SGA Rewatch: Doppelganger

Well, another Wednesday has rolled around, and that means another installment of the Stargate Atlantis Rewatch! Today's episode is season four's "Doppelganger." Be advised of spoilers for the episode and all that came before it, as always!

What Happened


We join the team in progress as they are exploring a lush jungle-like world. It is quickly made apparent that while scans of the planet revealed no life signs, they did find an interesting energy reading and are searching for its source. John, Teyla, and Ronon are all starting to believe they are wasting their time and that there is nothing of value to be found on the planet. John ready to call it a mission but an uncharacteristically enthusiastic Rodney insists that they should keep looking. Further questioning of his unusual persistence reveals that he had made a bet with Radek that they would find something valuable on the planet and he doesn't want to lose the bet.

John finally pulls rank and gives the order to return to the jumper when they stumble across a crystalline formation growing from the side of a tree. It is glowing and closer inspection reveals it to be the source of the energy reading Rodney had taken earlier. Rodney gets excited, thinking that if they could cultivate more of the crystal, they could literally have a source of energy that grows on trees. As he talks about the possibilities, John examines the crystal and seems to get drawn in, reaching out to touch it. The contact causes a sort of shock, throwing him backwards. Rodney berates him for touching the crystal and John acknowledges that he's not even sure why he did that. Rodney turns back to the crystal and is dismayed to find that John's contact with it seems to have "killed" it. The glow has disappeared and it is no longer giving off an energy signature.

Rodney wants to continue searching, hoping to find more crystals, but John and the others are done. John promises to send a science team back to the planet to explore the phenomenon more closely. In Atlantis, he heads to the infirmary, accompanied by Teyla, to get checked up after his shock. Keller gives him a clean bill of health and he decides he is ready to call it a night. He bids Teyla good evening and pats her on the back. As he touches her, there is a weird sort of glow at the contact.

That evening, as Teyla sleeps, she begins to have a very strange dream. She is back in an Athosian tent, her hair long like when she very first joined the expedition. John is in her tent, eating dinner with her. Ronon appears and tells her he always knew the two of them would hook up. She starts to protest this but hears the sound of wraith darts outside. A voice calls her name, and she thinks it is her father. She runs to the tent flaps to check but Bug!John (from "Conversion") bursts into the tent and backs her up against a table. He slams a hand into her chest as if to feed, wraith-like, and Teyla wakes in her quarters in Atlantis, out of breath and out of sorts.

The next morning she is breakfasting with Rodney and Ronon and tells them about her nightmare. John joins them and notices the uncomfortable silence at his arrival. Rodney tells John that Teyla dreamed about him and John's curiosity is peaked. Teyla elaborates that it was more like a nightmare and that she doesn't want to talk about it. To John's further questions, thinking maybe he had saved her from a big bad monster, Ronon tells him he was the big bad monster. Clearly uncomfortable, Teyla leaves the table, claiming a headache from lack of sleep. She goes to speak with Kate, explaining that the nightmare was unlike any she has ever experienced. It has left her deeply unsettled, and uncomfortable around John. She wonders if her subconscious is trying to tell her something. Kate says that if Teyla thinks she and John have any unresolved issues, addressing them might be a good idea, but otherwise, she shouldn't worry too much about it. When Teyla confesses that she is afraid to go to sleep, Kate sends her to Keller for a checkup. Keller doesn't find anything wrong with Teyla and prescribes her some sleeping pills to help keep any more nightmares at bay. Teyla takes them gratefully and leaves.

Later that evening Keller is woken from her own sleep by a radio call requesting her presence in the infirmary. She arrives to find Teyla on a gurnee, curled up in a ball and experiencing extreme abdominal distress. John is standing over her, concerned. As Keller looks on, something begins to crawl beneath the skin of Teyla's stomach. Before Keller can react to the situation, a creature bursts through Teyla's stomach, killing her. John looks on, appearing to be vastly entertained. Keller starts awake in her quarters, quite freaked out by her dream. She heads down to the infirmary to get some sleeping pills for herself.

