Semi-functional arms are overrated: The husbeast has ordered a leash that can be turned into a belt, and yesterday experimented with taking the dog on a walk with the end of her least looped thru his belt. I think this could be a reasonable solution to the issue of having me doing all the dog walks - which I can do, but it means I can't use my breaks in the day for much else. 

I started reading KJ Charles's Magpie Lord this week and it's fun and sexy and has interesting integration of magic into Victorian England. It's a good book - I'm looking forward to finishing it.

I am also reading Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant for my book group - since we're reading it in pieces, I have stopped myself at the end of the Accountant section, but it's been a very thrilling read that has made me fascinated by imperialism thru trade. Content warning: a section of the book refers to plagues deliberately being used to subdue a new trading ally. 

I'm listening to the podcast Overinvested talking about Moonstruck (1987) and how Nicholas Cage has a strange and narrow set of skills but MAN, this is a good use of them. 




So, this post is at least partially about covid19. Sorry. Skip this part if it's not to your taste just now.

As the weather gets better, and people start to talk about 'reopening', I'm feeling more dissatisfied with the staying in the safety of my home. I went for a longer walk the other day to a park about a mile away and the reality of having that be sort of my outer limit made me tired and a bit irate. The act of sitting under tall old trees was soothing - and then I went home and read an article about how now I'm supposed to avoid shared public furniture like the bench I had just been sitting on. 

I am afraid that politics of this situation will make it difficult to get public funding for bike paths and park benches after this. It's not a well fleshed out fear, but it's there. 

In other news, my husbeast will be getting an X-ray - time and date to be determined. We have checked in with several friends who work in hospitals and they have a clear set of precautions and guidelines. We think this can be done safely, or at least with minimal exposure, and then we'll have some clearer sense of how to treat his arm. 

-I bought a slanket and it makes me feel like a decadent cozy noble in a weird futuristic space play. Totally cozy, down for it.

-My dear husbeast is missing my actually dressed up self, and I also, kind of miss my dressed up self. But snuggly clothes are key. 

-I have been slowly trying to get the dog into the bathroom, and it's working! This is mostly out of a desire to make the eventually process of taking a bath as pleasant and unworrisome for her as possible. So far she's gotten to the point where she will come and hang her head into the (empty) tub and take treats or a drink from the handheld showerhead. I'm debating - she's about 50 lbs, so it would be nice if she would be willing to get into the tub herself. (Particularly since she has shown a general aversion to being picked up. That, also, we need to train for, but her skin issues and general smelliness make the bath a slightly more pressing target for me.)  My current plan involves steps made out of my foldable playmatt, which is what she uses to get onto the couch, and then padding the bottom of the tub with some towels for a landing site. We'll see how it unfolds. 

- I took a short midday bike ride today and was surprisingly productive! I think that it may be an every other day addition. 

- My work has presented some actual real deadliness, so it's kind of nice to have a kick in the pants to get some things done. [Edit: I meant to write "deadlines" but I am so delighted with the visual pun I am leaving it!]

- I have started reading the book for the book club that I need to finish by tomorrow and it is, actually, such a fast read and a good book that I might be able to get myself there in time! The Wrong Stars - a very fun read. 

-After watching BY JEEVES, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical the Wodehouse books, I kind of want to watch the Fry and Laurie adapation of the novels - it seems like the kind of fun, slightly formulaic and fundamentally conservative English nonsense that would be fun to watch.

-The Downton Abbey movie made it to HBO and I watched it and there's very little to say about it that doesn't devolve into a personal tirade against Julian Fellowes - he's in love with the aristocracy and I think they need to fear the guillotine a bit more than they current do. 

-I am going to bake some chicken and veggies this evening - should be delicious! 

- NOTE: following bullet points are corona related!

-The quarantine state of mind is having 3 solid days where you feel pretty well adjusted, followed by a sudden, unexpected dip into what we call "the hell zone" - Dan Sheehan seems to have this one right! 

