Monday, February 17, 2020

More Quick Takes (Feb 2020)

I've seen quite a lot of good theatre in the first six weeks of the year.  Most of the plays have already closed, though Marjorie Prime at Coal Mine still has another week to go (though it is sold out and you just have to turn up and hope a seat becomes available), and Lady Sunrise at Factory is just opening.  (To be completely transparent, I haven't seen these two, but I am confident they will be solid.)  I debated going to see the last performance of Theatre Rusticle's Midsummer's Night's Dream, but just have seen this far too many times in the past few years.

I did, however, take my eye off the ball and missed out on a couple of screenings that were of interest to me at the Paradise.  I missed out on Lost in Translation and Wings of Desire.  (I've actually never seen Wings all the way through, so that makes it doubly unfortunate.)  Well, I'll just have to do a better job of tracking these things.  Maybe I'll even put together a page that has the second-run movie listings of interest to me.  I'll have to decide if I want to include The Fox, as I wasn't particularly impressed on my last visit.  On the other hand, they actually will be screening Knives Out fairly soon, which I had wanted to see but didn't manage to for a variety of reasons.  As a bit of an aside, I was one day off from being able to see Varda's Cleo from 9 to 5 in Pittsburgh, but they were screening it Sunday evening, rather than Saturday, which seemed like poor scheduling to me.

Speaking of odd scheduling, I am a bit surprised that the AGO didn't have its Art of Magic exhibit ready for Family Day.  (It opens next weekend.)  To be honest, this doesn't look like my kind of thing at all.  I'm much more interested in the Diane Arbus exhibit, though I wouldn't expect that to be as family-friendly.

I've been doing quite well at swimming laps after work, usually managing to go twice a week.  I've have a few things interrupt my gym schedule, and it is more like 2 times a week, instead of the three times I had stuck to for the past year or so.  Also, there are quite a few more people on the machines (darn resolutions!), and I've generally only done 60-85% of my normal routine before getting too frustrated and leaving.  Today was a pretty solid workout, however, and I'll probably go tomorrow as well, since I can't go swimming until Thurs.

While it has certainly been cold at times this winter, we've been fortunate that snow and ice on the sidewalks haven't been a major problem.  Last winter was definitely worse.  That said, I am looking forward to some warmer weather.  It looks like next week the temperature should be above average, though I don't know if I will actually break out my bike until mid to late March...

We had been planning a train trip to Montreal over Spring Break.  That's looking quite unlikely at the moment.  While there is a slim chance the blockade by the Mohawk will be lifted by then, I don't really want to risk it.  It is far beyond the scope of this post (and really this blog) to go into the ethics of shutting down the rail network.  There is some irony in that after I did some probing it turns out that the art exhibit I really want to see in Montreal wouldn't even be open by the kids' March Break.  I can see it at some other point in the late spring or summer, either by myself or with the family.  I suppose there is a much better chance that the issues will be more or less resolved by that point (and if not, then the Canadian economy will be in pretty sad shape).  Now it turns out there is a pretty interesting photography exhibit in Ottawa that does close in mid-March.  I can't quite justify going just for that, and I am annoyed that there doesn't appear to be a stand-alone catalogue of the show, but there are a few other resources I can use to fill in the gap and make up for not making the trek.

I suppose that covers enough for the time being.

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