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the usual year-end review
Dec. 31st, 2008 05:30 pmThe year in review, as told by the first posts of each month:
January
We had a few drops of champagne at midnight - we went to the New Year's Eve Gala at Lorenzo's Timonium Dinner Theater in - you guessed it - Timonium, and saw "And Then There Were None" which ended at 11:45 and then the cast, which were also the waitpeople, served champagne to everyone and we all made noise and sang Auld Lang Syne, and then we split. Dropped Cindy off, passed a wreck on the highway that seemed to have at least one law enforcement vehicle as one of the crunch-ees. Home safe, drink some decaf tea.
February
Here's what it says on Central Market's brown paper bags:
"I am a brown paper bag. More than likely, I'll end up under your kitchen sink with a few of my friends. I might get cut up and wrapped around an old textbook. Or just stuck under something messy. It would be nice if someone made me into a kite. I'd like to be a kite. But whatever happens, I will never forget the day I carried groceries home from Central Market."
March
We are back in Baltimore. Haven't had chance to catch up on my flist yet. It went over 85 degrees while we were in Austin. And the oak and elm trees were pollenating. We have at least one more trip to make down there, sometime in the second half of April.
April
Siiiigh - the sellers of the house we're trying to buy are being real jerks; they didn't get the water turned back on in time for the official home inspection by an engineer, so we had to reschedule that, then the day before the rescheduled inspection, they got the water turned on - and discovered that the pipes had not been properly drained before shutoff, so there is water/ice damage to the pipes, which has to be repaired.
May
Besides the Manga Shakespeare, I picked up another graphic thingy from the library - Opera Adaptations, Vol. 2 by P. Craig Russell. A mixed bag - I hated the way he interpreted "Parsifal" - he made it all about the rejections instead of the quest. The Mahler songs were depressing in any event, and graphics made them no less so. I am not familiar with "Ariane and Bluebeard" so it made no sense to me. "Pagliacci" was the last thing in the book - and it was done quite well! All the sly nastiness, all the misunderstandings that each character encourages among the others, were brought out. The characters looked just right to me.
June
The movers show up Friday morning at 8:30, so we have actually had to start packing, and perhaps we're even getting a bit frantic at this point. So that's what I've been doing instead of LJ - along with getting the last few repairs done at the new house, and making curtains, and stuff like that.
July
OK gang, Monday noon we're off for the Baltimore Symphonic Band tour of Eastern Europe. We will be gone July 7-17. A sitter will be taking care of the pets and the house, all that stuff, but she will not be answering our phones. We are not taking our cell phones to Europe; they're the wrong kind. We will, however, be checking our email from internet cafes, once we get to Europe. We're taking the little OLPC XO computer. So if you are trying to get in touch with us, email should get responded to within a couple of days, whereas a phone call will not get returned until the 18th at the earliest.
August
After we got back from Europe, I was only home for a couple of days before I turned around and went up to New York to help my friend Sally-the-hoarder throw some stuff out.
September
Rehearsals have started up again for the fall this week, so less reading now than in the summer; here's the last of the summer's reading:
October (not counting Twitterings, which is all there was for the first week)
A few posts ago, I mentioned Dave Freer's A Mankind Witch, and in truth it was a bit from that, as much as Granny Ogg's writings, that inspired the post "To Serve Rat." Oddly enough, *after* that was when I ran across the book Rats: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, from whence came yesterday's tweets about rats. And then, AFTER I had twittered those, I read the newspaper, and lo! an article about rats in Baltimore! The city is proposing a rat census, as the first step in reducing Baltimore's rat problem; the initial estimate of the number of rats in Baltimore City is 3 million! Which is quite a bit more than one for every fifteen people - Baltimore City is only about 700,000 people, although the metro area of much of Baltimore County is well over a million.
November (not counting Twitterings, which is all there was for the first week)
We'll be away for a few days, attending the wedding of a niece in Omaha, which you'll hardly even notice since I've posted so little the past two weeks anyway. I have been working on finishing assorted RL projects - knitted things, quilted things - and also having a cold. Whee. Anyway, when we get back from Omaha next week, I'll try and catch up.
December
So we went to the Winterthur on Saturday. They have really nice lunches in their cafeteria, including a fancy dessert table. I spent more time on the "Who's Your Daddy" exhibit than [info]squirrel_magnet or Cindythelibrarian did.
