Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Poem for Wednesday and Don Juan & Miguel

Written in a French Psalter
By Elizabeth Tudor


No crooked leg, no bleared eye,
No part deformed out of kind,
Nor yet so ugly half can be
As is the inward, suspicious mind.

--------

Tuesday made me grrrr. I was stuck at home since Paul took the van while the other one was in the shop. The estimate to repair the A/C -- whose evaporator and condenser are both leaking, requiring that the dashboard be taken apart to repair -- is nearly $3000, so rather than trying to deal with this now, we are going to try to get through the heat this week and then hope for no more hot weekdays until next spring, by which time we will hopefully have 1) found someone who can repair it for a third of that price, 2) won the lottery, or 3) decided the van is old and crotchety enough that we should get a newer, greener vehicle. The only good thing to come out of this is that the Chrysler place is next door to IHOP, so we had eggs, French toast, pancakes, hash browns, etc. for dinner when we went to pick up the van.

Otherwise, it was an uneventful day, since I was stuck at home. I did some reading and organized some computer files and updated my resume for a couple of different places, not that I am having any better luck than anyone else I know in that regard. Adam came home in a great mood because he had discovered that he can play with Photoshop CS5 in the school lab at lunchtime and he's allowed to print out photos he didn't specifically take for class in there, so he had printed some of his fractals, plus he got to go outside during class because they were using the school's film cameras to take nature photos. He went out to rollerblade with a friend and came back to tell me that Rose was home, so we went over to see the baby bird, who is pretty close to full-grown now but still an erratic flyer. Rose had tried to release Peeper in a nearby park and he kept coming back to land on her shoulder, so we are all thinking that he's probably going to be a backyard bird by choice and live off our feeders and expensive birdseed. He could do worse!

I liked this week's Warehouse 13 -- I like H.G. Wells a lot and at this point there are a lot more women than men who appear regularly on the show, which makes me quite happy, particularly since they're all smart and have toys like the Star Trek steampunk spinning time machine -- how come Sherlock can't be more like that, instead of retro in its outrageous sexism and contemporary in the viciousness of its serial killers? Admittedly Warehouse 13 is pretty hit or miss with its plots, but I really enjoy all the major characters.


One of our favorite acts at the Pennsylvania Renfaire is Don Juan and Miguel, here on the stage of the Globe Theatre.


During the portion of their show with whips, Don Juan performs with his daughter Esmeralda (a.k.a. Dakota Star Granados, real-life daughter of Jose Granados, who plays Don Juan).


Miguel (Doug Kondziolka) wanders into the audience before the show and at several points during it to flirt with women.


Though a Spanish prince, Don Juan expressed concern when a plane flew overhead that it might be Immigration - until he remembered he wasn't in Arizona.


Don Juan whipped dried pasta out of Miguel's hand and mouth...


...and challenged him to a duel to see whether Miguel had truly become a Renaissance man.


Then, blindfolded, Don Juan popped these "Smurf bladders" blindfolded, though Miguel insisted on a bigger one between his legs before they were finished.


Here are my father-in-law and Esmeralda.

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