The Quest for Tea

While looking for something to watch while I ate dinner last night, I stumbled across a fun little animated movie on the Disney Channel: Igor. It's about an Igor who really wants to be a mad scientist, but because of his hump he's stuck in the job of assistant. But then after his master has a bit of a lab accident, he gets his chance to create his own monster to compete in the Evil Science Fair. Only things don't quite go as planned, and instead of being evil, his monster just wants to be an actress. And the role she desperately wants to play is Annie (which may be kind of evil, after all). The climactic fight scene done as the monster sings "Tomorrow" may be one of the funniest things I've seen in ages. Adding to the fun are Igor's sidekicks, the results of his previous experiments: an immortal (and very snarky) rabbit with a death wish and a brain in a jar on wheels. I'm assuming this was a theatrical release because the voices are all pretty big names, so I don't know how I missed this one. This could make for a good triple feature with Megamind and Despicable Me, or else a good addition to a Phineas & Ferb marathon featuring the best of Doofenshmirtz (especially their Frankenstein spoof).

Then I was accidentally forced into watching part of Terra Nova when the schedule got messed up by the baseball game and House wasn't on when I switched over after the movie. From the small bits I saw, I can say I made the right decision in not watching that series. The dialogue and the characters made me cringe. I very quickly switched over to a PBS documentary on the War of 1812. I'm also likely to give up on House. The character has never been what could be called "pleasant," but I think he's a more unpleasant version of unpleasant now. At the beginning, it was more like he said the things we all think but don't dare say, and then he said and did some of his more outrageous things as a diagnostic technique -- poke it with a stick and see what happens -- that helped him figure out the people around him. Now he's just acting like a selfish, overgrown toddler who thinks he's at the center of the universe and who expects everyone to cater to his whims. There's less of a purpose in his behavior and there's nothing left in him that I can relate to. Unfortunately, now that the SyFy summer season has ended, there's nothing else in that time slot, and that's my prime time for needing background noise for doing my weekly writing for the medical school (I enjoy the irony of doing medical writing while watching House).

Today's work will mean hitting the part of The Problem Child that will really change it and send it in a different direction. It will be interesting to see how the ripple effects work from this one change. This is such a strange book that I'm not sure how any of it works. I love it, and I love the characters, but I'm worried that anyone else reading it will be going, "Huh?" Once I have it where I'm happy with it, I may recruit a few friends to read it before I subject my agent to it. This is the longest I've spent working on a single book. It's been more than two years since I started it. I have written two other complete manuscripts in the meantime, so I haven't spent two whole years working on it, but I did spend the better part of a year working on it, with a couple of gaps, and then spent about a month on the last draft. I don't know how long this draft will take.

Otherwise, today I must undertake the Quest for Tea. I'm almost out of my favorite writing tea, and we finally have the kind of weather that allows me to enjoy hot tea in the afternoon. Fortunately, obtaining tea is easier than ever since there's an Indian market across the street from the post office. They have an entire aisle dedicated to tea.