Peeking into the rock

If you've been with me for a while you know that the other time I came to Prague, Frank and I went to an opera in the beautiful and nationalist old Narodni Divadlo (National Theater) whose motto is "We are a nation!" The opera at that time was this thing about how the Czechs went to Osaka and, against great odds and giant Canadian and Russian ice hockey players, brought home the gold medal and also a Japanese girlfriend for one of the team members. It was hilarious, and I think that musically it was even kind of nice. The costuming and especially the set designs were amazing and hilarious too.

So this time, Hana got us tickets to the opera that came up on short notice (a month: that's what she said, but when we got tickets before it was like two days' notice, but I was paying full price for tickets and Hana gets some kind of employee discount thing, or maybe it is a perk that the government hands out or something). She lucked out. We ended up with Donizetti's "The Elixir of Love," (Napoj Lasky in Czech). I knew we were in for a good time when the prelude featured percussion provided by hay bales falling off a grain conveyor. That piece of equipment was the star of the show. The story line features a perverse but intellectual heroine, a self-absorbed sergeant, a depressive hero, a medicine-show charlatan and his limber assistant, and some switcheroos concerning inheritances and army enlistments and deceptions. The music is nice -- not something that haunts you the rest of your life, but really really nice. Did I say the sets were clever? The stage back of the Narodni Divadlo goes on and on and they took great advantage of that, and reused elements of the staging in ways that actively enhanced the comic sensibility of the show.

That was the opera. We have also been to the National Technical Museum, the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Zoo, and some other such sights. Emma, Frank, and Hana toured the underground of Vyšehrad. Myself, I took a nap: remember that "worn cartilage" thing? It's totally a thing and everything hurts after a few hours of walking. Also, a boat ride, during which we got a great view of the Fred and Ginger Building and some other, less explicable, stuff.

I am disappointed in the lack of cabbage in restaurants this time out, but there has been plenty of cucumber and very nice tomatoes, as odd as that may sound.

Will tell you all about Easter and spanking some other time.

Why won't Opera display the Mundane Science Fiction Blog? Or a lot of other Blogspot blogs? Why won't it launch a Popcap game properly?

The "knowledge base" at Opera is no help.

Anyway, I've been making about three hundred words a day, not all keepers, because I've been engaged with the vengeful spirit of Andrew Marvell, who keeps egging on the hordes of fruit I must process in self-defense.

Saturday: collection of pears,apples, grapes and blackberries
Sunday: blackberry jam, apple juice for pears, pear-blackberry tart (which was excellent but the nice fellow went out and bought supermarket sweet rolls and let the tart go nasty! WTF?)
Monday morning: pear-grape and mixed-fruit leather in the dryer (still in the dryer! Those guys are wet!)
Monday night: canned pears

Today, I don't know: there's still a lot of pears and maybe I'll make pear puree? Like applesauce? Or there's some unprocessed windfall apples, maybe I'll combine them into apple-pear sauce? There are also grapes ripening. There's some critter, maybe a bird, maybe a bug, that likes to bite the ripe grapes but not consume them, leaving me with a dilemma as to whether to toss the bit grapes or use them somehow. That's why I put grapes into the fruit leather. Overripe fruit is good in fruit leather too.

Nobody has asked me about the extra time on Friday yet, but they haven't picked up the timecards yet either.

I went through my old sewing patterns and kept the four that I can make fit me now and hesitated about the ones that are only five inches too small, because I have already lost a couple inches where it matters . . . but I put all the ones that are too small at all in a bag for Emma to look at (go look, Emma. I believe they are all complete and some of them have served me quite well in the past).

I also went through a corner of the old pile of papers upstairs and recycled a bunch and stacked others in such a way that you can get around it (this is the stuff that was inside of a huge filing cabinet (horizontal, I think you call it, with four drawers each almost four feet long) we pulled out of this room so we could work on the floor and I think I don't want to put it back because I think it's too big. So I don't want to have all the stuff that was in it and on it any more.

And so now I turn to my writing -- by my calculation I have an hour.