weekend?
Great, thanks. How was yours?
The plan was simple: The TorJen boys were due to arrive early Saturday morning. I’d park them at home, and then both D and I would head up to town; drawback to havign a month off is that you can’t really refuse to work one Saturday when you get back. In my case it was the long-scheduled annual New York Disaster contingency test that would show that, in the evnt my NY guys are out of action (you know: Turrist attack, mass food poisoning, civil war), we in London could cover for them. In D’s case, it was simply the result of having too few people to cover in his absence, and the resulting backlog needing to be cleared quickly.
In the end, the TorJen boys were struck down with the Lurgie; the stinking, surely Terrorist-created cold that is sweeping across Europe. Snot, closed up throats, hacking, coughing, spluttering and gutteral noises; in Holland, it’s business as usual, but everywhere else… So, since flying in a pressurised tin can was as advisable as playing Russian Roulette with Phil Spector, the trip was cancelled.
Then, at 4pm on Friday, my NY Disaster Test was also called off. Reason? “We expect snow,” said my boss. “Well, that’s a good test,” I answered. Silence came back, and so my weekend suddenly became a little freer.
However, by this time, I, too, was struck down with the vilest head/chest/nose cold ever created in a North Korean BioTech lab, so any thoughts of having a booze-fuelled Friday were relegated to the same place as “Hmm, maybe I could try my hand at a serial killing spree. Just to, you know, see…”
Home from work earlier than I recall being for a very long time on a Friday (God the Friday evening commuters at 5:15 are a class apart) and I started work on the mammoth task of installing my new 500Gig Harddrive. Which took all of about fifteen minutes (twelve of which were spent finding an extension cord for the plug). That done, I set about moving all the media files from my teeny tiney Fisher Price Hard Drive over to my new palatial space.
Ever since I acceptee Pod into my life, I’ve been acquiring more and more media files. And the Honeymoon pics are taking up a ton of space, so much so that I had less that 1.7 Gig left on the old hard Drive, which, apparently, is not a good thing.
Only drawback was that I f*cked up my iTunes library, and am now having to manually repopulate it, which sort of sucks, but is sort of good, ‘cos it’s making me look at some of the stuff, and go “Why the hell have I got the entire works of NSync on my pc?” So there is a silver lining.
Sat’day night, despite the stinking cold (which was in a sort of hibernation by then) I travelled up to town for dinner with Mr H, and a trip to the Coliseum to see ENO’s production of G&S’s ‘The Gondoliers’. A private box. A lovely lovely lovely evening. ENO have put up Surtitle Screens, despite the fact that most* of their operas are sung in English, which I thought was odd. Then the show started, and I realised why: For a while, there have been complaints among the cognoscenti that ENO, because the vast theatre was never actually built as an Opera House, but as a more General Palais du Theatre, have been allowing some of their performers to wear microphones during performances. Sacrilege, the purists (and puritans) screech. Opera is meant to be performed by Opera Singers, who can project to the back of the Gods. Well, yes, they can, in purpose-built Opera Houses. But I defy anyone - any Diva or Maestro on earth - to project to the back of, say, Wembley Arena. Fact is, bigger auditoria means an increased chance of having to have someone miked. ANd once one’s miked, they’ll all need to be if you want any unity of sound.
Well, nobody was miked on Saturday, which meant that the larger Ariae, and the Chorus singing, was perfectly audible, but that some of the recitation was, in the first act, a litlle less than totally clear. Things improved in the second act, but what seemed (to me) silly was that the Surtitles were displaying the words for the larger Ariae, and the Chorus singing, but not for the recitation. Doh.
Still, Cute leads (Hello Toby Stafford-Allen), great singing, camp choreography and colourful costumes. A set that was like some bright Early learning centre version of Venice, and a set of tunes that (surprisingly; I knew little of the piece, other than that it was the last sucessful G+S, and assumed that it would be inferior to the more popular works) was filled with hummable melodies, slightly more acidic lyrics than we might be used to from Gilbert, and a wonderful sense of Joy. Fabulous night.
Sunday consited of lying on a couch, the cold having reasserted itself, catching up on the Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty episodes we’d recorded whils we were out of the country, watching Mission Impossible 3 (not bad), and making a home movie out of the first set of our Honeymoon picturesd (Auckland, for those of you interested). I love the results, and would have them up here for your review, except I want to wait until I’ve got a few more ready to go, to avoid long delays between segments. So keep an eye out. Moving pictures. Coming soon.
Today, work (the head cold having now matured into a hacking cough) and then off to see Dolly Parton (who, one hopes, will not have the Hacking Cough).
Onwards…