FIGS – Life Off Headset

FIGS Week #4

Between rehearsal and having to make slides for a supertitle gig today, this past week has had very little margin for breath or things outside of work and parenting. I had planned to write a February recap post, but it didn’t fit in the schedule this week. So maybe next week. Or maybe not since this is tech week.

BUT, it is the last week of collecting FIGS for Elisabeth, so I wanted to at least write about this weeks’ gratitudes.

One of my biggest FIG this week was this recital that I did supertitles for Sunday night.- so many things brought me joy and made me feel so lucky that I get to do this gig

The recital program itself was one of my favorite recitals I’ve ever worked on. The entire program was in English – Copland’s Old American Songs, a set of songs based on poetry of Langston Hughes, a set of songs set to Shakespeare, and one of my favorite song cycles – Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Songs of Travel, based on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. English art song is my jam. I know that’s super nerdy, but there you go. I love that stuff, the elegance, the restraint, the tuneful melodies, the ways the words and music all make sense to me.

One thing that makes working on surtitles for an all English program so wonderful is that yes, I’m working on music, but I’m also working with poetry – like I literally get to read poetry for my job. How cool is that? I think my favorite line from this recital program was from Shakespeare’s Fear No More the Heat of the Sun:
Golden lad and girls all must
Like chimney-sweepers come to dust.

or this one from Langston Hughes’ poem Song to a Dark Virgin:
Would that I were a flame,
but one sharp, leaping flame
to annihilate thy body,
Thou dark one.

“annihilate they body,” I mean that phrase gives me goosebumps!

Or R.L. Stevenson’s poem, Whither Must I Wander, the first stanza of which:

Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?
Hunger my driver, I go where I must.
Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather:
Thick drives the rain and my roof is in the dust.
Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof-tree,
The true word of welcome was spoken in the door –
Dear days of old with the faces in the firelight,
Kind folks of old, you come again no more.

I think this poem would speak to anyone who has ever left home and returned to find it no longer the same.

Other FIGgy things from this gig:
-I got to take the Metro to work. This is a new venue for us, and it is two blocks from the Metro. I could have driven, but I avoid driving in downtown DC if I can help it. I got to take Metro, read my book, and not be stressed out by traffic.

-The venue itself had beautiful acoustics – the singer’s voice rang clearly and warmly thought the hall. I got to operate the surtitles from the back of the auditorium so I could hear everything live. Usually on this gig, I am stuck in a booth somewhere and the sound is coming through a speaker.

-The singer and pianist did such a great job. The baritone has one of those beautiful velvet baritone voices that you just want to crawl into. I left the recital feeling really uplifted by the music and the singing. Isn’t Music amazing?

-The two encores – one was a song called “Going Home” which, if you are familiar with the Largo from Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony, is adapted from that tune. The song is, as you can tell from the title, full of nostalgia and weary wistfulness. The second encore was an aria from The Ballad of Baby Doe, which is an opera that is very rarely done, but which has a lot of significance for me personally and professionally, so it was lovely to hear a snippet of it. Usually by the time the encore rolls around, I’ve packed my bags and am ready to leave. This time, however, I stayed and was enraptured.

-Technology. So back in the day, before internet and what not, surtitles were done via slides – like those slides you put in a carousel and each opera took a whole stack of carousels. I was thinking that they probably didn’t do titles for recitals back then because it’s really expensive to do so many slides for a one off event. And I was thinking about all the technology that makes this job possible that wasn’t around twenty or thirty years ago. For example -being able to have the artist email me a pdf of the music, instead of having find a physical copy of the score and then photocopying it; PowerPoint – much sleeker than a whole bunch of carousels, but also super easy to make fixes or text alterations on the fly; Apple Music, so I can listen to the music ahead of time when trying to set cues; Forescore – the app I use to mark my scores, saving me the cost of having to print all those scores. I can’t imagine how/if anyone could do this job before these technologies that I might now take for granted.

-After the recital, as I was leaving I ran into an old colleague of mine. I didn’t think he would recognize me because it’s been over ten years since we worked together and he was much more senior than me in the company. But he recognized me and said hello and we chatted for a bit.

-People who come to voice recitals in general. As the audience was leaving, I heard one guy say to the woman that was with him, “How did you like your first art song recital?” She murmured something in response. and he said, “Yeah, people who come to voice recitals are a super specific subset of music lovers.” So I’m glad that enough people come to these voice recitals that the organization has been presenting recitals for 35 years.

It was a good gig. I was walking home from the Metro, I just felt an overwhelming sense gratitude that, even though I had to spend my day off from the opera working another job, I was pretty lucky that this other job brought me a lot of satisfaction and joy.