January
We had a few drops of champagne at midnight - we went to the New Year's Eve Gala at Lorenzo's Timonium Dinner Theater in - you guessed it - Timonium, and saw "And Then There Were None" which ended at 11:45 and then the cast, which were also the waitpeople, served champagne to everyone and we all made noise and sang Auld Lang Syne, and then we split. Dropped Cindy off, passed a wreck on the highway that seemed to have at least one law enforcement vehicle as one of the crunch-ees. Home safe, drink some decaf tea.
February
Here's what it says on Central Market's brown paper bags:
"I am a brown paper bag. More than likely, I'll end up under your kitchen sink with a few of my friends. I might get cut up and wrapped around an old textbook. Or just stuck under something messy. It would be nice if someone made me into a kite. I'd like to be a kite. But whatever happens, I will never forget the day I carried groceries home from Central Market."
March
We are back in Baltimore. Haven't had chance to catch up on my flist yet. It went over 85 degrees while we were in Austin. And the oak and elm trees were pollenating. We have at least one more trip to make down there, sometime in the second half of April.
April
Siiiigh - the sellers of the house we're trying to buy are being real jerks; they didn't get the water turned back on in time for the official home inspection by an engineer, so we had to reschedule that, then the day before the rescheduled inspection, they got the water turned on - and discovered that the pipes had not been properly drained before shutoff, so there is water/ice damage to the pipes, which has to be repaired.
May
Besides the Manga Shakespeare, I picked up another graphic thingy from the library - Opera Adaptations, Vol. 2 by P. Craig Russell. A mixed bag - I hated the way he interpreted "Parsifal" - he made it all about the rejections instead of the quest. The Mahler songs were depressing in any event, and graphics made them no less so. I am not familiar with "Ariane and Bluebeard" so it made no sense to me. "Pagliacci" was the last thing in the book - and it was done quite well! All the sly nastiness, all the misunderstandings that each character encourages among the others, were brought out. The characters looked just right to me.
June
The movers show up Friday morning at 8:30, so we have actually had to start packing, and perhaps we're even getting a bit frantic at this point. So that's what I've been doing instead of LJ - along with getting the last few repairs done at the new house, and making curtains, and stuff like that.
July
OK gang, Monday noon we're off for the Baltimore Symphonic Band tour of Eastern Europe. We will be gone July 7-17. A sitter will be taking care of the pets and the house, all that stuff, but she will not be answering our phones. We are not taking our cell phones to Europe; they're the wrong kind. We will, however, be checking our email from internet cafes, once we get to Europe. We're taking the little OLPC XO computer. So if you are trying to get in touch with us, email should get responded to within a couple of days, whereas a phone call will not get returned until the 18th at the earliest.
August
After we got back from Europe, I was only home for a couple of days before I turned around and went up to New York to help my friend Sally-the-hoarder throw some stuff out.
September
Rehearsals have started up again for the fall this week, so less reading now than in the summer; here's the last of the summer's reading:
October (not counting Twitterings, which is all there was for the first week)
A few posts ago, I mentioned Dave Freer's A Mankind Witch, and in truth it was a bit from that, as much as Granny Ogg's writings, that inspired the post "To Serve Rat." Oddly enough, *after* that was when I ran across the book Rats: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, from whence came yesterday's tweets about rats. And then, AFTER I had twittered those, I read the newspaper, and lo! an article about rats in Baltimore! The city is proposing a rat census, as the first step in reducing Baltimore's rat problem; the initial estimate of the number of rats in Baltimore City is 3 million! Which is quite a bit more than one for every fifteen people - Baltimore City is only about 700,000 people, although the metro area of much of Baltimore County is well over a million.
November (not counting Twitterings, which is all there was for the first week)
We'll be away for a few days, attending the wedding of a niece in Omaha, which you'll hardly even notice since I've posted so little the past two weeks anyway. I have been working on finishing assorted RL projects - knitted things, quilted things - and also having a cold. Whee. Anyway, when we get back from Omaha next week, I'll try and catch up.
December
So we went to the Winterthur on Saturday. They have really nice lunches in their cafeteria, including a fancy dessert table. I spent more time on the "Who's Your Daddy" exhibit than [info]squirrel_magnet or Cindythelibrarian did.
