Thank goodness for air conditioning. In February. It snowed about an inch here. Tomorrow it should get up to mid-50s or so. I am very happy that it is not in the 80s and 90s. In February. 

My central air and my garbage disposal were not working.  I managed to fix the garbage disposal last night (after I sent in an online maintenance request for it).  There is a reset button on the bottom of garbage disposals.  I pushed it in and it still didn't work; that is why I created the maintenance request.  A bit later I was rinsing out the sink and thought I would try again and it worked!

The a/c got fixed today.  They replaced the thermostat.  I used to have a google Nest thermostat.  Now it is a cheap non-programable thermostat.  I will stop by the office tomorrow and see if they can change it back to what I had when I moved into the apartment.  The thermostat was a selling feature of the apartment and I want it back.  In the meantime I was grateful to have cool air this afternoon.  (I got done with work early today.)  

I'm listening to the new OCR of Adam Guettel's Days of Wine and Roses for the second or third (call it second-and-a-half) time since downloading it last week, and enjoying it more and more each time.  When last I checked, a few weeks ago, the show seemed not to be selling very briskly despite its good reviews, name (well, Broadway-name) cast and familiar, if hardly feel-good, title.  Brian D'Arcy James and Kelli O'Hara sound wonderful on the recording and are reportedly heartbreaking onstage.  And Guettel's score, wedding his distinctive harmonic sensibility to a midcentury jazz idiom, is quietly devastating on Apple Music, so I can only imagine its effect live.  I may have to scrape together the cost of a ticket before the show's limited B'way run ends on April 28.

It got up to 92 degrees in the Dallas/Fort Worth area today.  Tomorrow it "drops" down to a high of 88.  I would not care except my central air is not working.  I have a fan in the window but the outside temp at 8PM is 81 degrees so that is of limited use.  

I heard WI will be start out the 70s tomorrow and then during day the temps will plummet to the 20s.  There could be tornadoes and a snow storm.  

I'm not sure how warm it actually got (it was supposed to get to 63°), but it's still 58° an hour after the sun set. I should open my windows. According to Apple's Weather app, there is a 35% chance of snow on Tuesday, but otherwise in the 50s and 60s all week. Which is good for when I go to the theatre next Sunday.

I am craving potato chips, of which I don't have any at the moment. I am not craving salad, even though I got myself some greens and a nice cucumber to put on them when I went to the supermarket yesterday.

This has been pretty much a nothing weekend. I did two loads of laundry--one of them sheets. We went on a long walk yesterday because the weather was so nice, but it was a little windy during our walk today, so we didn't go the extra around-the-block. I am supposed to be working on a brochure, and I am planning to call the client tonight so that we can wrap this thing up, although he didn't seem to be in a great rush for it when he left me a message earlier tonight.

(It only took me a little over six months!)

The old deserted beach that we walked — remember?
Remember?
The café in the park where we talked — remember?
Remember?
The tenor on the boat that we chartered,
Belching The Bartered Bride —
Ah, how we laughed!
Ah, how we cried!
Ah, how you promised
And, ah — how I lied.


[FUN INTERNET WORMHOLE]: The Bartered Bride's performance history suggests that — after flopping at its 1865 premiere in Prague, being performed only a scant handful of times over the next quarter-century (still without notable success), and achieving broad popularity only after a much-reworked 1892 revival in Vienna — its score wouldn't have been widely-known until very late in the century.  Technically, this should place the boat ride remembered by Mr. Lindquist no more than eight years before A Little Night Music's dramatic date of around 1900 — unless the tenor in question happened to be a (literal) Bohemian, introducing the Swedes to a little-known musical curiosity from his homeland.

Two weeks ago someone posted video of the show's first act, with Groban and Ashford. 

And someone else posted this Roblox version, compressing an hour of Act I highlights into 15 minutes while capturing all the theatrical intelligence and nuance of the actual production: literally, if you could just watch the whole show animated this way, you'd save yourself the cost of a B'way ticket without missing a thing.  Though the design and staging aren't always an exact match for what's happening at the Lunt, they're not far off -- and more importantly, this digital "toy theatre" tribute captures the vibe, and even the performance style, of Kail's revival with astonishing accuracy.  (I'm not even being snarky here.  Well, okay, maybe a little; but I'm not being hyperbolic: from my jaundiced perspective, the creators of the revival, and of this video homage to it, get the exact same things wrong about Sweeney Todd, in exactly the same ways and with exactly the same painfully misguided theatre-kid enthusiasm.  They're doing what they're doing with absolute love and no shortage of talent — and not a clue how badly their efforts are trivializing the material).

NYT piece on Sutton Foster, who recently took over Mrs. Lovett for Sweeney's likely-final three months; she's been rehearsing off and on since last fall, while juggling concert appearances and the recent Encores! Once Upon A Mattress:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/theater/sutton-foster-sweeney-todd.html


And here are some new production shots featuring Foster, Tveit, and Joe Locke as Tobias.

I fully support your procrastination, for as long as you can manage to do it.

This is a few days old, but I suppose I should put it here...