Craig Berry

Wow, it's been quite a while since my last post.  LJ seems to be a cyclical thing with me; I'll post and read very actively for a month or two, then take a few weeks off.  I should gather stats on my posting and see if it matches one of the biorhythm curves or something. :)

For the last two weeks, I actually have a good excuse for not having posted: I haven't had five spare minutes the whole time.  The weekend before last,

belladonna93  and I flew to Las Vegas for a mini-vacation to celebrate her birthday.  We had a wonderful time; the highlights were a lovely dinner at Postrio in the Venetian, and a visit to the Bodies exhibition in the Luxor.  I recommend the latter very highly to all of my friends who are at least slightly morbid and not excessively squeamish...which is pretty much the same as saying "all my friends" without further qualification.

The only disappointment of the trip was finding that, as z111  had warned me, the Luxor has embarked on a campaign of systematic de-Egyptian-ification.  Many of the things I remember from my last visit several years ago -- gift shops stocked with interesting pseudo-artifacts, an exhibit of actual Egyptian relics, cheesy but fun Egyptian naming and decor -- are gone or much reduced.  Apparently management has concluded that middle America doesn't want to stay at a middle-eastern themed hotel.  That makes me so sad, frustrated, and disgusted I had to force myself to stop thinking about it in order to enjoy my stay there.

On Sunday afternoon belladonna93  flew home, and I changed gears from vacation to episcopal mode.  First, on Sunday evening I attended a Gnostic Mass at AHBH Camp, where I supervise several members of the clergy.  Celebrating Mass in a cramped living-room temple made me nostalgic for the olden times; watching the officiants having to move the font back and forth to make room for ritual activities quickly tempered that nostalgia.  The Mass was rightly performed with joy and beauty; my thanks and congratulations to the Mass team and the whole AHBH crew for what they're accomplishing in Las Vegas!

On Monday Sister C. and I discussed preparations for the wedding, and visited the site where the ceremony was to occur.  I'd kept the whole day free, but it turned out only a couple of hours were needed for preparations and nothing else emerged to fill my remaining time during the day, so I spent a few relaxing hours reading.  Ah, luxury.  Then it was out to a Nepalese dinner with a few of the AHBH members on the way to the airport, and back to Los Angeles.

There followed a crammed week of long days at work, fully booked evenings, and (around the edges of those) trying to prepare for a double-whammy Memorial Day weekend.  On Friday evening, I flew back up to Vegas to perform C and J's wedding.  The ceremony was held in a beautiful outdoor location on Saturday morning, and despite a few minor glitches -- most notably the truly mysterious disappearance of my EGC crown, which seems to have evaporated into the ether on the way to the wedding -- everything went beautifully.  z111  and I officiated as Priest and Priestess in a modified version of sabazius_x  and Helena's wedding ceremony, done stand-alone rather than as part of a Mass.  The funniest moment was when the very young and very terrified ringbearer came up the aisle, got within about ten feet of his intended position, then panicked and ran past us and out into the very large expanse of grass behind us.  He stopped about 50 feet away.  It took us a minute or two to coax him back into place.

Following a really pleasant reception and a quick tapas stop with z111 , it was back to the airport for an afternoon flight to LA, where I was due to join the Kaaba Colloquium already in progress.  I took a taxi from LAX to the conference hotel, arriving exactly in time to join the team for the Saturday debrief dinner.  We spent a couple of hours at that, then drove over to Star Sapphire Lodge for the reception, which I barely remember because I was hitting the wall hard by that point.  To say that I slept well that evening is a considerable understatement.

Before I knew it, my alarm was beeping Sunday morning, and it was time to get up and prepare for my four Kaaba presentations -- three of them before lunch.  Whee.  Fortunately, coffee reached my synapses in the nick of time, and all of my presentations went well.  As usual, "The Creepy Guy" was the big hit.  It's not necessarily the title I'd prefer to have associated with my name, but that's show biz.

Then it was another debrief dinner, then back over to SSL for a lovely Mass, followed by another definitve hitting of the wall, and a trip back to the hotel and my bed that I made largely in my sleep, so far as I can tell.  Monday was much more relaxed -- no public speaking!  No ritual lines to do from memory! -- but still intense, as the Kaaba team spent the whole day discussing the outcome of our "Kaaba 3.0" dual-tracking approach and made plans for future Kaaba topics and locations.

