March (and February) recap

The first quarter of this year has been a bit of a roller coaster, especially in terms of its speed and ability to catch us off guard. We're trying to catch our breath over here during a hopefully restful stay-at-home spring break. But before we flip the (entirely metaphorical, as I no longer even attempt to keep up with paper versions) calendar page to April, here's a quick recap of what we've been up to for the past six weeks.

Before we headed to Texas, Oscar and I managed to squeeze some stuff into February– including his Valentine's Day party at school, which we marked with rocks and gemstones this year. We spent a fun day with friends at Main Event, and now Oscar is obsessed with laser tag. He and I did an art class together. And we got to go see Back to the Future with the philharmonic, which is becoming my favorite way to see movies that I grew up with but haven't always gotten to see with an audience before. (Also, here is your reminder that just because a movie is rated PG and you remember watching it as a kid in the '80s doesn't mean that the content is as kid-friendly as you expect it to be. The first time we watched Back to the Future with Oscar, we had both completely forgotten that a major plot point involves Doc getting machined gun to death by Libyan terrorists. Oh, right.)

The Oscars snuck up on me this year with everything else we had going on, so I didn't even get close to watching most of the nominees despite my good intentions last year. I loved Wicked, enjoyed Dune 2, and found Conclave well acted but not memorable. I attempted Emilia Perez and couldn't get into it. I just didn't have the energy for The Brutalist or A Complete Unknown, and I missed my chance to see the others in theaters, so I will watch them on streaming soon. In any case, I found this kind of a weird year for the Oscars anyway, with the four acting categories seeming like foregone conclusions (though Mikey Madison's win was a surprise) and none of the other categories really seeming to have frontrunners. The ceremony itself was pretty forgettable, aside from some great performances of songs from The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, and Wicked and Adrien Brody's obnoxiously longwinded and tone-deaf acceptance speech.

March has mostly been about getting back into our normal routine and making up for lost skiing time. I finished up my reading for the Winter Adult Reading Program (WARP) and got my best mug yet. The boys did their belt tests and ranked up in taekwondo. Turtle started at a new doggy daycare after his last one shut down, and he is a big fan of hanging out with his friends there; he comes home a very tired and borderline chill puppy. We have had him for almost a year already (how?!), and though he is definitely still mischief personified sometimes, he has definitely started to settle down into slightly less-puppy-ish doghood.

And, as anticipated, we had a quiet stay-at-home spring break. Oscar, Mom, and I did head up to the Denver Art Museum one day, but otherwise the only real excitement around here was getting a new dishwasher and fridge delivered.

Books:

• The Vacationers by Emma Straub: I mentioned before that I've gotten into a bit of an Emma Straub rut, but this one might actually be my favorite of hers that I've read. Again, she's looking at a small circle of humans and the complicated relationships between them, but this time in Spain.
• Table for Two by Amor Towles (audiobook): I haven't read any of Towles's other work, including Rules of Civility, which might have come in handy while listening to the novella Eve in Hollywood (which spins off of RoC, apparently). I much preferred the short stories to the novella, which felt unnecessarily long for what it seemed to want to do. My favorite was "The Bootlegger."
• Yin Yang Love Song by Lauren Kang Jessen: A wispy little romance that is both enemies-to-lovers AND star-falls-for-normal-person with some fun details and a set of aunts who I wish got more page time.
• A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings: I read this on the recommendation of a friend, who warned me that it was a tough one. I still found myself shocked at some of the experiences Levings chronicles. On top of being a really harrowing portrait of religious trauma and an abusive marriage, this book hits hard at this cultural moment as it highlights how hard some versions of Christianity have worked and are working to completely deny women agency.

TV:

• The Residence: This show was supposed to come out last year, I think, but then Andre Braugher died and they had to reshoot all of his scenes, which is a big bummer (and also probably explains the extreme pre-November 2024 vibes). The show itself is not a big bummer. It has a fantastic cast and energy, and the way it uses the White House setting is really smart. It's also, at its heart, just a really funny whodunnit.
• Goosebumps: Don't ask; just learn from our experience. We watched season 2 first because we kept seeing billboards for it and were fascinated to see what David Schwimmer could possibly be doing in a show based on R. L. Stine's books. Turns out that even David Schwimmer doesn't seem entirely clear about what's going on there. (Also, the show wants us to pretend that David Schwimmer was 14 in 1994 and not playing a grown-ass man with a PhD on Friends that year.) There's no real internal logic, but there is a lot of silliness, and ultimately it was kind of fun. But we also hadn't realized until we went looking that there was a previous season of Goosebumps, this one starring Justin Long, who is a perfect fit for a show like this. So we watched that season next, and the first eight episodes of season 1 hang together a lot more logically and are funny and at times even legitimately scary. If you watch this show, please feel free to skip the entirely useless last two episodes of season 1, which feel a lot like that time that Felicity got cancelled and THEN they told J. J. Abrams to come up with six more episodes.
• Agatha All Along: I finally got the chance to binge this one, which I had been meaning to do for a while. Kathryn Hahn is a treasure, and Joe Locke (who is also great on Heartstoppers) really impressed me as Teen. I had hoped for a little more singing from a cast that includes Patti LuPone (whose character's arc is my favorite), but "The Ballad of the Witches' Road" is catchy as hell. And there are some deeply moving moments as the season wraps up.

Movies:

• Love Me: Some movies sound so weird that I have to see them just to find out if they can possibly work. This one– about a buoy and a satellite that fall in love after eco-disaster has ended the human race in the not-at-all-distant future– doesn't work, really. Kristen Stewart and Steven Yuen try very, very hard to make it work, and the visuals are at times incredible, but the premise needed to be explored by someone whose imagination could have pressed a little harder on the question "what if robots learned how to be human from influencers?"
• My Dead Friend Zoe: I went into this one with almost no information– just the score on Rotten Tomatoes and the fact that it stars Natalie Morales, an actress I really like. This is a movie by and about veterans, and while its themes definitely apply beyond those with military experience, I think it's most effective as a window into the reasons people enlist, the bonds they create, and the question of what happens after they serve.
• Night of the Zoopocalypse: This is a very bright, silly introduction to horror movies, which a cinephile lemur character essentially spells out for us over the course of the film. Both the plot and the voicework are basically fine, nothing special, but the character designs are a lot of fun.
• Your Monster: This movie actually came out last year, but I caught it on streaming and kind of fell in love with it. It's a rom-com/musical/horror mash-up, though the horror part is pretty minimal and definitely not the point. Bonus: the songs from the show-within-a-show have been stuck in my head for a month.
• Flow: This Oscar winner is streaming now and absolutely worth watching during a quiet night at home. It's wordless, depending entirely on music and pacing to carry us through its deceptively simple story about a group of animals surviving a climate crisis together.

Cross-stitch updates: I finally finished (and delivered) a stitch that I've been working on for my goddaughter since summer 2023. This piece is 14 inches across, which I could not visualize before I started it. I can visualize it now.

And I've been making progress on my 2025 temperature stitch, which is all lovely colors and flowers and cute things and thus totally failing to catch the figurative temperature of the year so far.

Unsurprisingly, since I didn't bring this with me when we went to Texas, I got behind. I'm almost to late March now, but here's a picture of the mostly finished January and February lines.