OUAT 3.1 - "the Heart of the Truest Believer"

Hello folks. I seem to be on a "have a headache every Sunday" schedule, so if my reviews are a little late while we get those under control, please excuse me!

Spoiler alert!

Well. Here we are again. After a long summer of anticipation, we pick up right where we left off... a pirate, a prince, a villian, a queen, a princess and a mother forming an unlikely alliance as the Jolly Roger sails into a portal... while Henry is delivered to the Shadow and Neal is discovered by some old friends.

We get one single flashback in this episode, which isn't a bad thing as the episode is already jumping between three - no, four - plotlines. And the solitary flashback is a good one - the moment of Henry's birth (with some ominous magical light flickering). The look on Emma's face when she resolutely kept her eyes trained away from Henry... heartbreaking.

And then forwards into the future, where Emma has embraced her role as mother wholeheartedly, even if (as Rumple points out) she isn't ready to be 'the truest believer.' She does however place her trust in her family's love for her by diving into the ocean to quell a storm. She knows that her parents will not hesitate to save her, and this is, for her, the biggest leap of faith we've seen her take yet. Mostly good scenes (getting Neal's Sword! Regina being sassy! Snow punching Regina! Mermaids!) although the whole sailing-over-the-wave montage was... laughably over the top.

Meanwhile Greg and Tamara meet quick ends on the Island of Neverland, which is having more and more in common with a certain island in another show inhabited by a shadowy monster... I'm not 100% certain that Greg is out of the picture, however. His body is dead but his shadow spirit might still come into play.

Henry is all of the awesome in this episode, making friends with a friendly lost boy... who looks just a little too much like Peter Pan... suspicions that are proved right when he reveals his true identity at the end. But what does he want with Henry? Why is he so evil? And what are we going to do with the hordes of newly awakened fangirls?

We only get a handful of scenes with Rumplestiltskin, but he is utterly brilliant in them. Turns out, he's been to Neverland before, and there's painful memories waiting for him there.

Meanwhile over in the Enchanted Forest, Neal wakes up to find Mulan, Aurora, and the mysteriously rescued/aliveagainbutnotazombieasfarasweknow Prince Phillip. Aurora tries to contact Snow via the dreamworld but has no luck, whereas Mulan takes Neal to his father's abandoned castle where they find magical aid and a plucky new outlaw friend. Who is enjoying the Neal/Mulan bromance? Yes, that's right, "Bro"mance. I refuse to accept a romantic pairing there yet. I'm 100% Neal/Emma all the way. Loving the new casting and slight writing change to Robin Hood. Looks like he's going to be a properly fun character, which we desperately need as we begin this obviously darker season.

Speaking of darker... I'm really not sure what to think of this Neverland. It's not at all the land I've adored since childhood, and I'm curious to see whether it was once the happy place of a celebration of imagination, or if it has always been this dark.

Invites are out!

 I have been working insanely hard on the wedding invitations for the past month. Well, over that, actually. I started designing them almost as soon as we got engaged, and we've been working on the guest list just as long. There are still a few addresses I am tracking down so a few invites will be shipped off later, but the majority of them went to the post office yesterday.

We opted for a simple package. The main invite (the front is to your left) is a single sheet, with the information on the backside. Anything we couldn't fit nicely there is on the wedding website, address included in the invite. 

The RSVP postcard (view front below) includes the meal choices, and is already addressed and stamped. We debated whether to have cards at all, but then I got a good deal on them, and once we had them we knew we'd get better responses if we stamped them. So far I've gotten back four responses from my hand-delivered efforts. Pretty fun to get them in the mail! 

My only concern has been making sure that everyone really does reply. I've done my best with the wording both on the RSVP card and the website to make it clear that we need a definite reply or there will not be food. I've heard horror stories about people showing up with out RSVPing, or RSVPing and then not showing up. With how much a plate costs at a wedding these days, even four unclaimed plates is a tragic waste of money. And I've been working so hard to be economical with everything!

(The pink is not showing up 100% color true here... it's a color called guava, which is close to coral, and I am utterly in love with it.)

Also on the wedding front, I went shopping with my grandmother and mom this week to pick out their ensembles for the wedding. I'm terribly excited about what we found for them... very Downton Abbey. I kept saying that we were the Dowager Countess, Lady Cora and Lady Mary. It was pretty fun.

Downton Abbey is BACK! Or not? Where do you live...?

Downton is BACK! Well, overseas, that is. Tragically PBS has once again decided NOT to air the show simultaneously in the US, and it'll be January before most Americans see it.

Because the show has a huge following, a great many of whom live most of their lives outside the computer and therefore don't even know that the show airs earlier in the UK than the US. Which is why PBS can delay the airings and claim that it is still highly successful. Because our moms and grandparents and aunties don't watch it until they can see it properly on Masterpiece Theater. But there is still a large contingent of those who spend a lot of time online who are given the conundrum of whether to wait and watch it on the (relative) big screen and likely have the whole thing spoiled on tumblr, or whether to try to find another way to watch it online. If you're in this group, I highly encourage you to contact one or all of the following and express your frustration:

Producer: WGBH
One Guest Street
Boston, MA 02135
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/feedback/
http://www.pbs.org/about/contact/viewer-services/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/feedback/index.html

The Nine Tailors

My copy of this book had nothing about churches or bells on the cover, so you can forgive me for thinking it might have something to do with sewing. I mean, it's Dorothy Sayers and it's a Peter Wimsey mystery, but the word "Tailor" on the cover is certainly what made me choose to purchase this title over any of the others in the store.