- My workplace has been talking about opening up again - for students in the fall is one plan in the works, but I have heard that the leadership has already started to take meetings and talk about opening up our office building in a modified form for the end of the month. That seems ludicrous - our office in in a building famous for its poor ventilation, and there is no way to social distance in some parts of the building effectively. I will push to stay at home as long as I can, for my own health and safety, but I also hope that we can get better guidelines from our (fairly reasonable) governor about the actual steps that we need to take and would have to meet before we'd return to the office. Honestly, it seems like it would be safer to just write off the next three months as either months we'd be ordered to stay at home, or months where it would be safer to work from home, and adjust from there. Our division does not need to have physical connections. 

-Also, I kind of am quite tired of working from home, and would like to be able to branch out a bit, but that's not something I am willing to risk anyone's LIFE to do. 

- I have been hit by the tired stick.
-Apparently John Constantine dated King Shark and I kind of dig it.
-Ice cream delivery worked! Huzzah!

 -I'm reading a fun novel for a book group that I will cover in more details in the future.

- As expected, Love Never Dies was a totally bizarre and fun experience - partially because I conned several other people into watching it with me and then discussing it afterwards. The version we watched was the 2011 Australian production with Ben Lewis as the Phantom.  It suffered from being inconsistent, having no real background characters, having a really boring Christine, and it just felt kind of small. I have been watching some excerpts from the London 2010 production, which suffered a fair few of its own problems, but there were songs that gave characters more interaction and fleshed out the world a little bit - sadly, there's no actual official recording. I'm working with absurdly poorly filmed bits from Youtube. 

The problem is, of course, that having major problem just makes the show more fascinating - there are some engaging songs! There's the skeleton of an interesting plot in the London version that was stripped out for the Australian version. (Or maybe just the concept album version.) My brain is going to have some fun taking it apart and looking at all the jagged edges to see how it could be improved or changed or fixed - it's a lovely distraction!

-Mask making continues apace - I made 10 last week and that seems to be my general normal output. I didn't get the 60 yards of foldover elastic I bought via etsy back at the beginning of the month - the seller is in China and I am honestly just not certain if that's been lost or the transit is just going much slower than usual.  I tried to make polyester ribbons from my stash work, but they are largely too slippery and too difficult to tie. I finally gave up and purchased more foldover elastic from US suppliers on Etsy, and those should arrive this week.   

Etsy's really gone into the mask-making business since I first ordered back at the beginning of the month - the whole front page was people selling premade masks. Which, yay, finally!

- Our local wine shop(e) has a joint venture with a produce wholesaler for a box of fresh produce for $35, so we tried that and got a pretty fair amount of food. The Husbeast thinks it was a little expensive for the quality, which, may be true, but was also easy and definitely enough to keep us in fruits and veggies for the week. I think he prefers to shop for his own tastes.

-Husbeast has returned triumphant from the grocery store. He has been doing all the grocery shopping for the household, which feels luxurious to me since I normally dislike going to the store. But, well, I also would like an excuse to go out and do things other than walking the dog, so I will rationalize my jealousy. 

-I have started to watch Leverage again! It's on Amazon Prime, which is evil, but it's delightful so I'm just going with it. The fic is also delightful - I'm going to pace myself but it's exactly what I would like to watch right now.

-Other things I am continuing to watch: The Granada Sherlock Holmes, Poirot back episodes, the Mirror Crack'd, and Knives Out. 

My brain tends to function in waves of intense interest in something, and since we entered lockdown, that's been largely on hold. It's not super fun.

But, happily, my brain took in the streaming Phantom of the Opera performance and decided, oh, it's time to get back into this!  (25th anniversary at the Royal Albert Hall, on Youtube for the weekend and now gone)

I'm reading new fic! I'm getting into things! Woo! 

