Fall cleaning

"The thought left me disconcerted and wanting to know, really and truly and in its entirety, the life and miracles of our famous Spaniard Don Quixote of La Mancha, the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and in these calamitous times to take up the exercise and profession of chivalric arms, righting wrongs, defending widows, and protecting those maidens who rode, with whips and palfreys, and bearing all their virginity on their backs, from mountain to mountain and valley to valley; and unless some villain, or some farmer with hatchet and pitchfork, or some enormous giant forced her, a maiden could, in days of yore, after eighty years of never once sleeping under a roof, go to her grave as pure as the day her mother bore her"--Don Quixote

This week we've been doing fall cleaning.  Think of it as spring cleaning six months late. (Or as I prefer, six months early!) We shifted a lot of junk at the outermost end of the back yard, and I'd forgotten how long it is! It reminded me of my Aunt Alma's back yard in a suburb of Sydney in Cape Breton, which went all the way down to the shore!

My room also got Marie Kondoized.  My computer now has a big table in place of its former old-fashioned desk.  The armchair I used to sit in when using it is now out on the sidewalk in case someone wants it.  We'd got it when we lived in New Brunswick almost forty years ago!  That's the same age as my clock radio, which no longer works as a radio, but I'd still been using its digital clock feature, but now I feel it's time for a change.

When I sat down at my computer on its new table, I had a drink in a glass that came apart in my hands! (It had had a crack at the bottom but I didn't care because it wasn't leaking, even earlier that day when I noticed the crack getting longer.) Hello again, mess.

Thursday night was this season's first opera rehearsal.  This year the Toronto City Opera is doing Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (one of my favourites!) this fall, and I think we'll be doing Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (another favourite) in the spring.  We started learning Offenbach's Drinking Chorus, just the notes without the French words.

Today we had the first Crowdreads Meetup since Sergei's return from Odessa. We discussed art, and I brought several coffee-table books of ours showing masterpieces from famous museums (National Gallery, Louvre, Prado...). I also printed out Picasso's "Guernica" and Joseph Wright's "Experiment With a Bird in an Air Pump." It occurred to me to say that "Guernica" depicts chaos yet isn't itself chaotic, which John P. thought sophisticated.

Unfortunately, I was way late because the Harbourfront streetcar was off, and the walking route was also blocked, so I had to go to the York Street end of Union Station and go south and east. (I was also late getting home, of course.) The Harbourfront bike path now has its own traffic signals!

Yesterday we were airing out the house because of smoke detector problems, so I had to open my windows, and it was so cool that I put on a sweater (the first of the season). Yet when I went out today I wish I'd taken my summer jacket, it was that warm!

This is a longer post than usual...