Okay – other FIG from the week, though –

-Elisabeth for organizing FIG-gy February and for collecting everyone’s FIGS. For everyine who shared FIGS. how lovely to share FIGS- your figs are my figs!

-The Metro doors opening again. Monday was another snow day. I’ve lost count, but it’s been enough snow days that school has been extended a whole week. Anyhow, since I didn’t have to drive the kids to work, I took the Metro to work. Just as I was getting off the elevator to the train platform, I saw the doors to the train start to close, and they shut just as I reached them. I resigned myself to waiting eight minutes for the next train. Then… the doors opened again! I looked down the platform and I saw the conductor leaning out of the window. He must have seen me and the other guy next to me and decided to let us on the train. I got on the train and got to work on time.

-a clean stack of freshly laundered underwear, just in time for tech week!

-The 13 year old walking down to the bus stop to pick up her younger siblings on an early release day, and then taking them to the park for an hour before bringing them home.

-Sleeping. I am really bad at going to sleep at a decent hour, but once I’m in bed, I don’t have any problems falling asleep. Sleep feels so good. I don’t know why I’m always avoiding it.

-Finding the pouch of my favorite pens that I thought I had misplaced.

-Sligo Creek. This is the creek that is near our house, alongside which is the trail/walking path. The other day, I was realizing that this creek is probably what led people to settle and built up a town in this area, and even before that, I’m sure Native Americans lived along it as well. I’m grateful that today the Creek, gives us a place for the kids to throw rocks and sticks and leaves in the water and watch them float away; it’s a place for ducks to swim, which we saw this week; it’s a place for us to take in nature despite our very urban lives.

The water is actually really disgusting, but still grateful for it all the same.

-The Husband doing all the things. Including filling the hot water boiler and cooking dinner all week. And for buying me a scone while he was out running errands.

-group chat with friends.

-The Kindergarten Concert, and being able to go. Thursday night was the Kindergarten music concert. The theme was dogs and each class sang two songs about dogs. The kids all dressed up like dogs with floppy construction paper ears. It was super cute. The 6 year old’s class sand BINGO was his Name, in French. And the whole thing was short – maybe only 30 minutes. I’m grateful that the concert was at 6:00pm so I could go over on my dinner break at work. It’s so hard to show up for things when I work the evenings, so I’m glad I could show up for this. Also grateful for elementary school music teachers.

-I came home one night to find this on the counter:

Yes, someone wrote “Kompost” on a covered tray of brownies…

-A sassy six year old. This exchange – exasperating at the time, but made me laugh afterwards: (For reference “Well, I want a pony and I can’t have one” is our standard response to our kids when they are being demanding and just need to wait.)
6 year old: I want hugs and kisses!
Me: Well, I want a pony!
6 year old: Go to a farm and get one!

(To be clear, I wasn’t being a cold-hearted mom and denying my kid hugs and kisses at bedtime – I had something on the stove and needed her to wait. )

-Laughing a lot at work. There are parts of this rehearsal process that have been challenging, but even still the process has been a lot of joy thanks to the rest of the stage management team. The other day, at our end of day meeting, one of them said, “I don’t remember laughing so much during a rehearsal process, and most of it has been in this stage management office.” I think we all just have the same sense of humour and the ridiculous things in rehearsal makes us laugh rather than enrages us. I mean the hours suck and the pay is crap, so if we aren’t having fun, why do what we do?

-Another work FIG- the prop crew for moving a bunch of things for us from one room to another. The room we were rehearsing in had to be used for something else, so after rehearsal one night we had to pack up all our props and furniture and move to another room in the building – it was past 10pm and we were tired, so I asked the prop head who was coming in to set the room for the next thing in the morning if he could move the last of our stuff and they did!

-When the eight year old declared, “I love nature!” as we were walking to school.

-A book that is just sucking me in.

Okay – that’s a wrap on official FIGS, but you know I’ll keep being grateful for things every day and every week.

–

Weekly recap + what we ate: Things I track and FIGS Week #2

Scaling mountains of ice and snow to get to school.

The week ended with weather that was positively spring like with temperatures in the 50s and, more importantly, blinding sunlight and clear blue skies. I am of the opinion that the sun and sky have more effect on me then the actual temperature. So much light and colour, the world can’t help but to feel like it is warming up. I left the house without my bulky winter coat a couple times and it feel so freeing! But this coming week looks to be a little on the grey side. Today (Sunday) was oh so rainy and chilly.