After closing the medication cabinet, she turns around is startled to find Ronon standing right behind her. He says hi and John pops around from behind him, saying hello as well. The two explain that they were sparring and John managed to get in a lucky shot. Ronon has a gash on his forehead. Keller sets him down on a gurnee and looks at it, trying not to stare at John, still creeped out by her dream. She tells Ronon he will need stitches and Ronon sends John off, promising a rematch later. Keller watches John leave and Ronon remarks that he doesn't think John is seeing anyone, clearly amused. Shaken out of her distraction by the jest, Keller gets down to business and begins sewing up Ronon's wound.

As Ronon is leaving the infirmary, he begins to notice a distinct lack of people in the city. Growing more worried as he fails to encounter anyone, he heads to the gate room and finds it completely deserted. Growing more and more frantic, he runs through the city calling out but cannot find anyone. He reaches a transporter and activates it, surprised when the doors open to reveal a forest beyond. Cautiously he enters the forest and looks around. Energy bolts begin to fly by him and he runs, trying to evade the attack. A branch falls across his path and he runs right into it, getting knocked down. John appears and reaches out a hand to help him up but then knocks Ronon out instead. Ronon comes to at the bottom of a hole in the ground and finds John standing at the top, shoveling dirt in, burying Ronon alive. Ronon starts awake and finds himself still in the infirmary on the gurnee. Keller tells him he drifted off to sleep while she was sewing him up.

The next morning Keller discusses her dream with Teyla, Rodney, and Ronon. Ronon remarks that it sounds an awful lot like the movie Alien and Teyla says John talks about it all of the time. Keller agrees, admitting that it was the source of some of her worst nightmares ever. Rodney relates his own story about the first time he saw the movie (a disastrous first date) and Ronon remarks that he really needs to watch it. Bringing the topic back around to their dreams, Keller remarks that it is very strange that she, Ronon, and Teyla have all recently had such vivid nightmares featuring John so prominently. She also notices the interesting progression of those nightmares. Rodney and Ronon shrug it off but Teyla looks thoughtful.

Keller decides to take the matter to Sam, just in case. She explains the similarities of the nightmares (centering on John) and the fact that they seemed to be sequential. She also notes that they started right after the team came back from the jungle-planet. She admits it might be nothing but she wanted Sam to be aware. Before they can discuss it much further, a tech informs Sam that she is needed to deal with a situation in the living quarters.

In the living quarters, a barefoot and very distraught Major Lorne is standing in the middle of a small crowd with his gun pointed at John. John tries to get him to lower his weapon but he keeps calling for an ARG and insisting they need to shoot John with it. Teyla and Kate are also there and try to talk Lorne down but he claims that John is a replicator. Sam arrives and tries to diffuse the situation but Lorne turns his gun on her, claiming she is a replicator as well. He starts to get even more agitated and seems about to shoot when someone manages to hit him with a stunner. They get him to the infirmary's observation room and when he wakes up he is appalled to find out what he had done and relieved that no one was hurt. He explains that he used to sleepwalk as a kid and apparently had done so again.

Acknowledging that there is definitely something going on with people's dreams, the team meets with Keller, Kate, and Sam to try to figure out what to do about the situation. It seems obvious that the crystal from the jungle planet is somehow involved. They suspect it must have contained an alien entity of some sort that jumped into John when he touched it and is now impersonating him in other people's dreams. Based on the subject of those dreams, Kate and Keller think that the entity must be feeding on people's fear. Keller also thinks, based on the sequential nature of the nightmares, that the entity must jump to different people by touch. Sam gives orders to round up anyone that has come into contact with Lorne recently and decides to confine all non-essential personnel to their quarters until they can figure out what they are dealing with.

Sam's next move is to send the team back to the jungle planet to try to gather some evidence so they can start figuring things out. They take Radek along and return, clad in HAZMAT suits, to try to find what they need. They locate the empty crystal that John had touched and harvest it to take back to the city for study. They also find another "live" crystal and bring that back as well, to compare.

