I thought I'd get a jump on the Daily as I just got home from work a little bit ago. (It was after midnight so I figure it makes this legit.  )  Our 9PM flight to DCA was delayed, as usual.  I guess the nice thing is that I got some overtime.  It was forced overtime because I am a GSC (Ground Security Co-Ordinator) and there must be one live and in person for every passenger flight.  And now I need to "power down" and drift off to sleep. 

One other good thing is that we start our new work schedule today and I don't need to be at work until 1PM.  That means I can stay up for another hou, get 8 hours of sleep, and still have time to do "stuff" before I have to leave for work.  I'm trying very hard to look on the bright side of things.    future's so bright I have to wear shades

Woo-hoo! I found my hat that had been missing for a few days! It was buried inside a blanket. Someone other than me buried it there.

Today was a nice day to go for a walk. It's currently 52°, which is not too cold or too hot, so it's perfect walking weather.

The fried rice sounds delicious. Even after I ate my second lunch from yesterday, which was also delicious.

Total accumulation of snow turned out to be a dusting, which was still quite slippery in places. Last night I went to a hockey game, which required a bit of walking, because I park about half a mile away so I don't get ticketed, and because I'm too cheap to pay for parking. Most of the parking signs around campus say "1 hour parking until 10 pm" but the ones where I park have one hour parking only until 6 pm, so I can park any time after 5:00 and leave my car there for however long.

Anyway, the home team won by a score of 5-0, which was disappointing only because if they had scored 6 goals, everyone would have gotten a free burger from one of the sponsors.

Overnight the temps fell into the single digits with a "real feel" of 1 degree.  Brrrr!!!!

Today might be a good day to stop at the Chinese place near the airport and get some of their delicious Yan Chow fried rice.  (I think that is what it is called.)  It doesn't have much, if any, soy sauce so the rice is white.  I don't know what spices they use but the taste is just wonderful.

I just ordered two lunches from Noodles and Company, planning on saving one until tomorrow. I am hungry and bored, which I guess is "Bongry." Somehow I doubt that will catch on the way "hangry" has.

It has started to snow, but it doesn't look like it is sticking to anything.

I just discovered that somebody has been chewing on one of my masks.

Not snowing here--that's supposed to happen tomorrow, and I really hope it doesn't snow much, because I have a bunch of places to go.

Today it's just cold, although it's supposed to warm up to the upper 40s.

Bernadette and I went to McDonald's this morning.

A friend who saw the show yesterday texted me excitedly during intermission, and as we were chatting it occurred to me that, for all its scale and spectacle, one of the things that excited me most about Christie's design was its efficiency.

I remembered pausing on the way out of the theatre, when I was there two weeks ago, to look at the set under worklight (on two-show days especially, it's not uncommon for crews to start resetting things while the audience is still vacating the auditorium).  During the performance I had marveled more than once at the sheer size and quantity of scenery, wondering where they were fitting everything backstage.  But under worklight it struck me that, while there is indeed a whole lot of stuff, Christie's stage-filling compositions actually break down into a half-dozen or so main units (only two of them really large -- and even those, less so than they appear from out front and under light) being constantly reconfigured and re-dressed throughout the evening.

It reminded me of John Napier's original Les Misérables design, in the broad sense that its satisfactions were based not so much in pure spectacle as in the amazingly clever compression of an entire microcosmic world into a machine that was, in its most basic form, as surprisingly simple as it was astonishingly efficient.  Unlike Les Mis -- whose basic elements were all on display from the moment the curtain rose, occasionally doing unexpected tricks but with almost nothing ever added to or subtracted from the basic unit set over the course of the evening --  Christie's Company design has a magic-box element of constant surprise and revelation.  It takes a while, but only adds to the delight, to realize that her box of tricks actually consists of a limited number of pieces being re-used with shrewd variations.  Neil Austin's lighting design, balancing neon clarity and inky blackness, is crucial to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't strategy by which the show moves.  And the gorgeously controlled color palette -- hot-red Bobbie moving through a world of silver-grey cubicles -- is deployed with such blazing intelligence, culminating in the astonishing "Tick Tock," that it becomes hard to imagine Company any other way.

I've never designed the show before (only assisted a friend -- in fact, Dan, the one who texted me yesterday -- on a regional production some 15 or 20 years ago).  But if I had, I'd be green with envy.  And if I ever do, I'll be sorely challenged to get this one out of my head.

It is snowing this morning.  We are not supposed to get more than an inch or two of snow.  The temperatures are supposed to be in the mid 20s to low 30s until the end of the month so this snow will stick around for a few days.

I hope your new card has that design, too!

The new documentary Keeping Company With Sondheim, coming to PBS in May, "explores [the show's] legacy" and "offers an inside look at Tony-winning director Marianne Elliott's creative process of bringing the reimagined, gender-swapped production to Broadway during the COVID-19 pandemic":

https://playbill.com/article/keeping-company-with-sondheim-exploring-stephen-sondheim-and-george-furths-company-will-debut-on-pbs-in-may