The Elgin packet and the Western stubby

Butter is king!

Also: Phillip Dyess-Nugent is not impressed with Lepage's Ring and Bruno Maddox is not impressed with the Higgs Boson.

Movie music

I had to stock up on cough drops, but Rheingold was appealingly vulgar and very watchable.  And as L. said, the machine hardly creaks at all...

Grumpy at lung ailment and not having run for a week, but I am on the mend, I think tomorrow will mark a return to full-on exercise.

Also: mother's ruin!  (Via Sarang.)

Update

Well, this has been about the grumpiest week in living memory.  I had a sinus infection and bronchitis during a week I'd hoped to spend doing large amounts of exercise; I was also hoping for clarity to emerge on a piece of work stuff that instead turns out to be enmired even more deeply in murkiness than I had hitherto guessed (in this case murkiness leads me to believe the outcome will ultimately be negative, and in fact the only thing to do now is completely detach from it emotionally!).  Foul mood only slightly dispelled by regular yoga.  Woke up at 4 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep at all; every few minutes, strove to unclench my extremely tightly clamped jaw muscles, but to little avail!

Flying back to NYC later this afternoon and feel that I have resoundingly squandered my week here; I dimly remember that I spent the weekend in a state of elation due to manuscript completion, but can no longer at all recapture the feeling....

Read a bunch of good crime fiction: Asa Larsson's Until Thy Wrath be Past; John Rector's Already Gone; Jorn Lier Horst's Dregs; and Johan Theorin's Echoes from the Dead.  All recommended, but the Theorin is particularly good, and I have downloaded his other book to read at the airport.

Also viewed: Hunger Games movie (in the theater, with popcorn!); The Lives of Others, which caused me to revisit this interesting piece by Timothy Garton Ash; the remaining portion of season 3 of The Mentalist, which seemed to me to go downhill in the last episodes (this show will not be to everyone's taste - I know my mother finds it unwatchable! - but I have on the whole enjoyed it); and several episodes of a very funny and charming program that B. dug out last night to distract me out of my bad mood, Wonderfalls.

I trust I will soon regain my equilibrium.  (Kill or cure: starting tomorrow and ending next Saturday, four massive sessions of Wagner at the Met!)

Took the plunge

and ordered tickets for Cycle 3 of the Ring Cycle at the Met - found a good friend who would do it with me, that was the clincher.  Who knows when I will have the chance again?  In a best-case scenario, it is a truly magical and transporting experience; in the worst-case scenario, parts of it are somewhat boring and it adds an onerous number of hours to a busy week, but I think there is no huge downside, it will be worthwhile whether or not I absolutely love it.

(Have uncharacteristically watched some hours of television this weekend - usually I only watch seasons of television on DVD with B. in Cayman, but we were very near the end of the third season of Fringe when we parted ways at the end of the Thanksgiving odyssey, it is a program which is very perfectly suited to my tastes, and my new laptop makes it very easy to watch videos from Amazon anywhere in my apartment - I watched the last three episodes of season 3 and then, regrettably, the first seven of season 4, which is as far as it now goes - am in horrible desiring limbo now of wanting all the rest of the season in one fell swoop, when really it will only be doled out WEEK BY UNREASONABLE WEEK over the rest of this year.  Anybody who has secret early access, tell me and get me in on it too!  Though I do observe, as always with this series, that they play overly fast and loose with the alternate universes: I feel that though high-quality television does a good job creating investment in characters over a season and its successors, the provision of too many alternates in this sort of a plot erodes general belief in and concern with the characters, to a sometimes problematic degree.)