Saturday, January 22, 2022

Greetings from My Chilly Deck

Quickie, we're having a Benedict Cumberbatch night -- first The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, which is both whimsical and sad -- not sure how I feel about nascent schizophrenia being portrayed as the former but since the movie is about his artistic gifts and how they're connected to his unconventionality, I guess it gets a pass -- then The Power of the Dog, which has had waaaay too many onscreen animal deaths and I'm a little puzzled by all the acclaim it's gotten because there seems to be a direct link between being gay and being a psychopath (the Serious Critics all claim it's being in the closet that's toxic, but the character who's least in the closet and barely attempting performative machismo is the one who's the most terrifying). 

It was otherwise a very cold, fairly uneventful Friday. I took photos of the massive (like 3x7) family tree that Paul's mother had printed out of her father's Swedish family and tried to piece them together into a digital file, then went looking online to see if I could find the same records -- her account at Ancestry.com hadn't been used for so long that none of her information was saved -- and wound up in the maze at WikiTree looking at various records containing my own family members, then rereading the sections of my great uncle's book with the names of his grandparents. We took a walk in the feels-like-15-degrees wind chill before dinner. Here are some of the cardinals who've been visiting our deck, competing with squirrels for birdseed: 

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