Greetings from Smoky Massachusetts

Our plan for Saturday was to meet Adam and Haley to pick blueberries early, before the afternoon storms arrived, but the air quality had dropped into the unhealthy range by mid-morning from the Canadian wildfires, so instead we picked up bagels and brought them to Adam and Haley's house to share. We hung out for a while chatting afterward, then drove home in the late afternoon between bouts of heavy rain, which unfortunately did not improve the air quality; it's supposed to be poor-to-unhealthy through Tuesday. 

 

The last photo above is from yesterday when we could actually see the disc of the sun, though it was a weird orange circle in the smoke; we never saw the sun through the clouds today. When we got home, we watched the Orioles extra-innings win over Houston and the last few outs of the Red Sox victory over Tampa Bay, and we're spending the evening watching Avatar: Fire and Ash, which seems to be exactly the same plot and rhythm and characters as The Way of Water only with more, you know, fire and ash.

Greetings from Tai Ceti

Quick post because I'm watching Project Hail Mary and it's as good as everyone told me it was. I talked to my college roommate in the morning, my high school friends after lunch, and my fannish friends in the late afternoon when we watched the end of season two of Good Omens together. 

Paul and I took a walk, ran into our neighbors to chat, and ate dinner before the movie. I have a friend who's having surgery as I type this, so I'm distracted, but hopefully I'll have good news about her tomorrow. Here are the giant anteaters at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence:

Greetings from Blackstone

Another night running late because of The Vampire Lestat, which again had me screaming three seconds in ("Picture the dingy seat of the Lioncourt family at the fag end of a thousand years of aristocratic decline") even before it got to the Oedipiphany ("You are being very patient regarding the vampire incest factor"). Lestat and Gabriella hunting together remind me of the beginning of The Hunger with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, and this week I feel he's more Jim Morrison than Iggy Pop. And Twilight references -- baseball! Grace Jones in Gucci! "Va te faire foutre!" So much love! 

It was otherwise another gorgeous warm day and we spent most of it out, starting at the Stanley Woolen Mill at the Blackstone River and Canal Heritage State Park. The mill building now has an antique shop and the canal trail has frogs, turtles, at least one snake, many birds...it resembles the C&O Canal towpath. We stopped at West End Creamery for ice cream before heading to Purgatory State Chasm, where we climbed down into the gorge and hiked up onto the cliffs. Eventually we came home for sloppy joes and family Zoom. We missed much of the day's baseball, though we saw a bit before Lestat.

Greetings from New Britain

I got to spend a lot of Saturday in Connecticut, including lunch with Kristen at The Main Pub in Manchester, then a visit to the New Britain Museum of American Art, which Paul and I haven't visited since the 1990s when it was in the Landers House. The collection is much larger and there was a special exhibit on pop art, plus a display of the permanent collection's Faith Ringgold paintings.

 

We stopped at the Target in Manchester before driving home, seeing lots of azaleas and tulips in Connecticut that aren't blooming yet in Worcester. We just finished watching Waterworld, which somehow neither of us had seen before; it has some distinct flaws, but it's a lot more enjoyable than I was always led to believe, and has two major female characters who are more interesting than Kevin Costner.

Greetings for an Early Birthday

After spending the morning putting together a bookcase and unpacking books on it, we had a quick lunch and drove to Fitchburg to meet Adam, Haley, Hildy, Tom, Solveig, and Sagar. We went to Hollis Hills Farm's Maple Season, where the sugar experts were demonstrating the evaporator and giving out samples of maple syrup both straight from the device and poured over snow to create taffy candy. Then, since it was quite rainy, we went to the Fitchburg Art Museum, which has over 500 pieces of art from the museum's permanent collection on display as well as a couple of exhibits by local artists.

We stopped at the gourmet and garden store Mill No. 3 to get hot drinks and look at the decorations, then went back to Adam's house, where we ate some of the fabulous bread he picked up there and chatted with the extended family, who had brought Paul Red Sox-themed birthday presents. He wanted Friendly's for his birthday dinner -- as a teenager he worked at the one in Norwood -- so since Haley is performing in a concert along with Hildy on his actual birthday, Haley and Adam took us out to the one in Leominster. When we got home, we watched Mercy, which has no originality but moves quickly! 

Lyrics for Tuesday and Nutcracker House

Waltz of the Flowers 

By Marvin Kahn and Mel Mandel 

See how the flowers dance,

Waltzing in time 'round the ballroom.

Each gardenia dancing with a rose,

Gently swaying while the music flows.

Every gold chrysanthemum

And geranium in full bloom.

See how the flowers dance,

Wonderf'ly gliding together.

Every tulip leads a violet,

While the pink petunias pirouette.

Daisies do a gentle jig

With each little sprig of heather.