Anyhow, it’s been a week back in the office. It was fine. Everyone is overwhelmed and doing three jobs, but morale is high and we are all excited to be doing opera again. I want to remember to carry this feeling and remember it when the show feels hard – we are so very very very lucky to continue to tell stories onstage for people.

Stephany had a post a few weeks ago about the how she tracks her habits and goals and I was inspired to write a similar post. I’m fascinated by the minutiae of other people’s planning/tracking, so maybe other people will be interested in my methods?

So my current planner stack features:
-Hobonichi Weeks for day to day planning. (this might get it’s own post some day…)
-Levenger Five Year Journal, which I try to write in every day, with varying results
-A moleskin notebook that I use to track my reading; I write books that I read, and a few comments on them. This isn’t always a moleskin- it’s generally whatever blank notebook I have on hand when I run out of pages in the last one.
-A Hobonichi Cousin that I use to track routines, life, habits, some longer form reflections.

This has pretty consistently been my stack for the past five or six years. Last year, I tried a different planner, trying to put the planning and reflection/tracking in the same book, but that lasted less then a month before I went back to my tried and true method. I’m mostly going to write about how I use the Hobonichi Cousin here.

First off – Meals, media, and time outside:

On the top I track tv and movies that we watch. A lot of these are family movie night movies. Hearts are things that I really enjoyed.
Below that, I write down each day what we have for dinner. If we eat out, it gets a pink dot. If it is a vegan dinner, it gets a green dot. If it’s a meal we made at home that went over really well, I draw a heart so that I can go back and remember what was a hit with the family and make it again.
The last section is where I track time outside – each box on the grid represents one hour. I started doing this when I was trying to do 1000 hours outside, but I don’t think I’ll ever get to that in one year, so I now just track to see what is trending.

The Weekly Spread – Here I time track, writing down what I did every day in 30 minute segements.

This was a very light week for paid work.

I have a loose colour coding:
Green = work that I get paid to do
Purple = unpaid labor and family time (ie chores, making dinner, driving carpool, hanging out as a family)
Orange= time that is just for me, where I ignore (or don’t have to think about) the kids or family
Blue = Sleep.
Also on the left hand side, I write the books that I’m reading.

This is the section i’m the most inconsistent in filling out; I find I have a lot of nebulous time that is not accounted for….

365 Day Tracker – this is where I log my daily yoga. Here I also colour code according to how much yoga I do – pink=10 mins, orange = 15 mins, yellow = 20 mins, green=25 mins, and blue = 25 mins. There is something really fun and satisfying about this page. I sometimes think I should track something else for 365 days, but I’m not sure what that would be.

Daily Pages – This is where I write longer reflections that don’t fit into the 5 year journal. When I travel, this is where I write daily travel reflections, gather ticket stubs and what not. If I go to a museum or see a play, musical, etc., this is where I write my thoughts about what I saw. If I need to do a larger brain dump to problem solve something it goes here. I write haikus here for my weekly haiku project.
These daily pages also have a blank page at the start of each month and that’s where I write my monthly highlights/ low lights/ lessons learned.

The Monthly Spread – This is where the bulk of my tracking is. The categories I track here are mostly inspired by things I learned when I took The Science of Well Being, a free course on Coursera that is also known as the Yale Happiness Course because it is taught by a Yale Professor, Laurie Santos. Each week of the course, Santos talked about one thing that has been scientifically proven to make people “happier”, and gives assignments based on that topic. I took this course during the pandemic and it was really helped me focused on little things that I could be mindful about that could make life feel fuller, especially at a time that was really felt like a stressful daily grind. A lot of what her findings show is that people are really bad at predicting what makes them happy- the things people think they want are often inflated in their minds, leading to disappointment if it doesn’t come about. People find the most contentment when they focus on personal connection and what is right in front of them.

January. The first eleven days are blank because we were in Taiwan/I was getting over jetlag/feeling overwhelmed.

I like tracking things here because I can write a little more on what each thing is, allowing for a bit more reflection.

