Standing On Boxes

I’m almost done with the 5th (of 10) of the KP dream series. Not sure this fifth one really works but I could say that about all of them. I’ll probably post it to assorted places late Friday.

I’ve been sampling the local mass produced sweet teas at my local Wal-Mart. For those who don’t know, Sweet tea is a Southern US kind of thing (In my experience anyway). Iced tea with lots of sugar/sweetener. For more details – If you wander over to FoodTV.com and poke around for the Alton Brown pages – he did sweet tea in one of his shows. He made a sugar syrup and used that in his tea.
If you go into a restaurant around here you are often given the choice between unsweet and sweet tea. Further south you don’t usually get a choice.
It’s VERY sweet.
There were three brands at my local.
Store brand “Ready to drink sweetened tea”
Ingredients: water, corn syrup, sugar, tea, caramel color, and FD&C Yellow #6
80 calories a serving (8oz.)
Mayfield “Brewed Sweet Tea”
(Mayfield is the local beverage/dairy place)
Ingredients: water, sugar, tea, caramel color, gum arabic, medium chain triglycerides, gycerol ester of wood rosin, brominated soybean oil, potasium sorbate (as a preservatice.)
(Doesn’t that all sound delicious!)
90 calories per 8 oz. serving.
Milo’s Famouys Sweet Tea (Apparently from Alabama (Milo’s Tea Company
Ingredients: water, sugar, and custom blended teas.
90 calories per 8 oz. serving.
As for flavor?
The store brand was very bland. The Mayfield had the best “tea” flavor (must be all those chemicals – I wonder if they’ll sue me for saying that?). Milo’s was the sweetest with a mild tea flavor.
Cost? They were all under $2/gallon The store brand and Mayfield had the same price spread as their milk. (Mayfield is at least 10% higher than the store brand.)
What else is there to know? It’s Milo’s if you want tea without any non-tea chemicals (Though I suspect some of the Mayfield chemicals come from the tea they used. I’ll have to find a chemist and ask.)

to my KP Dreams ficlet series. Not quite how I wanted that one to turn out but I posted it anyway. Not perfect but it isn’t meant to be.
Also posted an update to my TtH 100 series of Dawn/Amanda Highlander ficlets on “TtH”. The last in the series of HP ficlets. I originally wanted that one to have some big reunion between Dawn and Amanda (they hadn’t seen each other in over a year) but I just couldn’t write it so I finished it a different way. Now I can move on to another idea in that series. Probably a series of short bits.Double-drabbleish in size.

I watched it last night. It wasn’t bad. The Ron/KP shippers must have loved it. I thought “Super Ron” at the end was a bit much. The whole episode was centered around him for some reason. He spent the whole thing stressing about life after graduation. Kept waiting for Kim to tell him to put a sock in it.
But it wasn’t the first episode where he obsessed over something and wouldn’t shut up. In the history episode (Ron and KP dream about one of Kim’s ancestors during a nap during a school trip to the museum) where he keeps commenting on all of the coincidences that keep happening.

First episode was on BBC America tonight – finally.
No real comments. It wasn’t bad. I’ll watch it next week.
The only character I really liked was Gwen. I wasn’t a Captain Jack fan when he was on Dr. Who and I wasn’t impressed by him in this first episode. He seemed a bit full of himself. Smarmy?

Picked this up used this morning… watched it this afternoon.
The packaging was designed to maximize profits. 6 episodes on 3 DVD’s in 2 different “volumes”. Could have been squeezed onto 2 DVD’s in 1 package. I paid $25 for it. Must have been over $60 originally. (It’s an OVA, so the shortness and high cost are common.)
(Okay… just looked it up on Amazon. The current/newer release IS on 2 DVD’s and is the same price as I paid for my 5 year old used copies.)
I watched the sub, not the dub like I usually do – after watching the first episode – which came in two versions – one “Special”epsisode with English, one only dubbed – and noticing how different the subtitles were compared to the dubbed version. Not huge differences but the dubbed version wasn’t as subtle as the original. And was a little cruder.
There was a sex scene (nothing graphic. Mostly nudity.) in the first episode (Poor Yohko, she has to be a virgin to become the official, ‘magic girl’ demon hunter and the demon she faces in this episode seems to know that and attempts to arrange for that condition to be taken care of before Yohko can become a demon hunter. But Grandma, an old demon hunter herself, saves the day…)
After that, there’s the occasional bit of female nudity – in the bath, magical girl transformation, getting dressed, etc.. And other mild forms of fan service.
But other than that, it’s a fairly decent story. Even if Yohko spends the whole series of episodes trying to get a boyfriend.

Disney started burning through past seasons of “Kim Possible” today. The goal seems to be to show all episodes for all 4 seasons ending with the season 4 finale on Friday (8-9PM Eastern). Kim graduates. Everyone rides off into the sunset. In a Disney-esque kind of way.
Probably forever. Finally (Disney dumped all of the KP creative people once they finished season 4 and a bunch of them have gone to work for Nickelodeon. Or so the rumors say.)

So… Apple announced two updated iPods and a new iPod (along with a ringtone add-on to iTunes and a WiFiiTunes Music Store for those with wifiiPods…)
What? WiFi iPods? Since when?
Since the iPhone in late June, of course. And then there’s the new iPod ‘Touch’ – announced today. Basically looks like an iPhone (millimeters smaller) except it doesn’t have the phone part or the camera — or some of the applications. But it does do wifi and comes with Safari.
We won’t know what it really is, other than from Apple tech specs, until it goes on sale in October. But it sounds like the gadget I was asking for when the iPhone came out.
We’ll see… not sure the cost will be worth it. But it is better priced…

It’s a three day weekend, and I just want to hang out and veg. Sure, I need to go grocery shopping (I’m out of soda and a few other things). And I have a Best Buy coupon and a 25% off coupon for Borders… only good this weekend.
But I don’t want to go anywhere.
I bought a UV lens for my new camera (a cheap $10 one at Best Buy) and a cheap $5 lens cap that has a strap so it doesn’t get lost… but those took 5 minutes to put on. I looked at the few Canon/other lenses they had that would fit my new toy… looks like Amazon will be my best bet for those (and the carrying case I want. They had several actually designed for my camera (they sell them but they want $650 – on sale!- a lot more than I paid for mine.) but they wanted twice what the one I saw on Amazon costs.)
Last night, at the same time I was buying the lens cap I bought “The Misaki Chronicles” – which turns out to be a sequel to something I haven’t seen (So I’m missing some of the subtle relationship stuff between the characters but the Wiki helped fill in the blank spaces). I’m already half way through it.
If I go anywhere I’ll just end up spending more money I shouldn’t. There were 3 DVD’s I was really tempted to buy, along with another copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary (since I lent my copy to T and won’t see it again until Thanksgiving.) Best Buy had so really odd prices for TV show season boxed sets… but nothing I really wanted. (I want Season 2 of Bones but it won’t be out for another 3 weeks.)
I really want to spend some time writing this weekend. Also.
We’ll see… my A/C mostly isn’t – need to get it fixed – it gets humid but not hot in my apartment. Not sure how much writing I’ll actually do…