You know you're leading a busy life when you go to bed on the Monday of Memorial Day weekend thinking "Oh thank God, I can go to work tomorrow and relax a little."
 

 

Thank you, everyone who has contacted me regarding Lauri's death.  It's amazing how much all the love and support have helped me andmadelineusher .  I don't know what I did to deserve a circle of friends like you all, but I'm very glad I did it.

Life is starting to return to normal, despite surreal moments intruding now and then.  This weekend I will be traveling to Salem to help present an OTO Advanced Initiator Training session, which seemed impossible a few days ago, but sounds quite good right now.  A change of scenery and seeing some distant friends will be very good for me, I think.

I have, after only four decades of procrastination, started learning to play the guitar.  I can currently play a somewhat adequate E chord, and a really crappy, buzzing, unreliable A.  When I perfect these two and add a third, I will be able to play every song the Ramones ever recorded, and indeed about half of the entire body of popular music.  In entirely related news, the fingertips of my left hand hurt, except for the index finger, which has gone numb.  You'd think I would have built up calluses from all the typing I do.

My life of late has been absurdly busy, accounting in part for my absence from LJ.  (In part, because I also just felt like taking an LJ vacation.)  The biggest current news is that I am about to have three housemates -- the residents of Hazard House will be living with me for a few months while they prepare and execute various new plans.  This will be fun; I haven't had friends living within walking distance (much less shout-down-the-hall distance) in many years.

My strategy worked; yesterday I staged a raid on Circuit City's post-Christmas-we're-so-desperate sale, and was practically paid to haul away a modest but quite adequate HDTV.  I hadn't realized how bad the old set had gotten until I saw the new one...no wonder I never watched TV, as it was effectively invisible toward the end of the previous set's life.

This morning, I nearly managed to convince myself that calling Time Warner about upgrading to HDTV service would be too much of a hassle, and that said service would probably be too expensive anyway.  I finally decided it was worth a try, especially given how quiet things are at work today.  In ten minutes flat I had an HD set-top box order in place, ready to be picked up this evening (though I probably won't actually pick it up until Friday).  And the price?  Nothing up front, and an extra buck a month on my bill.  Recessions do have their up sides.  They're even throwing in a free HDMI cable for no obvious reason; the website says they don't do that.  I'm certainly not going to object.

One happy result of all this is that movie nights at Tonatemocalli will resume sometime in January.  And this time you'll be able to see the movies as well as hear them. :) 

Lately I've noticed that a lot of formerly quasi-public spaces are being secured against intruders.  My own office building recently reduced the hours during which you can enter the lobby without a key card.  The building across the alley from us has locked the corridor which used to provide easy access to the Promenade.  And it's effectively impossible to find an accessible rest room; many businesses have closed ones that used to be available, and the remainder are locked down with strict "patrons only" policies, rigorously enforced.

Is this a general trend, or just in LA?  Any ideas why this is happening now?  It seems to have accelerated in the last year or so, which means blaming post-9/11 paranoia doesn't seem sufficient.  The homeless are often mentioned in connection with these changes, but it doesn't seem like the number or nature of the local homeless population has changed in the last several years.

My conjecture is that the cost of purchasing, installing, and maintaining electronic security systems has become so low that people are doing it reflexively; in other words, if those costs were equally low in 1990, this would have happened then.  But even that seems like a weak explanation for a change that has caused so much inconvenience.

Any ideas?

Yesterday evening was exciting.

First, I dashed out early (for me) from work to meet the lovely rosefox  for a quick dinner.  It had been a long time since our last chance to visit, and the conversation zinged wildly from common friends to politics to the economy to our careers and relationships, and points between and beyond.  In retrospect, I'm amazed the whole thing lasted only 45 minutes.

I would have liked to linger, but later that evening I was due to coordinate a "Gnostic Boot Camp" session up in the Valley.  scorpio111  was going to swing by on his way up from work and give me a ride; it's a maneuver we've done many times, and I anticipated no difficulties.

Little did I realize that the anti-Proposition-8 riot in Westwood (which we'd heard about while I was still at work) had turned into a monster, sprawling from the Mormon Temple south of my apartment all the way up to the critical intersection of Wilshire and Westwood.  Essentially all of West LA was one giant traffic snarl, and getting up the 405 -- which passes right through Westwood -- was essentially impossible.  To add to the fun, so many people were using nearby cellular circuits that my phone stopped working, so I ended up just standing at my rendezvous point, figuring I'd wait 45 minutes past the arranged time and if scorpio111  didn't show up, start walking the six miles home.

