The Sunshine Bay saga continues

Remember the other week when I was writing about the Facebook game Sunshine Bay?  I said that I wasn't going to buy new land for buildings but save my game bucks to finish the enlargement of the port terminal.  Well, a few days ago they had a special where land was being sold for half price, so I spent all five of my bucks on land that would usually have cost ten.  I've used it to build a second villa, and a second hotel that produces 56 passengers every four hours. (The catch is that it requires nine squares of land instead of four.) I could use some of the space for the solar plant, but I still don't need extra electricity.

This expansion came at the right time, because I finally saved enough coin to buy a third sports yacht! (I got room for it by selling off my small yacht.) My next step will be raising the funds to upgrade my lighthouse, so I can carry a fifth boat.  I'll get the small yacht back till I can afford a fourth sports yacht, or perhaps I'll save a whole yacht and buy a business yacht first.

Meanwhile, by plugging away I finally got all the parts to complete the port terminal expansion, which I was afraid would require purchasing with bucks.  Changing the plan was a good decision.

If only I could find a career that involves me the way these games sometimes do!

Another coincidence

At the memoir slam yesterday, the subjects were "Potluck dinners" and "The biggest mistake." I didn't feel like writing about the biggest mistake I'd made, so I ended up writing about a mistake I actually didn't mind, just because it was MY mistake!  On the subject of potluck dinners, I ended up digressing into times when John and Kathrine brought vegan dinner over and I ended up sneaking out to McDonald's or KFC.

Not for the first time, there was a coincidence between the memoir pieces I was writing about and what I did that day.  For yes, John and Kathrine did bring over dinner that day.  But I actually had a good excuse for sneaking out:  they were late arriving and I was pressed for time because of choir practice. (But before I left I did get the chance to have some of their nice garlic bread.)

At choir practice that night we started doing the Carol of the Bells, but we're doing it in its original Ukrainian!  That language has sounds like "shch" and "hh."

At opera rehearsal this evening we started the last act of Carmen.  We're actually doing an onstage number from that part that was edited out the last time we did it. (Opera productions aren't an exact science.)

RUSH

"Are you ever not an asshole?"--Rush

Today I went out food shopping.  All I could think of to get was milk and eggs, but I felt the need to get out of the house.  It was pretty cool, but I decided against wearing my furry winter cap. (My breath isn't visible yet.)

I also felt like seeing a movie, and didn't care which so much.  I'd hoped to see that documentary about the woman in charge of the Beatles' fan club, but it was on earlier than I thought.  In the evening I went to see Ron Howard's Rush at the Varsity.

Rush is an enjoyable, sometimes thrilling biopic about the world of 1970s Formula One auto racing and the famous rivalry between Jim Hunt and Niki Lauda. (I remember reading about--spoiler alert!--Lauda's recovery from a near-fatal crash, leaving his face with permanent burn marks that seemed not uncool when I was fifteen.) Howard's middlebrow craftmanship can build real excitement--both here and in his Apollo 13--though his use of not one but two flashback montages is more than a little cheesy.

The other night as I was going home from karaoke I noticed a long queue in front of a nightclub.  I hope Toronto isn't turning into New York!

Demophobia

Am I afraid of crowds?  I don't mind being in a crowd watching a parade, but last year when I visited London there was one point when I left the theatre after seeing The Jersey Boys and there was a crowd of hundreds so huge that they filled the whole street. (I don't recall what event they were there for.) And that really did frighten me.

I thought of this because I went to karaoke last night at the Office and there was quite a crowd getting together for some party.  And they rather unnerved me:  they crowded the bar so that I was a long time ordering a Coca-Cola there.

I was there with Lillian's Karaoke Meetup group, singing "Always Something There to Remind Me" and "If You Could Read My Mind." She gave me a candle holder decorated with Christmas reindeer.

This afternoon Nancy filled in for Ivan at the Acting Meetup.  She had one exercise where two people were given an Alice Munro book, someone gave a page number and they had to start a conversation from a line of dialogue on that page.  When I did it I suggested using my copy of Ivanhoe, and the result was a scene where I was a guy who thought he was a mediaeval knight.  My last line was "Do you know where there are some windmills?" Later we did these scenes in pair with the dialogue "You came," "I had to," and "You shouldn't have," only as part of different genres.  My pair got to do it as horror, which was pretty fun.

