Kendra Leigh Castle

Archive for August, 2009

Ah, Monday.  Most wretched of days.  How come Monday always sucks?  Well, in an attempt to make it suck substantially less, I bring you this week’s Mr. Mantastic, Jeffrey Dean Morgan.  He is, in a word, yummy. 

I love men who look sort of sexy and rumpled and lived in, especially if they have big brown eyes, big shoulders, and dimples.  Awesome deep voice, too  

So, okay, apparently this guy played Denny on Grey’s Anatomy, but that’s a show I don’t watch, so I had no idea until I hunted up info on IMDB (I freaking love IMDB).  I discovered his existence, in fact, when I watched Watchmen the other night, FINALLY, because I’d been dying to see it since it came out in…what was that, April or May?  I understood it, and it was visually just fascinating, but I’m still not sure I actually liked it, if that makes any sense.  I definitely want to read the graphic novel now, which I understand is fantastic in ways a movie just can’t be, so there’s that.  Oh, the movie did have one of the most awkward sex scenes I’ve ever seen (whether or not it was meant to be that awkward is up to conjecture in the wider blogosphere…yes, it weirded me out enough to check, and I am far from alone) and lots of blue peen.  For reals.  You kind of get used to it after a while, though.

So anyway, I watched this three hour Director’s Cut of Watchmen, and there’s this character called The Comedian. 

He’s an amoral nutjob for most of his life, but is awfully good at what he does and is eventually hired for government work after costumed superheroes are outlawed.  He, um…really enjoys killing people.  And he’s one of the “good guys” (though the traditional definition of a superhero is really turned on its head and skewered in this movie, and looking at what these people might actually be if you put them in something that looks like our reality is quite a lot of the point of the piece itself).  So you feel like you should really dislike this guy, and ugh, most of the things he does are utterly unforgivable.  REALLY.  But at the same time, there remains something very compelling about The Comedian.  He, of all the Watchmen, really understands what they all are.  You’d have to catch the flick to see what I mean, but as violent and morally repugnant as the character is, he’s one of the most complex as well.  I though Jefffrey Dean Morgan did a kick-ass job playing him, and I’ve got a big huge soft spot for talented character actors.  IMO, they’re usually waaaaayyyy more talented than your run-of-the-mill “leading man”.  Also, more intriguingly hot in many cases, LOL.  I don’t like cookie-cutter guys.  And this one’s got a smile that is just…and this laugh…well, I’ll let you check him out for youselves.  Here’s a clip of him back in May on Craig Ferguson, and I giggled all the way through it.  The guy’s laugh is just awesome.  And he rides a motorcycle.  *sigh*

Hope you all have a good one, and I hope Donna’s enjoying her first day of FREEDOM.  Hmm, I probably shoulda hired some Scots to paint their faces blue and lift up their kilts in honor of the occasion!

Yes, it’s time for my new weekly commentary on Project Runway.  It’s an addiction lots of us share, so why not?

Last night’s theme was Pregnancy Chic, and the designers had to come up with an outfit (casual or formal, their choice) for the then-pregnant Rebecca Romjin.  Am I the only one who was refreshed to see the towering beauty that is Rebecca actually looking like a real live pregnant woman?  Her face was fuller and everything.  And IMO, she looked gorgeous.  She also seemed very cool, which is what I’d hope for out of a woman who gets to be married to Jerry O’Connell.  Anyway, she’d like some clothes please, and btw, she’s quite preggers with twins.  Thus do the designers sketch some stuff, then dash off to Mood to find fabric with which to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.  Or just Tim Gunn.

Having been pregnant three times myself, I really enjoyed this episode (as, I think, did the judges, and thank God they had Monique Lhullier sitting in for Michael Kors).  Watching the designers trying to work with pregnancy pillows on their forms was interesting, and you could totally see who was going to screw up.  Nicolas and Ra’Mon were busy talking trash about all the draping going on, but Ra’Mon, in particular, should have paid attention.  Draping the pregnant female form can often turn out beautiful and figure-flattering.  The purple bowling ball bag of a dress he made (yes, Rebecca called it that, and it was so dead-on) was soooo bottom three-worthy, and that’s just where it wound up.  Lucky him, the other two hot messes of this week were just substantially worse than him.  Nicolas talks a lot of smack, but for me so far his stuff is just meh.  For someone so opinionated, he’s not exactly bringing teh awesome. 

So for me there were a few standouts this week, not all of which made it to the top three.  Shirin, no doubt, deserved her win.  I would wear that dress with or without a big pregnant belly, and her coat belongs in my closet.  Like, now.  I’ve actually decided to like Shirin.  At first, I thought the sweet and bubbly thing she does might be an act (because that sort of thing often is), but so far, she seems to really just be…cute and nice.  Which is refreshing!  And damn, woman can make some clothes. 