So what I track here:
-Hours outside (yes, I know I put this in two places, but I wanted also to see how much time I was spending outside on a daily basis.)
-Gratitude: at least one thing I’m grateful for each day.
-Savoring: one thing I take time to slow down and savor each day.
-Connection: at least one person I connected with that day. Santos has a week where she talks about the benefits of positive interaction. Sometimes for me, this is a long conversation over dinner, sometimes it is small talk in the grocery line or just a text exchange with a friend.
-Brush/floss: Okay, this one isn’t from Laurie Santos, but I used to be terrible at brushing and flossing, so I started making myself check a box for it. I’m not usually a box-checker, but in this case it really worked for me. One check for brushing, one for flossing.
-Exercise – I take this to mean movement. So the daily yoga and any work outs or runs I do go here, but also if I take a walk at lunch time, go skating with the kids, etc.
-Create: Here I write if I do something creative that day. To me this means write a blog post, compose a haiku, play piano, spend time painting, cook a fancy new recipe – basically anything where I create something from nothing.
-Anticipation: I write something I’m looking forward to. This wasn’t part of Santos’ course, but I read a NYTimes article about how anticipation boosts happiness so I added it to the list.

Along the bottom I track some of the habits I want to do this year:
-Paint 26 pictures
-Write 1 haiku a week
-visit a museum
-go on a hike
-do the Post Sunday crossword puzzle every week.

As a side note, some things that Santos talks about which improve well-birng that I don’t track:
-Sleep. My sleep is shit. I’m working on this, but I’ve tried tracking sleep and tracking does not motivate me to go to bed earlier, so I stopped.
-Meditation. I’ve tried, Lord know I’ve really really really tried meditation. I just can’t figure it out.
-Acts of kindness. This one was really hard for me to do mindfully without feeling performative. Some days I feel like the kindest thing I can do is hug my children and tell them I love them every single day, so I try to at least do that.

So that’s my system. I’m not a box checker, as I mentioned, so I don’t necessarily do these things to cross them off the list. But I do find it useful to see what things I’m making room in my life for. If I’m looking at my tracking spread and I notice I didn’t write something in a particular column for several days in a row, I will make an effort to find time to do it. But also, it helps when I’m in really busy time of the year to remind myself that there are certain things I still manage to do, even if it is as simple as brushing my teeth.

Anyhow, speaking of creating – here are my paintings from January:

This was from our hotel room in Beitou, Taiwan. Picture’s blurry because I didn’t actually take a real picture of this one and now I don’t know where it is….

The top picture is an exercise from Everyday Watercolor by Jenna Rainey; it’s a book of daily watercolor exercises. The bottom picture uses the salt technique where you sprinkle salt on wet paint to create a blotchy effect- it’s loosely based on a tutorial I found on YouTube on painting snowflakes.

Grateful For (FIGs, Week 2) – shout out to Elisabeth’s February FIGS collective, where she is gathering people’s gratitudes this month. These are some of my FIGs from last week.

-Libraries and printing. We aren’t fully set up with our IT at work yet, and I needed to print our music scores. So I went to the library to print them out. The process is so easy – log into the website with my library card, upload the documents and then go to any library and print. There is a thing where I have to have the librarians put a “fine” on my card to pay for the printing, but once I print the job, I pay off the “fine”. Also, the first 15 pages are free. This is such a great service.

-Sunlight in the morning. On Tuesday, I did my daily morning yoga in my bedroom instead of the basement. I pulled up my shade, and as I was doing my upward dog, I noticed that I could see pink sky when I had been used to the sky still being inky black at 7am in the morning. The days are starting to get longer.

-On the other side of the day, I walked out of work at 5:30pm one day and it was still light outside. After all those days of being stuck at home with the snow, the longer stretches of daylight are like fingers of hope and growth and the end of the tunnel.

-Our tax guy. I had to fill out new tax paperwork as part of the transition at work, and I was so very confused by the form. So I sent my tax guy an email and he told me exactly what to write in. Thank goodness.

-Getting to watch the 14 year old play basketball twice -once for her middle school team and once on her rec team. Her face always lights up when she sees me at her games, and I hope mine does too.

-Getting to pick up the kids after school. That moment they get off the school bus lifts my heart. I hope I never get tired of my kids coming home.

-To that end – school bus drivers. Some of the roads still are barely passable because the snow has not been cleared out to the curb. Grateful for the bus drivers that navigate that and get our kids to and from school safely.

-That quiet sliver of time between getting home with the kids and starting dinner. A few times last week, the 6 year old and I got the watercolours out and made a piece of art or two. A relaxing transition from the work/school day into the evening.

-Crisp clean sheets to slide between after a long day.

-Birdsongs and fat robins hopping in the snow. Spring is coming.

-Leaving for school a little on the early side and not having to rush up the path. There was time for the kids to pause and throw sticks in the still frozen creek, to tromp through the snowier path to school, and to summit the ice mountain that still sits in the parking lot between our path and the doors to school. (see photo at the top of the post!)

-A quiet office before the rest of my team arrives. I try to get to work half an hour before the rest of the stage managers get in; I love the stillness of the office in the morning and the ability to knock off some tasks without interruption.

