February 20, 2008

"Father always said that it's no sin to take money from sinners"--Big Love

Dreamed of the folk song "Un Canadien Errant."

Got an Ebay package of Phantom and Johnny Hazard reprints.

Dinner was pork chops.

February 19, 2008

Pickup line: "Lizzie--is that short for something?"--Undeclared

Dreamed of a non-existent Elmore Leonard novel involving illegal immigrants, drug smuggling and a Lake Superior shore property whose late owner was slowly developing it into a tourist attraction; bicycling around my hometown of Sackville, N.B.; encountering an Arab yelling at his wife; the Johnny Cash song "Folsom Prison Blues"; noticing Tom Hanks living on Toronto's St. Clair Avenue(?).

Went shopping.

Moira returned from Kingston.

Dinner was lasagna.

Downloaded some software to make JPEG images small enough to post through resampling. (It was shareware, and I contributed to a fund they endorsed for girls' schools in India.)

February 18, 2008

"If I could open a vein and cleanse myself of the half of my blood that's yours, I'd gladly do it"--Big Love

"It's like talking to a fortune cookie!"--ibid.

Dreamed of my grandfather's home in Campbellton, N.B.; seeing Saturday-morning cartoons on TV; trying to turn the set off but finding that the off switch didn't work properly.

Headache.

Dinner was lasagna.

No new music at choir practice.

February 17, 2008

Dreamed of "Evangeline," the song The Band performed with Emmylou Harris in The Last Waltz.

Went to the Lunch Club Meetup at the Golden Griddle near Lawrence Station.  Four women showed up, with only one cancellation!

Afterward I went to see There Will Be Blood at the Varsity, but it was sold out.

Started reading the first issue of Lapham's Quarterly, which is about war.  I'll be spending a lot of time reading it!

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Found the next Big Love DVD at Suspect Video.

February 16, 2008

I was thinking of seeing a movie today, but I didn't bother.  I was also thinking of seeing the other Toronto City Opera show, but I decided it could wait.  I stayed home and did puzzles instead. (I'm pretty good at Skill-o-Grams!)

Dinner was KFC. (They no longer offer corn as a side order.)

The second DVD in the Big Love series still hasn't shown up at Blockbuster.

I considered cancelling tomorrow's Lunch Club Meetup because of bad weather predictions.  But now the forecast doesn't sound too bad so we'll proceed.

I won two Steve Canyon packages in Ebay auctions and the seller gave me a list of other SC strips he has so I could choose the ones I didn't already have.  I found 11 such and paid $15 for them since there were no duplicates.

February 15, 2008

"What time is it?"

"Time for yesterday's dinner."

--La Boheme

Dreamed of the actress Adrienne Shelley coming over to discuss directing someone's script (I'd just read that the trial for her murder had been concluded); a big group of contractors and such coming to prepare for the production.

Baked multigrain bread.

Finally baked the gingerbread to be sold at the opera. (I had to go get molasses as well as cinnamon.) I left it in the oven a bit too long because I was watching Undeclared on DVD and lost track of the time.

Dinner was salmon.

Saw La Boheme at the Toronto City Opera.  Natalie was great! (Adolfo de Santis is now the musical director; Giuseppe Macina is just artistic director.)

February 14, 2008

Dreamed of travelling by car from New England.

Dinner was the rest of the shrimp and Italian food.

I was going to bake gingerbread late in the evening for them to sell at the Toronto City Opera tomorrow, but I couldn't find the cinnamon.  This whole thing happened because someone went and rearranged the whole kitchen and put everything in plastic boxes.  I used to know where everything was:  the spices used to be in one place.  Now they're in at least three places and those plastic boxes make it almost impossible to search through things.  It's an issue of respect!

February 13, 2008

"I keep asking myself, What would Abraham Lincoln do?"--Big Love

"Everything is crap and sin!  Sin and crap!"--ibid.

Dreamed of the song "Loco-Motion."

Went out to my shrink Dr. Hassan's office and got a new appointment.  I also distributed the last of the Toronto City Opera leaflets. (Actually, I had four left over because the last branch I went to was also being renovated, but I'm through anyway.) I had a big headache (due to Coca-Cola withdrawal?).  I went to Indigo Books and got a couple of puzzle magazines, and after I left I realized I hadn't paid for them!  I went right back and paid.  Lucky nobody caught me!

John, Kathrine and Merle came for dinner, which was Indian food.