Once they get the crystals back to Atlantis, Rodney and Radek get to work on studying them (with lots of extra precautions in place). They think if they can isolate the frequency of the energy signature emitted by the crystals they will be able to scan people to see if the entity is inside of them. Keller comes in to check on their progress and leans in to examine the live crystal. Her eyes lose focus as she gazes at it and begins to lean in, almost touching it before Radek stops her. She blinks and comes to, saying the crystal had mesmerized her. Radek and Rodney tell her they think that the crystals do that to get people to touch them so that the entities can jump into them.

After they get the energy signal isolated they scan Lorne, still in quarantine, and are unpleasantly surprised to learn that the entity isn't in him any more. They realize that it must have jumped into the city's power conduits in order to travel, and so could be in anyone now.

Teyla steps out onto a balcony to find Kate standing on the railing, poised as if to jump. She is clearly terrified. Teyla tries to talk her into getting down and she says she wants to but can't. Teyla moves to help her and John appears, pushing Teyla away and keeping her from getting to Kate. Kate falls from the balcony. A door opens and Keller steps into what are obviously Kate's personal quarters. Kate is lying motionless on her bed in her nightgown, Teyla standing over her clearly upset. Teyla tells Keller that Kate did not report for duty that morning and when Teyla could not get her on the radio she came to check on her and hasn't been able to wake her. Keller does a quick check and announces, appalled, that Kate is dead.

John is in his quarters and seems to be at a loss. After a moment he seems to come to a decision and heads for the door. He opens it to find Teyla standing there. He tells her he was just going to see her, although he didn't know if she would want to see him. Teyla says nothing but hugs him and begins to cry.

Radek gets the citywide sensors calibrated to track the entity and is able to pinpoint his location. He takes it to Sam and they realize that the entity is in Rodney. They get Rodney into quarantine, padding the walls of the room with rubber so that the entity can't use the city's conduits to escape. Now that they know where it is and have it trapped, they just need to keep Rodney awake and find a way to get it out of him.

John wonders if maybe they can't reason with the entity, since it clearly seems to have a consciousness. If it knows it is trapped, he reasons, maybe it would take the offer to return home, to go back into the crystal and be taken back to its own planet. The tricky part is communicating with it. They think it might be possible to hypnotize Rodney, put him into a waking dream so that he can be aware enough to communicate with the entity and ask it to leave, but the likelihood of that actually working seems slim. John comments that it would be nice if they had a way to let someone else actually go into Rodney's dreams, and Sam gets an idea. She has Earth send over some technology that SG-1 found in its exploits. It was originally intended to allow multiple people to experience and interact within one virtual reality. The SGC has since been using it as a training tool, but for the current situation, they adapted it to tune in to subconscious brain activity, allowing John to interact with Rodney while Rodney is dreaming (and hopefully see what Rodney is seeing).

They sedate Rodney and we enter his dream. He is in a rowboat on the ocean, trying to get to Atlantis and it is pouring rain. No matter how hard he rows, he doesn't seem to get any closer to the city. To make things worse, his whale friend is circling the boat and seems to have turned hostile. John appears in the boat and starts trying to convince Rodney that failure is inevitable and he should just go ahead and give up. Rodney is rather affronted that his friend is being so unhelpful but then another John appears behind him and says that the other guy isn't him. John starts encouraging Rodney to just keep trying and even moves to help him row. Not that it does any good. The two of them keep on rowing without getting anywhere as Evil!John mocks them, and then the whale surfaces beneath the boat, swallowing it up. John comes awake to find Keller and the medical team furiously trying to revive Rodney, who has gone into cardiac arrest. They are unsuccessful and Keller declares Rodney dead.

John leaves the infirmary and is walking through the city, clearly unsettled. Teyla confronts him, telling him it is his fault that Kate and Rodney are dead. Ronon joins in, quickly followed by Sam and Keller, all blaming John. From the corner of his eye, John notices something. He looks up and sees Evil!John lurking in a corner, gloating. John lunges for his alter-ego, realizing he is still dreaming and the entity has moved to him.

