A few miscellaneous travel trips:
1. Do not pack in haste just before leaving on a trip. For my recent trip to New York for a few days, I packed just before leaving. One of the items I packed was a pair of grey flannel trousers. When I got to New York and was putting them on for the evening, I discovered that I had packed a pair so old that it was six inches too small in the waist and impossible for me to wear. Fortunately the black jeans that I had worn on the train could suffice.
2. Do not pack a small container of pasta salad you bought in a grocery store. It may leak olive oil over other things, in my case, fortunately, just the outside of some plastic bottles of water that I had in the same grocery-store bag.
3. It is nice to remember razor blades, but, if forgotten, they can easily be bought in New York.
A crocus has blossomed. I thought that in the past they blossomed in my yard in late February, but I’m not really sure.
All the lights are on in the house next door, and there are no curtains on any of the windows. There used to be curtains. Did the people decide to clean all the curtains at the same time? Have they decided to live without curtains as many people do? Have they moved away? And is the new occupant in the house looking things over? I don’t know.
Jane Fonda will be the narrator at a concert performance of the opera The Grapes of Wrath next month at Carnegie Hall. The audience will able to observe the results of her recent plastic surgery. She wrote on her blog on Feburary 16:
I just had some ‘work’ done on my chin and neck and had the bags taken away from under my eyes so I decided it would be good to get a new hair cut so people will think it’s my new hair. . . . I’m writing a book about aging so I couldn’t very well NOT talk about it. It’s been 2 weeks.
“Opera improved on its glitz factor thanks to HD broadcasts and tabloid publicity, but lost sight of its artistry. Administrators and critics fostered the wholly erroneous notions that singers of the past couldn’t act and singers today could; while the jet-set demands of the international lifestyle fostered hothouse careers: the next great hope comes along, wins acclaim, oversings and fades from sight. The tenor Rolando Villazón became a poster boy for opera in the 2000s: not, alas, for his huge talent, but for singing his voice to shreds.”–Anne Midgette writing for the Washington Post about opera of the past decade
Are you giving somebody a gift card? The Federal Trade Commission says, “Give the recipient the original receipt to verify the card’s purchase in case it is lost or stolen.”