In the evening I had a choice of going to the Nonfiction Book Club Meetup, the first Writers Meetup, or Toronto City Opera's Un Ballo in Maschera.  I was going to go to the Writers Meetup, but because of my headache I stayed home anyway.

Rented the Blockbuster DVD of the first episode of the second season of Big Love.  Still brilliant.

February 12, 2008

 Went shopping (despite the snow).

Dinner was shrimp and rice.

Went to the Chinese Literature Meetup, but we decided to cancel because of the weather.

Finished reading George Monbiot's Heat.  Very informative.

February 11, 2008

"I guarantee you, that professor hasn't had sex for at least ten years!"

"But you didn't have to tell him that in front of the whole class!"

--Undeclared

"No, the Queen is just some old lady.  Adam Sandler is, like, a god, OK?"--ibid.

Saw some more Undeclared episodes on DVD.  It's really funny, especially the hero's second-childhood father.

Went out to distribute some more Toronto City Opera flyers.  Two branches were closed Mondays, and a third was being renovated, so I only had time to leave them in two others! (It's so cold that Father borrowed my scarf before going out, and I had to wait for him to get back before going out myself.)

Dinner was scalloped potatoes and ham.

At choir practice we started again on Theodore Dubois "The Seven Last Words of Christ," which score I'd forgotten to bring. (Am I getting tired of it?)

February 10, 2008

"Bind yourself to nothing seek harmony with all.  Then will you be truly free"--Kung Fu

"Well, in that case there's only one thing to do."

"What's that?"

"Panic!"

--Get Smart

Dreamed of meeting an intelligent race from another planet; deciding this was a movie and not real; seeing an American and a Russian nuclear missile leave their bases in Quebec City and Vladivostok, charted on a world map; the US missile going off near Madagascar; reflecting that everything catches up with you in the end.

Went to the Classical Music Meetup.  We participated in a choral run-through of Mozart's "Vesperae Sollenes" put on by the Canadian Association of Musicians at the Anglican church near Yonge & St. Clair. (I'd done "Ave Verum Corpus" and "Laudate Dominum" with my Italian choir.) We could have used some "ringers" for the rest to follow.  I met Jane from the Lunch Club Meetup.

Dinner was a ham.

Saw the Kung Fu episode "The Elixir," which I remembered:  it's the one where he meets a hoochie-koochie girl and a hunchback mountebank being stalked by her outlaw ex.

I've finally figured out how to make thumbnail links on my blog!  I've updated the post with scans of the comic strip Jack and Judy in Bible Land.

February 9, 2008

Telephone operator: "I'm sorry, sir, your party has been drowned"--Get Smart

Dreamed of taking a walk near the Reversing Falls in Saint John, N.B.; buying a new pair of pants; being in a tight fix and getting saved by a pretty woman's bluff about how she was about to inherit $4.5 million and her lawyer didn't want her to be late.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Saw The Lady Vanishes again, with a soundtrack commentary by Bruce Eder.

February 8, 2008

Went out to my shrink Dr. Hassan to get an appointment. (I should have known his secretary would be out!) I also distributed Toronto City Opera leaflets to six library branches.  Couldn't find the new location for CPUsed.

Baked raisin bread. (I'd bought some yeast while I was out.)

Dinner was fettucine alfredo (which I cooked).

Went to Mary's Meetin games night.  I played Scrabble, Balderdash and Jenga, where I managed to get the tower up to 28 tiers!  Mary managed to arrange for us to meet in her apartment building's common room.

February 7, 2008

Michael Redgrave (entering Margaret Lockwood's room and finding her in bed): "Now on which side should I sleep?"

"Do you want me to throw you out?"

"Ah, in that case I'll sleep in the middle!"

--The Lady Vanishes

"If you must know, something was dropped on my head!"

"When?  Infancy?"

--ibid.

"Aren't you rather fond of him?"

"I'm rather fond of rabbits, but they need to be kept down."

--ibid.

Dreamed of misplacing my boots on a train; someone at the end of the train putting on a green hairpiece from the tracks(?) and turning into Batman's enemy the Joker; Burgmuller's study piece "Babillarde" (which I played years ago).

Saw the DVD of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (for the third time). It's a really funny thriller about Englishness in a foreign country.  The supporting pair Charters and Caldicott are especially amusing. [They reappeared in several other movies.] Some great dialogue by Sidney Gilliatt and Frank Launder.

Dinner was pork chops.

Went to the Architecture for Humanity Meetup.  There are a lot of people coming now. (My attention wandered and I ended up thinking about three-dimensional geometry.)