In the waking world, Keller and team do manage to revive Rodney. They tell him that the entity has moved to John. Observing John's vitals, Keller laments that he is in trouble. Rodney surveys his friend, thinking furiously, and then asks to be hooked back up again. In the dream, John and Evil!John are having a knock-down-drag-out fight through the city and have ended up in the gate room. John is not doing too well but he refuses to give up. Evil!John gets him pinned and tries to talk him into surrendering, reminding him that it is all his fault, including Rodney's death.

From behind them, Rodney appears, piping up that he is not dead. Evil!John turns, surprised, and attacks Rodney. Rodney smirks at him that he knows now that the entity is vulnerable to electric shocks. It jumped to John when the med team started to revive Rodney, leaving before "finishing the job." We see Evil!John suddenly shudder and flash to the waking world, where Keller is using the defibrillator on John. In the dream, John takes advantage of Evil!John's momentary weakness to get the upper hand, throwing him through the open stargate. Forcefully evicting the entity from his mind like that sent it back into its crystal, which was also hooked up to the two men. Once it is back inside, Radek unhooks it and both men wake up. Everyone makes Relieved Face.

They take the crystals back to the planet and dump them on the grass. When they do so, hundreds of crystals start to light up throughout the jungle around them and they wisely skedaddle.

Back in Atlantis, John is sitting in the mess late at night, unable to sleep. Before long Teyla joins him and then slowly Rodney, Ronon, Keller, and Sam all trickle in as well.

Commentary


So, first real stand-alone episode of the season, yay! This one holds up pretty well. I think it's one the relative novice to the show could stumble upon and enjoy, maybe hooking them to check out more episodes. That's always a good thing. I like that this episode features so many of the people in Atlantis, not just the main team.

As far as the larger story of the season, this episode does do a good job of making us more familiar with both Keller and with Sam. We get to see how they integrate with the rest of the players in the city as well as how they work under pressure, and we get to know them a little better personally as well. In fact, one of the most fun parts of this episode is the peek it gives us into everyone's subconscious. Dealing with nightmares is a great way to show us what our characters' fears are, as well as how they deal with them both in the light of day and when they are defenseless at night in their beds sound asleep.

I mean, it sucks that they had to kill off Kate, but nice as she was, her character always felt a bit bland to me anyway. I wish they would have seized on the opportunity to replace her with with a more interesting shrink who could have been more integrated into the city's stories. In my head canon, she was replaced with Lance Sweets from Bones (as so marvelously portrayed by John Francis Daley). Man, I know it was never in the realm of possibility, but I would have given a lot to see a Bones/Stargate Atlantis crossover.

Um...where was I? Oh, right, the episode.

So, I thought it was interesting that they had Sam point out the events of the SG-1 episode "Cold Lazarus" here (from season one of that series), since that was clearly the repurposed idea behind this episode. Still, in true Stargate fashion, they took the seed of an idea and manage to run an entirely different direction with it, growing a completely new and interesting story. Quite well done. It still amuses me when they have the characters hang a lantern on similar story ideas by mentioning previous exploits. Still, it's not like every situation they come across is completely unique, and it's nice to have the characters acknowledge continuity every once in a while.

I also feel like there need to be signs up all over the city with the admonition "No More Touching Strange Stuff" because that is clearly the source of most of the trouble these people find themselves in. At the very least, they should print up a few reminders to put in the ready room and next to the gate where people can see them when leaving for a mission, am I right?

Favorite Quotes


"What are we doing?" (Ronon)
"Exploring the Pegasus galaxy! It's what we do!" (Rodney)

"Looks like one of those toys you play with when you're a kid." (John)
"What, Commodore 64?" (Rodney)
"Triple-barreled shotgun?" (Ronon)
"....A kaleidoscope." (John)

"Is she really mad at me? I can't control what's in her dreams!" (John)
"Really? You think you can't control a person's dreams? My father read me Moby Dick when I was seven years old. I mean, seriously, what was the man thinking? Do you have any idea how long I had nightmares about being eaten by a whale?" (Rodney)
"They haven't stopped, have they?" (Ronon)
"No." (Rodney)

"Your planet has some truly strange rituals." (Teyla)

"Based on what's been described to me, the personification of Colonel Sheppard in everyone's dreams is behaving much like a sociopath." (Kate)
"Did I have a goatee?" (John)

~*~

So ends another installment of the rewatch. Join me again on Monday for our next episode, "Travelers."

