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After work I finished reading Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane di Prima. It was my book for this season's Spousal Book Club and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Then at night we went up to the Pink Palace to see The Thing on the giant screen (and I just found out that it's not technically imax anymore, I guess the screen is still the screen but the projector was replaced with another brand when they upgraded to digital over a decade ago...but that's just branding...it was still The Thing on a GIANT-ass screen). Anyway, that ruled, I guess it'd been longer since I've seen it than I realized and I've never seen it like that before.

Had a pretty chill day yesterday. Except for work, which was busy as there was a deployment that was taking forever and had some small things forgotten and some small issues but the infrastructure team has gotten so red-tape-heavy that it was pulling teeth to get the few small things that weren't called out beforehand taken care of as well. And that's really about it for now.

Mary Beth and I walked over to Hattiloo to see If Scrooge Was a Brother (which as you may expect, is exactly as the title describes). It was pretty good though there was a bit of a religious/Bible-fixation in it (which it felt like the play was sending up in the Christmas Future part, but then it went back to an embrace at the end). Then later I finished reading Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories by Philip Roth and it was quite good. That's about it for now.

In the morning, I watched The Shrouds, the newer Cronenberg movie. It's good, has a very weird vibe that's very much in line with his other recent one Crimes of the Future (beyond extremely stilted dialog and acting, etc.), but it kinda works in that it makes up its own sub-niche genre, even within Cronenberg's works. Then in the evening, Mary Beth and I went up to the Park and walked around and we walked around the forest and the pond and stuff. At night I started working on this composition idea I have for a future electroacoustic thing. I'm just starting to get a little bit down. We'll see how it all goes. I got up today to go to the bank and I went and got a fuck ton of ones. And there ya have it.

Got off work early for it being the day before the holiday. So in the mid-afternoon Mary Beth and I walked up to the Park and then we walked through the Old Forest. As we were about to come back out, we went and checked out the NEW trail...the part of the Forest that had been fenced in by the fuckin' Zoo finally got opened up again and the fence was taken down and there's a trail over in that part so we walked it and that's cool and stuff. Then we walked around the pond and then lay in the greensward for a bit as dusk settled in. Then we walked back home! We had a little mini-Thanksgiving dinner with some slowcooked turkey and cranberry sauce and pie. That's about it for now.

During my lunch break I finished reading The Silent Cry by Kenzaburō Ōe and it was okay. After work I went back to James Davis to pick up my suit (and additional jacket) as it was supposed to be ready and all. On the way back I stopped by Kroger to pick up a few things. Anyway, okay so I get back home and after dinner try on the clothes again for Mary Beth to see and she is very unhappy with all of it. Though the suit says it's navy, it seems to be even darker than that and really just looks black on me (which I was incapable of telling by myself at the store). And the extra jacket that I thought was a lighter shade is only lighter than the suit and itself looks closer to a navy. So now we've spent way too much money (and time) on something that doesn't even look good. And to top it all off, that jacket looks like it wasn't even finished being altered on one shoulder (and the suit's pants are too short). I need to take it back which I will do soon. I thought it was going to look good when I got home but it's turning out to have been a pretty miserable experience.

Mary Beth and I went back out to Paradiso for some more MetOp, this time for Richard Strauss's Arabella. It's later than Salome and after he had gotten to where he was going so out there in dissonance and all, but it's still good and has quite a lot of the Strauss feeling still. Even the parts with traditional kind of waltz stuff has this dense layered and near-collage kind of effect. So yeah, that was fun and a nice four hour extravaganza. At night I worked some on my music-loading script. Something seems to have happened with the python discogs library I'm using (it's has a built-in backoff for requests when you hit the limit...I use it to download album art). It had been working forever but I ran it recently and I would get about ten images downloaded and it would hit a limit and then just start erroring out for the rest. This is only speculation, but while looking up the issue I was seeing things about their requests going through Cloudflare...so since there was a huge Cloudflare outage a few days ago, could it have been something changed with the way they're handling those errors or with the response structure, etc and that's broken the way the library processes them? I haven't seen anyone else reporting this issue at least not yet. But I just made my own, very non-optimal, backup solution to handle it when the library doesn't backoff correctly. Okay, boring stuff!

Mary Beth and I went up to Crosstown for a screening of Tav Falco's movie The Urania Trilogy. Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra did a live score (didn't realize it until it was over but it was Jim Duckworth on guitar!). The movie to me was kinda if Guy Maddin was Mike McCarthy. It's done like it's an old silent film though there is some sound, usually not synchronized (but then towards the middle in part two some of the dialog does start being synchronized). There is some interesting stuff and it can be quite funny at times. It is probably a bit overly long. Though one funny incidental thing is that after the part two ended and the title for part three came up a WHOLE bunch of people got up and left, probably believing that the third part was going to be as long as the first two. But then the third part was like MAYBE five minutes and then it ended. (The abrupt end was a very amusing part.) After it was over we went upstairs to Art Bar and hung out for a little bit.

After work Mary Beth and I went on a short walk around the neighborhood. It was practically almost warm even. Upon coming back home, we were greeted by Peanut so we hung out with her a little bit. Then at night we did our Superlo grocery run. And I guess that's really about it.

Mary Beth and I went out to the Tennessee Shakespeare Company to see Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit. It was another reading (they're part of a little series, we caught the first one with the Chekhov and this as the last one) and not a full-on play production. On the way home we stopped by Kroger for a few things they didn't have (or have enough of) when we recently went.