David Kiang

This afternoon my father's friend David Kiang came to visit.  Father taught him at Mt. Allison over fifty years ago. (Mother recalled that he did every problem in the textbook!) He was later a mathematics professor at Dalhousie University, and now he's retired.  You know Father is old when even his students have been retiring.

When David was a student he did some babysitting for us.  On one occasion he left a Chinese-language book at our house.  Later on, as I started learning Chinese, I got an ambition to translate the book, and I cracked the first part a few years ago.  It's a cold war romantic thriller about a beautiful Chinese student who gets exploited by the communists and ends up with a Prince Charming in Hong Kong.  I'll have to translate some more of it sometime.

We also talked about another Dalhousie math professor called Edelstein, who briefly taught me in a year at Mt. A. (When I saw the classic Italian movie Umberto D., something about the title character reminded me of Edelstein.) He supervised David's wife's Ph.D. thesis and spoke well of David.

This evening I went to see Night of the Living Dead at the Event Screen. (I've never seen it, though I know the whole plot from reading Roger Ebert's Reader's Digest article "Just Another Scary Movie?" which didn't fail to reveal the ending.) But it turned out the schedule had been changed.  Oh well, maybe I'm better off not seeing it...

Sunshine Bay

A Facebook game I recently started playing is Sunshine Bay.  That's a game where you send out cruise boats to different destinations, requiring passengers and fuel.  (You get the passengers by building houses on your land.) It's a game that requires long-term strategic thinking.

I've outgrown pleasure boats, which only go on local cruises.  But I still have a single small yacht, which goes to the Bahamas or Cuba. (Who cares about Washington's embargo?) It's no longer needed for the specific challenges, but it's nice to have one boat that needs only twenty passengers.  I also have one high-speed catamaran, an intermediate-sized boat that goes to Bermuda, Haiti, New York, Cancun or Venice.  I still need it for one challenge, but I imagine there won't be much more of that.  But I have two sports yachts that go to Buenos Aires, Vancouver, San Francisco, Reikjavik, Dublin or Barcelona, and I'll be getting more soon when I've accumulated enough coin, as well as a business yacht.  First I've had to replace a couple of docks so they'll accommodate boats at that level.  All that costs coin, and I've planned the order of purchases carefully.  I'll also upgrade the lighthouse to allow for a fifth dock, in addition to replacing the smaller boats.

Some players spend a lot of real money--something I only do as a last resort--and get a lot of land for buildings.  But I prefer to use the land I do have more intensively. (Beachfront expansion is a higher priority.) First, I largely got rid of my business buildings, whose income isn't so important, to focus on residential buildings.  Now I'm going to replace several of the buildings with villas that produce passengers every hour, which I consider the best frequency.  Things will be easier when I've expanded the port terminal to allow a bigger reserve of collected passengers, but it can wait.  So can other improvements like expanding the city hall for greater residential population--which I don't need--and creating a solar plant.  So far fuel supply hasn't been a problem.

A new Meetup group

Two weeks ago at the memoir slam, only six people showed up and Selia was worried about its future.  So I've started a new Meetup group to attract people from that milieu. (Since I'm already organizing the ROLT Meetup, I can start a new one with no extra fees.)

It's working well.  The Meetup group already has about ten members.  At yesterday's session three of the nine people came from Meetup. (A couple others may be coming next week.) Our two subjects were "Things that aren't as they appear" and "Being chosen last." On the first subject I couldn't think of much to write about, but mentioned how I'd belied my appearance.  The latter was a subject that I'd just submitted:  ironically, it got chosen first!  I talked about being chosen last for teams in gym class, including the time when both teams insist the other one take me.

At this evening's opera rehearsal things were reversed and Adolfo went downstairs with the boys, like in previous years, while Beatrice stayed upstairs with the girls.  We did the number from the third act of Carmen where the smugglers sing about sending pretty women like Carmen on ahead to distract the customs officer. ("Like all men, he's eager to please/He loves to play the gentleman..") Just at the end of the number there's a triple-dotted note!  That very rare sign means that the note's value is increased by seven-eighths, and it goes from two beats to three and three-quarters.  In other words, it fills the four-beat bar all except for one quarter-beat note at the end.  I noticed a note like that in the finale of Macbeth too.

The social whirl

Friday night I attend another trivia contest put on by Sash's Toronto Social Friends group, which took place at Fran's Restaurant near Carlton station.  Once again I was one of the top finishers.  In each round we formed new teams and had to choose a team name, so I chose the movies titles "The Wild Bunch" and "The Meanest Men in the West." (I was surprised how hard much of the second round was.) For my dessert prize I chose rice pudding.

