard to come by lately.
* Kate Jackson obsessives, I’m not implying she isn’t still the queen bee. If you watched her Joan Rivers interviews, she mentioned playing tennis; she wouldn’t disrupt an Alcaraz match by summoning a swarm. Since Jackson fandom usually goes hand in hand with Angels fandom, here I should add that Jaclyn Smith is the second-most popular Angel by traffic at Cranky, which I forgot to mention in “Independent Women, Pt. 1.”
Cheryl Ladd is in third place but Farrah Fawcett will probably overtake her once I’ve posted about The Burning Bed (which you can stream at Tubi) and Small Sacrifices. As for Shelley Hack and Tanya Roberts, I’ve not yet reviewed any movies in which they starred and it took all my restraint just now not to refer to them as Jenilee Harrison and Priscilla Barnes.
I’ll further note that it’s hard to invoke Smith without inserting a Papa shout of “Jacquelyn Kupferschmidt!”, as that was supposedly the surname her dad changed to something less ethnic. Roberts, meanwhile, was born a Blum, but that’s not as fun as Kupferschmidt. Everything about Hack screams ‘shiksa,’ so I assume she wasn’t born a Horowitz.