persimmonfrost | We had a good Christmas

On Christmas eve, we ate sandwiches, drank wine and watched "The Bishop's Wife." We spent a long time analyzing what constituted any particular "David Niven role" because Dawn and I both believe that Orlando Bloom would be terrific in that sort of role. He's got the grace and elegance of a Niven. And what a fantastic cast that film has; not just Niven and Cary Grant (Oh baby, baby!) but Loretta Young, Monty Wooley, Elsa Lanchester and Gladys Cooper. It didn't need remaking, and it sure didn't need any artificial romance to make it more appealing. The point is that Dudley doesn't long for Julia, he longs for humanness because of Julia.

Dawn rolled on out of here around midnight or so after a couple of eps on HGTV, and I turned off my lights and just enjoyed the Christmas lights I'd put up. (As you can see to the left.) It's been a long time since I took any pleasure in the trappings of Christmas, and I had the feeling that my folks would've been very happy to be there with me if they could. They loved decorating for the holidays. I ended up staying up past three watching the last showing of "White Christmas" on TBS, which was stupid.

Then on Christmas day, Dawn's sister Laurie came over early and we had julekakka, coffee and deviled eggs for breakfast, opened presents (I got two books from Laurie -- a collection of great alternate history stories, which I dearly love, and Elizabeth Bear's "Dust" which was on my amazon.com wishlist -- and a scarf from Dawn which is almost like one she has, which I've been salivating over since she got it. We'd given each other our main present a couple of months ago, a Rosetta Stone unit for learning Latin American Spanish.) I made some Christmas phone calls while dinner was cooking, and went back up around three or four when we had Dawn's roast loin of pork with apricot-mustard glaze, spaetzle, Laurie's sauerkraut and her amazing gravy, my pecan-orange brussels sprouts, and a winter fruit chutney. I have to tell you, it was just delicious, and we have a load of food left. Unfortunately I left mine in Dawn's fridge and have got to go up and get it soon if I want to eat well for the rest of the week.

Naturally we had the "A Christmas Story" marathon on most of the day, but switched to one of the music stations during dinner. Then after everything got cleaned up, we came back down here, planning to watch "The Lion in Winter" which Laurie had never seen, but opted to sit and talk and drink eiswein instead. Dawn and I had opened one of the bottles of Esoterica -- a late harvest Vognier -- from Wine Woot a couple of days earlier and had just loved it. I suspect if we hadn't tasted it before the eiswein, we've had liked the latter better with its apricot and apple notes, and a very rich caramel aftertaste, but we'd been wooed and won by Esoterica's HUGE apricot bouquet and flavor and it was hard to unremember . And to be honest, while it was the most unusual eiswein I've ever tried, it wasn't the best. Still, kudos to domestic growers who are attempting things like eiswein now.

Finally we had Dawn's applesauce cake for dessert which was just light and simple enough to compliment the meal without being overwhelming.

On Saturday we were supposed to have AT&T's U-verse installed here. The process had already been fraught with problems and I knew that they were going to have to do some weaseling around to get both phones squared away (why is still a mystery to me, but this is corporate lunacy we're talking about) but I'd gotten a call from the installer on Xmas eve saying something about not being able to hook up the second phone at all, which worried me. I said to Dawn "I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that we're going to get screwed today." and we agreed that it might be a good idea to phone AT&T to make sure everything was still the way it was supposed to be.

Well... it wasn't, and frankly I blew a gasket because I'd spent over an hour on the phone with them earlier in the week trying to get a straight answer about what the problem was and figuring out how to fix it. I finally had to demand to talk to a supervisor (the second time I've done that in the last couple of weeks, the first time being when I was about to reach through the phone line and throttle a rep from People's Gas who was being a prick) who at least explained the situation and how it was going to work. Unfortunately the fudge factor yesterday was time. They had been scheduled to come between 9 and 11 since it would take a good four hours to do all the work and we'd made plans to go see "Sherlock Holmes" yesterday. When I spoke to the U-verse people earlier in the week, I discovered that they'd changed the time to 1-3 pm, and I'd said "No, that's not right, it's supposed to be 9-11 am." They said they'd fix it. You know what's coming, don't you? That's right, nobody fixed it and we were still set for 1-3 pm. However I finally got a customer service rep who seemed to know what she was doing, and we rescheduled for mid-January, and she swore she'd have the problem with the other line sorted out by then. We shall see. If it all works out I'm nominating her for sainthood.

So yeah, we did go see "Sherlock Holmes" yesterday evening and I have to tell you I loved it! It's not your granny's Sherlock Holmes for sure. If your idea of canon is the Basil Rathbone films (which I love, don't get me wrong) and you can't deal with a different interpretation, then you won't like this. But if only for the fact that Watson isn't an idiot, I loved the film. He was clearly not Holmes' intellectual equal, but he was smart and could hold his own, and I was very happy about that. Holmes? Well I think this portrait of him is true to the spirit of the man. If you took what we got in actual canon and expanded on it, I think we might well find RDJ's Holmes lurking there. Other than that, it was fast-paced, clever without being obscure (though apparently a number of people are finding it confusing, suggesting to me that Americans really are getting stupider) featuring really decent female roles, a nifty villain or three and a soundtrack that's just a lot of fun. I gather a lot of the more overtly slashy stuff has been clipped out, which is a shame, but there's still enough there for those of us with slash-colored glasses.

RDJ is starting to do it for me in a serious way, too. And the scene with JL in the vaguely military suit? Dawn, Taylor and I all went "Meep!" at the same moment. Yes, it's that good. I want to go see it again soon, and that never happens with me anymore.

See? I told you it was good.