Despite the “nightgown” comments, I also loved Louise’s dress.  It was beautifully crafted, sexy in a classic sort of way, and a gorgeous color to boot.  She dyed the lace in the bathroom sink.  I shudder to think what would become of my bathroom sink should I attempt such a thing.  I liked hers MUCH more than Althea’s dress, which rounded out the top three. 

Up close, the ribbon on that bodice looked all frayed, and I’m sorry, but the boob cups on that damn dress…HELLO, UNREALISTIC!  Even a pregnant model would spill out of those, I don’t care if she’s a negative A-cup beforehand.  At least the judges did mention that the bodice might need more coverage, but for me it was a bigger issue than they made of it.  It was utterly distracting, like you’re staring at this model’s chest waiting for disaster to strike.  Whatever, to me, she should have been in the middle pack and Christopher should have been in the top again. 

His outfit was just beautiful, reminded me of Liv Tyler in “That Thing You Do!”  That was another outfit I’d like regardless of pregnancy status.  Go, Christopher!  I’m already a fan, and I know he’s going to be one of the ones I look forward to seeing every week.  Now if we could just get him to ditch the stupid trucker hat, all would be well.  Oh, and you know who else pulled it out this week?  Qristal.  Really liked her simple, elegant dress.  After last week’s Purple Flower Monster dress, which looked like the 80s had thrown up on it, I wasn’t expecting much, but last night I saw why she’d been invited on the show.  And she’s SUCH a sweetheart, so I hope she continues to “make it work”!

As for the disasters of the night, head on over to the Project Runway site to check them out in all their glory.  Just look at the gallery.  I already mentioned the bowling ball bag dress.  just, ew.  And then there was Malvin with his Mother Hen dress (*sigh* no, really) and Mitchell, with his poorly-sewn piece of crap.  I was honestly really surprised that Malvin got thrown off, even though the outfit was hideous, because Mitchell’s was so indescribably bad.  I wish they would just get rid of him now.  This guy is obviously not up to par, and he’s likely going to be Bottom Three until he’s finally thrown off.  Doesn’t look like next week’s going to go any better for him.

Okay, your turn now, ladies…what did YOU think of last night?  And really, go check that gallery I linked to if you didn’t get to see.  Great pics of last night’s designs.  Let’s have a Gather ‘Round and talk about it!

Morning, everyone.  Apologies for not checking back in yesterday…wound up with quite a headache, probably from the hours of work it took me to muck out the Aegean Stables, otherwise known as my sons’ room.  Also, it was a day of beginnings, which are both exciting and stressful: the kids were keyed up, I was keyed up, and the four-year-old was awfully out of sorts from having his main targets/playmates removed from the house.  He doesn’t start preschool for a couple more weeks, but I must say, it was still a LOT quieter here yesterday!  Hence the massive undertaking of Jack and Connor’s room, hence my pounding head and avoidance of the glowing screen.  But it was worth it, because I hauled out two bags of clothes that don’t fit, two bags of junk, moved many toys to the basement, and organized all that was left.  You can see the floor in the closet now.  It’s a wonder of the world, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, the other beginning which has been giving me fits is this new book I’m working on.  Beginnings are always a little tough for me, because setting the tone, introducing everyone, and not boring the universe to tears with too much backstory are always a challenge.  You want to draw people in, not send them hurling the book across the room.  I’ve had about 8 pages sitting around for over a week, and I wasn’t being able to make it move further, which is never a good sign.  The prologue was fine, which accounted for about half of that.  Of course, it’s the bad guys in that…I never have an issue writing from the POV of the straight-up baddies.  Meresin, however, was eluding me.  So last night I took my nice pen (yes, I have one very nice pen, which my husband keeps trying to abscond with) and a fresh notebook, and sat in the big chair to start fresh with my new hero.

I think, though I must look at it today and see, that I finally got it. 

Sometimes, in writing, it helps if you shift the medium.  If you’re having an issue with the screen, go to paper.  I had a good excuse to do just that yesterday, and it jogged my brain.  I started out scrawling stories in notebooks…one of these days I’ll have to share a bit of it with you, along with the illustrations done by the friend I used to write with.  Those notebooks are falling apart, but I treasure them.  We called it simply “The Story,” and traded it back and forth, taking turns detailing the wild, alternate universe adventures of our thinly-veiled alter egos.  Mine was a gorgeous blonde drummer named Macbeth, and she lived with her very famous bandmates in a dark British castle where all sorts of bizarre things happened: random shifting of dimension, naked fat men who enjoyed playing with tinkertoys and spoke in monosyllables, a disco star with magical powers, an intrepid (and kind of stupid) adventurer named Captain Nemo who had a knack for showing up at odd times, and of course, hot men.

I miss that place

Anyway, new beginnings all around here yesterday.  What do all of YOU have around the corner?