-The Husband for helping make a tough situation better. We found out this week that when the 14 year old filled out her high school choice form, she had forgotten to also apply for the high school program that she wanted. (It’s a program that allows high school seniors to take a full year of classes at the community college for free.) So she got assigned to the school, but not to the program. I have to admit that the whole process was kind of confusing; we had thought you filled out the interest for after getting assigned to the high school. We were wrong. There were tears. So many tears. And yelling. And despair. All the stages of grief. This program was the whole reason she wanted to go to the school. Well, the Husband did some digging and it turns out that if she goes to the school counselor in the first week of school, she can still fill out an interest form for the program. So all is not lost. Thank goodness. I’m grateful that the Husband was persistent and called and emailed until he got an answer on the issue.

Looking Forward To:

-Starting rehearsal this week. Ready to dive in.

-Lunar New Year. It’s Tuesday. I have to work in the evening so no big celebration for us (plus it’s Taco Tuesday), but I will wear red and I did buy pineapple cakes, so I’ll bring those to work.

-Just started this audiobook, a memoir of growing up in Derry as one of eleven children being raised by a single father. It’s funny in that stolidly ironic way. On of my favorite bits is that whenever anyone asks O’Reilly’s father how he managed to raise 11 children on his own, he says, “Well, which of them would you have me give back?”

-Also started reading this book – I feel like it’s going to be the perfect read as I wait out the last of the cold winter:

What We Ate:
Monday: Chinese leftovers from Super Bowl Sunday.

Taco Tuesday: Middle school tacos – basically ground beef tacos.

Wednesday: Curry chickpeas with scallion and cilantro. From Milk Street Fast and Slow, their Instant Pot cookbook. Eaten with rice and paratha. We’ve discovered this year paratha from the frozen section of HMart. You cook the paratha on the griddle and it’s magical. Vegan.

Thursday: Breakfast sandwiches.

Friday: Pizza (take out) and The Hitman’s Bodyguard. This 2017 film with Ryan Reynolds as a protection agent (bodyguard) who is hired to guard a notorious assassin played by Samuel L. Jackson. The movie was hilarious, with Reynolds and Jackson in top notch bantering form. Greatly enjoyed this movie. There is a lot of swearing and shooting in it, though.

Saturday: Dumplings and green beans.

Sunday: We went over to a friends’ house for a casual afternoon gathering, and ate lots of hummus and baba ganouj and fruit and Valentine’s candy. It was a lovely time – the big kids and little kids played together, then the tween/teens put on music and started performing K-Pop dance numbers. At one point, one of our hosts, who is a musician, started playing Part of Your World on the piano and the girls did an improv dance – I think they were all some form of seaweed. All in all, it was a lovely afternoon. But all to say, dinner was … undefined. I filled up on snacks so wasn’t hungry when we got home. Of course the little kids were, so I boiled some ravioli and doused it with olive oil and parmesan and that’s what they ate.

I hope you have a sunny week! We have a lot of evening rehearsals this week, so I’m girding my loins for that. But I’m excited to get started with rehearsals.

How/what do you track or record? How do you transition from work to home life in the evenings?

Weekly recap + what we ate: A New York Adventure and FIGS

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Through New York), I love a stage before a show!

This was my last week “off” before starting a new show. It wasn’t really “off” because I had emails and paperwork to go through and I’ve started thinking about staffing for next season and I had a supertitle gig on Sunday to prep for. But, I was able to work from home and I didn’t have to be in rehearsal so it was nice to have the flexibility. The kids were home Monday (no snow but the school district deemed the sidewalks and roads not sufficiently ploughed/shoveled for kids to make it to school safely), and then a delayed start Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday, however, it was business as usual. The school year has been extended by one day and there is a no-school day in March that will now be a school day, but there is something like five days of school that need to be made up, so I’m curious where the other days will come from.

The highlight of the week was going to New York to see a musical with the 14 year old. It was Broadway Week so you can get 2 for 1 ticket deals. last year we had gone go see Hadestown during Broadway week and it was such a fun adventure that I decided to go again this year. This year I just took the 14 year old, as a birthday present, pulling her out of school on a Wednesday for a mid-week escape.

We took the 8:10am train up, arriving in New York at 11:30am. The trip up was pretty smooth- I got some work done and had to take a meeting on the train. The best thing on the train was this group of senior women who were clearly on some kind of group trip. They settled into seats next to us and the proceeded to bring out the most lavish buffet I’d ever seen on a train – breakfast sandwiches (“bacon or sausage?” they asked each other), strawberries, grapes, homemade muffins. All on these eaten off delicate gold trimmed plates. They were most certainly living their best lives. I don’t know why they were going to New York or even if that was their final destination, but they were having such a good time.