I was late getting to the Actor's Meetup yesterday, so I didn't do much:  just a generic scene where I'm openly worrying and the other guy is resisting worry.

Last night I went to an Asperger's Meetup for the first time in a while.  We had an Indian dinner at the Banjara restaurant near Eglinton Station. (I ordered chicken biryani and butter naan bread.) There were five of us, all boys, but I was unfamiliar with most of them.

This afternoon I was going to go on a Professor's Walk up Dufferin, all the way from Bloor to Yorkdale Mall!  But I lost interest and stayed home.  I finished harvesting the potatoes, and they fill both of our big bowls.  Some of them are reasonably big.

Last week I tried a new Facebook game called Trainstation, but I couldn't get into it. (Joining locomotives and wagons isn't my thing.) But I have become interested in another one called Tribez [sic], which involves building a prehistoric village.

Funny Girl

"I'm a bagel in the middle of onion rolls!"--Funny Girl

Moira went off to Kingston for a while, so we'll resume watching The World at War when she comes back. (Before she left, she made us a turkey pie!)

I've started digging up the potatoes in the garden.  It's somewhat better than last year anyway.

Last night at opera rehearsal we started bringing the props upstairs from the basement.  We're now getting into the third act. (Beatrice is hoping to start the staging part before the Christmas break!) It turns out that David Roche won't be doing the acting class this year.

Today I finally saw William Wyler's movie of the musical Funny Girl at the Event Screen. (It was for the second or third time:  the first time was in French on a black & white TV, so I'm not sure how much that counts.) It's a pretty good Barbra Streisand vehicle, on the conventional side.  With Streisand, what you see is what you get:  either you adore her or you don't.  I checked out Fanny Brice on Wikipedia and it turned out that Nicky Arnstein didn't become noble in the end as the movie depicted. I think the projector didn't have trouble last week; this print starts with an imageless overture so they thought there was something wrong.

Afterward I had dinner at the Eaton Centre food court. (They now have "collection centers" for empty trays.) I used to eat roast beef sandwiches at Arby's there, but that place has now closed.  Instead I ate Indian food from Amaya Express:  butter chicken with fresh naan bread and mango juice. (They also threw in chickpeas.)

Oh to be in England...

Yesterday was the October ROLT event.  At the last minute I found out that Butler's Pantry was closed on Thanksgiving weekend, and had to change the location to Victory Cafe, also in Mirvish Village to the south.  Fortunately, we still got a full six people.

I read part of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre where she returned to her old home and met two cousins, who were messed up in opposite ways.  I also read a beautiful chapter of the third book in T.H. White's The Once and Future King explaining how Guenevere ended up in love with Lancelot. (All the library copies were out--some book club must be reading it--so I had to buy it, but I was hoping to read The Sword in the Stone again anyway.) And I read the first page of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, and Jane considered this a highlight.  I considered reading Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" as well, but skipped it.

Among the other readers, a new guy called Darren read an entry from his blog "Personal Travel Stories," about visiting Cheshire. (Like me, he's a big fan of Bill Bryson.) Moira came and read part of Samuel Pepys' diary with his vivid depiction of the Great Fire of 1666.

Too bad that the lunch I ordered there made me unwell for much of the day. (Beware those home fries!) Donald came over for dinner but I had to skip dessert.

Viewership of this blog has been sluggish for a while, but I just had a big uptick.  My "Busy evenings" post has already had seven pageviews!

HEADACHE!

At today's Acting Meetup, I did a commercial for a financial planning group, pretending to be a rich heir confiding in his psychiatrist.  I also did a scene from The Replacements where coach Gene Hackman recruited has-been quarterback Keanu Reeves for his team. (It was the kind of cliched writing where Hackman waits on Reeves' boat then makes him jump when the latter returns there exhausted.) I played the Reeves role, but in hindsight I really should have been doing Hackman.

This evening I was going to try to see Funny Girl again at the Event Screen, planning on an early dinner since the movie started at 6:45.  It turned out, however that John and Kathrine were coming for dinner and they'd be a while arriving.  Do I stay for dinner with them and miss the movie, or go to the movie and miss dinner with them?  In the end I did neither, because I had such a big headache I ended up in bed.

Lately I've been doing o'ekaki puzzles by this Japanese expert.  The way it works is that you have a grid of tiny squares where some are filled and others are empty.  With each row and column, they tell you the length of the segments of filled squares, but you have to figure out the length of the empty segments yourself, and when you're finished you get a picture! (Left-brain process, right-brain result.) 

