Christ, it's cold today

It's like someone flipped a switch and turned off all the warm weather. Which I'm fine with. I was sick of summer anyway, but today I woke up and needed to change from the pyjamas I went to bed in to warmer ones I intended to spend all day lounging around in, plus a hoodie, socks, and slippers. I need to go to the pharmacy later today, and I was planning on getting my flu and whatever covid jabs are available right now, but then I remembered I have a bunch of other appointments this week as well and getting both jabs at once always fucks me up for about four days straight. So I'll probably just go back next week instead. After my Thursday appointment, since my husband's off work that day, he's told me to stop by somewhere on my way home and pick up something to eat for myself, and he'll go somewhere else, and then when we're both home we're gonna watch the Venture Bros movie. The reason we're doing it this way, and not ordering from the same place is because all this dietary stress and testing nonsense the last few months has basically confirmed what I already knew: I am allergic to everything, and really need to start taking that more seriously. So rather than making him suffer because there are only about three entire restaurants in town that have a menu I can eat from, and one of them does fish, which he doesn't even like, we're just being reasonable adults about it and getting our own separate goodies.

Annoyingly, on the appointment front, my online account with my dentist appears to have evaporated again, so I wasn't able to confirm my appointment without calling into the clinic directly like it's the fucking bronze age. This is the third time my account with them has just vanished. No one seems to know where it goes, and the people in the office are just used to me calling in with cosmic bullshit at this point that it stopped being funny a year ago.

I was barely even at my desk all day yesterday, except to download something real quick. Mostly, I was out front working on my giant blanket, trying to get it done while I watched a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to watch for a while. I'm so close to done with it. After the colour I've currently got, there are only five colours left. And then it's done, and I can move on to pulling another sort of yarn from the giant bag of doom beneath the bed. While I worked on that yesterday, I got through a few things I've been meaning to watch for a while, but haven't got round to since aside from that, my hobbies lately don't really lend to spending a lot of time in front of the TV. First, I finally watched James Acaster's Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999. I've seen bits of it in those out of context clips that get posted on YouTube, mainly his dig at Ricky Gervais and bits about his Bake Off breakdown, but the whole thing was fantastic. Having just watched Nish Kumar's Your Power, Your Control when it came out last week, I'm really loving this trend of comics talking about their mental health struggles so candidly and frank. I thoroughly enjoyed both specials, both for what they were, and for their ability to make something so horrifically bleak still incredibly funny. Goals, honestly.

I also finally got through Bridget Christie's The Change, which was not quite what I expected, but also still very good. The trailers for it leaned a bit more heavily into the Wicker Man vibe than was really present in the overall narrative, I thought. I mean, it was still very much a vibe, but I have no idea if that was intentional or just a byproduct of the setting. By that point, my husband had woken up, so we watched it together more or less. In that, it was on, and he got more invested in it than I think he meant to. Really enjoyed this one as well though, despite it not being at all what I expected it to be. I'm not really sure what I expected it to be, honestly, so I can't say if it was better than expectations. If anything, not really knowing what it was meant to be may have been a factor in why I put it off for so long. But I definitely did expect it to be a lot more culty psychological and weird than it was, somehow. I guess I kind of missed the fact it was a sitcom, is what it comes down to. It does, however, end on a note that had me literally shouting at the TV that you can't end it there, and then my husband laughed and said, "Well, they did."

The last one I finally watched was Big Boys, which my husband also got way more invested in than he meant to. Usually he tunes out by way of headphones and YouTube when I watch stuff out front, but he got very invested in the lives of idiot university students trying to get laid. This one was very cute, and did fall more in line with what the trailers led me to expect. But I suppose it is harder to subvert expectations when the concept is basically two idiot boys meet at university and work out how to get laid. This one was very cute though, and there's a second series in the works which I'm looking forward to already. I think what I really liked about it is that it avoids what is becoming a fairly common sitcom trope, especially for this sort of sitcom, where everyone's kind of unlikeable and horrible by design. The Inbetweeners would be an easy parallel to draw here, except those kids were all dickheads. The only thing that really saved them as characters was that they were teenagers (at least in the show), and teenagers are kind of dickheads anyway. By the time they made it to university, their antics started getting into territory that actively started causing harm and it stopped being funny. That element wasn't present in this one, which ultimately made for a rather refreshing romp. They were still terminally stupid at times and made poor choices, but never malicious or overly selfish.

I think today is largely going to be a writing day. Might make some coffee or something and try to get some words in order. I've got the first issue of the new and improved newsletter going out tomorrow and I want to get on top of that as well, so it's definitely a day where I'll be tied to my desk I think.