Upon arriving in New York, our first stop was to get bagels from Best Bagels, four blocks from Penn Station. The bagels there are huge and fluffy, crispy on the outside and soft and chewy inside. I got a jalapeno everything bagel with bacon and scallion cream cheese and the 14 year old got an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese. We took our bagels to Bryant park and ate at the tables there. I was worried it would be too snowy to eat outside – the city was still ankle deep in snow in places and all over you could see work crews clearing the snow – but the tables and chairs in Bryant Park were clear and even though it was chilly, the sun was out and the day was cheery. (I took a lot of food pictures on this trip; when I first asked the 14 year old what she wanted to do besides see the show, she said she wanted to eat lots of tasty food. We certainly did our best.)

After we finished our bagels we went to Katagiri, a Japanese grocery store that had onigiri. Onigiri (Japanese rice balls wrapped in seaweed, often with meat or veggies stuffed inside) is one of the the 14 year old’s favorite food. We’ve always had them from grab and go places like 7-11 in Taiwan or from the boba tea shop or H-Mart. The onigiri at Katagiri made those pale in comparison. First of all they had so many different kinds – salmon, spicy tuna, veggie, eel…, a whole display case full. And they were huge – almost the size of my fist – and the rice was fluffy yet still sticky enough for the onigiri not to fall apart. I got a ume plum one and a shiso one and the 14 year old got a salmon one. They were so tasty and still a little warm.

We munched on the onigiri as we made our way to our next destination- Kinokuniya, the Japanese Manga/Book/Stationary store. We had visited here last year and I love popping in to see what they had. I didn’t end up buying anything, but it’s always fun to browse.

We left spent about twenty minutes in Kinokuniya before walking over to the theatre. Our seats at the theatre were next to a a bunch of theatre buffs. Next to us was a gay couple, one of whom had seen Wicked ten times. In front of us was two ladies in their thirties who had come from Buffalo and Florida for Broadway week. I loved listening to them talk and gossip about shows they’ve seen and Broadway stars.

We had seats in the second row of the balcony. Broadway theatres are smaller than the theatres where we see opera, so even though we sat in the balcony, I still felt like I was very close to everything. I will say, though, next time I might try sitting at a lower level, even if it’s farther back. I found with this show, the actors tended to direct their energy out in front of them, so I felt like I was watching much of the action from above rather than directly in the line of it. It’s not a big difference, but I’m curious how a show would feel from a different angle.

The show itself was wonderful. It’s a two person show, about a British guy and an New Yorker. His dad is marrying her sister and the whole situation is messy and complicated. The show was funny and sweet and moving – the best kind of rom com. The two performers brought so much energy and brilliance and heart to their performances. It must be a lot of pressure to have a two person show – so exposed, you know. I loved, though, how, even though it was just the two of them onstage, they made me believe that their world was full of so many other people.

The guy next to us said, “Someone wrote this. They put it on stage, and now it’s on Broadway. How amazing is that?” Amazing indeed.

After the show, we walked back to the train station. On the way, we picked up some Chinese food for dinner to eat on the train home (noodles and dumplings from The Handpulled Noodle in Hell’s Kitchen) and also got some boba tea as well (from Coco Bubble Tea). We also swung by a bakery to pick up some treats for the rest of the family. I had looked up bakeries near us and found Posh Pop Bake Shop, which had some beautiful desserts. I didn’t realize until later that it was a gluten free bakery. We came home with some apple cider donuts, a salted caramel brownie, and a birthday cake cookie.

I’m loving these little day trips into New York. To be honest, I find New York overwhelming – the people and the rush and all the things for sale, all the options for things to do, to see, to eat. Just walking down the street is an adventure filled with so many characters and stories. One of my favorite moments was in the evening as we were walking back to the train station. We heard a phone ring, I patted my phone, but it wasn’t mine. It was the guy next to me, slick looking guy in a business suit and long wool coat.

“Yeah,” he says impatiently into the phone. “I’m on my way. I’m nearly there. Look I’m on Seventh already.”

We were on Eighth.

Not that I’ve never fudged my location when running late….

Dusk in NYC. Something about all the tall buildings make the view of sky very precious. Golden, almost literally.