He got there 20 minutes late, and we made an attempt to take a very, very alternate route to the Valley via PCH.  The California Incline was backed up out onto Ocean Avenue.  At that point, I realized that it's important to know when to give up, so I did.  His phone was working, thank goodness, so we were able to get the word to other attendees.  Then we spent just over an hour making that six-mile trip to my apartment via a roundabout route, since he was kind enough to give me a ride home.  Thanks, brother.

From the corner nearest my house, you can look south and see the spire of the Mormon temple that was the launching point for the protests, and Wilshire runs a block to the north.  So my quiet little neighborhood was in the center of the maelstrom.  Fortunately, nothing really spilled onto the residential backstreets, but there were low-flying helicopters, sirens, and distant megaphone rants still filling the air as I drifted off to sleep.  It's times like that when I'm very glad I inherited my mother's ability to sleep through a nuclear war, rather than my father's tendency to be kept up all night by a barking dog four blocks away.

By morning, everything was back to normal.  There were still some abandoned signs on the sidewalks, and other riot trash here and there, but either the rioters were very tidy (not unlikely, come to think of it) or the city had already made good progress on cleaning up by 8:30am.  This leant the morning a rather surreal air, especially as today was an especially pleasant day even for West LA, with cobalt-blue skies and a balmy breeze.  It was hard to believe the transformation from just eight hours before.  Los Angeles always eats its past, but this was an especially hurried meal.

Last night I left work around 7:15, stepping out into deep twilight in the alley between my office and the buildings on Third Street Promenade.  We're just a couple of blocks from the ocean, so it's always cooler here than further inland; in the fall, it usually gets pretty brisk out as the sun sets and the onshore breeze blows the fog in.  So as I step out the door heading homeward, I'm always unconsciously bracing myself for that first touch of cold, damp air.

Not last night.  It was around 80 degrees outside.  There was a breeze, but it kept shifting direction; it felt like a weak Santa Ana, dry and silky on the skin.  I caught the bus back to Westwood, around five miles inland, and it was even warmer there as I walked home in the velvety darkness, leaves rustling in little whirlwinds and chaotic rushes of air.

Santa Ana weather always makes me feel energetic and on edge, somewhere between anxious and exhilirated.  It was leaning toward exhilirated last night.  Apparently my cat Wafer felt it too; he came in with me just long enough to get fed, then rocketed back to the front door, begging to be let back out into the windy darkness filled with the chirping of heat-loving crickets and the echoed barking of distant dogs.

I've felt very much like an animal lately.  Not in the sense of losing my humanity, but of gaining an appreciation for the meat and bone I'm made of, and of how much like all the other animals on the planet we humans are.  This morning, on the way to work, i was waiting to cross busy Westwood Boulevard with a dozen other people.  The crosswalk signal was about to change for us when we all heard a siren approaching.  It was still out of sight but getting louder when our signal changed.  There was a beautiful moment of nonverbal tribal consensus as we all looked at each other, looked toward the apparent source of the sound, shifted toward the street, hesitated, and then all at the same instant concluded that the siren had stopped getting closer, had clearly turned on another street; and we all began moving in unison.

I'm sure that a Neolithic hunting band hearing a branch crack in the forest would have looked just the same.  Or a band of wolves catching an unfamiliar scent on the breeze.  And that is an intensely wonderful realization.

When I'm under too much emotional stress, I tend toward the turtle reflex -- pull my head and legs into my shell and wait in the dark for danger to go away.  That's where I've been the last month; hence the lack of posts here, along with all the unanswered email and phone calls.  Sorry to everyone I've left worried or confused.

Though the sources of stress are still humming right along, my stress-management skills are being honed as never before, so i should be simulating normality more effectively in the weeks ahead.

Salon is running a fascinating interview with James Carse, whose new book The Religious Case Against Belief raises all kinds of interesting questions about the nature of faith and religion.  I haven't read it yet, but based on this article the book has jumped to the top of my pending list.  He emphasizes the differences between religions, which I find somehow refreshing given the warm fuzzy "all religions are pretty much the same" vibe that permeates Los Angeles.  Eclecticism and ecumenical harmony are fine and welcome, but we shouldn't pretend that there are not real differences between (say) Judaism and Hinduism.

