Monday, December 16, 2019
Things That Are Making Me Happy
Went to see TOO HOT TO HANDEL at the Detroit Opera House, a yearly event where The Messiah is reinterpreted as a jazz composition. Always fun and we go to the dress rehearsal with all the Detroit school children and senior citizens. So lucky to have friends willing to take me along despite my being out of their way.
Went to see RICHARD JEWEL, about the security guard suspected in the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Very good acting but it really felt like a movie done on the cheap. There are far better crime dramas on TV now. This was with a group of people who have been seeing a movie once a month for ten years. A really nice time despite the movie being mediocre.
Reading THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Of course, it is terrific.Tried FIVE DAYS MISSING, but could not get into the writing style.
Went to visit a friend who has been ill practically as long as I have known her (20 years) with breast cancer. She remains upbeat, involved, and a real hero to me. I am sure it is partly that spirit that has kept her going this lone.
Out to dinner with six friends. A yearly tradition but this year without Phil. Not really able to enjoy it.
Very difficult Christmas shopping this year. I had to order practically all of it online. Most of it is okay but I'd rather see it before buying it.
Watched another season of LINE OF DUTY. Finished MRS. MAISEL. Finished Season One of Victoria. Tuned back into EVIL and was shocked at how scary and evil it is. And on a network!
What about you?
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Didn't see any movies this week. Passed on Richard Jewell.I guess Eastwood liked the story because of the parallels to Donald Trump. i.e Innocent man victimized by the media and FBI. Nothing else I wanted to see. Uncut Gems is on my radar for this week. I'll probably end up seeing the new Star Wars for lack of anything else. Cats I'll avoid like the plague. The advance word is not very good on it. They went back and did some reshooting and editing after bad audience response to the original trailer.
Finished watching The Man in the High Castle. Ended okay. Not the best season of the series. Loved Watchmen on HBO.
Finished The Painted Bird. Read the new Alan Furst which was a real letdown. Not only has he gone to the same well too many times it just is not very well written. Now reading Night Watch. The third in a series by David Taylor. I liked the first too. The main character is a NYC cop in the mid 1950's.
Love the new The Who album. Their best work since Who's Next and Quadrophenia.
With ten grandkids Christmas can be a nightmare. I just give them each $20. I don't do anything on Christmas day. My oldest daughter will have the family over on the 27th this year. It is impossible to get everyone together on Christmas day.
Diane and I stayed up to watch the Buffalo Bills defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers to qualify for the Playoffs. The Bills haven't been a 10-win team since 1999!
Patrick and Katie will be arriving this weekend so Diane is busy prepping the house for their arrival. I need to remove the stacks of books from "Patrick's Room" and assist with menu planning. But the Christmas tree is up and there's a little snow on the ground.
We have tickets for the Star Wars movie, too!
I can imagine how difficult the holiday season is for you without Phil. You are doing amazingly well, really! Hang in there. Florida will be a good change.
Not much doing in the cold this week but reading and television. Tomorrow night is the third year for us seeing Steve Earle & the Dukes do a benefit concert for his autistic son's school. It's at Town Hall, where we've been going a lot lately. But it's a perfect example of why we don't like to go to shows or concerts this time of the year - having to wear winter coats, sweaters, scarves, gloves, etc. Holding them on your lap is a pain.
We're trying to finish up the series we're watching before leaving for Florida (it's less than three weeks away!). We're closing in on MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and THE CROWN and SLINGS & ARROWS (series two), finished WATCHMEN last night. We watched season two of THE RESIDENT. But we've also started the four part THE GREAT FIRE (of London, 1666) on PBS (Long Island's Channel 21 gets interesting shows that our Channel 13 often doesn't), which is OK so far but has a very different picture of Samuel Pepys as an intimate of the King, playing croquet with him and telling him he is bankrupting the country! As if. We've also started the five part HBO series CHERNOBYL after reading a couple of interesting things about it. Haven't started MRS. MAISEL yet.
And we actually watched a couple of movies. After seeing THE IRISHMAN last week, we watched MARRIAGE STORY this week. Jackie preferred it to the former. I didn't. And we finally saw last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, GREEN BOOK. Better than I'd expected, but I would still vote for ROMA.
Very glad you enjoyed the production at the Detroit Opera House. It sounds great. And as far as The Spy... goes, it's hard to go wrong with le Carré...
The whole Richard Jewell saga seemed like a fubar beyond all fubars. It's a shame his life ended as it did. Christina attended the Olympics that year but luckily she was nowhere near the explosion.
Our Christmas "tree" is up, a small rosemary tree/bush that smells great, all decked out with lights and candy canes.
After four long tuba-less Christmases, we got to a Florida Tuba Christmas. It was held about an hour and a half away, through major road reconstruction, and on a gated up-scale community. We needed a visitor's pass to get in. And it was held outside (something we were not told) and everyone had to bring their own chairs. That was the bad. The good was the enthusiasm of the players and the crowd. the kids dancing to the m usic, and the general air of happiness and festivity.
Christina's mother-in-law had a recurrence of her breast cancer and had to go through a double mastectomy. Walt drove up to Virginia to be with his parents. The operation was evidently successful and she was home the next day. Time will tell but we're hopeful and crossing our fingers.
Jack had a second-grade project examining his cultural heritage. Unfortunately he has none. We decided to make him Irish and Kitty and Christina help him organize it. "That little green thing with three bumps is a shamrock. Can you say that? Jack. SHAM ROCK."
A lot of graphic novels and short stories this week. Finished the second season of Castle Rock (I liked it; Kitty was so-so) and wtched or re-watched a number of episodes of SILENT WITNESS.
Have a fantastic week, Patti!
Oh, how I love hearing from all of you. Not sure I will get this up next Monday. But if not have a happy holiday.
Jerry, my wife keeps trying to get our sons - who both play tuba - to go to a nearby tuba Christmas event but they never bite.
I took seven Boy Scouts 2.5 hours North to a cabin East of Black River Falls, WI. I didn't lose my patience once. I do wonder how one of those kids has not done something yet to get himself killed or maimed. -21 on Sunday morning but with no wind and it was actually pretty nice out.
Boy #1's holiday concert was last week. I was impressed by how well each band and orchestra played. Boy #1 played an introductory solo on his standing bass - something he never told us was planned.
Damn, you lead a classic American life, Gerard.
Glad to see this post up, and I encourage you to do another next week. Please.
We continue to see a movie on DVD via Netflix, this week it was THE POST, which we both thought was very good indeed. Excellent cast, engaging story. Hanks is such a good actor. There were a couple of other movies we thought of watching, but football interfered, so we DVR'd them: LITTLE WOMEN and... I forget the other. Maybe we'll watch them this week.
I bought a few back issues of ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE that I didn't have, and I'been reading one of those now and then, which is both enjoyable and for me, educational.
As you know, I'm having, starting mid last week, problems posting comments on many eBlogger blogs. This, thankfully, isn't one of them, but I miss commenting on some of the others, especially Tracy's BITTER TEA AND MYSTERY. Drat.
Barbara says she has wrapped all the gifts (even mine to her), so that's done. We have a small artificial (I don't use the word "fake" since POTIS use of it) tree which is lit and decorated. The cat thinks it's his.
We'll have heavy rain starting tomorrow, they say 5 inches in three days. Our street drain is clear, everything is good, but we'll get a soaking. Sure glad we put in new gutters last Spring.
Oh, and we watched a two-hour episode of VERA on DVD from the library. It was episode 1 and I think they will get better.
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