Anyhow, it was all in all a nice day. Next time I might opt for an earlier morning train. The 8:10am train was easy to get to, but also it didn’t quite leave us enough time to explore before the show. I had chosen the 8:10am train because it was $38 for that leg and the 7am train was $60. But I think the extra money is worth it to have more time at the beginning of the day. I’m hoping to make a Broadway Week trip to NYC an annual thing I do with one (or more) of the kids.

Grateful For: For the Month of February, Elisabeth is gathering people’s gratitudes for her gratitude collective, FIGS. I already regularly write a gratitude list in my weekly posts, but this month, I’m going to make an effort to write at least seven per week, though I’ve found that some days when I’m writing them out, I have so many more than one each day. Anyhow – some FIGS for this week that was:

-One more snow day. Yes, everyone was starting to get a little feral after ten days at home, but I was actually glad to have one more day cozy with the kids. We shoveled some snow, built up our snow fort, met the Husband for lunch, got boba, went to the library (got the 9 year old his own library card!), went to the park and slid down icy slopes on our butts (because I didn’t think to bring the sleds.). I work so many weekends, that I don’t often get an obligation-free day home with the kids, so the snow day felt like a gift of time with them.

She wanted the snow fort to be taller than she was when kneeling. Unfortunately I didn’t do a good job with the construction and on the next slightly warm day, the snow melted enough for the walls to fall in.

-A warm house after a cold walk.

– getting to go to New York with the 14 year old. I had such a good time, and I do genuinely like hanging out with my kid.

-Google for when I don’t know what I’m doing in PowerPoint, and people who provide tutorials to tell me how to do it. I use PowerPoint to my my supertitle slides, but I’ve never really learned it. Mostly just noodled around until it did what I wanted it to do. But for those times when noodling doesn’t work, I’m grateful that I can put what I’m trying to do and 90% of the time I will find a step by step tutorial that teaches me how to do it.

– Laughter. There was an article in the New York Times this week, The Evolutionary Brilliance of the Baby Giggle, that talked about the social importance of laughing. It’s an interesting read, but really what got me was the various videos in the article of babies laughing. I dare you to click over and not at least smile at the pure baby joy.
Laughter feels so good. I don’t often realize that I haven’t had a good belly laugh recently, until I do. One thing that made me belly laugh was last week – the 14 year old has a Bark Phone, through which we can set parental controls and also Bark will flag content that it thinks we should be aware of. Well, the latest thing is that Bark now give us a summary (clearly AI generated ) of the 14 year old. The Husband read it to me and we were rolling on the floor laughing. Apparently Bark knows our kid is well rounded because she spends equal amounts of time on Webtoons, listening to music, and on Libby. The kicker, though was when it told us that her most frequent contact was John Smith (not the real name!). “John Smith is often included in communication with ‘Mom’,” Bark relayed, “indicating that [14 year old] is open with her communication.”
Friends, “John Smith” is the Husband.
We howled with laughter, thinking about how Bark seemed to be hinting that John Smith was some nefarious stranger.

-Friends who help celebrate the Husband’s milestone birthday on Superbowl Sunday. I’m not the best at planning parties, so I’m glad that people come over and make it about the company and not the party. A few die hards did stay until the end of the game, including one friend from Boston who was holding out hope for the Patriots. We actually set up a second tv in another room to play the Olympics in case any of our friends weren’t into the Superbowl. I drifted between rooms, but I did watch the half time show. I wasn’t very familiar with Bad Bunny, and wow. It was unlike any half time show I’ve ever seen before – there was such specificity to the whole act, and it was full of people looking like they were having a great time. I kind of loved it.

-That dark chocolate quinoa crisps are back at Costco!

– All the people who make middle school sports possible. I got to catch the first half of the 14 year old’s basketball game this week, and I’m just so grateful for the Coach (who is the school nurse), and the people who put in time to ref the games, and our middle school sports coordinator. At a time when playing sports can be so expensive, I’m really grateful that through the schools there is a no/low cost way for kids to play sports.

-All the people out there who are steadily chipping away at the snowcrete, clearing sidewalks and cutaways that are thick with ice, even a week after the snow.

Looking Forward To:
-Contra Dancing this week. We’re going to try to go to the Thursday night contra dance.

-Familiar colleagues coming into town for my next show. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again.

-Pomelo! We went to HMart and picked up some fruit – they had pomelos for Lunar New Year, so we bought one. They also had mangosteen, which we had in Malaysia last winter. It’s of course not as fresh as in Malaysia, but it’s still tasty. Also … I didn’t really look at the price when I put it in the cart, and ended up spending $37 dollars on 2.5 lbs of mangosteen. Ooops. Sorry/not sorry. I kind of look on it as an indulgence – some people buy fancy clothes and cars. I buy fruit.

