Cav/Pag

Today we got to see San Diego Opera's production of the double bill Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci (abbreviated "Cav/Pag").

Cav has some wonderful orchestral and choral parts. For me, the story and characters are not terribly interesting and I didn't really care that the cad Turiddu dies at the end nor that his shamed, tattletale girlfriend is left without a boyfriend. And none of their songs really does anything for me. Mamma Lucia is about the only character who I can feel sorry for but her part is too small to give me a chance to really care much. The orchestra, conducted by Edoardo Müller, played well and the chorus did a good job. Richard Leech sang Turiddu. I guess he did a good job. He sounded a bit hoarse for a while.

Pag, on the other hand, has characters I think are interesting, though not terribly likable. José Cura sang Canio very well. Mr. Cura will be singing both Turiddu and Canio at the Met next season (it will be his first Canio there so we got to see him in that role before New York does!) And Elizabeth Futral was good as Nedda. I felt bad for everybody at the end when Nedda and Silvio died. All they did was want to run away together leaving Nedda's husband in the lurch.

For those of you who couldn't make it to the opera, here's a classic performance of "Vesti la giubba" from one of the Golden Eras of opera recordings (the 1960s).

Ding!

Back when I said "I want to just stay at home for a while," I wanted to include a YouTube video that showed what such incidents can become. But it was removed (probably because of copyright violation). It's back but might disappear again. If silly YouTube videos appeal to you, watch it before it's gone.

I'm glad my little bump with the other car didn't escalate to this.

Hello

I am always amazed at how people ignore other people (at least me) as they pass each other. At work there are very few people who acknowledge me as I'm wandering through the the building. As we pass they almost always just look straight ahead and don't see me. One day I was off to check my mail slot and one of the senior officers of the company was coming from the other direction. He gave me the look-straight-ahead-and-don't-notice-the-other-person treatment. I would have thought that high muckamucks should be happy to greet their little people. But no. About the only people I notice who acknowledge my presence are people I work directly with and people who don't work there like the folks who stock the snack machines and the toilet paper dispensers.

Yesterday I took another hike up the mountain across the street from work. I thought it was a rule that out in the wilderness (and as things are, that was the wilderness) you always greet others out there when you meet them. It worked that way for almost all the people I passed on this walk. Except for a couple who were walking together. When I passed them one was about 15 feet behind the other. Each looked straight ahead as she passed me. They didn't even look down at the ground, pretending they were making sure they weren't trampling the tender regrowth after the fire. They just ignored me.

Maybe there is some evil aura around me that everybody can see that makes them look away? Or is it just our self-contained, iPod world?

I saw a horned lizard on my walk. I hadn't seen one of those in years.

Here are a few pictures of some flowers and other scenery I took with my cellphone on the walk. It doesn't take the greatest pictures. I adjusted the color and contrast and such in some of them. Maybe with some tweaking the phone takes OK pictures.

I don't know what most of them are.

Where I work as seen from the hill

A cross put up after the fires. For Easter?

Are you Sirius?

The Department of Justice is not going to block the merger of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio. Now it's up to the FCC to give its approval.

If this finally goes through, it's been in the works for more than a year now, I wonder if you XM subscribers will get the Metropolitan Opera channel. I hope so. It's worth the monthly charge by itself.

I wonder what other changes the merger will bring.

Tristan und Isolde

There were no incidents in today's performance of Tristan und Isolde that will be put in Mishaps at the Opera books. I enjoyed it a lot. All of the performers did great jobs.

It took me a while to get used to their using multiple images. They'd show the long shot of the stage in one image and close-ups of the singers in others. I've wished they'd show the long shots more often so I guess this solves the problem of satisfying people like me who want to see the big picture and satisfying the people who what to see up the singers nostrils.

And they tried to liven up this Park and Bark opera by making these close-up images move around the screen when there was no real action on the stage. That was too much for me. But I was there to hear the music so that didn't really matter much.

It lasted nearly five and a half hours. It felt like about twenty minutes. It must have been good.

(micro) EARTHQUAKE!

This morning at 12:17 before going to sleep we got to survive an earthquake. We didn't really feel it but we sure did hear it. There was a rather loud (it seemed) rumble followed by a sharp "crack" followed by a bit more rumbling. It was over in about three seconds.

Whenever I feel an earthquake I have to run to the Internet to see if Los Angeles has succumbed to The Big One. It hadn't. This one was very close to home. Its magnitude was 2.8. Here's the report from the USGS.

It says that it was 10 miles east of Escondido. But we're already a couple of miles east of what they're probably measuring from. So I had to go to Google maps to see where it was in relation to us.


View Larger Map

We're the pointer on the left and the earthquake is the pointer on the right.

We're OK! You don't have to worry about us any longer.

What to do with PB2?

When I visited New Mexico last summer, Pegbert gave me a jar of PB2. It's peanut meal with only a little of the fat left. They say to mix some of the powder with water for a low-fat version of peanut butter. Or, they say, you can mix it with jelly and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with less fat.

Yum?

I couldn't bring myself to doing either of the suggested things with the product. So it just languished in the pantry waiting for an application that seems more appealing.

Finally I came up with the idea!

I had gotten some natural peanut butter (only peanuts and salt) from Costco. This peanut butter, being natural, is runny. This stuff is very runny. Very, very runny. If you tried to eat an open-faced peanut butter sandwich on warm toast you would need to have a bib and a drop cloth. It would run off the bread. Even if it had been stored in the refrigerator.

My idea was to mix some PB2 into the Costco peanut butter. I figured that the peanut meal would soak up some of the excess oil from the peanut butter and thicken it up. My idea worked!

I put this peanut butter in little 1 oz. soufflé cups I get from Smart & Final (your smaller, faster warehouse store). For the lunch I take to work, Jerry gives me a bagel, a 1 oz. cup of peanut butter, some fruit, and a soft drink. It would be too much to ask him to smear some peanut butter from a large jar on my bagel because the bagel is frozen and assembling my lunch as it is is enough for him to do.

So I use the soufflé cups and contribute to the solid waste stream. (How much does my use of this plastic contribute to the carbon footprint of my lunch, you ask? I don't know but it surely is a lot less than if I drove my car to a restaurant. And I bring my apple cores and banana peels and orange rinds and put them in my compost bin. So I remove a lot of stuff from the solid waste stream!)

This fortified peanut butter sometimes causes some major "Got Milk?" moments. I sometimes get too much PB2 in it and it sticks to the roof of my mouth big time.

For your time wasting needs, I made a movie of what the peanut butter looks like before and after the application of PB2. Watch it if you dare! Sorry. (It started out with the title "What to do with PB2?" but for some reason that doesn't show up.)




(Does everybody watch each movie bloggers insert into their posts? I hope you find the time for this one...I made it myself!)