This afternoon Dusty and Sara asked if we wanted to go out for ice cream with them, which we did. I didn't get any because my teeth have been killing me lately. Dan and Sara both had to go to a lecture at the podiatry school at 6pm but the plan was to come to our place afterward. Justin texted me that he'd gotten ahold of the dolly he had said he could borrow so we could move the extra washer out of the basement (even our landlady doesn't know if it works, we're having the city pick it up) and so we invited him over, too. Well, we'd have invited him anyway, but it was convenient that he had the dolly.

So after Dominic went to bed it was the five of us. We had a drink and spent about three hours watching tonight's episode of So You Think You Can Dance on the TiVo. My favorite guy didn't make it :( In the end it was down to one spot left for a guy and two guys left in the running--my guy and another guy I really liked. The other guy got it. But I'm happy because I liked them both. My guy will come back next year. Anyway, it's more fun to watch TV with friends than by yourself. I'm glad that I'm at a point in my life when I have people over often enough that it isn't a Major Social Event and we can "waste" it doing something mindless and unimportant like watching TV sometimes.

I posted my recap of the Milwaukee auditions today, and will post my recap of Vegas night tomorrow.

I started watching American Idol last year, and am watching it again this year. A lot of the time it's painful for me because it tends to have a lot of that Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey melismatic style singing, which I absolutely can't stand, but some of the time it's really good, and it's usually entertaining. I don't think I could watch it if I didn't have TiVo, though. For example, last night we watched both Tuesday's performance show and Wednesday's results show back to back in a total of about 45 minutes. I couldn't have spent 2 hours watching that.

Anyway, last night Jason Castro went home. He was the happy go lucky guy with the dreadlocks who was probably stoned about 98% of the time. I agree it was time for him to go home--vocally he just isn't up for this level of the competition. But I like the guy so much! He seems like he'd be really fun to hang around with (though he seems a little airheaded which would probably get old after a while) and he seems so genuinely nice! One thing I loved about him is his attitude about the show. He doesn't let it get to him. He seems happy to take the ride he's on for what it is, have fun doing it, and not take it too seriously. I think he was totally ready to go home and probably sort of baffled that he'd made it this far. His goodbye sing-out was so joyful and happy! I was a bit irritated that they cut it off when the credits ended. Boo!!

My favorite contestant is David Cook. I love his voice. He's also unsettlingly sexy, even though he isn't actually handsome or attractive. He just has a sexy way about him. I have downloaded some of his songs and some of the stuff he did with his old band, Axium. It's pretty good stuff. While he is my favorite, I don't think that I want him to win. The winner gets saddled with a really restrictive and controlling recording contract, and I think that it would hold him back from doing the music he wants and needs to do. I would probably buy an album of his, which I can't really say for any other AI contestant that I've seen in the 2 years I've watched the show.

David Archuleta I can't stand. He started off as a nice kid with a sweet voice, but now he's a bland, boring kid and all of his songs sound the same. His niceness turned out to be just shy dullness. He's totally one-dimensional (or comes across that way on TV anyway) and we've seen everything he can do and personally, I don't need to see any more. It would be bad enough if he was just boring. But he actively pisses me off because he chooses these iconic songs with really beautiful melodies, and then he takes a big, steamy crap on the melody and changes it into something unrecognizable. Or at least, it was unrecognizable. I've come to realize over the last several weeks that it's no longer unrecognizable because I've come to recognize it: it's the same freakin' melody that he morphs every other song he sings into. He has what I refer to as "pet note combinations" that he puts together that are the same in every song.The only thing different from week to week is the lyrics. It would be one thing if he was a kick ass songwriter and his new melodies were awesome, but he isn't and they're not. They're bland and awful and they're always the same. And then he throws all that melisma bullshit on top of it and makes me gag. He also breathes too loudly into the microphone and has zero stage presence. And then the judges, who must be smoking something, fawn all over him like he's a musical genius! It makes me want to throw things at the TV.

I want Syesha to win. She has had a great attitude through the whole show, she seems really nice, she has talent, and I think she has a career ahead of her (probably on Broadway). I don't think she'd be hurt by the AI recording contract the way Cook would, and she isn't as irritating as Archuleta.

So that's my opinion, anyway.

