A busy weekend, most of it spent in domestic chores and the appreciation of material comforts:

• Attended a community theater performance of Shakespeare's Tempest with Leta. It was run of the mill, but for once the Ariel could really sing.
• Recorded about 20 pages of a literature anthology at the studio. I was working on poems by Robert Browning, a Victorian-era poet about whom I know fairly little. I like his stuff.
• Scurried home to meet a plumber to give me an estimate for installing a utility sink in my basement. His number came in higher than I expected, but that's usual for me and plumbers. He's going to do the work on Monday.
• Wrote a letter to my mother and enclosed her monthly check.
• Walked for a brisk 30 minutes on a loop that took me around Lake Thoreau. The fitness walking is a new deal for me. Maybe more about this later.
• Distributed the pile of clippings and bank statements from the past four months into their respective file drawers.
• Listened to a stream of Act 3 of Heather Woodbury's what ever while I was doing my filing. Woodbury's multiplicity of voices is quite skillful.
• Ran six loads of laundry. (I didn't get to the laundering last weekend.) Hmm: I'm still cleaning short-sleeved shirts this late in the year.
• Watched a DVD of Sunday Bloody Sunday, my first rental from Netflix. I more or less knew what to expect (Christopher Durang loglines the plot in Act 1 of Beyond Therapy), but I didn't anticipate the bar mitvah.
• Leta came over late, and then in the morning helped me move a pine desk from my basement to my storage unit in Leesburg. It's a nice old bare bones desk: it's the first piece of furniture that I ever bought for myself. When I was in Minneapolis with Anne, I brought it home from the unfinished furniture store (in whose car?), stained it walnut, and polyurethaned it.
• Dropped off an NVTA calendar for Don Paul at the RCP scene shop.
• Watched the wrens picking through the leaf litter in my back patch.
• Went out again, this time to the supermarket and the ATM.
• Took a doze in the big comfy chair in the living room.
• Ordered my Christmas cards from the Metropolitan, thereby earning back some fraction of my annual membership fee.
• Put together a box of emergency supplies and packed a suitcase of clothes. Radio and batteries; bottled water; I even already had a roll of plastic sheeting from some old abandoned project! I feel a bit like a troglodyte digging a fallout shelter in the back yard. But mostly I'm making a list of where to find stuff that I already have (like a fire extinguisher, my passport) so that I don't have to think too much in that very improbable case that I have only five minutes in the house to "grab some stuff."
• Took out the trash.
• Watered the houseplants. I didn't get to do that last week, either.
• Wound the clock in the living room. It loses about five minutes a week.
• Talked on the phone to a director who was looking to cast an ensemble part, a good one. I was gratified to get the call, but the location of her rehearsals/performances is geographically undesirable, as we say here [70 miles round-trip]. I'm just not willing to make the time commitment required and give up my futzing around the house time for an ensemble part.
• Ate my bread and salad bar for dinner and listened to John Coltrane. A CD recording of John Coltrane playing "My Favorite Things" is my idea of what 20th century culture is all about.
• For dinnertime, read a profile of Sallie Chisholm, discoverer of genus Prochlorococcus, tiny cyanobacteria that are responsible for roughly half the photosynthesis in the oceans.
• Listened to Gunsmoke on the radio. "Every man's got to kill his own snakes." This tape has interleaved ads for Sugar Krinkles and for Post Toasties, when they were the "heap good" corn flakes that will be popular with your "tribe." Ahem.

posted: 8:25:59 PM