Now they're whirling, and they're twirling.

Oh! What magic they're unfurling.

Stardust settles on their petals.

It's a marvelous sight.

May they dance all night.

And when the flowers dance,

Doesn't the world seem appealing?

Don't you hear the music of your heart?

Don't you think it's time for you to start

Treating everyone you know

To that special glow you're feeling?

Like the pretty flowers

In their sweet gentle peaceful bowers

Why don't we all devote our hours

To making other people happy, too?

-------- 

My Tuesday morning was about reading, washing my hair, and some bank-related chores online, then yogurt, granola, fruit and nuts for lunch. Then we went to Bella Vision so I could order new glasses; I had a prescription from a couple of months ago but my benefits hadn't kicked in yet, and now they have. We went for a short walk on a gorgeous chilly day and saw a couple of eagles, many mergansers, and a few geese and coots in the lake. 

My DS9 group watched "Profit and Loss" which I'd remembered as a pretty good Quark episode but had forgotten is also an important Garak episode. After that and dinner, was in the mood to watch Interstellar, and since it's been ages we did; I really enjoyed it, it remains quite unique among speculative science fiction movies and has some great performances. Some more photos of amazing Ballard Nutcracker House:

Greetings from Oz

We went this afternoon to see Wicked: For Good, which I enjoyed enormously -- I wasn't positive I would because I was never particularly a fan of Wicked until the first film, and the second act isn't as strong as the first. Stephen Schwartz wrote two new songs for the movie and "No Place Like Home" absolutely sold the movie for me (it's always been a very Jewish story but after a week of listening to antisemitic antizionist conspiracies, that song hit hard). For Good is also extremely queer; we're supposed to accept the love story between Elphaba and Fiyero, two actors I've seen kissing members of the same sex more often than not, but Glinda literally can't keep her hands off Elphaba. 

Like its predecessor, this Wicked is visually spectacular; some musicals aren't much improved by being put onscreen, as it ruins the intimacy of the theatrical experience without really contributing any magic only film can create (see: Camelot and Annie), yet this one is stunning and every scene seems to have been carefully reimagined. The costumes and visual effects are gorgeous to look at. I still wish the second act had a number that comes close to "Defying Gravity" but I think it was smart of the filmmakers not to try to do a full reprisal of that. "For Good" isn't the same kind of showstopper, it's too sad, but it's a beautiful song, and the singers do terrific justice to it. But why does weather goddess Morrible ever need a wizard?

 

We had bagels for dinner because we weren't very hungry after popcorn at the theater, then we watched American Folk, the movie in which Amber Rubarth and Joe Purdy drive across the US after 9/11 wrecks their flight plans; they're both enjoyable to watch and there's lots of music, but structurally it's single road trip movie you've ever seen and the dialogue's rather didactic. Now for some reason we've decided to watch the 2022 film of The Magic Flute, which I knew absolutely nothing about except a couple of cast members from the promo photos; it's a strange cross between Hogwarts and Mozart, but probably no stranger than the libretto of the Mozart opera!

Poem for Wednesday and Cat-Squirrel Chase

Squirrels 

By Nate Klug 

Something blurred, warmed

in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke

becoming tears;

but when you turned to look

the stoop was still, the pumpkin

and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk —

just a rattle

at the gutter and a sense

of curtains, somewhere, pulled.

Five of them later, scarfing the oak’s

black bole,

laying a dream of snakes.

Needy and reticent

at once, these squirrels in charred November

recall, in Virgil,

what it is to feel:

moods, half-moods,

swarming, then darting loose; obscure

hunches that refuse

to speak, but still expect

in some flash of   luck

to be revealed. The less you try

to notice them,

the more they will know of you.

-------- 

Other than catching up on election results (still no decision in the King County executive or Seattle mayor's race), I had a fairly typical Wednesday morning -- chat with two of my high school friends, some computer work -- followed by lunch and an hour of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with Kristen and Laurie. Then I had my annual dermatologist appointment; she did not like the look of the tiny recurring pimple on my upper lip and removed it, but otherwise said I was good to go for a year as long as I use sunblock every day on the backs of my hands, which I usually forget about. 

In honor of Guy Fawkes Night, we had bangers and mash for dinner. Then we watched a bit of Toledo's blow-out of Northern Illinois before putting on the live-action How To Train Your Dragon, which I enjoyed greatly -- a lot of that had to do with recognizing places in Northern Ireland and Iceland where it was filmed, from the Causeway Coast to Reynisfjara Beach. Now we're watching some second-season Twin Peaks. Here's the saga of a barn cat and Douglas squirrel we met at Farrel-McWhirter Park, which ended with me carrying the cat back to the farm so it couldn't keep chasing the poor squirrel: