Prime Suspect

My friend L recently loaned me Season 1 of Prime Suspect.  It's a BBC series about Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, which started in 1991.  The first six seasons ran from 1991 through 1996, and then it restarted again with another season in 2003, then one in 2006.  There has recently been a reboot called either Prime Suspect 1973 or Tennison, which is a flashback to the main character's early days on the police force.

About the main character, Ms. Tennison is played by the phenomenal Helen Mirren, who lives up to her reputation in this role.  The show has the expected issues of sexism from coworkers on the force, skeptical superiors, and a doubting public, but Mirren plays the role of the singularly-focused DCI without becoming too much of a stereotype.

I am looking forward to the remaining seasons, and excited to learn about the reboot.  I hope it matches the quality of the original!

Mountain Biking

S and I have been doing lots of mountain biking lately.  I use the word "mountain" loosely, since we live in the Midwest.  Trail biking?  Off-road biking?  Whatever.  One of those.  And it's been a blast.

If you need a good activity for a hot day, it's highly recommended!

Happy Birthday, America!

The Grapes of Wrath and The Trial

E and I had an opera spectacular, enjoying two shows in one day a couple of Saturdays ago.

We started with The Grapes of Wrath, which was first performed in 2007.  I was not crazy about the music, contemporary as it is.  The OTSL performance was the premiere of a new revised version of the show.  I didn't do enough research to know what the changes were, but one of the composers was there for the performance, and I suspect he was a speaker at an event either before or after the show talking about just that.

Though I didn't care for the music, I very much enjoyed the tragic story, which I had never encountered before, not having read the classic Steinbeck novel!  I definitely preferred Titus, but as between this and Butterfly, it's a bit of a toss-up.

After the matinee, E and I headed out for dinner with G&G at Peno.  It's a fairly new place just outside downtown Clayton, and I think we were all quite pleased with our meals.  E and I shared a pizza and a pasta, and other than about 3/4 of one of my pieces of pizza, we demolished them both.  G&G each had a variation on the fisherman's stew.  One of them polished it off, one of them took half home.  You decide.  We even had a couple of desserts; the lemon sorbet was delightful.

Then E and I headed back to the opera for Philip Glass's The Trial.  I really didn't know what to expect from this one.  Now I know.  Absurdism.  Although I can't really blame Philip Glass for that.  The opera is based on Franz Kafka's story of the same name, so the plot is his fault.

The music was less offensive to my ears than the music in Grapes had been, and I must agree with E that I very much enjoyed the monochromatic set of black, white, and grey.  But aside from that, just not my style.  Last place.

Goals 2017 -- July Edition

I'm cheating a bit by returning to a prior goal this month.  However, it will be a bit more ambitious, as I am adding to it.

Remember back in April how I was going to put together my crafting area?  And then how I didn't?  Well, I'm going for it again.

My rugs are still at the condo, but now that spring is over, hopefully I can find a non-rainy day in which to go pick them up and lay out the basement a bit differently than it is.

Where this gets more complicated is that, in order to do the above, I must also clean up the basement.  In the intervening months as I moved my stuff to S's house, we accumulated quite a mountain of stuff down there.  Some of the boxes are my stuff that I haven't even sorted through yet, but a lot of it is stuff he and I have gone through and decided to get rid of -- either because we have duplicates or because we just don't want or need it anymore.  It's all piled up down there right now, so I'm going to try to organize into toss/sell/donate categories, and to organize the yard sale stuff so it's easier to store until sale time.

That's ambitious, huh?