I really love that kind of puzzle.  Figuring out which squares are filled requires a special kind of logical thinking.  For example, if a segment is more than half of its row/column's length, you can determine that some squares in the middle have to be filled.  Or when you have a long segment on the top of the grid while the adjacent row only has some very short segments, you can figure out its location by seeing which columns begin with a single-square segment.  Or if a row/column equals the combined length of its segments plus the number of segments minus one, that means its unfilled segments are all just one square in length and you can determine the whole row! (Or if it's that number plus n, you can determine part of the segments that are n+1 in length.)

Busy evenings

Tuesday night I went to opera rehearsal.  Just as I approached the bus stop I realized I'd left my Metropass at home!  I had to go back and get it, so I was twenty minutes late. (Oh well, I'm usually early.)

Last night I went to see Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl at the Event Screen with the Classic Movie Meetup group.  But the projector broke down (it was delivering sound without picture) and they gave all of us rainchecks.  Actually, it was probably for the best because I wasn't feeling well.

This evening I went on the Queen Street art walk.  One of the places we went to was a boutique selling Japanese art prints that just moved there from Yorkville.  In the back they were having an exhibition of Hiroshige's landscape prints.  Hiroshige's one of my favorites! (I especially like his winter images.)

What with my schedule, I've been watching The World at War in the afternoons while Moira watches it in the evenings.  Just today I saw the episode about the incredible Battle of Stalingrad.  The budget standoff in the American government reminds me of Stalingrad, with the Republican extremists ruling out compromise like Hitler ruling out retreat, and the Democrats forced to take a stand like the Russians.

IVANHOE

I've developed an odd ambition to read every novel that was made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  Issue #1 of Classics Illustrated is Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, which I  read about a decade ago. (It's amazing how villainess Milady takes over the story in the second half.) The second issue is Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and I picked it up yesterday at Lillian Smith library.

It's a bit slow so far, with lots and lots of visual description:  I'm glad I've read the comic.  It occurred to me to read into the novel's Norman-Saxon conflict a subtext of the emerging class tensions in Regency Britain.  Cedric the Franklin seems to represent the upper-middle class, the backbone of the modern British social order.  Of course, the squirearchy of the antebellum American South took Ivanhoe to heart and made the Normans their role model, which is odd because Scott's Normans are basically jerks.

At yesterday's memoir slam there were just six people, so we had time to do three subjects:  breakfast, bad grades and Saturday rituals.  (The latter two had been my suggestion.) On bad grades I wrote about being in Grade 7 the year we were in Mississauga, and the art teacher giving my blue squares 1 out of 5 because the edges were messy; on Saturday rituals I talked about the color comics in the weekend newspapers and swimming at the university pool.  But I couldn't think of much to say about breakfast.

I got the idea of starting a Meetup group to attend the memoir slam, to see if we can attract Meetup people, since I can organize a second group with no extra fees. (I had to quit trying to start the Ph.D. Students Meetup because of the Acting Meetup on Saturdays, but I was getting nowhere anyhow.) I've set it up and we already have one new member!

Last night's choir practice was the last for three weeks.  We started "Tu Scendi Delle Stelle" (we'd done this under Giuseppe, but this was a simpler arrangement) and Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad." I forgot to bring the book of Hemingway stories for John George, so I'll just have to remember it next time.

This evening I got an email from Blanche Klein.  I attended the first meeting of her book club, then didn't get to any of the later ones.  But I think she liked my book suggestions, and I'm impressed that she remembered me. (They'd just been reading The Leopard, which I'd suggested.)

What I think about sometimes

During yesterday's walk in the park, I got to thinking about how I'd remake Ingmar Bergman's sexy comedy Smiles of a Summer Night in an American setting.  I imagined it being set in Arlington, Virginia, in 1899.  I imagined Fredrik going to see the opera Carmen at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., with Desiree shown singing the Habanera.  And there'd be some dialogue afterward.

Younger woman (cooing, holding up her fan): That was so immoral!

Older woman (livid): You could see he was having intimate relations with that... that...  If he hadn't stabbed her, I would have!

Mother (with boy in tow): He should have married the nice girl.

Fredrik:  It's all French to me.

Boy: If they were Spanish, why were they singing in French?

Mother (grabbing the boy's ear): Don't ask questions all the time!