Have some recs: 

Title: More of an Aminta
Fandom:  Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms
Author: ConvenientAlias - at AO3 here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConvenientAlias/pseuds/ConvenientAlias
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9595652
Pairing:  Christine Daaé/Raoul de Chagny/Erik | Phantom of the Opera (THAT'S RIGHT, OT3, MOFOS)
Author's Summary: Christine and Raoul rehearse "Point of No Return" together, even though Raoul was never meant to be a Don Juan. But Erik is watching, and for the first time finds their chemistry together something other than infuriating. The way they complement each other is beautiful.Why I love it: So, Christine deserves better boyfriend options than she gets in this source material - Erik the Phantom is a murderous stalker, Raoul is a high handed aristocrat who has way too much power over her fucking job. The phandom's main conflict, about who should she choose, is simply rejected in canon AU where she doesn't have to choose, because Erik sees Raoul as desirable and transfers some of his Stalker Music Teacher energy onto Raoul. Raoul has to deal with the stuff that Christine's been handling, sees that it is really goddamn hard, gets into Erik as well, and learns about how hard doing opera is. The whole fic is a gem of worldbuilding - Raoul gets some horrible critical reviews, and it's fucking great. Erik doesn't murder as many people, he gets a nice boyfriend, and in theory, he learns to share. It's awesome. 


 

Title: Her Walking Clothes (and sequels) 
Fandom: The Great Mouse Detective (1986)Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Author: x_los at AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los 
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470565
Author's Summary: (For both fics) (Set before the film.) Ratigan has always considered Basil’s disguises to be little more than a light amusement. That’s about to change.   - Since unmasking Basil's best disguise, Ratigan has been assiduously courting the detective. It's taken years, but Basil has grudgingly admitted him into her life. Unfortunately, being part of Basil's life inevitably involves getting wheedled into spending the night in a pitch-black vault under a bank, unable to speak, to prevent a crime Ratigan would have preferred to commit himself. Be that as it may, Ratigan has always found the rewards of meticulous planning and patience to be delicious.
Why I love it: Since starting to watch the Granada Sherlock Holmes tv adaptations (1984-1994), I have realized one of my childhood favorite films is also a Holmes adaptation - the Great Mouse Detective (1986)!  I didn't realize at the time, but this is actually just a really good Holmes story, and hinges on taking the Great Mouse Detective's world seriously. Ratigan, as portrayed in the cartoon film, is not very fleshed out, but when you blend in the inspiration behind him as carefully as x_los has done, you can get some really interesting stories. In this, Basil of Baker Street, the great mouse detective, is a ciswoman mouse who has cross dressed to dodge the kind of limitations that Victorian mouse society places on women -and she's also absolutely Sherlock Holmes as a mouse.  Ratigan, the math professor mastermind behind many a plot that Basil has foiled, is a gay Irish sewer rat in a society where absolutely none of that is acceptable - and that fleshes him out in a way that the children's movies can't, and that Moriarty never really got. It's just a great story about enemies who truly admire each other, the weird ways that sex impacts the turns your life takes, and it's about literal goddamn fucking MICE. Ratigan's secret weapon against his enemies is a HOUSECAT.  I should note, this fic series has a third installment that is quite tragic and while I think it's well executed, the second fic is a perfect place to stop if you're not feeling a story with major character death. 

Holy Week was not my most pious. 

Maundy Thurday, by far the most social event of the week, was a video conferenced dinner with the junior pastor delivering a sermon. It was very clearly a sermon adapted from a past year, when she was at a Methodist parish, and it was neither interesting nor well-delivered nor well-researched. She's a nice person and extremely skilled at her actual job in the parish, but man, she cannot fucking preach. 

My favorite service, the Great Vigil of Easter, wasn't offered by my church this year, and I got to Easter Eve with so little energy left that I just took the night to watch old Poirot films and rest. 

Easter services streaming with the Cathedral were actually lovely, and I got to let a friend know that her program had gotten a shout out in the sermon from the actual factual bishop that she'd had no idea was there.

I video chatted with friends and family and had lots of chances to check in with everyone. 

