Being all alone at home tonight, due to Wonderful Husband working late, I banged some grains and curled up under the sofa blanket to keep going through the TiVo backlog. Caught the last 20 minutes of TFs1 on TV, then started working through Prime. I'd considered continuing with Thundercats, but given I just wrote fanfic about it today, I wanted to rest my brain, not send it into a fannish frenzy. Those never end well.

After going into shock (how the heck do I have 52 episodes waiting?!) and fixing my recording preferences (first-showing episodes only, please) and deleting eps I've already seen, I settled in where I left off, way back in season 1, at episode "Rock Bottom." Which has the utter win lines: "She (Miko) went in. Unbelievable." / "Really? Have you met her?" I like snark, yes I do. "Partners" caught me by surprise with the dedication to Larry Cullen... I knew there was one, I just didn't know which episode. And "T.M.I." I loved for its shoutouts, both to "Perceptor's Paradox" and for TFA's Bulkhead taking up painting as a hobby. ^_^ And I suppose Bulkhead writing archaic Cybertronian formulae all over the place is a sort-of reference to Sam doing the same in RotF.... :)

Nothing in the noggin seems to've been knocked loose for fanfic purposes, so it is probably bedtime for tonight. Dance class in the morning, and then a heck of a lot of things to paint tomorrow.

Since many people on my flist have squeed at me about the end of the season, and I've gotten a bit spoiled by a few fics I've read, I sat down and started watching my stockpiled episodes this evening while Wonderful Husband continued playing through Portal 2.

"Out of His Head"... went pretty much as I expected, given where "A Sick Mind" ended.

"Shadowzone," OTOH, I loved. So much snark. So much technobabble. Between "Masters and Students" and this, Ratchet truly has the makings of a great mad scientist! Just as well, since Wheeljack is apparently off being Drift in this series. There was also a mention of "crossing the streams" which made me snerk, even though Agent Fowler (Ernie Hudson) wasn't in this episode. Was this, by any chance, the episode the cast read at BotCon? Then there was the moment of a certain zombie'Con's hand turning into Thing from the Addams Family, and Starscream being a lousy patient.... Lovelovelove. Had to pause for laughing when Knockout suggested he upgrade to nullray weapons. Kind of feel a bit sorry for the aforementioned zombie'Con going around in circles for eternity out of phase. Though the (failed) attempt to jam the (wrong) arm back on ala Starscream in RotF made me giggle some more....

And "Operation: Breakdown"... wow. Graphic, unrepentant torture going on there. This is so not a show for kids. This may, in fact, be the first Transformers series made for adults.

Then I looked at the next-episode summary and realized it was an Airachnid episode, and thought to myself "Self, that episode can wait a little bit." (See: my extreme dislike of that particular spiderbot.) And came to see how Wonderful Husband is getting on with his potato and the idiot.

Two more episodes of TFP closer to being caught up. Speed Demons amused me for its underlining of just how annoying it really is that only Raf can understand Bumblebee. (And where, I kept asking, was Ratchet during this episode?) I was also amused by the potential love interest's name; "Sierra" was the other girl's name my parents had been considering when I was born. :)

Predatory, OTOH... I'm really hoping I don't get another nightmare from that episode. Transformers has finally hit upon a truly terrifying psychopath character, and I don't think it's just because she's a spider; I like both versions of Blackarachnia, after all, in differing ways. I really like Jack in this episode; he exhibits human resourcefulness. (Also, Chekov's Armory FTW!) Still wanting a fic where he and Sam get coffee and hash out the problems of living with Cybertronians, but can't think yet of how to plausibly cross the universes.

I watched another episode of TFP last night while pinning the last two laundry bags together. And while I give the writers full TFA levels of reference credit for titling the episode "Convoy," I think it actually led to a nightmare for me. I very very infrequently have bad dreams, you see, but can't think of any other cause for me to have awoken at 5am from a dream wherein there was an at least Fukushima level nuclear meltdown in Irvine (where I went to university; ~20 miles from Greenwood) which had the possibility of escalating to something more Chernobyl-like. So a "you have ten minutes; grab what you can, and run."

Which led to me lying awake, stressing over what I would grab from my place if I might never be able to come back to it. My list ended up running something like: Wonderful Husband, the cats (...need another carrier...), the quilt my grandmother and I sewed together, my jewelry box, the first edition Oz book my grandfather gave me and a couple others I've bought since, Abigail (the doll my grandmother made for me when my sister was born), Maggie (grandmother-in-law's sewing machine), and the computers. Pretty much everything else, much though it would hurt to lose it all, is replaceable.

What would all of you choose to grab?

Spent Wednesday in bed sick, mostly unconscious. Spent yesterday wishing I was unconscious. After I've successfully dodged con crud for how many conventions this year, SDCC finally nailed me with it. Fortunately the last of it disappeared last night around dinner time. (I could tell because I actually felt like eating again, which I really hadn't since Tuesday night.)

Fortunately, I say, because today was the first day of Costume College and I had a 9am limited class to take, and a 1:30pm open class on Medieval Garb: The T-Tunic and Beyond to teach. And I've been busting balls on having various samples worked up to take in, and doing up handouts and learning how to use Open Office's graphics tools to draw everything out, and you know what? It was TOTALLY worth it. I walked in and had to check that I was in the right room because there were something like FORTY students in there! I've NEVER had that many students show up for one of my classes, not even the full-size fairy wings one. I'd only done up thirty handouts, expecting plenty of leftovers. I took a contact list for the students who didn't get one and will have to convert the files to PDFs. It went swimmingly, and between my usual clumsy lecture method and opening the floor for questions, went to about the right length.

(For the record, I only teach classes on subjects that I've worked with enough that how to do it is completely obvious and simple to me. My teaching style tends to reflect this, breaking things down into idiot (ie, me) sized blocks and showing students how to put them together.)

I was about ten minutes late to my 9am class, but over the course of three hours I caught up. An overview of the class can be seen here. We made two feather ornaments (one of which is that top one, the other isn't pictured) and ran out of time but still got the supplies to make a third. I learned how to clean feathers and dye them with either Kool-Aid or cake food dye. I also tried to attend a class on fitting clothing to oneself, but had to leave because the aircon wasn't working right or something and I didn't want to fall asleep in class. Instead I ended up at the teaching circle, which was at that time about how to do needlelace. Wish I'd known about that beforehand! I'd've totally brought supplies and been able to participate instead of just doing observational learning. And I looked around the goodies already donated for Sunday's Bargain Bazaar, and then came home. And pulled a decent amount of fabric off my shelves to put in the bazaar as well.

And then Wonderful Husband and I watched ThunderCats, and it was good, even if we snarked about a few tropes (we are somewhat snarky people), and then I finally started watching Transformers Prime. Episode 6, amazingly, did not have any moments that made me want to throw things at the screen. Hopefully the writing will stay improved!