3 things: Susan's party; nuclear family reunions; I can't go home because "home" isn't there anymore

1. Susan's party went well, I think. Four people (not counting Susan) attended -- two women she knows from a chorus she sings in, the husband of one of them, and me. We had ridiculously indulgent ice cream sundaes -- for the record, chocolate and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, stewed strawberries, chocolate chips and sprinkles, whipped cream, and three maraschino cherries is delicious, though a bit difficult to finish.

After the ice cream, we sat around talking for an hour or so. Then we cleared away the dishes and went indoors to play Cranium, which is kind of like Pictionary, Charades, Trivial Pursuit, and karaoke having an orgy under the influence of crack and steroids. You split into teams and work your way around a game board, doing "tasks" from four categories in order to roll a die and move onward. These can be anything from answering random trivia questions to spelling words backwards to humming popular music to mimicking famous people to sculpting words out of clay to drawing with your eyes closed to playing Wheel of Fortune-style fill-in-the-phrase to solving word scrambles to charades. It can get pretty random. (It probably did not help that three of us were drinking wine during game play, though interestingly enough, we did win in the end. *grin*)

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2. My parents have arrived safely home, hurrah! We are planning to have steak for dinner, after which Susan and I may or may not go catch a movie in the local theater. This is the first time all four of us -- Mom, Dad, Vicky, and I -- have been in the same place since December in Spain. We manage to get three together fairly often, considering, but all four is much trickier and tends to be restricted to Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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3. Over the past ten years, my parents have been, agonizingly slowly, stripping the former guest room bare and eradicating its persistent mildew infestation. Before that, they had attempted to turn that room plus my dad's old study into a sort of suite for Vicky -- this was during my last year of high school and a couple years thereafter, until the mildew made her give up on sleeping there. Anyway, the upshot of that is that for many years now, MY old room got turned into something of a junk room, the place where all the random furniture and boxes got stashed with no organization whatsoever. When I visited my parents, I was either in the new guest room (which used to be Vicky's room, except for the year or two that we shared bunkbeds there and just used my room for playing and clothes storage) or on an air mattress between piles of junk.

But! This has now changed slightly. My old room is still filled with random crud, but it is somewhat more organized and the sofa can be opened and extended. So I have been sleeping on a sofabed. It is rather lumpy and saggy in turns, and wider than I really need -- kind of halfway between a double and a queen -- but at least my parents' dog can't just walk all over me in the middle of the night, which happened occasionally when I was on the air mattress. (Dogs. What can you do?)

It is nonetheless deeply weird to see my mom's giant shoe rack hanging over the door of what used to be my closet, and plastic storage tubs filled with spare blankets where I used to lie on bare carpet and read while my dog snoozed against my side. Change is inevitable, but I don't always have to like it. :-/

Captain America: The First Avenger, and some tangentially related thoughts

Susan and I decided to see Captain America: The First Avenger rather than Crazy, Stupid, Love -- our joint movie-watching tradition, does, after all, lean much more toward action movies than toward romantic comedies. And overall, we liked it.

I had to keep looking away from the screen during the USO bond advertisement show portion of the story -- it was like the writer and director had their fingers right on my sympathetic embarrassment squick button and were mashing it with gleeful abandon -- and Susan and I both agreed that the helmet-with-eyeholes was dumb (a regular helmet, even if it were painted blue with the A symbol, would have been immeasurably better), and the gratuitous use of slow-motion for random three second intervals during action scenes did not look cool in the slightest; it just made the moves in question look fake, fake, fake... and also tacky. Aside from those quibbles, though, the story was a lot better than it strictly needed to be and you could tell the actors were having fun. It genuinely felt like a WWII movie, albeit a WWII movie crossbred with a sci-fi action flick.

(Question: Why do futuristic weapons always glow blue these days? How about something that glows yellow, or, I don't know, white. Or maybe one where they decided that glowing weapons are stupidly obvious and covered all the power source elements, like sane people might do? But clearly that would not be visually cool enough... *grumble*)

I really should rent Thor when it comes available on Netflix, and maybe the Edward Norton version of the Hulk, just so I know what the movie-verse take on those characters is before The Avengers comes out next year. Because I will be going to see that movie, no matter how stupid it is. (Just like I will be going to see the new Spider-Man movie, though I think it was deeply unnecessary to reboot that franchise this soon.) A small corner of my soul is in hock to Marvel, okay? The first comics I ever read were X-Men and Spider-Man issues that Cat pushed on me, and the first non-PBS television I ever watched was the 1990s X-Men cartoon (which Cat also pushed on me, come to think of it). I think I imprinted a bit.

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At least these days I get reasonably entertaining action movies out of that bargain?