Playing Catch-up

It may look like I haven't blogged for three months, but that isn't really true. The simple reality is that I've got a couple half-written blog posts about things that have happened since the first of the year, they just haven't managed to progress beyond the half-written stage. "So, then," you may ask, "what's been going on that has kept you from writing?" The answer: "Nothing but the ironic reality that, when there's plenty of time to write, it means that there's nothing happening and, when there's plenty happening, there's no time to write." Here, then is a precis.écis of what's been going on.

On January 8, Kimberly, Ian and I went to Mystic Seaport for the annual Pub Sing and Chantey Blast. Before the music began, we wandered around the seaport, seeing Amistad looking quite forlorn, with her topmasts and yards struck, her jibboom gone, and her deck covered with a shelter made of plastic sheeting. Conversely, the Charles W. Morgan is coming along nicely in her restoration. The pub sing was held across the street from the seaport in Frobisher Hall and featured a motley assortment of Seaport musicians, including Don Sineti, Geoff Kauffman, and several others, as well as other chantey singers from a variety of other venues.

My church hosted a performance by the "God Show" conference from Silver Lake on January 9 and Kimberly and I ended up hosting a bunch of teenage boys who stayed overnight in our home. The following Saturday, Kimberly and I took Ian and his girlfriend, Emma, to NYC, where we saw the Henrik Ibsen play John Gabriel Borkman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Prior to going the the play, we stopped in at the Greenlight Bookstore for a bit, then had lunch at Deniz, a Turkish restaurant on Fulton Street, notfar from the Harvey Theater.

Then the snow came. From the middle of January until the beginning of March, there was snow on the ground. Mountains of it. Fortunately, after the snowplow had plowed several snowfalls of the white stuff into six-foot-high mountains that prevented me from being able to turn the car around in the driveway, help arrived in the form of Eric and Pusnoch, two Chinese homestay students from Beijing. According to the official instructions from the Center for Global Studies, we were to make the kids feel like they were part of the family and to include them in all family activities, so I handed them snow shovels and set them to pitching the plow piles into the back yard. Kimberly, Ian and I shoveled, too, of course. That was only fair. But it was very nice to have three teenagers shoveling instead of only one. Even with all that snow, there was only one ski trip this winter, a day trip to Fahnestock Winter Park with our friend Eric. Our usual multi-day X-C ski trip didn't happen at all because the schools lost their spring break due to all of the days they were closed because of the snow we received here. How ironic that we couldn't go skiing because of all of the snow.

The big event in March was going to the Quick Center at Fairfield University to see a broadcast of the Danny Boyle's production of Frankenstein from the British National Theater, starring Lee Miller as Dr. Frankenstein and Benedict Cumberbatch as the monster, roles that they trade off every other performance. It was astonishingly good and provided a perspective on the play that we'd never have gotten by seeing it live on stage. It was so good that Kimberly is going back tomorrow to see it again, with the actors in the opposite roles.

On a sad note, one of our favorite restaurants, Falafel House, recently closed, so Kimberly has been seriously jonesing for some deep-fried chickpeas. We have, however, discovered a new place, Masas, a Peruvian arepa restaurant, which is directly across the street from where Falafel house used to be. We've been there twice in the last week, so I expect that I'll have to devote a post to it at some point in the near future. So that brings us pretty much up to the present, at least well enough that I don't have to hang my head in shame every time I think about my blog.