First Cup of Coffee - April 29, 2019

Happy Birthday today to my wonderful agent, Sarah Younger! Today I take a little walk of our property, make a discovery, and talk Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 3 spoilers - though not until the end on the spoilers, and I give fair warning so you can bail before that. Also a bit about going to see Avengers Endgame this afternoon!

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today's Monday, April 29th. It's actually the birthday of Agent Sarah. Sarah Younger of Nancy Yosta Literary. Happy birthday, Sarah. She's out in California. She was doing like some meetings with various movie studios to pitch our books. Thank you very much, Sarah. I don't know exactly what all she was doing, but she was semi-mysterious about it, which is only right and fair. And now she is, I think, in Nampa, enjoying her birthday. Enjoying a little California birthday. So that's very fun. I'm taking us on a little walk of the property today. Because I saw something funny from my window this morning as I was running on the treadmill, which is a faces a window that looks out east. And I wanted to see what this was hanging off of this Choya. I don't often look out that I say east-west and faces west. I mean it's just a piece of broken off Choya. Yeah, this Choya's getting a little. He's got new and old on him. He's sort of both scruffy and still growing. Some of these choya have a lot of dead on them, and then we should probably clear them out. Choya are kind of difficult to deal with though because they are so very prickly. A lot of people around here have all of the choya removed from their property, just have it hauled out, which I don't really get. So not part of my ethic. But then there's also people who like mow the desert too. You know, it's like they have this irresistible urge to try to make everything into a lawn. Which, you know, New Mexico High Desert, it just ain't never gonna be a lawn, people. So now we are going to walk down here, down here where Jackson is, because I see something white sticking out here on the south side of the house. Hi, Jackie Boy, what you doing? Oh, it's a flower. Wow, it's a pretty flower. We'll have to take a picture of that. Huh. I'm not sure I've seen that flower bloom before. It looks like some kind of um wild rose or primrose. How pretty. Okay. Take a picture, see if we can get it without turning you guys off. Nice picture. Are you guys still there? You are. Yeah. When you see how white it is, you'll realize why I looked out here and wondered what the heck it was. Okay, and we've got one more thing to visit over here. Also off to the south side, a little bit farther out, about midway between us and the next neighbor over to the south. And it looks like a bag caught in a Choya. That's the other thing about the Troya being prickly, is they kind of catch blowing trash. So let's go see. Is that a bag or is it a shirt? Inquiring minds want to know. I'm closer and I'm still not entirely sure. No, it's a bag. It's one of those freaking plastic bags, which are actually illegal here. But oh, it's Walmart. When Walmart's in the county and not the city, so they can get away with it. Apples. Alright. Well, there we did a little bit of litter cleanup for the day. Things are really greening up here. We're supposed to get a little rain this afternoon. David and I got tickets to go see Avengers Endgame, which will be really fun. I'd been wanting to go see it. It just opened, what, on Friday? Thursday night. Uh but you know, he doesn't really like going to movies for the most part. I wasn't sure how I was gonna talk him into it. And that was not the best way to go. That was a prickly way to go. Okay. My little wearing a sundress and my skirt got caught on a thorny bush. Not a toy this time, but most everything has some sort of thorns here. That's the desert thing, right? So he came home on Friday, Saturday. I guess it must have been Friday. We gotta put this bag inside. Crows are waiting for us. Crow fountain. I don't have to keep track of it. I can throw it away. Scratched my leg though. Very sad. So anyway, he came home on Friday saying that uh the disc jockeys and Albuquerque were talking about what a how excited they were to see Endgame, and people had already seen it. And it was funny how he put it because he said, Well, he said it's something a movie called Endgame. Or something called Endgame, and I said, Yeah, yeah, the Avengers Endgame, it's the final movie of the whole arc. And he says, Well, what do you mean? And I said, you know, it's all of the Avengers movies with like Iron Man and everything. And I knew he had seen some of them, but he hadn't seen all of them, and he hadn't really tracked that there was an overall arc. And I said, You know, I don't think you saw Infinity War. You know, I went to see it in the movie theater without him, because he didn't want to. So we figured out that the last one he had seen was Ragnarok, Thor Ragnarok. You know, he's funny about which things he'll see, you know, he sort of picks out his thing that he looks appealing to him and he doesn't really track the overall fandom, that kind of thing. I'm gonna try to stick this thing up again. I'm going to have to find a way to get that guy to stay in the ground. This is my little solar lamp at the end of the driveway. Now that I'm in wander round mode, I'm just wandering. So he uh oh, I was saying about you know, so we you know it's funny he because he didn't really realize that there was like an overall arc because I think he just doesn't pay that much attention. He kind of watches for the single movie experience. So anyway, we watched Infinity War, which was free on Netflix, hooray, on Friday and Saturday nights, because we didn't make it all the way through. It started a little late. And so now he's all rev to go see Endgame. So once we finished it, he was like, wow, and I said, Yeah, you understand why everyone was so upset by how it ended, and why everyone's dying to go see the next one and find out what happens. I call it a cliffhanger, except that