Yes, the children went back to school.  Today receives the Official Seal of Awesomeness.  And if anything wishes to arrive and detract from that awesomeness, well…it’s just going to have to wait until tomorrow.  That’s all I’ve got today.  Just basking in a return to some semblance of sanity.  May your day be equally awesome.

I seem to be hosting one of the signs of the Apocalypse on my redbud trees.  Behold the Puss caterpillar, utter freak of nature, eater of trees, and furry little SOB.  I had no freaking clue what these hairy things were the other day when I noticed them clinging to the pretty, heart-shaped leaves of the young redbuds lining my driveway.  They weren’t moving, so I figured them for somme sort of bizarre cocoon.  WRONG.  After some online research (seriously, what did I do before teh Google?) I discovered that not only is this an actual caterpillar, albeit one that doesn’t move much, but this is the worst offender amongst a cruel and accursed segment of the caterpillar population known as stinging caterpillars.

Yeah, they have all that fur, luring the unsuspecting to pet them.  And then…intense pain radiating through your body, possible shortness of breath, even a possible trip to the hospital.  It’s not always that bad, depending on both the human and the bug, but even in a best case scenario these little buggers cause hours of pain at the contact site and one hell of a welt.  Some of the hair beneath that fur are full of a toxin, you see, designed to keep birds from munching on them.  The Puss isn’t actually stinging you on purpose, but does it really matter?  Also, what asshole thought these looked like kitties? 

So yeah, I am now playing host to Satan’s Caterpillars.  At least it’s not a plague of locusts, but still.  Did I have to get the WORST of the stinging caterpillars?  Oh, and they brought buddies.  I have White Flannel Moth caterpillars, which are tiny and also marginally hairy, skeletizing the redbud leaves as well.  Those little suckers sting too, though not as badly.  The Puss will winter here in a cocoon and emerge in the spring as a Flannel Moth, a very funky and furry moth that is actually sort of cool and to my knowledge doesn’t cause anyone pain.  Until then, however, I think I’m stuck with the evil clinging to my trees.  The general recommendation is to leave them alone, since they’re not known to kill anything.

Great. :-/

Hope you all have a great day…my kids are currently upstairs trying to destroy one another, but ah, today is Open House, and tomorrow…tomorrow the doors the the school will open wide, and a choir of angels will burst into the Hallelujah Chorus, and all will be well at long last!

Happy Monday, everyone!  Well, I’m trying to be happy about it, at least.  Didn’t sleep well because of some very loud thunderstorms and a restless four-year-old, and I have about fifty things to do today.  Big week around here, because the kids head back to school Wednesday.  Cue “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” LOL   Anyway…

I saw a very cool preview for a new show the other night, called Flash Forward, and I think it’s from the creators of Lost…very weird, mysterious plot dealing with everyone on Earth blacking out for a couple of minutes, waking up simultaneously, and having had these weird visions of the future.  It looks worth checking out, especially because I saw, to my delight, that Joseph Fiennes will be one of the leads!   He’s very adorable, and I haven’t seen him in forever.  You probably remember him as Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, which won a bunch of Oscars a few years back.  Guy’s got great eyes.  Bonus: Jack Davenport is ALSO in the show, and he played baddie Norrington in the Pirates of the Carribean movies!  I feel I must watch, if only for the eye candy, LOL.

All that said, I’ve decided to give the sparkly tiara and man sash to Joseph this week, which will of course infuse him with all the luck needed to have a hit show.  I mean, what’s luckier than being honored as Mr. Mantastic?  Um, no answer is required

Hope you all had a good weekend!  I baked and puttered and had a cookout (more like a cook-in, considering the rain) and got my husband to find and plant a young Mimosa tree in the yard.  The parent tree is around the corner, and the flowers are a beautiful deep pink in the spring.  I know this is a “love it or hate it” tree, but they’re not terribly invasive here like they can be in the deep south, and they smell wonderful and attract hummingbirds.  I also understand that they throw as much crap around your yard as a weeping willow in the fall, but oh well.  Hopefully someday it’ll look like this:

The flowers look like little pom-poms.  The parent tree’s blooms are an even deeper pink than this, bordering on orange, so I’ll be curious to see what ours does in the spring, provided it lives.  These are also called the Persian Silk Tree.  I’m hoping it does well…ours seems to like where we put it out front so far, but you never know.  It’s not fighting for space by the side of the road anymore, at least.  Oh, and my redbuds have some rather disgusting visitors right now, but what’s on them is so weird it bears an entire post, so I’ll tell you about THOSE freakish little creatures tomorrow. 

Have a great one, everybody!