"All words are sacred and all prophets true," but each says true things in different ways, about different things, in different contexts.  I rather like a world with that kind of vibrant variety in it.  It would be even better if people would stop killing each other over such differences.

In entirely unrelated news, we finally let Wafer out to wander the neighborhood on his own yesterday; we figure he's had enough time to get used to the idea that family, safety, and (most importantly) food are located in the new apartment now.  He came in and out several times during the afternoon, clearly building up his nerve with ever-longer expeditions.

Then he disappeared for more than an hour just as twilight was deepening.  The last light was fading from the sky when we heard the unmistakable sounds of a feline territorial battle under way behind the neighboring condos.  We called his name now and then so he'd know where to run if he decided to retreat, but otherwise just kept our fingers crossed.

An hour or so later, Wafer scratched at my bedroom window, and I went to the front door to let him in.  He was covered with leaf-litter, but didn't have a scratch on him.  I guess we've introduced the new alpha cat to the block.  madelineusher imagined him saying to the other cats "I used to fight coyotes.  Stay out of my way."

We're gradually getting settled in at the new apartment.  I love the place, especially its roominess; 10 years crammed into our previous home has made me really appreciate room to swing my arms without knocking over a lamp.

I haven't had net access at home since we moved.  Nor have we had TV.  The all-in-one cable installation is due to happen on Saturday; meanwhile, we're living like our primitive ancestors, doing this odd thing called "talking with each other" to pass the time.  Well, actually madelineusher has found an open wifi link to leech, but I haven't stooped that low.  Yet.

This morning, I decided to try for speed on my trip to work, just to see what might be possible.  Door to door time was 45 minutes, and that was with an unusually long wait for the bus.  I'll never get my antique Masonic tomes read on a commute as short as that. :)

Speaking of which, I'm nearly done with Robert Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy.  It's a very typical "lone visionary" book -- he has one very good idea, and proceeds to apply it where it is appropriate, and then where it is not appropriate, exhaustively, stretching his argument well past the breaking point.  I also tend to distrust an author's views on sacred geometry when he can write "The radius of any circle is one sixth of its circumference" with a straight face.  Still, his core ideas are excellent, and the book has shed some intriguing and productive light on several symbols of special interest to me.  I recommend the book if you already know Masonry and astronomy reasonably well, and can thus spot when he's gone off the rails.

We're moved.

Well, mostly moved; we still have a few things to pick up from the old place, and we need to clean there as well.  But all the major furniture and nearly all of our stuff is in the new place, and we slept there for the first time last night.

And it rocks.  There's a lot more room than we had before, and far more efficiently arranged.  The paint and decor accents are perfect.  Being on the first floor is about a thousand times more conenenient than our former position at the top of several flights of narrow, steep stairs.  (I sometimes thought of the first landing above the street as "base camp".)

There are a few problems -- for example, the hot water is misbehaving, sometimes there, sometimes not.  But they're working on other parts of the building, which probably explains that situation.  The property manager says he'll get it worked out quickly.

This morning, I got to try out my new commute for the first time.  I left the house at 7:35.  The walk into Westwood Village took 20 minutes and was very pleasant, over a gentle hill along well-tended sidewalks.  I stopped for a relaxed breakfast at Noah's, then walked around the corner to catch my bus just as the 920 pulled up.

The 920 is a "rapid express" (or some redundancy like that) which only makes a few stops as it travels from downtown to Santa Monica along Wilshire.  In fact, it makes no stops at all between Westwood and Santa Monica, where my office is.  This means I travel those four miles as fast as a car would, or perhaps even a little faster as the rapid buses have traffic light influencing systems that hold green lights for them if they're nearing an intersection.

I walked in my office door at 8:40, which means that with a leisurely stop for breakfast my door-to-door commute time was an hour.  I think I'm going to like this.  A lot.

First, happy Bloomsday to all!  May you find your Penelope with a minimum amount of hassle from angry giants and petulant gods along the way.

