The Next Life

Edited - well, I meant to post this over on zagreuswaits, which is where I usually confine my extended ramblings about the Big Finish Doctor Who audios, but I screwed up and posted it here. I suppose I might as well leave it.

I finished listening to The Next Life this morning. It was better than I thought it would be. I had relatively few expectations going in to this story. All I knew was that it was three discs long; it ended the Divergent Universe Arc; and it had Daphne Ashbrook in playing someone who was not Grace Holloway. So, I was kind of expecting something like Zagreus without the crackfic aspect. Which would be no fun at all.

What we got instead was a fairly intense sequence of a villain really messing with the companions' heads (always a good thing), coupled to an extended chase scene in which everyone manages to find time to deliver tons of exposition, wrapped up with a lot of shouting and guns.

( And now I have reached the point where I can't say anything more without getting incredibly spoilery... )

A few random snippets

I went to a 91st birthday party for Daniel's grandmother on Saturday. 91st birthday parties are a good thing.

Buying someone a 91st birthday card can be tricky. There's a limited supply of cards that are a) not unbearably tasteless, b) not unbearably sappy, c) not full of overly-hip pop-culture references of minimal relevance to a 91 year-old. I try to aim for something cute and funny. I had a moment of embarrassment last year when I realized I'd bought the same card that one of the cousins had given the year before. Not that the birthday girl noticed, I think, but it's the principle of the thing.

This weekend I bagged up all the change that I toss into the drawer in my bedside table when my pockets get too full or when I have to take a plane flight, and I took it to the CoinStar machine at the local supermarket. It added up to slightly more than $63. Yikes! (I converted half of it into a Starbucks card and half into an Amazon.com gift certificate. I really ought to have donated it to charity - when I lived in Berkeley, I never accumulated change because I gave it all away to panhandlers.)