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howeirdThe temps got up to around 90° in my neck of the woods today, but the apartment does not get any direct sunlight, so out on the patio it was only about 82, and inside it was mostly 76 since that's when the air conditioner kicks in. It is like boot camp for Thailand. Minus the humidity.
Slept till 9:30, eventually walked a few blocks to the nearest manicure place and my timing was perfect, got my nails done right away, even though only one person was working. Nice little place, probably they have two people doing nails/pedicures and one or two doing hair during the week. I think it's called Touch of Silk. Manicurist was a very nice middle-aged Chinese-Vietnamese lady who kept up a conversation through the whole time. I'll be back.
Back home, tried the patio for a while but it was too hot. As usual, most of the traffic was families with kids. Boring. Channel surfed and found Ghostbusters II on Bravo, which IO watched because a friend of mine was the person inside Slimer's suit. Funny, at the time I tuned in, the ghostbusters were climbing out of the sewer covered in slime, and Bravo put up one of their annoying little promo overlays which said "Real Housewives of NYC get some unexpected visitors". LOL. I managed to record that, and Slimer's last 3-second appearance as a bus driver.
Vacuumed, and also shampooed some trouble spots. There is an area I spilled some red Crystal Light or similar house brand drink, and nothing is getting it out.
Made a banana smoothie, this time remembered that the malted milk was the one on the left, the one on the right is Parmesan.
Looked up an article I did in 1974 for the Astoria, OR paper at the request of a friend (via her husband on FB), found the negatives for the photos which went with it and scanned them in with my neat little Wolverine hand-held film scanner. It does a great job, except it expects store-bought film where the gaps between each image line up with the notches on its feeder. But these were hand cut from 100-foot rolls so some of the photos needed the ugly black line cut off. Posted them on FB, instantly got comments from several of her hubby's friends.
At about 6:30 I headed to Palo Alto, got to the theater sooner than I expected, waited in the park for the box office to open and was happy to find they did have a ticket reserved for me. The back to the park with my Kindle. Am now reading Hugo nominee with the unlikely name of The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees By E. Lily Yu. I gave up, sadly, on Mary Robinette Kowal's Kiss Me Twice. Two problems - the mobi formatting was annoying (top and bottom headers are in line with the text) and pdf formatting was unreadable on the Kindle (6 point type. Trying to expand it made the type bigger, but cut off at the width of the screen). Bigger problem is it is awkward, as if she was writing a detective story as a class assignment. The beautiful flow she had in last year's winning story is just not there in this one. Sigh.
Back to the theater, took my seat, and people were still arriving at 8:05. My row was full, as were the rows in front and behind me. Most of the side section seats were empty, as well as the last five or six rows. I made a note to move at halftime.
The play is called The Lieutenant of Inishire, and according to the director's notes, it is an attempt to show through over-the-top humor the insanity of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Had this been produced during the bombings and assorted bloodshed and other nastiness, it might have had a point, but these many years after everything is peaceful, it is just another case of beating a dead horse. And poorly.
I did not enjoy the play at all. Had I been able to understand the words, I may have laughed once or twice, but the cast all talked far too quickly, with way too thick an accent, and mostly talked upstage. It also helps it one opens one's mouth when one speaks.
The first scene takes place in a humble Irish home. The second in a torture chamber, with a victim hanging upside down from his ankles, stripped to the waist, bleeding from under his pants. Several audience members gasped and looked away. This scene has what I took to be light banter between the torturer and the victim, but as I could rarely understand either of them, all I saw was a person hanging upside-down for far too long. I think at one point he was given a choice of which nipple would be cut off, but I'm not sure.
A couple of scenes later, the woman sitting next to me started to snore.
Half the audience did not come back for Act II. As he left, a man in the row behind me said there was still time to watch the baseball game on TV.
The only reason I did not leave is after the play was free food. The play just got worse and worse, in thoroughly predictable ways, except for the next-to-final twist at the end, which I would bet a case of Guiness was thrown in by the author after the play was finished, when he showed it down at the pub to his drunken buddies. The twist at the very end was the expected punchline of the shaggy dog story which the play is.
The sets were okay, scene changes were marred by too-loud, too-cacophonous metalicized Irish folk tunes.
The free food was quite good. I only saw one person from Jeckyl & Hyde (my free ticket was thanks for being in that show earlier this season). Some of the conversation was amusing. One man pointed out that one of next year's offerings, Miss Saigon, is a musical. As if this was unknown previously. But it did make me think that there should be a rip-off musical, Donald Trump's Miss Saigon Universe - The Musical!
Home, unpacked the eBay-bought VCR, and it did not work. It fired up okay, but would not play a tape, fast forward or rewind for more than 3 seconds, and when I started to open it up to see what was going on I didn't - when I saw that someone who did not know how to had already done so, bending one metal part and breaking off a plastic catch. So I sent a nastygram to the seller, and bought one from a repair shop.
Plans for tomorrow:
Take pictures of my eyes
MIB3 - matinée if I wake up in time (not a problem, 3D is at 12:20)
Spend some time at Starbucks
Take the camera out for some GPS testing.