Saw the Kung Fu episode "The Salamander," which I remember for the China scenes.

February 6, 2008

Maxwell Smart: "I know the game [pool] perfectly, Chief.  You'll have absolutely nothing to worry about."

Chief: "That's what I was afraid you'd say."

--Get Smart

Dreamed of performing in a play as a replacement for an actress who'd played the character in an early scene, as a passive wife; staying overnight in Moncton, N.B., because Father was performing surgery on Julie Andrews(?).

Went shopping. (We didn't let the snow stop us!)

Saw the DVD of the Get Smart episode "Dead Spy Scrawls." (Yet another one I remember!)

Dinner was lasagna.

Went to the Nonfiction Book Club Meetup, but only three out of the six people came due to the fierce weather, and we agreed to postpone it a week.

On the way back from the non-Meetup, I picked up another 20 kg bag of flour, this time white.

February 5, 2008

"You see wisdom as a flower for you to pluck!  It is not.  It is a mountain for you to climb"--Kung Fu

Dreamed of going camping in cold weather; arriving in London and briefly becoming ill.

Got a comic-strip package from Barry King (just in time for my birthday!).

Dinner was takeout Chinese food:  their New Year special, which wasn't as good as our usual order. (My fortune said "Your energy is at a peak.  Channel it into creative efforts." Which seemed odd, since I don't feel that energetic.)

Saw the DVD of Expo:  Magic of the White City, a video documentary about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.

I also saw the DVD of a Kung Fu episode where Caine takes on a Chinese tong.

February 4, 2008

Dreamed of waiting with a bunch of dwarfs at a place next to San Francisco harbour for the crew of the Enterprise to arrive and start a Star Trek adventure.

Father and I went to Staples and bought some computer discs for copying files, but they didn't work on my computer.

Dinner was pizza.

Went to choir practice, where we started learning the rest of the mass music. (We did Mozart's "Laudate Dominum" for the first time in a while.) I told Frank DeJongh that I'd read his letter to the editor in today's Globe and Mail.  I also noticed that I'll be in London at the time of our spring concert!

February 3, 2008

"What are you doing after work?"

"Emily, can you believe the nerve of this guy?...  Nothing."

--The Bob Newhart Show

"Before you sit down, Howard... sit down!"--ibid.

Dreamed of my family going on a vacation and staying away too long, resulting in a fight; a little kid who caused trouble turning out to be the son of Satan; a non-existent Calvin & Hobbes story in which Calvin put a forked stick into a bush and magically drew out money.

Saw the animated movie of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis at the Variety, with the "We Don't Do Mainstream" Movie Meetup. (I joined them at the Bishop & Belcher afterward, but only briefly.) It's a wonderful movie.

Dinner was roast chicken.

Posted on my blog about translating Sappho. (I also started a draft post about the comic strip Teen-Wise!)

February 2, 2008

"I love this problem.  I don't want you to take it personally, but it's you"--The Bob Newhart Show

 Got up early for a change.

Hand my first Lunch Club Meetup as organizer, at Le Papillon.  Only three others came, but they seemed to be having a good time.  I had French toast.

Afterward I went to Value Village in Riverdale because I'd heard they had some good board games really cheap.  Nothing interested me, except for several cheap books that I bought to add to our used books stock on ABE Books.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Went to the Karaoke Meetup.  Doug was there, whom I remembered from my Fossil & Haggis karaoke days. One time I was singing Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" and afterward he showed me a picture he'd drawn of a wolf!  So I sang "Hungry Like the Wolf" again, and dedicated it to him. (I also sang Van Halen's "Panama.")

The New York Times Sunday crossword was a rebus puzzle, just a couple of weeks after the last one of that type!

February 1, 2008

On dieting: "Emily, fat is only cute when you're nine months old, playing with a Busy Box"--The Bob Newhart Show

Later: "Emily, I am not thinking about that banana cream pie!"--ibid.

Dreamed of flying over Prince Edward Island and seeing it looking like a road map(?); trying to play Monopoly.

It's been snowing pretty heavily but I still managed to get to Loblaw's and bring home a 20 kg bag of whole wheat flour!

Dinner was pork chops.

Phoned Le Papillon to reduce our lunch reservation from ten people to six.

Baked whole wheat bread overnight. (It'll take quite a while to use up this bag!)