It has nothing to do with tailors. Or sewing. Although clothes do figure rather prominently in unraveling the mystery.

Rather "The Nine Tailors" refers to the old English practice of ringing out the "Tailor" bell nine times when a man passes away. When an anonymous corpse is discovered in someone else's grave, a sleepy country village has to ring the bells for this stranger, and call on Lord Peter to solve a murder that grows more sinister with every turn.

Still, I found the novel to be deeply intriguing despite the lack of needles and chalk. I know very little about the English art of bell ringing and the book made the whole mathematical music deeply intriguing.

And the mystery! While I figured out one important aspect very early on, there were still plenty of other pieces to be surprised with. Plus, like any Sayers novel, the mystery is but the framework in which an investigation of human nature is launched.

The Care and Keeping of Deaf Ears

I went in for my semi-annual hearing check-up last week. Now that I'm an adult and my hearing hasn't changed in years, I don't have to go in unless there is a problem. When I was a child I had to go multiple times a year... which wasn't fun at all.  It's still not super fun, but now I at least understand the importance of it all. 

For those of you who don't know, I'm deaf. It's a genetic thing that only showed up in one person of my generation - me. I started loosing my hearing when I was about four, and it got progressively worse until I was about seven. I spent a lot of my childhood in audiologist offices taking hearing tests and getting new earmolds made and trying out new hearing aids.

I've written more about what it means for me to be deaf here. This post is specifically about hearing aids and levels of hearing.

This is the hearing aid from my left ear. It is nine years old and by today's standards, it is quite large. Believe it or not, my aids before these were even larger... when I got these I couldn't believe how small they were! And my very first power aids had a power box that I had to wear in a pouch on my waist, and it had cords that went up to my ears. NOT what a six-year-old wants to be wearing.

The earmolds are soft. I'm not sure if they're silicone or something similar, but they're about four years old and will need to be replaced soon. The tubes are new - tubes shrink up and get hard so you have to replace them every year or so. My old tubes were so bad that I was actually loosing sound. As soon as I got these new ones in, I realized that there were a lot of high pitched sounds I hadn't been hearing for months.

One battery lasts for 7-10 days. They cost about $1 each.

My hearing aids cannot be exposed to water. I have to be very careful to dry my hair, or cover my ears if I'm out in the rain.

The aids get my hearing up close to but not at normal level. I can actually hear most sounds with them (except the last few notes on the piano), but I don't hear the very high ones normally. I also have audio processing issues, which is why I rely so heavily on lipreading. Many many people don't realize that I'm deaf unless they recognize my slight accent - this is because with lipreading I get 94% of what's being said at a reasonable distance (listening to a pastor, for instance, is very different, and forget television). Without being able to lipread, I only get 20% of what is being said. Even though I can hear a lot of the sounds, my brain just can't go fast enough to keep up. No wonder my eyes get tired!

Sleepy Hollow

I've been simultaneously intrigued and turned off by the lead-up to Sleepy Hollow's pilot release last night. Ichabod Crane does a Rip-van-Wrinkle and ends up in the 21st Century battling the horsemen of the Apocalypse? That could go either really well or really bad, and it's more likely to go bad.

However, after seeing some gifs on Tumblr, I was drawn in by the acting of Tom Mison as Ichabod and decided to give the show a try. And while there is certainly room for a lot to go wrong with this premise, the writing and acting draws the viewer in and keeps them there.

Not surprising, it's a creepy show. I watched in on Hulu during lunch today, but I don't think I'd be nearly so interested in it if I'd been creeped out of my socks at 9 at night. There's a lot of talk of the supernatural, and a coven of witches (one apparently was masquerading as a reverend) is due to play a big role which is undoubtedly going to result in a lot of Christians blacklisting the show. And they might be right. It's too early to tell whether the mixed up theology is going to be interesting or offensive... but at this point I'd say this is a show to keep an eye on, if only because lead characters Ichabod and Abbie are so enjoyable to watch.

Fall TV Shows - 2013

Oh it's a delicious sense of anticipation that fills me as I realize it's only a week until the fall television season starts!!! What shows are you looking forwards to watching?

Here's my watchlist, which I've set up over at TV Guide to keep track of what's airing when!

Old Favorites Returning
Downton Abbey (UK only) 9/22
How I Met Your Mother 9/23
Castle 9/23
Modern Family 9/25
Parenthood 9/26
Big Bang Theory 9/26
Once Upon a Time 9/29
Raising Hope 11/8

New Potentials
Sleepy Hollow 9/16
Agents of SHIELD 9/24
Once Upon a Time in Wonderland 10/10
Reign 10/10
Dracula 10/25