it wasn't presented as a cliffhanger. It was presented as well, this is a spoiler if you don't want to know, cover your ears for a moment. It was presented as that they lost. So that was the end of the spoilers. And so we're excited to see what they do, and from what everyone's saying, the next one's pretty wonderful. So that'll be a fun treat this afternoon. This morning I am going to be working on the fate of the Tala. Starting in on that book. Have to get my head back in that world. Fortunately, um I know which character I'm writing from, and it's uh she'll be pretty easy for me to slip into. I don't know how long I'm gonna be able to keep it a secret, whose point of view it's from. I kind of want to keep it a secret until it comes out. But I don't know if I'll be able to, especially because I tend to blab things on here. A few people know. But overall, it's a secret. Secret, secret. So let's see, what else do I have to tell you all? Oh, well, we could talk about Game of Thrones, which I know now that's terribly spoilery. So yeah, um, if you don't want to hear Game of Thrones spoilers from the uh episode three, go ahead and tune, tune out and come back tomorrow. Bye, bye. So, the Battle of Winterfell. I don't know, you guys. I know a lot of people loved it. I know a lot of people love the whole thing with Arya at the end. I already saw the the memes with Arya on the Iron Throne and saying, What do we say to the god of death? Which is cool. I mean, I hope that's very cool. But I don't know. I was really um I'm still not getting the reasoning behind this season. The story just does not feel as tight to me. It's um I mean, I thought that was one of the worst planned battles I'd ever seen or heard of. I mean, what was their strategy? They just sort of fling the entire Dothraki horde into the night at the whites, and I don't know what they expected to have happen. Uh, you know, they didn't start the didn't set the trench on fire till later. Well, what was up with that? Why not have the trench on fire to begin with? Why not have a number of trenches? I mean, they had time to prepare, right? Why not take the dragons out, flame the front lines of the whites, and soften them up for the Dothraki? Why not focus the entire battle on the Night King, on getting the Night King? But you know, it was one of those things where the battle was not set up to make strategic sense. It was entirely set up to make dramatic sense. It was all about the story. And so, you know, the Dothraki horde being pretty much extinguished at the very beginning of the battle is supposed to, you know, make us feel the hopelessness of the battle. And then, you know, the whole John and Daenerys and the dragons fighting by Syrian and the Ninth King. You know, that's supposed to be uh, you know, sort of that whole mono-imano dramatic, now it's personal fight. But it didn't make any strategic sense. And with Arya killing the Ninth King at the end, um, you know, I mean, it was cool. I loved the whole thing where, you know, like she used her skills, that was great, you know, and he stopped her initial strike and she followed up with the second, and that was cool too. But I didn't understand why it was so easy for her. Uh I didn't understand why, you know, no one else could have done that. Um you know, why didn't they give the Dothraki Horde all dragonglass tipped weapons to go? I don't know. It just seemed uh it was it was definitely riveting and exhausting, you know, and it was like now it's officially the longest battle scene ever filmed and everything, and I think they wanted to go for those records. And I, you know, apparently I'm in the minority because other people seem to be very excited about it. But um yeah, after having spent a bunch of time trying to figure out how to do my battle strategy and the fiery citadel and so forth, I was like, oh well, you know, apparently you don't need a battle strategy. Though I think it's different for books. And it's also different for a long-running series right now. I mean, everybody just really wants the big excitement of the of the story. So yeah, we have um lost some people now. Not that many, though. And you know, we're at midpoint. There's three more episodes for the sea midpoint of the season. So three more episodes to go now. You know, so we know it's uh David said after it was done, he said, Well, what the heck was Braun doing when he went off being the three-eyed raven and had the ravens flying around and everything. It's like, yeah, you know, what was he doing? Nothing very useful. So that's why I think you know, we're far from over. It's not gonna be three episodes of battling Circe. I could be wrong, but I doubt that's all there is to it. You know, when heck, if it was that easy, we could have just sent Arya against the Night King ages ago and had done, right? So But it was funny, because like throughout that whole battle scene, we were like, why are they why are they meeting force against force when they know that they're facing an overwhelming force? Why weren't that why wasn't the whole strategy focused on luring in the Night King and killing him since he clearly powered everyone? Oh, and then the other thing was is why did everybody forget that the dead were going to rise up and fight against them? I mean, they all knew that. Most most everyone who had been part of that was at least semi-aware that that would happen. Certainly Jon Snow knew that, and he was at least half in command. So that should have been, you know, if I'd been in command, that would have been like one of the first things we talked about. You know, it's like, okay, as soon as somebody dies, you gotta dump them into the fire. You gotta have some something ready to to burn them to ash because they're gonna rise up behind you. But everyone conveniently forgot about that for dramatic purposes, too. So I don't know. I'm probably overthinking it. But hey, that's my job, right? So I'm gonna get to work. Hope you all have a wonderful week. Happy birthday, Sarah, darling. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye bye.