27-Dec-99 Update
I wish I knew why I've been able to concentrate on work so much better recently. Maybe it's a question of getting more sleep. Whatever it is, I don't need so many distractions (read: looking at journals). The other side of the story is that I'm less interested in writing mine.
Continuing with our discovery that we can go to movies, we (and Anne) went to see Man On The Moon last Friday evening at the Circle. Sixty or eighty or a hundred years ago there were amusement parks at the ends of all the streetcar lines, and people would make a day excursion out of the city by riding to the end of the line and spending a day at Norumbega or Salem Willows. The Circle Cinema seems like that. It's at the end of the streetcar line down Beacon Street and across the street from the Reservoir stop on the Riverside line, right at the border between Boston and suburbia. We haven't dared to try driving to a movie there in years because parking is a problem, but it was Christmas eve. There were spaces in abundance and the theatre was only a quarter full.
If you want a review of the movie you'll have to look at Kymm's writeup. We all liked it, but I don't have much to say about it. I never watched Taxi and I don't think Arlene & I watched SNL regularly in those days.
Saturday (that's Christmas, of course) we went to Sue & Richard's for Christmas dinner and some exchanging of gifts. I played two games of three-handed pinochle with Richard and his father, who doesn't speak clearly any more but still keeps better track of the cards than I ever could. While we were playing cards, Arlene, Sue, Katherine, and a couple of Katherine's friends were playing a board game "Hare and Tortoise." In the original German it's "Hase und Igel", with pictures of hedgehogs instead of tortoises. We've never figured out that part of it. Is the German story about a hare and a hedgehog rather than a hare and a tortoise? But isn't it an Aesop's fable? At any rate, it requires a remarkably complex strategy for a board game. A further part of the hilarity comes from reading the chance cards in German.
Our present for Richard was a puzzle, Railroad Rush Hour. We all took turns doing the simplest fifteen or twenty puzzles, and then Richard, Katherine, and I worked together on several more. We got stuck on, I think, the second puzzle on the advanced level.
Swimming was particularly good last Thursday. Once in a while I get to a point where swimming doesn't feel like one stroke after another but rather a continuous flow of movement. It was like that Thursday, and my time was by far the best of the season. Today I ran out of breath early and my time was much less good than Thursday, too.
The trumpet is going well, too. It's like swimming in that sometimes it works lots better than most of the time. I've been hitting the C above the clef fairly regularly lately. Sometimes I can hit it strong and clear, and sometimes weakly and with great effort. I know it will get better if I keep working at it, but it's also like swimming in that it's not a permanent accomplishment. If I don't practice for three of four days in a row, I get worse again. Darn. At least web sites stay put once you upload them. Well, there are always those links that go away while you're not looking.
Oh, what else, I've actually read some books recently. There was Pat Dillon's The Last Best Thing, which had been serialized in the San Jose newspaper. It's about marketing hype in Silicon Valley. It turned out to be lots of fun to read, with more interesting characters than I expected. Its biggest weakness is that, as a serial, it has a lot of review in each chapter. Sort of "last week on Last Best Thing, ...". Next, Milan Kundera's Farewell Waltz. It's the real literature in the bunch. It's good, has complex characters and interesting situations, but I never really got into it that much. Third, Tony Hillerman's Talking God. It's a mystery story about Navajo spiritual life. At the end I still wasn't sure what had really been going on, and I think I could have found a few loose ends if I looked a little, but I enjoyed it greatly. If we didn't have so many other books lying around the house for me to read I'd go to the library and get out the rest of the Hillermans. As it is, I've started Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses and I'm already more engrossed in it than I was in the Kundera or the Dillon. Which reminds me, it's time for some eggnog and to see if I can read a few more pages of printed book.
 |
 |
 |
|