And I imagined a scene where Fredrik sneaks up behind Anne and puts his hands over her eyes.  Anne smiles at first, but when Fredrik speaks and she realizes it's him and not Henrik her smile fades, but it returns when she turns around and faces him.

I think the original movie had a scene where the Countess fires a pistol at a shooting range, so I imagined a soldier saying to her, "Bullseye!  We could have used you in Cuba!"

That's what I think about sometimes. (While I remember these characters well, I had to check the Internet Movie Database to remember their names.)

Autumn damp

Yesterday's Acting Meetup still attracted a good twenty people.  Someone did a commercial pitch for Captain Morgan's rum, and that character appealed to me.  So when I did a pitch for this fish vitamin that improves your skin I performed it as Captain Morgan! (I started by swooping off my imaginary hat.) I also did a scene from Elysium, where my only three lines were "Where are the guns?" "What is this?  Family Heirloom?" and "Hmm--yeah, it'll do."  I had a bit of a headache, so I didn't mind.  I entered the scene at a slow, steady pace to suggest a gangster.

I've finished Larry McMurtry's Roads.  I haven't read any of the "50 ideas you really need to know" series for a while, so now I've started reading the entry on architecture.  I knew a bit about gothic architecture because I recently saw J. Bronowski discussing it in The Ascent of Man, and I also knew about Doric, Ionian and Corinthian columns (which Vitruvius compared to a man, a woman and a maiden respectively).

This afternoon I went on a Walking Meetup with some Culturelink people.  We met at Victoria Park station and walked through Dentonia Park.  The weather was damp with autumn gloom:  you could see fog around the tall buildings.  But that weather appeals to me.  I considered seeing Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal again at the event screen, but the day was gloomy enough.

I've been getting into Facebook's Sunshine Bay game.  Just now I'm saving money to upgrade my port to allow a greater capacity for passengers.  After that I'll replace some of my businesses, which I don't really need, with residences to increase the passenger flow. (I won't be able to buy more land till I get a fourth neighbor.) Only then will I save to buy more sport yachts.  And I still won't need to upgrade the town hall to increase the resident capacity for a while, because I'm not yet close to full.  Fuel upgrades aren't needed either.

Plantar fasciitis

Wednesday I finally went to see Dr. Ang, and it turned out I have plantar fasciitis.  Moira has had that too, but she runs a lot more than I do.  She recommended some foot exercises (which Moira knows all about) and suggested insoles for my shoes.  Moira also mentioned that her hairdresser recommends a change of shoes.

I've been wearing my previous pair of shoes, whose soles are a bit worn, but my condition is already easing.  This evening I finally got out to the drugstore and bought the cheapest pair of insoles I could find. (Tell me I'm not my father's son!) That meant I had to cut them to my foot size of 8 1/2; unfortunately, I cut them to a woman's 8 1/2, which is more like a man's 6 1/2.

Wednesday I went to rent the Danish version of The Killing at Suspect Video in Mirvish Village. (I used to go there a lot a decade ago, before we started our zip.ca subscription.) Unfortunately, they had no copies of the first half which we wanted, though they had three copies of the second half!  I've been hoping to rent the third season of Treme, but that still isn't out.  

Instead, Moira and I went out to 2Q Video where she decided to rent The World at War, the 1973 British documentary series about World War II.  What a powerful show it is! (I'm seeing it for the fourth time.)  It's very clear and well-structured, with a lot of interesting people being interviewed.  But it's also rather depressing.

Group photo

Larry McMurtry on Edmund Wilson: "He was a great describer--after all, he even described Finnegans Wake"--Roads

At the memoir slam we did life on a farm (I wrote about our family garden) and vacations.  Selia wrote about a vacation where she found out some girls she'd admired had stolen something, and that's all she could remember about it.

At choir practice we posed for our group photo so we were dressed fancy, largely in black. (I wore my black suit and black tie, but with a grey shirt.) They had us stand on a staircase so we could all get in the shot.  We also did a new song combining "O, Holy Night" and "Silent Night."

I was pleased that John George showed up. (He'd missed the earlier rehearsals, and Giovanni was giving me a lift afterward instead.) He told me that he was taking up reading Ernest Hemingway, so I promised to lend him a volume of Hemingway's short stories that I have in my room.

My right foot got sore around the heel instep and has me limping.  The odd thing is that I have no idea why:  it just got sore. (Someone in the choir said that when you get older soreness often comes out of nowhere.) I'll have to see my doctor about it.