New TV Scorecard: Alphas

Well Syfy finally premiered its summer shows this week. We won't discuss those weird pseudo-reality series they have debuting/premiering, but among the actually anticipated series (by this viewer, at any rate) were Eureka, Warehouse 13, Haven (premiering tonight), and new series Alphas.

I have to say, getting David Strathairn to head up one of their series is a major coup for Syfy. So off the bat I had high hopes for this series. The addition of Ryan Cartwright, most recently seen as one of the revolving squinterns on Bones and Laura Mennell, who will be a familiar face to fans of recent genre shows, are definitely nice bonuses. Along with a guest appearance by Callum Keith Rennie, yum. I don't have much to say about the rest of the cast yet, but as a whole the group seems to have a nice chemistry. They feel very much like a team that has an effective and efficient rhythm down despite the dysfunctional family dynamic they have going on.

The basic premise is nothing terribly new, a group of "evolved" humans, each with their own special ability, assembled by a super secret government branch work together to foil bad guys, said bad guys also being super-powered in most cases. We've got the chick who can use mind-control, a young woman capable of enhancing any one of her senses at a given time, a guy that can hulk out when needed, another able to see all electromagnetic frequencies (i.e., see all television/internet/cell phone signals in the air around himself), and another with crazy insane perfect aim. Then there's the goodly doctor who keeps them all in check and doles out the missions.

The pilot introduces the group to us and more or less demonstrates the recruitment process--the guy with ridiculous aim starts out as the puppet of the bad guys but is drafted into the White Hats (well, more like blackmailed, but it works) after he helps them right the wrongs he unwittingly committed. We learn of a group called Red Flag, also made up of Alphas (the people with powers) who are set on destroying the White Hats. That looks to be the big overarching season plotline right there. The episodes themselves look to be aiming toward a super-powered baddie of the week formula, but I could be wrong there.

The show itself didn't really bring anything new or fresh to the table, I'll admit, but it was entertaining enough. It has definite potential. The premise may not be fresh, but the execution was interesting, as were the characters. Not their powers, necessarily, but how they deal with those powers in their everyday lives. We are shown right off the bat that most of them have families at home who are unaware of what they do for a living. I will be curious see how things play out over the first season. As long as they can steer clear of the missteps made by other super-powered humans stories *cough*Heroes*cough* and avoid stealing too much for the comic books then we might have a pretty decent show on our hands.

One thing that makes me think Alphas might be headed in the right direction is the indication that these powers aren't unlimited or without repercussions. The woman who can hyperfocus, for instance, loses access to her other senses while she does so (i.e., she can't hear anything if she is "seeing") and the guy who hulks out can only go for so long before his body starts shutting down. I like that and look forward to how that gets explored as the season progresses.

I also really, really, like the fact that they drive around in a mini-van. It is actually a logical choice for their operation and the low profile they are trying to keep (their office seems to be in a building fronted by a bowling alley). Also, it's funny.

First Impression Rating: 7/10 (With fingers crossed and a hopeful optimism.)

Amendment

So yesterday I read a a really interesting article about fan fiction, from the perspective of someone who writes it, and has written it for quite some time.  It was up on Pink Raygun (which is a fabulous site for fans of genre) and looks to be the beginning entry in a series on the topic.  After reading the first article I am definitely looking forward to more.   This is partly due to the fact that it was well written and about a topic that I have some personal experience with.  But my anticipation is largely due to the fact that this article once more got me thinking something I have been thinking for quite some time.

I need to start writing fan fiction again.

Some of you might be nodding your heads in understanding with this, others might be wondering if I have completely lost my marbles.  Fan fiction, in my experience, is something that people either understand or don't.  Most of the people in my life don't get it.  I am at peace with that.  As far as I know, nobody I love enough to really care about their opinion on the matter has judged me for my involvement in the activity.  My husband, in fact, has always been quite supportive of my writing fan fiction.  He has had some minimal exposure to fan fiction in the past, but mostly, he understands the two things that are most important to me about it:  It is an incredible way to practice and improve upon my writing, while sharing it with a group of peers who will give me feedback; and it is a way to delve deeper into a community of people who love something that I also love, as deeply (or more so) as I do.

