I've got a choral concert tonight. Yesterday I called my parents, not to remind them of the show, but to suggest that they skip it. The weather here in Buffalo is terrible, with high winds and lots of snow. I would rather have my parents come visit sometime when the roads are safe for travel.

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As I type, it is pouring rain and hailing. In five hours, a High Wind Warning kicks in, along with a Winter Storm Watch. I.e. all the rain pouring down is going to freeze in place. Then, overnight, we'll get up to a foot of snow.

And it's the last week of classes, so I am buried in tests and papers. Whee! What fun!

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My life is filled with excitement. Today I got my first Christmas letters of the year, and a present. I've not yet begun writing my own letter. I might not get started until after finals, so I hope everyone can contain their excitement.

The present, which was nicely wrapped in red paper, I opened without delay.

Wait, don't look at me like that! I'm not a dirty cheater! It was from my twin and her family, and I received it with instructions to open immediately. It contained an papercraft "Christmas Tree-In-a-Box", and I intend to set it up when I get a chance.

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One of my German classmates is a retired high school teacher, auditing the class. He has season tickets to the Buffalo Philharmonic, but he's out of town this weekend. Thus I got a free trip to get some culture, taking along a friend whom I knew appreciated music.

The Philharmonic plays in Kleinhans Music Hall, which seems like it should be "Kleinhan's" or "Kleinhans'", but it's not. The acoustics were excellent, noticeably better than the Clemens Center. The program was Trittico Botticelliano by Ottorino Respighi, Concerto #2 for Cello and Orchestra by Victor Herbert, and the Symphony #2 by Jean Sibelius.

Despite planning some spare time to arrive on time, we were almost late, as Kleinhans was not as easy to find as I expected. Its address is "Number 3 Symphony Circle", with said circle being a roundabout downtown. I figured drive to the roundabout and it'd be the obvious concert hall with a distinctive facade. Well, that facade faces away from the circle, and there were two other monumental buildings facing said circle. And to get into the Kleinhans I had to guess which of the roads leaving the circle actually led to it. There were several false starts, I must confess, and the parking lot was full by the time we identified the proper building. On-street parking is free in Buffalo, and being young and healthy we just resolved to walk two blocks or so.

The seats were up in the nosebleed section, just one row ahead of the back wall. We could have moved forward into any of hundreds of empty seats, but my companion was happy being "behind all the coughing people" which seemed like a reasonable decision. And as I mentioned, the acoustics were excellent even up where we were.

The performers were quite good, with a nice cello soloist. There was one trombonist who appeared to be seeing the music for the first time that evening. During intermission, there were a couple of violins onstage keeping warmed up, and that trombonist, who was flipping his music and trying out difficult sections. I didn't hear him screw up during the symphony, so I guess he got it together in time.

As a final amusement, the building did not have anything so gauche as a bathroom. It had a "Powder Room" for the ladies, and a "Gentlemens' Lounge" for the men. I must confess that the Lounge seemed like a rather unpleasant place to lounge around, what with the lack of comfortable seating and the rather ceramic decor. That is the kind of odd track that my brain's humor center follows.

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This is a sign I'm internalizing the norms of historical study: for a 1000 word paper, a mere bagatelle, I checked out eleven books from the library. I'm probably going to quote at least six of them.

I don't even like the subject that much. I'm discussing how the movie The Governess reflects on the modern cultural interpretation of the Victorian period. And the movie didn't turn out to be that good. The director seems to have been overawed by the cinematographer, in that it is full of beautiful perfectly posed scenes in which nothing happens. And the ending… well, it doesn't really have an ending. It just sort of peters out.

As a side note, I didn't have to write about The Governess, as there was a list of films to pick from. Perhaps I should have gone with Tom Brown's Schooldays. I was a bit nervous about that one because it is about my professor's specialty, so he'd be more apt to notice any infelicities in my paper. It looks like a more interesting movie, however. Ah well, I'm not going to start over now.

UPDATE: I used seven of the books. A thousand words is really quite limiting. I had to cut out all my discourse on Victorian ideals of childhood, focusing solely on Jewish acceptance and assimilation into British society. I hope I don't get called on the fact that the movie's events mostly happen in the Isle of Skye, which is Scottish rather than British. The family that hires the governess seem like Brits that purchased a northern estate, rather than actual native Scots. Their coachman wears a kilt, but no one else does. And the family scion attends Oxford. That's British enough for my purposes!

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Of the five dishes I've made for Thanksgiving, three of them were prepared with my late grandmother's cookwear. It's not that I didn't have my own pie plate or casserole; it just felt right to keep her legacy present.

It wasn't her apple pie recipe, though. Sorry.

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The Marines have an aphorism: "Piss-poor planning leads to piss-poor performance." So, I have written a plan.

Note that I am cooking more than I promised I'd bring, because I am not certain all these items will come out to my satisfaction. My potential menu contributions are:

1. green pea and ham soup with vegetables
2. angel-food cake with whipped cream and blueberry topping
3. apple pie and/or
4. apple crisp
5. vanilla ice cream

The soup and ice cream I did not originally volunteer for, but I figure I should bring more rather than less, and make options available.

This constitutes a Warning Order. It is written in regulation format. 

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I have never read the Twilight series, nor have I watched their movies. But if someone paid me to create a new movie adaptation, I think this is what I'd go with:

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In German class, a girl that I sometimes am partnered with came into class today with a nice cut on the bridge of her nose. While waiting for class to begin, I jokingly said "Nice cut! Looks like you got tired and let your guard slip."

She nodded. "Yeah, keeping up with conditioning is always tough during the school year."

I said "But seriously, how'd you get the cut?"

She looked at me like I was kind of slow. "Umm, boxing. You know, my hobby?"

"Wait," I said. "You box? For real?"

"Well, yeah. I thought I'd told everybody."

I looked around. The other people that sit in our corner were nodding their heads. I still don't remember being told that; maybe I was sitting somewhere else that day. What's funny to me is how surprised I was, even though I attended a kung fu academy with as many females as males. I think it's that serving with female Marines gave me a mental linkage between "Marine personal appearance standards" and "combat-trained females," such that when I see someone that is a bit less squared-off, I don't think of them as potentially dangerous. This is a bad habit. Perhaps if I got back into martial arts training, I'd recover my more open-eyed view of people.

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