Mostly enjoying the ‘hunkering down’ part of winter/the snowstorm, especially since work events and the jury trial mean I’m out of the house more than I normally am. At work, we had one of our regular town halls, and those of us with anniversaries got recognized. I’ve been there for five years, so was one of quite a few on the PPT slide, and we got gifts! The sort of thing where they send you a link and you pick a gift from a catalogue, which is always fun. I still have the framed print of a sailboat I got for a 10th anniversary gift at my old job, it’s up in my cube. The gift I picked was a blanket, as I needed a new one for the guest room.
I’ve been making soup! I made the creamy turkey vegetable noodle soup that Niece Allison gave me the recipe for a few years ago, and that came out great. It calls for ‘large pasta’, but I had orzo to get rid of, so I used that and it was great. The turkey was the leftover turkey from the ‘turkey breast in the slow cooker’ dry run I did back in December (I’d frozen it) and so now I guess I need to do another turkey breast at some point. I also did the slow cooker spicy cabbage beef soup recipe – I’d forgotten how really good it is, and quite easy. I have hot and sour soup cued up – I was going to make it last night, but decided just to go with a meatloaf. My experimenting there is that instead of just adding barbecue sauce or whatever, I added a can of baked beans. The resulting meatloaf was not your crusty-outside loaf (which definitely has its charms) but a very moist hotdish-y thing, but it came out great. I also got a little creative – I was going to make frozen green beans, and decided rather than just zapping them and maybe putting some butter on, I’d saute them and add lemon pepper, something I have to remind myself I have because I bought it for some recipe, but don’t normally use it in anything. That came out really great. I’ve also become a fan of those little microwavable minute rice single portions, so I did one of those.
I also got whimsical and decided to try making gingerbread, even though I’d made no planning and had no idea whether I had the ingredients. I swapped butter for shortening, maple syrup for molasses and light brown sugar for dark. It came out very blond, but tastes fine. I think I will try it again soon, but go buy the real ingredients.
So now I have several servings of soup, meatloaf and lasagna in the freezer, with more to come. That should probably take me to spring!
So, anyway, I can’t give you any details about the trial (yet), but I will say that it’s been fascinating. The prosecution is being very detailed, so things aren’t moving very quickly, but I see exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing. The evidence presentation and questioning-the-witnesses part is similar enough to what I do as a business analyst that I can definitely see an alternate timeline where I became a lawyer.
We’re definitely past the ‘spend hours in the jury room’ part, we can get called in at any time. I’ve been just reading and also playing that phone game whose ads have been all over social media, “Royal Kingdom”. Unfortunately, it’s so fun I’ve even been playing it at home. They do try to make you buy stuff, like extra lives. If you lose the same level X number of times, you either have to wait like 20 minutes to play again, or buy more lives. (I wait.)
And the challenge at lunchtime is to figure out lunch. There are quite a few takeout joints on the strip across from the courthouse, but they tend to be, like, fried chicken places or don’t have much seating room. I did a little exploration and discovered there’s a different clump of shops/restaurants by the LIRR station, two long blocks away. The Chinese restaurant has no seating (unhelpful), but Austin Ale House turns out to be a great place. They have lunch specials and their regular menu is interesting, too. It’s not cheap, but at least they have seating and it’s not crowded and you can definitely hang out and have a cappucino if you have time to kill after lunch is done. (on a warmer nicer day, I’ve gone walking around the neighborhood. I don’t know KG at all, and it’s really interesting. But mostly it’s been too cold.)
I’ve also (when the lunch break is long) taken the subway one stop to Forest Hills, which has a ton of food options (I found a ramen place I’ll be visiting with regularity), and I also took the time this last Thursday to check out the west end of the KG subway stop, which has quite a few options (I tried Cobblestones, which is fun). Sorry about going on about this, but I’m thrown by the reality that I can’t just grab a lunch and bring it back and eat it. Well, I can, but there’s no place to hang out except the Hot Lobbies, which have no tables.
What else? The apartment is now completely deChristmassed – it took a while, striking three trees and packing them up, vacuuming up fake tree needles with the teeny shop vac I bought just for that purpose (I’ve now bought a new tree to replace the one that was shedding), taking the leaf out of the dining room table, moving the music bookcases back in place.
I was supposed to go on a writing retreat last weekend, but cancelled because of jury duty – decided to do it in house (three-day weekend). And I did! I reserved afternoon time, and had a list of writing projects which I picked from randomly. Unfortunately, on the third day, my home PC crashed. Didn’t affect the writing directly (I use my Chromebook, mostly, for that), but it did mean that a lot of my energy was spent trying to fix the PC. I ended up having to reinstall Windows and then download most of my files from the cloud backup service I use. It’s mostly back now, but I keep finding stuff I’m missing that I either have to reinstall or just create from scratch, urgh.
I went to an opera! Friends of mine put on Purcell’s one-act, Dido and Aeneas. Standouts were my buddy Manya (my Buttercup from last summer) as the sorceress, and really all the leads. Chorus and orchestra could have been snappier, I must say, but probably didn’t get enough rehearsal time. I did chorus for Dido in grad school, and there’s a lot of chorus and a lot of it is tricky. I don’t find it that interesting as a theater piece. There’s a number with lyrics, Fear no danger to ensue, the hero loves as well as you! And at some point during our grad school rehearsal, I sidled up to my friend Cyrus, the music director and sang, Fear no drama to ensue… He laughed and responded, The cast is bored as well as you! But it can be interesting if well-directed, and this production was, and I look forward to seeing what they do next.
Meanwhile, my buddy Martin has been directing Amore Opera’s Magic Flute, with multiple casts of leads, and I was going to go see it yesterday, except we had a snowpocalypse. So I’ll probably see it next weekend, so I can see my Pinafore Bosun as Papageno. I love MF, so that will be a fun outing.
And I have Sweeney Todd auditions coming up! Vocally, I’m a Sweeney or a Judge, but probably too old for Sweeney now. I’m also (characterologically) probably a good Beadle. I can’t sing it as written, but I could certainly sing it with some judicial tweaks here and there (I did a dry run of “Ladies in their sensitivities” and went, yeah, I could just falsetto the A, or do an alternate C# and it would be fine). So as always, the goal is to just present myself and what I can do and let them figure out where to put me (if anywhere). I’m well aware that we may have a hundred talented folks auditioning for twenty-five slots, so even if my audition is fantastic, I might not get a spot. But I definitely won’t if I don’t audition, so… here we go!
Stay warm! Make soup!
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