Right now I have...
American Idol (yeah I know, shaddap)
Battlestar Galactica
House
Lost
My Name is Earl
Doctor Who
The Sarah Jane Adventures
Grey's Anatomy
Stargate: SG1
Stargate: Atlantis
Star Trek Voyager
Star Trek Enterprise

and a few other things that aren't currently showing, but that I hope to catch whenever they do air (mostly BBC America stuff).

The Stargate and Star Trek stuff is my "comfort food" category TV. I've seen them all and they're familiar, so they make good background noise if I need it, or if I just want to sort of zone out, I can watch them without having to pay attention. This is a good way for me to take a nap, for example, because it focuses my mind enough to quiet it down from the 50 other things it's thinking about, but doesn't command my attention enough to keep me from dozing off, since I already know what's going to happen.

I honestly can't imagine watching TV without TiVo. We were very early adopters of TiVo--we got it just a few months after it came out, I think. It totally revolutionized how we watch TV and the idea of going back... :shudder:

Saturday mornings are awesome. The alarm went off at 7:30am because Dan has clinic today, but it didn't bother me because I knew I could go back to sleep. But then I remembered the dream I was having and decided to jot down some notes so I could write it in my Dream Journal later. By the time I'd written it out, I was fairly awake and so I decided to just get up and have breakfast with Dan. I could always nap later.

There is still snow on the ground and has been for over a week. I love it. I looked out the window and saw this long, winding trail of tracks that went across the yard and ended at the trunk of a tree. Clearly it was a squirrel, but it just made me think of all those cartoons where characters are skiing or whatever and run into trees. It was sort of cute and funny in that context.

Dominic came down while we were having breakfast, and so I decided to stay up. I came in and checked my email, wrote up my dream (it was fairly odd, if you want to go read it) and now we're going to go watch Tin Man which my TiVo recorded off the SciFi channel. It's a miniseries based on the Wizard of Oz books. I watched the very first part a couple of days ago and it seemed kind of strange. We'll see.

I don't plan on getting out of my jammies all day. Mmmm. Footie jammies.

All in all that 30 minutes that I dozed off this morning is all the sleep I got. Fooey. My brain was too frazzled for school work so Dan and I started into the backlog of TiVo'd episodes of "Heroes". I've never watched it and so we had to constantly pause while Dan filled me in on the background. It seems interesting so far. We made it through three full episodes and halfway through a fourth. Now I'm doing reading for my History class and Dan and Dominic are out raking leaves.

Apropos of nothing at all: "ginormous" is in the dictionary, however it is interesting to note that dictionary.com gives the etymology as "giant+enormous" while m-w.com claims "gigantic+enormous". I tend to agree with the M-W. I was surprised to see that the word dates back to circa 1948.

Not sure why, but I just feel the urge to get kinda drunk tonight. Not falling over, throwing up drunk or anything. Just slightly more than tipsy. Dominic has already gone to bed. I'm on the couch with the TV on, working my way through a second goblet of wine. Wheee...

Maybe it's just that I have been stressed out over finishing those paintings, and I know that tomorrow I have to get my ass in gear and start on another painting (this one a homework assignment for class) and I want to have a night of not being responsible between the two.

Unfortunately my TiVo isn't recording anything new until tomorrow night, so I'm stuck either sifting through the older stuff or (gag) watching live TV. The horror...

Maybe I'll check out what's on HBO. I just kicked in the $13/month for HBO because the Sopranos is back on for its final season. With all the different HBOs there has to be something worth watching, right?

I am so incredibly sick of this Quizno's commercial! It made me roll my eyes the first time I saw it, and it started to grate on my nerves every time I saw it after that. Now it seems to be on in every commercial break of every show currently being broadcast and I have grown to LOATHE it. It's the one with the two women at the end, and one of them says "It's not lacking any meat! And that's what real women need!" followed by the worst laugh ever recorded.


(you can watch it here if you have managed to not see it yet)

I admit, the sentiment irritates me as a vegetarian.

The sexual innuendo is so unsubtle and clumsy that it makes me cringe.

The woman's ass-braying laugh at the end makes me want to hunt her down with a rusty, barnacle-studded harpoon.

Does this ad actually make anyone want to eat those sandwiches? I actually LIKE Quizno's, but this sort of ad makes me want to avoid them just on principle for having such an atrocious ad. Thank god for TiVo.