Meanwhile, big news in my household -- we're moving in two weeks.  We decided to get serious about looking for a new place, and found our dream home the first day.  It's a garden apartment in Westwood, 15 minutes' walk from the Transit Hub of the Gods (two rapid lines, one hyper-rapid, and more local buses than I can count).  This will cut my commute from 90 to around 35 minutes.  And the apartment itself is beautiful, with hardwood floors and nice paint in shades other than Depressing Apartment Off-White.

Stay tuned; we'll have a housewarming party as soon as we get settled in.  Because unlike our current home, which has a living room roughly the size of a Mercury capsule, the new place has room to party.  Woo hoo!

Today is my last day at my current employer; on Monday I report for indoctrination at my new one.

I never know how to deal with the ends of things.  Part of my wants to dwell on the last-ness of every little event -- "This is the last time I'll ride Culver City Line 1 to work!  This is my last dev-team meeting!  This is the last cup of coffee I'll drink at this desk!"  Another part pushes that even further, realizing that some time earlier this week was the last ordinary time for all those things, and that the actual last versions are so distorted from the norm that they don't count.  But then when was my last ordinary cup of coffee here?  If today's was so unusual, then yesterday's was the last ordinary one...but that makes that one unusual, too.  This reasoning can be extended backward in time as far as you care to go.  It's a variant on the unexpected hanging paradox.

Musing on this today (on the Culver City Line 1 bus), it struck me that the only reasonable conclusion is that every day is in fact special.  This can be seen as a circuitous route to the "Best Day EVAR" theorem developed by noted philosophers belladonna93, maeghanne, and lady_saffir.  In its highest sense, it's a call to stay awake, in the "Wake World" sense of that term -- fully participating in and appreciating each moment, never falling into the robotic coma of rote behavior.  Alas, in its more prosaic reading, it sounds like Rod McKuen.

I suppose that's why we have the word "ineffable".  When you say these things directly, they end up looking silly, tautological, or both.  You have to feel them, and then you're left with a feeling you can't express, which is frustrating.

But enough philosophy for now.  I have documentation to complete.

Recently I bought myself the album Gamma 3, which is (oddly enough) the third album put out by Ronnie Montrose's band Gamma.  Released in 1982, this came out while I was in college; I heard it in the dorm occasionally, and then was treated to more of it over the summer while I was home listening to Greg Stone, the best prog-rock DJ ever, on the late lamented KOME in San Jose.

Years passed, then decades, but a song from Gamma 3 kept coming back into my head.  Titled "Third Degree", the only line I could remember from it was "As long as you're in motion, you're moving in the right direction"; that became a motto of mine, and several of my friends have probably heard it often enough to get mildly annoyed at me.  So I bought the album, finally, to see if there was some reason that song was stuck in my head.  The short answer is "no", though I do still like it, and as a side effect I discovered (or rediscovered) several other good tracks on the album. 

Saturday afternoon I was trying to get my energy level up for the evening event at LVX Lodge, so I decided to play one of those tracks, "Mobile Devotion", really really loud, while playing accompaniment on my recorder.  The recorder is not normally considered a hard-rock instrument -- note that they fade out from "Stairway to Heaven" just as Jimmy Page kicks into gear -- but I've never been one to take the ordinary course, and I've been known to toodle out some hot riffs now and then.

I opened up my mp3 library, chose the by-artist sort, and scanned down...through the A listings, then the B listings, then slowed down, scanning for the band name...didn't find it...looked again more carefully...

And then belatedly realized that I was alphabetizing in the wrong language.  My mp3 organizer doesn't realize that Gamma should follow A and B.

Some days it's a wonder I can think coherently at all with all the jumbled (and often contradictory) information I've got crammed into my brain.

Happy π day! I will be sharing a round dinner -- pizza, Key Lime pie, wine in circular glasses -- with my friend Merri this evening. She showed her true geek-girl colors by noting we should really meet for a late lunch at 1:59 instead.

I've almost recovered from the Gnostic Death Flu. I'm still coughing and sneezing a little, and feeling a little draggy (especially while trying to get up in the morning, even after adequate sleep). But my overall energy is nearly back to normal, I'm no longer feverish at all, and I haven't needed Nyquil to sleep for the last several nights. I'm hoping this improvement means I can safely attend a St. Patrick's (pre-)Day party tomorrow evening; I need a little fun-and-relaxation-with-friends time. The day following I'm serving as Child for the Mass at LVX Lodge, and the day after that I have a fairly important appointment for which I want to be in top mental shape, so I'm proceeding with unusual caution, even for me.