My drug of choice was Stargate Atlantis.  It was my gateway into fan fiction and I never really strayed far from the fold.  That is, honestly, the only fandom I have ever been so involved with that I wanted to write more stories for it, and read what other people had to say as well.  It was a way of getting more SGA during the breaks between seasons, or, increasingly, the ridiculously long hiatus between season halves.  Sure, I have toyed with writing a few crossover stories involving the characters from Buffy or Bones (I love crossovers), but they would have been set largely in Atlantis.

Once I stumbled across the SGA fan fiction, I was, quite simply, hooked.  Finding the archive site Wraithbait was a revelation of sorts for me.  You see, hardly anyone I know watched SGA.  My husband, if home, would watch the occasional episode with me (and we are currently watching the whole series together), but he isn't that big at sitting down and watching serialized television, so I couldn't have the kind of in-depth speculative conversations with him about the series that I wanted to have (though he is kind and patient enough to have listened to me ramble on about the topic ad nauseam on more than one occasion, to be sure).  Fan fiction gave me that outlet, though, and I will always love it for that.

I'll admit, when I say I was hooked, I mean, I was spending hours a day poring over every new story added to the site, and would get antsy whenever there wasn't anything new to read available.  Then a series of stuff happened that caused me to get so far behind that there was no way to get caught up again, especially when some other stuff happened that cut significantly into my reading time.  So it has been a few years since I have spent much time on Wraithbait, or since I have written my own story.  I have a few started stories or story ideas hanging out in my writing folder though, and I think the time has finally come to get back to them.

I don't know that I will ever get back into fan fiction with the same fervor of that original experience.  That's probably okay.  But I have realized that I do miss that community, and I would like to go back, even if it is only for a brief visit once or twice a year.

One of my goals for this brand new year is to work on my writing, and today I would like to make an amendment to it.  I would like to dust off and finish one or two of those fan fiction stories that are waiting oh so patiently on my hard drive.  I may or may not upload them to Wraithbait.  I definitely think that my November novel may be a fan fiction story this year, if one of my ideas seems like it might lend itself to the length (you'd be amazed at some of the novel-length fan fiction stories I have come across over the years).  It seems like a perfect fit, to me.  I will be able to dive right into the characters and setting without the need to worry about world-building and without getting too bogged down in descriptive text.  This will leave my non-November writing time free to focus on the world-building, character development, research, and story plotting that I would like to devote to my original story.  The more I think about it, the more I like this idea.

I love this feeling, when my brain is all afire with new inspiration and ideas are just racing around like particles in the LHC.  This year I will not fear the blank page.  I will instead look upon it as the on-ramp to the highway that will lead me directly to becoming the writer I want to be.

All in All I'd Say It's a Good Start

Well, despite my daughter deciding to kick off 2011 by waking up several times in the night on New Year's Eve/Morning screaming her head off and all but inconsolable (she is in the process of cutting three very large teeth), so far this year has gotten off to a pretty good start, I'd say.

Saturday was just plain awesome.  I hung out with my husband and daughter all day long, which is actually a much rarer event than you might expect, given Hubby's normally busy schedule.  We finished off watching the first season of Stargate Atlantis together (we've been working on that for a while now), I finally started in on watching my season four Bones DVDs (I got them for my birthday back in August), and, there was something else...what was it?  Oh, yeah.  My alma matter, TCU, WON THE FRAKKING ROSE BOWL!!!!!!!  Dude.  I am not a football person.  I seriously only watch two football games a year (and as someone who lives in Texas, I promise you, that takes some dedication), but even I can tell you that was a GREAT game.  So yeah, heck of a way to ring in the new year.