Jesus Christ, Superstar, or how I spent my Good Friday


What was a surprisingly successful addition to Good Friday was to watch the filmed adaptation of Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973), and then to watch the 2012 stage adaptation (which was made available on Youtube due to the whole covid19 situation) - my dear friend and I had a book club like discussion of the adaptations and what worked and what didn't.

The 1973 film adaptation is very, very solid.  Carl Anderson's Judas is tortured and compelling and bold, and so clearly absolute adores Jesus that it's honestly hard to not read it as romance. Also, the film production has the luxury of giving space and heft to some elements of the musical that are left sort of blank. The moment of decision where Judas decided to give Jesus to the council, for one, has a truly stunning sequence with Carl Anderson fleeing form a line of advancing tanks -an excellent cinematic addition with no song behind it. It solidifies the fears that he sings about earlier, that their movement's increasing radical turn will expose them to institutional violence. And while I do *not* love the image of a Black man playing Judas committing suicide by hanging himself, there's a heft to the fears of institutional violence when voiced by a Black actor that lends me a lot more sympathy to Judas's perspective than those same lines sung by Tim Minchin. 

The 2012 stage adaptation was not a proper musical, really, it was an arena show, and it suffered from stunt casting and a general feeling of being rushed. Tim Minchin is not a strong enough singer for musical theater, and he's not a strong enough actor to pull off the emotional struggles of the lead role of Judas. The same moment of decision, where Judas chooses to betray Jesus, was portrayed with Tim Minchin being harassed by a street electric guitarist - his pleas to be saved from damnation for his actions afterwards felt super, super fake. He also had no chemistry with that Jesus. 

As well not giving the actors room to emotionally hit their emotional highs and lows, the 2012 adaptation had some poorly thought out stuff. Since everyone in the cast was English, the distinctions of the 1973 show, that followers of Jesus speak with American accents while Pilate spoke with a clear English RP accent, was lost. That mattered. 

Also, weirdly, the cast of the 2012 production were nearly uniformly white? I can't figure out why - they were talking about throwing over society and were clearly based on the Occupy movement and the setting was, as far as I could tell, an city that was vaguely London, so there's no reason why they should have been any less multiracial than the 1973 American adaptation. And yet, they chose a nearly completely white cast for some reason - the statement behind it wasn't clear?

I am probably going to have some more thoughts about this whole thing, but watching the 2012 version has really solidified the feelings I had that the 1973 version was a complete piece and it's the best way to introduce people to a show that is only questionably good. 

ETA: I was reminded that a friend sent me this great little summary of the Judases in various JCS productions - https://ghostcat3000.tumblr.com/post/615220304413900800/h0lyhandgrenade-in-case-you-didnt-know-im-a 

( job stuff, everyone is healthy and fine ) I really dislike having to be grateful that worse things have not happened yet. 

My morning and early afternoon have been frustrating, personally and professionally.

Bright spot: had two nice long walks with the dog already, and she has behaved herself and not gotten into long barking fits at strange dogs either time. She has done some understandable reply-barking, but was able to be steered away and calmed quickly both times.

NOW TO THE GRUMP!


- My job is now having "Town Hall Meetings" every week, which involve the leaders of our large division scheduling literally anyone they can think of to talk to us about how important our jobs are. It's about 150 people and they would never have done this Before Covid because the organizational cost would have been too high. But now they can waste our time to feel important, so they do. 

The meeting is entirely fluff and as far as I can tell, it serves to make the head our division feel important since there is no one to fawn over them in their office all the time since we are all working from home. Today, it was the university's head [men's] hockey coach, who talked about how hard it was for young players to have the season end before their championships could be played.

His speech was deeply offensive. Sports are an entertainment, even college sports. People are dying, and at no point did the coach acknowledge that the reason the season was canceled because having a large crowd of people gathered to watch the game would have endangered their lives. To add injury to insult, the speech was also very, very long - the coach was allowed to speak for nearly an hour, and none of it was relevant to our jobs or our work in any way other than the fact that, yes, some donors give because they like the sport. (Coach, if our jobs are so important, why are you taking up an hour of our time?)