…and ends up scratching her head, which is really part of the fun.  Any of you all watch this show?  Project Runway is probably my favorite show on television, and because of the legal wrangling over the show moving from Bravo to Lifetime (Bravo really didn’t want to let the show go, hence a long lawsuit), it’s been a year since the show was on.  I needed a Tim Gunn fix, badly, and last night I was treated to THREE HOURS of Tim courtesy of the two hour Project Runway All Stars competition that preceded the premiere.  YAY!  He said “gather round” and “make it work” a few times, and I was in heaven.  Am I the only person who thinks that he and Kevin Kline could be related?  Maybe Kevin could play Tim someday.  Whatever, I digress.

Anyway, I parked it with some popcorn and watched people sew their asses off.  The All Star competition was good because it brought back a few of my favorites, like Chris March and Uli.  I always liked Daniel too, but was I the only one who felt like he was a shoo-in just because he seems to have turned into the teachers’ pet?  His clothes were some of the ugliest and most unwearable to me, so naturally he won.  *sigh*  Oh well.  At least I got to listen to Santino do his Tim impression a little (it’s uncanny), though nothing will ever top the “What happened to Andre?” episode of his own season.  I will say that all of the designers who returned have definitely honed their craft and shifted their points of view somewhat, and that was really interesting.  I can’t sew, and I had no idea what all was involved behind the scenes in fashion, so this is all fascinating to me.  It’s why I watch Top Chef as well…love to watch people who’ve trained for the job make food. 

So after the All Star competition came the premiere.  I almost didn’t stay up for it, but then I couldn’t help it.  Loving that the guy who won the night isn’t actually trained, but self-taught.  Lots of strange crap drifted down the runway, some of which the judges liked, some of which they didn’t.  I do think they got the loser right…it was this girl Ari who decided to do a “red carpet look” based on a geodesic dome and, I dunno, hot pants and Mad Max.  Yeah…that didn’t go well.  Lindsay Lohan was a guest judge for no reason I can really fathom (I do not personally equate her with fashion on any level), but it was an interesting start to the season.

Yes, I’m afraid I will subject you all to my reality TV viewing from time to time now, since my shows have started again.  Ghost Hunters started again the other night too, and despite my fear that it was going to stink as badly as last season, it was a good episode and they caught some interesting evidence.  I keep thinking I’m going to have a ghost hunter heroine one of these days.  I think I’ve got the equipment down anyway, thanks to Jay and grant

So what do you all like to watch?  Happy Friday!

I’ve been waiting for some kind of news on this since I went to the big Harlequin author/corporate presentation at National, and lo and behold, some word has finally arrived!  The new line of Harlequin paper products featuring vintage cover art, complete with back blurbs, is coming soon.  They’re called Harlequin Notables, and you’ll be able to get notebooks, stationary, and all kinds of other goodies featuring art like this (which I admit, is my personal favorite):

I will have this on a notebook.  Oh yes.  Anyway, go check out the full line over at Flower Pot Press ( www.flowerpotpress.com).  There is much way cool stuff.  And when I figure out where they’re going to be selling this stuff, I’ll let you know!  I love vintage cover art, so finally getting a good look at what the Harlequin powers that be were talking about at National made my day   Hope yours is a good one…I’ll be spending my morning at the dentist’s with the kiddos.  Cleaning time for them.  Yaaaaaay

I promised Donna I’d get up an all-Keanu video, in honor of his being awarded the coveted title this week, and after perusing what appear to be zillions of fan tributes on Youtube (all, suspiciously, seem to have been created by the same five people…I smell a restraining order), I decided on this one.  Partly because it has clips of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in it, but mostly because it’s a great showcase for how damn cute the man is.  Apparently the song is something from The Lake House’s soundtrack.  Anyway, please kick back and enjoy the view:-)

In other news, I got zero work done yesterday in favor of tearing through my buddy Marie Force’s latest, Love at First Flight, and even though no one has fangs or sprouts fur in it (those things, or corsets and heaving bosoms, tend to be my prerequisites when selecting reading material), I really enjoyed it…Marie, like Cheryl, has a distinctive voice that makes me smile and also makes me not be able to remove my face from the book!  Big thumbs up for my foray into straight-up, emotional, contemporary romance!  Oh well, today it’s back to attempted productivity.  I did at least manage to water my poor, dehydrated trees and plants.  It hasn’t rained here, in any meaningful way, in at least two weeks…this is getting OLD.  And I’m sure the poor  trees would agree!  Hmm, I also really need to finish learning the words to the song I’m supposed to sing at my brother’s wedding next month.  Hellooo, Multitasking Faerie, I need you to come back to my house now!  Do you think she takes bribes?

Have a great one!

Saw this over at Smart Bitches…you ladies are gonna love this one.  Just watch:

Now how’s that for a way to start your day??  And we all know it’s true, LOL.  Plus, I love the damn war chant that the All Blacks do (I think it’s the NZ All Blacks who do that, and they do it before every game…unsurprisingly, they’re very good).  Have a great one, ladies!