Still recovering (or, as I like to say, convalescing) from whatever crud got me this time. Y’all should be glad that this just means that I post very little; my family (and especially my sister) have had to deal with my being grumpy lately.

The big problem with being sick is that you don’t feel like doing anything, and so you never get around to posting all the humorous details of your days. The exhaustion that preceded my illness (hmm… related?) means that I’m even further behind than usual. Today I’ll try to catch up a bit.

First up, the Beanery visit featuring John. Brian had invited Eric and me over for dinner one evening (we had delicious tofu stir-fry), and afterwards I suggested that we try calling John up. Brian did, and soon we were on our way to the Beanery.

One of the first things out of John’s mouth (after greetings, and a cameo appearance by Melissa) was a request for us to dredge up fifty cents. Why? Because that night was the first night Katie (John’s sister) was house-sitting for someone, and he wanted Brian to call Katie’s cell phone and ask her if she liked scary movies. Needless to say, we dredged up the cash in a hurry—only to be let down by Brian, who “couldn’t compose himself enough to do the voice right” or somesuch. He ended up chatting with Katie conversationally, and then noting the point of his call was to ask her if she liked scary movies.

Her answer, if you’re wondering: “no.”

Once our drinks were drunk and the conversation had run dry (including a second cameo appearance, this time by Rachel C.), John suggested that we all go Sailor Moon LARPing in Riverfront Park. The suggestion was just too good to pass up, so we did exactly that. It made a fine evening.

(I am soooo kidding. I hope you know that.)

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Also mentioned in the post I referenced above was that my cat is weird. Apparently my dad and Calliope were on the deck one day, when a bird landed on a nearby portion of the roof. The bird started twittering—and Calliope started twittering back (involving rapid movement/vibration of her lower jaw) at it. Dad says he’s never seen a cat do anything like that; despite being off-scale, her noises were otherwise similar to the sounds the bird was making. They carried on like that for a minute or two.

(Two days ago I discovered that Calliope had opened my desk drawer and jumped inside, thereby crushing all my paperwork. She’s too smart—and simultaneously stupid—for her own good.)

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Although Project Shinji-Dogg was a failure, and most of the footage I made (in the hope of emulating Insert Credit’s Project FF-Dog) was totally useless, I did manage to come up with one winning sequence.

For those of you not in-the-know, Neon Genesis Evangelion starts off as a tale of a lone organization and its giant mecha (called “Evangelions,” or “Evas” for short) battling against invading creatures. The evangelions have a small weakness, however: they only have enough battery power to operate for a minute at full power, and so have giant power cords running out of their backs. Seeing this weakness, a competing company designed their own war robots with built-in nuclear reactors (!!!); the first prototype they created was called Jet Alone. Of course, Jet Alone goes haywire (or is it sabotage?), and Our Heroes have to stop it. Thus episode seven of Evangelion was born.

A while back, John had found some design online to build his own paper model of Jet Alone. Sometime between “a while back” and now, he also picked up a model of a production-grade evangelion. Since this was Project Shinji-Dogg, John saw fit to bring both of his models up. The end result of this was that we watched episode seven of Evangelion with John’s Jet Alone model staring down at us from over the TV, at which point this video clip was taken:

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And that’s enough catch-up for one post. Still to come: the movie we watched after the first Spider-man, a brief impression of the Carmike theater, and the events of the Fourth.