(Sidebar: is there anything more absurd than unrelated adults addressing a fellow adult as "Coach" when he is not the coach of a team they are on? It's not a title. He's not a lord. He's Mister Dudeface unless he's YOUR coach.) 

I spent the meeting with my headphones plugged in but nearly muted so that I could limit the level of irritation while I got actual work done. 

- My upstairs neighbors (You know, the ones who flooded our closet and basement with the DIY home improvements that they did not consult us about back in, oh, January of this year, ten thousand years ago?) have once AGAIN flooded the shared basement when they found out their ancient water heater broke.

They could have replaced the water heater in January, of course, because the program we did the building insulation with is actually about energy efficiency generally - they will give you an interest-free loan to get a new water heater, if you do a bit of paperwork and choose a model they approve. But the neighbors  did not do that. And they did not do that despite the fact that, apparently, last summer, they had seen that the water heater in our unit had broken and been replaced with a new one immediately before they had bought their condo.

While they were calling around to find a plumber who can help them, the wife asked us in the group chat if we have a carbon monoxide alarm down there - state law requires one and the plumber wanted to check since a heater had broken. I wasn't sure - our side has a fire alarm but it's not clear if it does CO as well. I volunteered to let her use the one I have in the bedroom (b/c CO is no fucking joke and it's important to have more than one alarm in your home). And of course, she didn't say thank you for the CO monitor and seems to not understand that it is a loan. She seemed to think it was just a spare. 

She also stood waaaay to close for social distancing (easily within arms reach) and wandered into our basement section area to check the fire alarm herself.  I am skeeved by this because they travel every weekend, despite the stay at home order, AND she was still going into the office for at least a week after the state of emergency was announced by the governor - I don't think they have siloed themselves effectively at all. I washed my hands and face after meeting with her in the basement to hand over the CO monitor and I am writing it off as a loss - I can buy another more easily than I can sterilize the one I have given them, and it's reasonable to have one in the basement anyways. 

And now, to work. 

Things that are making me cry: (What, like it's hard?)

1.  This "fluffy" news article "The Easter Bunny is an 'essential worker,' Governor Raimondo tells kids" - https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/02/metro/raimondo-hold-press-conference-kids-live-updates/ The governor of Rhode Island is a fucking champ - she's doing daily press conferences and some of that is taking questions from children, which included questions about the FUCKING EASTER BUNNY. Christ on a fucking cupcake. Children should grow up without having to know what an essential worker in a pandemic is. 

(I can just about deal with life being awful for adults. But then you throw in children, and people trying to take care of children the best they can in rough circumstances, and my god, I just cannot handle it.  - see this This American Life episode about Girl Scouting in a concentration camp - I FUCKING WARNED YOU - for another example of the heartbreak of trying to take care of small children - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/559/captains-log I had to go walk away from the computer and cry into the dog's back. She held up like a champ.) 

2. This cover of 'Hard Times Come Again No More' by The Proclaimers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMoM5JEgf7o 


3. The musical 'Come From Away' - specifically, in the song "Blankets and Bedding," different singers repeat, "I need something to do/ because I can't watch the news anymore."   Actually, right now any song with any group part chanting along together is kind of hitting me in a hard place right now. Hadestown is doing it a lot, but Come From Away is more effective. 
 

 I'm stuck in a book - NK Jemisin's The Stone Sky, the final installment in the Broken Earth Trilogy- and I'm stuck.  I'm honestly really trying to finish this book and this series, I love Jemisin, I zoomed thru the first two books...
but I just can't really read about the world ending right now. Like, I just. It's not coming together for me. To see a world falling apart is just not doing it for me now. 

I have a bunch of Terry Pratchett books I could read! I have the new Jemisin book, The City We Became, to get into.