January 31, 2008

Dreamed of going to the movies and getting a free kit from which you could cut out cardboard prints of the moon in different phases; the Carillon from Bizet's L'Arlesienne suite.

I was looking at my translation of the first two chapters of the Chinese novel Wandering Youth last night, and I want to print it out.  But the printer connected to the computer in my room has no ribbon.  I could try copying it onto a disk and printing it on Moira's computer, but we need more disks. [I recently resumed the translation, which was only of the first section.]

Dinner was the rest of the chicken.

Saw the DVD of D.W. Griffiths' America, a silent epic about the Revolutionary War.  It's long, old-fashioned, often corny and disturbingly racist. (The menacing Negroes of Birth of a Nation are replaced by marauding Indians.) I want to learn more about the psychopathic renegade Loyalist Captain Walter Butler.

I did learn some more about Butler online, and it doesn't sound like he was a psychopathic renegade after all.

January 30, 2008

Sportswriter King Kaufman: "The dirty little secret of the '60s is that there were like 14 hippies in the whole country.  They just got their picture taken a lot"--Salon

"Give me your mature, adult reason why you don't want to go to a marriage counsellor."

"I don't feel like it!"

--The Bob Newhart Show

Dreamed of being in a game where you had to keep pressing a whole lot of buttons on a panel until each one showed the right number; pressing them in a continuous flow; visiting a Los Angeles shopping mall where a store had really low prices because the government was giving it a huge subsidy to encourage business development in that area.

I'm disappointed that John Edwards left the US Presidential race before Super Tuesday.

Went shopping. (Brass monkey weather!)

Dinner was McDonald's. (We were going to get KFC instead, but Father forgot.)

January 29, 2008

Saw a very surreal Avengers episode titled "Too Many Christmas Trees." It's the one where the bad guys use telepathy to infiltrate Steed's dreams! (The head villain resembled Rupert Murdoch.)

Dinner was roast chicken.

At the Chinese Literature Meetup Bill told me you can read the manuscript online!  I'm sure it'll be more readable that way.  Just four people came to the meeting.  We'd planned to read four chapters, but I managed to read xis. (At this rate, I'll be able to take time off when visiting London in April.)

Afterward I stopped at the Bickford Centre and picked up some Toronto City Opera fliers to distribute.

It turned out that the web link was to the same PDF scans as in the disc he gave us.  If only someone would post it in HTML! (Maybe I'll do that someday.)

January 28, 2008

Dreamed of the music in the opera Hansel & Gretel; wondering why I had music going around in my head but not visions; being about to go swimming but taking forever to hang up my clothes in my locker. (I kept forgetting which locker was mine.)

Read the fifth chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, with its famous dream scene.  Some great poetry!

Dinner was pork chops and the rest of the Chinese food.

At choir practice we finished the new Gounod mass.  We finally got the music list for our winter concert. (Giuseppe didn't think much of the Met's Hansel & Gretel cinemacast production.)

January 27, 2008

"Have you always squeezed the toothpaste in the middle?"

"Only since I got married."

--The Avengers

Boris Badenov: "I got some people to play with Rollo [his giant ape] last week but it didn't work out."

"What happened?"

"They broke!"

Dreamed of the movie Shadow of a Doubt. (It's Hitchcock at his most disturbing.)

John and Kathrine came over for dinner, which was pizza. (They also brought potato-leek soup.)

"Man-Eater of Surrey Green is The Avengers at its considerable nuttiest:  it's the one about a plant from outer space whose brain waves hypnotize people who aren't wearing hearing aids. (Inevitable shameless pun: "I'm a herbicidal maniac.") For the obligatory fight scene, they had a hypnotized Mrs. Peel fighting Steed!

January 26, 2008

"When will you be on shore again?"

"That depends on Hitler."

--In Which We Serve

"What's 'betrothed,' Daddy?"

"It's the beginning of the end, my boy!"

--ibid.

Saw the Engelbert Humperdinck opera Hansel & Gretel at the Sheppard Grande.  It was pretty imaginative, especially the dream scene. (But I could have lived without the mother overdosing.) One of my favourite operas.

Afterward I went to the Spadina library and borrowed the global warming book Hot Air.  I also went to a nearby health food store called Noah's, where I finally found rye flour!  So when I got home I baked rye bread.

Dinner was Chinese food. (My fortune said "Your air of confidence naturally draws others to you"?)

Saw the DVD of Noel Coward's World War II naval drama In Which We Serve. (It was in the queue since we joined zip.ca, for almost four years!) Rather middlebrow.