:::this is the way the world ends:::

Category: Quarantine

J.E. may be the only one who appreciates this

I was reading Atlas Obscura this afternoon, and they talked about a beautiful clock in Glastonbury. A deeply embedded memory of this surfaced:

It was 25 years ago, around this time that I first saw that clock. 25 years ago, exactly, I was in Norwich packing up to start my Navy Dumb training. Now to get some Toasted Tea biscuits for Jerod.

Background Enrichment

Carmen with Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna

The Metropolitan Opera is offering free streams of their past performances. I have the luxury of two monitors at home, so I leave the performance up in a browser window and listen/watch throughout the day while I work in the primary screen. The process is a little more osmosis than active engagement, but by the end, I feel like I got 80% out of it as I would watching the first time.

One tip, I also pull up the synopsis of what happens in the opera in Wikipedia and it increases my understanding of the work immensely.

Opera sets seem to be a whole different type of stagecraft. All are spartan in some manner, “pointing” their construction to the performers. I watched the entirety of Carmen and they employed a complicated mechanism of rotating sets. The design and way the performers used this to dramatic effect was top-notch.

This week is Wagner week, and here is the schedule for The Metropolitan Opera.

Mirrors in the Mirror

I thought it would be a good time to return to our blog. I am going to work on catching up with things I’ve set aside, intending to post but never posting.

So far, the only detour in our lives has been our kids were excused from school on Friday before Spring Break. This would have originally been Spring Break. We have changed plans — we will postpone the more adventurous intentions until everyone emerges later, all at once.

The interesting thing I’ve noticed has been a return to the good sort of boredom. There’s a restless, creative sort of energy I haven’t felt in a while. I think mindless distractions took up too much of my time. How to tell the difference between good pursuits and bad ones? Even good mindless from bad mindless?

Facebook doesn’t feel like one of the good ones. Perhaps this will be a refuge for us in these strange times.

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