Yesterday was busy and fun.  The day started with a practice session at 93 Oasis with the reconfigured Ararita Chorus, which will be performing Oliver's arrangement of the Anthem twice at Mass-a-thon this coming weekend.  Since the original tenors dropped out, Tony and I were pressed into service, each of us to take the part for the other's Mass.  It's a tricky harmony, but I think I can have it nailed down by Sunday.  All that time spent singing harmonies with laurellady and the car radio over the years has really payed off. :)

After that, it was a quick drive across town to LVX Lodge, where we celebrated a Mass with three baptisms and a confirmation.  I sponsored one of those being baptized, which is always a wonderful feeling.  Turnout was very high; we had people on cushions on the floor and the Mass team members had to navigate around them at times.  The Mass itself was beautiful; magdalena_lvx in particular came at things from a different and surprising direction.  I love hanging around with magicians; they keep changing.  You never get bored.

Then, when I got home, I was so energetic and happy that I decided it would be a good time to get my taxes finished, so I won't have that hanging over my head anymore.  Thanks to TurboTax, that's no longer the horrid chore it used to be; I think I spent an hour total on the task, split over two evenings.  The good news is I've got a moderately large refund coming from the state.  Most of it will go into paying down various debts, but I might just carve out a little for a treat.

Now I need to turn my attention to preparing for Mass-a-thon, then the Thursday following arranging the monthly Gnostic Boot Camp session (this one is on the use of music in the Mass), and in parallel with all that getting my plan and materials ready for my "Astronomology" seminar on the afternoon of Saturday March 8.  I'm also working on a major change in how US Grand Lodge email is handled.  And my day job is heating up, too.

The nice thing is, I'm happy with this whole unwieldy load of tasks.  I've finally allowed myself to admit that I like being overcommitted; the mental dance to keep everything on track feels good in the same way enjoyable exercise feels good.

Moody end-of-year memage obtained via sesa777 lies beyond the cut.

( Misty watercolor memories... )

I was feeling glum and tired on the bus to work this morning, listening to random music on my mp3 player and not liking anything I heard.  Then it played the live version of "The Song Remains the Same" by Zep, and suddenly I was smiling, tapping my foot, and struggling not to sing out loud on a crowded bus.  It's amazing what the right music at the right time can accomplish.

That segued into "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider, which made me grin for other reasons, but let's not go there. :)

I updated every driver I could think of on my home PC last night.  It seems like the lockups are happening mostly during heavy graphics usage (watching flash videos, playing Second Life), so I was especially careful to update and test my graphics card driver.  All checks out perfectly.  Now the waiting begins.

The bad news: I still have the Death Flu.  I'm getting better, slooowly, but I still feel that icky-feverish-sluggish-blah combination that set in more than a week ago.  I'm supposed to be doing a complicated software design, and I can barely summon the energy to yawn.  This is not a good thing.  Immune system, come on, let's get on the case!

The good news: I have my plane tickets and hotel booked for Kaaba Colloquium in Houston, December 1-2.  My OTO friends are invited to join me and the rest of the Kaaba gang for the most fun you'll ever have at a leadership training seminar.  I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone can shut me down as thoroughly as ihateswine did in Minneapolis during the mediation role-play exercise.

The other good news: Despite both of us being sick, laurellady and I had a pretty good Halloween night.  We put out a small fraction of her vast storehouse of Halloween decor, ordered in dinner, and watched The Rites of Dracula (a Hammer classic with the incomparable Christopher Lee as the Count), the original Haunting of Hill House, and the beginning of Night of the Living Dead.

As if it weren't hard enough going to work (or to bed) when I have a new computer to play with at home, yesterday my copy of The Other Conquest arrived. This is a film set just after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, and concerns the spiritual battle between an Aztec prince who struggles to keep the old religion alive in his heart and the Spaniards who try to force his conversion to Christianity. It's a beautiful and moving film. For me, one of its great attractions is that quite a lot of the dialog is in Nahuatl, the Aztec language which I've been studying for the past several years.

So, there the DVD sat on the coffee table, beguiling me as I ate breakfast this morning. It will probably be Sunday before I have time to watch it with laurellady, who has never seen it. Having a rich, busy life is great until you want to squeeze something in like this.