Move two boxes out of the bedroom. One goes into the computer room and gets sorted, the other will probably get dumped. Very heavy metal sections which snap together with plastic connectors, which I stupidly threw away when I moved.
Get a massage, if it cools down.
Slept till 9:30, eventually walked a few blocks to the nearest manicure place and my timing was perfect, got my nails done right away, even though only one person was working. Nice little place, probably they have two people doing nails/pedicures and one or two doing hair during the week. I think it's called Touch of Silk. Manicurist was a very nice middle-aged Chinese-Vietnamese lady who kept up a conversation through the whole time. I'll be back.
Back home, tried the patio for a while but it was too hot. As usual, most of the traffic was families with kids. Boring. Channel surfed and found Ghostbusters II on Bravo, which IO watched because a friend of mine was the person inside Slimer's suit. Funny, at the time I tuned in, the ghostbusters were climbing out of the sewer covered in slime, and Bravo put up one of their annoying little promo overlays which said "Real Housewives of NYC get some unexpected visitors". LOL. I managed to record that, and Slimer's last 3-second appearance as a bus driver.
Vacuumed, and also shampooed some trouble spots. There is an area I spilled some red Crystal Light or similar house brand drink, and nothing is getting it out.
Made a banana smoothie, this time remembered that the malted milk was the one on the left, the one on the right is Parmesan.
Looked up an article I did in 1974 for the Astoria, OR paper at the request of a friend (via her husband on FB), found the negatives for the photos which went with it and scanned them in with my neat little Wolverine hand-held film scanner. It does a great job, except it expects store-bought film where the gaps between each image line up with the notches on its feeder. But these were hand cut from 100-foot rolls so some of the photos needed the ugly black line cut off. Posted them on FB, instantly got comments from several of her hubby's friends.
At about 6:30 I headed to Palo Alto, got to the theater sooner than I expected, waited in the park for the box office to open and was happy to find they did have a ticket reserved for me. The back to the park with my Kindle. Am now reading Hugo nominee with the unlikely name of The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees By E. Lily Yu. I gave up, sadly, on Mary Robinette Kowal's Kiss Me Twice. Two problems - the mobi formatting was annoying (top and bottom headers are in line with the text) and pdf formatting was unreadable on the Kindle (6 point type. Trying to expand it made the type bigger, but cut off at the width of the screen). Bigger problem is it is awkward, as if she was writing a detective story as a class assignment. The beautiful flow she had in last year's winning story is just not there in this one. Sigh.
Back to the theater, took my seat, and people were still arriving at 8:05. My row was full, as were the rows in front and behind me. Most of the side section seats were empty, as well as the last five or six rows. I made a note to move at halftime.
The play is called The Lieutenant of Inishire, and according to the director's notes, it is an attempt to show through over-the-top humor the insanity of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Had this been produced during the bombings and assorted bloodshed and other nastiness, it might have had a point, but these many years after everything is peaceful, it is just another case of beating a dead horse. And poorly.
I did not enjoy the play at all. Had I been able to understand the words, I may have laughed once or twice, but the cast all talked far too quickly, with way too thick an accent, and mostly talked upstage. It also helps it one opens one's mouth when one speaks.
The first scene takes place in a humble Irish home. The second in a torture chamber, with a victim hanging upside down from his ankles, stripped to the waist, bleeding from under his pants. Several audience members gasped and looked away. This scene has what I took to be light banter between the torturer and the victim, but as I could rarely understand either of them, all I saw was a person hanging upside-down for far too long. I think at one point he was given a choice of which nipple would be cut off, but I'm not sure.
A couple of scenes later, the woman sitting next to me started to snore.
Half the audience did not come back for Act II. As he left, a man in the row behind me said there was still time to watch the baseball game on TV.
The only reason I did not leave is after the play was free food. The play just got worse and worse, in thoroughly predictable ways, except for the next-to-final twist at the end, which I would bet a case of Guiness was thrown in by the author after the play was finished, when he showed it down at the pub to his drunken buddies. The twist at the very end was the expected punchline of the shaggy dog story which the play is.
The sets were okay, scene changes were marred by too-loud, too-cacophonous metalicized Irish folk tunes.
The free food was quite good. I only saw one person from Jeckyl & Hyde (my free ticket was thanks for being in that show earlier this season). Some of the conversation was amusing. One man pointed out that one of next year's offerings, Miss Saigon, is a musical. As if this was unknown previously. But it did make me think that there should be a rip-off musical, Donald Trump's Miss Saigon Universe - The Musical!
Home, unpacked the eBay-bought VCR, and it did not work. It fired up okay, but would not play a tape, fast forward or rewind for more than 3 seconds, and when I started to open it up to see what was going on I didn't - when I saw that someone who did not know how to had already done so, bending one metal part and breaking off a plastic catch. So I sent a nastygram to the seller, and bought one from a repair shop.
Plans for tomorrow:
Take pictures of my eyes
MIB3 - matinée if I wake up in time (not a problem, 3D is at 12:20)
Spend some time at Starbucks
Take the camera out for some GPS testing.
Move two boxes out of the bedroom. One goes into the computer room and gets sorted, the other will probably get dumped. Very heavy metal sections which snap together with plastic connectors, which I stupidly threw away when I moved.
Get a massage, if it cools down.
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