-A water heater/boiler! Not the HVAC kind; the making tea kind. We ordered a Zojurishi Hot water boiler to replace our kettle. It seems awfully fancy, but I’m excited. I’m most looking forward to not being late out the door because I’m waiting for hot water to fill my tea mug.

-Continuing to read the Washington Post. The news about the layoffs at the Post this week was devastating especially since I consider the Post my hometown newspaper. In addition to our online subscription, we get the Sunday paper delivered to our door every week- there is something I love about the newspaper appearing on our driveway, the kids immediately pulling out the comics while I look at the arts section, and then leafing through to the Metro, Travel, Book and Front page. As terrible as it feels to “support” Bezos and whatever he is doing to American journalism, it is inconceivable not to support the journalists. I felt very similar when people told me they were not coming to the opera anymore because the institution where we performed was being taken over and going in a direction they didn’t agree with. Look, I’m not going to tell people where to spend their money, but to me the art isn’t about the building it’s in, it’s about the stories that we can tell, the ways we connect and the work that is being done, day after day by the people who believe in the medium. So just as I hope people will continue to come to the opera and go to the Symphony (what another terrible blow there was this week for the Symphony), I will continue to read the Post and look forward to it appearing on my driveway every Sunday.

What We Ate:
Monday: Ethiopian food. I made misir watt and yellow lentils and then fried up some potatoes to go with since not all the kids like injera. (The injera I bought from the store). The yellow lentils were a little soupy when I first opened up the Instant Pot, but they thickened over time. Vegan.

Taco Tuesday: Shrimp Tacos

Wednesday: This was our New York adventure day. The Husband took the two younger kids out for Korean fried chicken while the 14 year old and I were away.

Thursday: Golden Potato Leek Soup from NY Times Cooking and biscuits. I had some potatoes to use up. I added corn and peas to the soup, to give it a little more variety. I also threw in the leftover yellow lentils from Monday to give it a bit of protein. Two family members loved this soup, two family members said it had too much stuff in it.

Friday: Pizza (The Husband made)+ Central Intelligence – a 2016 funny buddy caper/action movie starring Kevin Hart and the Rock. It was pretty funny and the performances were fun, though the plot was confusing. Afterwards we watched the Olympic opening ceremonies.

Saturday: Tortellini with red sauce and leftover salad.

Sunday: Super Bowl Sunday. Also a big milestone birthday for the Husband. We ordered Chinese food from his favorite take out place, pretzels, cake. And lots of other snacks and sweets.

On that – can I say some random thoughts on the Opening Ceremonies –
-I missed the first ten minutes and was super confused by the Opening Ceremonies taking place in three different locations. It took me a while to realize that those weren’t just different sets that people were parading through, but actually different parts of Italy.
-I want to vacation in a small Italian city now. I mean, yeah, there is clearly part of the Olympics that is one big travel ad for the country hosting. And tell you what – it works on me.
-Can we talk about the opening ceremony country looks? How cozy were some of the team sweaters? I’m looking at you Norway and Ireland. Also those thick scarves worn by Great Britain – I want one. I also wondered if people wear their outfits after the Olympics. I certainly would. The Canadian puffer vests looked very impractical but such a fun statement. (though maybe not impractical – I read that they can also be used as pillows!) Oh and the French contingent all looked like they were on Hoth.
-I was VERY annoyed when Guinea-Bissou and Haiti was marching and NBC split the screen over to talk to the American athletes waiting to march. I mean Haiti had TWO athletes and Guinea-Bissou had ONE. The network couldn’t give them our full attention?
-How fun was all the choreography? All I could think about was, “How do you even rehearse something that big???” I loved how it was clearly designed to be impactful from far away – what looks on the camera to be chaotic mass of swirling people, when seen from a gazillion steps back, is a beautiful purposeful swirl of color. Also – shout out to the few times you saw the crew pop out to move things. I always get excited when I see stagehands.
-The nine year old is participating in his school Geobowl. The theme this year is Europe and the opening ceremonies was a fun chance to get him to start thinking about all the different countries. When a European country marched, I would point it out on the map and tell him the capital. It’s okay to stay up til 11am if it’s educational, right?
-The Olympic flame coming through and lighting the cauldron. Made me tear up. Thinking about journey and history and past becoming present…. gets me every single time.

Well that’s the news from this end. The snow continues to blanket our world here, but I hear sunshine and warmer weather is around the corner.

What makes you laugh? Did you watch any Olympics? The Super Bowl?