Yesterday was a pretty nice day as well.  I realized that I definitely need/prefer to go to the earlier of the two available services at our church (they started offering a later service in November), despite the fact that it means I have to get up early.  Going to the later service has just had me dragging.  So.  Did that, and then had another day of hanging out with my family.  Hubby mostly napped on the couch while I played with Baby Girl and watched some more Bones.  I also watched the first episode of the new season of Primeval on my DVR and enjoyed it quite a bit.  I am so so glad that show has come back.  Good times. 

Lest you think all I did was laze about and watch television (though I did do quite a bit of that), I also got in some good "puttering."  I finally, finally, pulled out all of my yarn and went through and cataloged my stash, then put it all on my Ravelry account.  I also pulled out all of the kits I have yarn for (crochet and knitting) as well as making a list of the other patterns I have that I want to make in the coming year and put those in my Ravelry queue.  I will definitely work my way through the patterns/kits I have the yarn for first, and then start moving on to the others.  While I was going through my stash I also at long last took the time to go through a stack of vintage patterns my mother-in-law had given me earlier in the year.  Most of them are for crocheting with thread, which I might want to try at some point, but while looking through them I also found the pattern for the blanket she has at her house that I have been admiring for years.  Yay!  As it is a rose motif, I told my husband that if the Frogs won the Rose Bowl (we were watching the game at the time) I was going to make the blanket this year and make the roses purple.  So.  Yes.  That will be happening.  Sweet!  Right now I am just dithering over the decision of whether or not to start my first attempted knitting project or my crocheted sweater first.  I think I may go with the knitting because it is a pair of slippers and darned if I don't just really need a good pair of slippers right now.  So I will hopefully get started on that this week.  I am sure you will hear much about it.

I haven't said much about Kingdom Hearts II yet, but that is mostly because I was still slogging through the beginning of the game, which was incredibly slow (I kid you not--I was five hours of playing time into the game before I got to the title sequence).  I am (mostly) enjoying it so far, I think the story is an intriguing one.  I was chagrined to find that even though the designers seem to have lessened the amount of time you have to spend in the Gummi Ship (yay!), they managed to make the time you do spend in it about three times as obnoxious as it was in the first game.  Sigh.  Also, I ran into this new addition yesterday called the "morale gauge" that was giving me some problems and is a huge pain in the rear-end.  But other than that, I am having fun with it overall.  I feel the strong urge to brag about the fact that I have thus far not once cracked open a walkthrough either.  I have a few bookmarked, just in case, but I am gonna see how far I can get before I break my resolve.

I made the first steps on the path toward achieving a few of my goals for the year as well.  For the "read more books" goal, I have made the executive decision (then told it with my husband and am now sharing it with you so that I have people to hold me to it) that since I am getting up early on Sunday mornings again, I will just rule Saturday nights a non-game-playing night.  I can read a chapter or two of my book instead of wittering away hours on my game.  It's a baby step, sure, but a step all the same.

I made some slightly bigger strides toward my writing goal yesterday though.  I've started giving some serious thought to the story I will be researching/starting this year.  I spent a large part of the evening bouncing ideas off of my husband last night to see how crazy any of it sounded.  I have definitely decided that this one will be straight up science fiction, not fantasy, which is a break from my normal MO.  This also means, flat out, NO MAGIC.  This is gonna be a challenge for me, but I think I can do it.  Sadly it also means no dragons, but I will find a way to make sure they are represented in the story, never you fear.  *cough*spaceships*cough*

So I would say I am pretty pleased with how my first weekend of 2011 went.  I hope each of you are as satisfied with the new year thus far, and if not, I sincerely hope that things start to look up for you soon! 

Oh!  And before I forget, I did manage to finish my cowl on Thursday.  I am pretty pleased with how it turned out, even though it was not as I expected.  I think if I made it again, I would half the width of the circle and double the length of the tube.  But still, it is super warm and cozy and I love how the colors came out.

Cori's Cowl by Cori 2010.

This is how the pattern photo suggests it be worn.

Though I like wearing it as a hood to keep my ears warm too!

Pattern:  Vintage Cascade Cowl by Lion Brand
Yarn:  Red Heart Super Saver in various shades (I used remnants from other projects).
Hook:  J