60 Minutes had an outstanding segment last night on the Foja Mountains in Irian Jaya and all the undocumented birds and animals found there. The full video is on their website if you missed it (<13 minutes).

My cornflake wreaths won a prize at the cookie party for Best Looking! I felt kinda bad, actually, since another woman had made cornflake wreaths as well but hers didn't get any votes (they were a lighter green than mine and less round). I rock.

I made about a million cookies last night for Caryn's cookie party. Not wanting to be up all night baking, I decided to make the cornflake wreaths that Grandma Hedstrom used to make which just involve melting marshmallows, butter, flavoring, and green food color. I think my cuticles are permanently dyed green.

Went to see Madama Butterfly last Thursday night in the middle of a huge rainstorm. There has been more drama this season in getting to and from the opera than has actually happened onstage. It took me to hours to get there and about an hour and a half to get home, including a half hour just getting out of the parking garage after the performance. So many people were stuck in traffic getting to the opera house they even held the curtain for about 10 minutes, and there were still a herd of latecomers standing in the back for the first act.

Two casts performed MB; I saw the second cast which did not receive the rave reviews of the first, but was pretty good nonetheless. Marie Plett, who sang Cio-Cio-San, is apparently not terribly popular but I thought she did very well. The guy who played Pinkerton was drowned out by the orchestra several times.

It's funny how the audiences are so different for each opera. Tannhäuser attracted a lot of Europeans, Macbeth a lot of serious elderly types, Appomattox a lot of people wearing black. Madama Butterfly is an accessible crowd-pleaser, so the audience was more varied. There was a lot of whispering, a cell phone that rang at least 7 times, and someone dropped a bottle or something that rolled around for a while, the most audience disruption I'd experienced thus far.

First my driver's-side headlight went out. Then my furnace broke. I got the headlight fixed this morning, after Rebekah and I went down to the parking lot yesterday and fiddled around with it ourselves and only succeeded in detatching the wires. I'm in less of a hurry about the furnace since it hasn't gotten colder than 58 in the apartment and I don't mind being a little on the chilly side. During the day it heats up to about 66 anyway, so I've just been running the space heater (the one that looks like a deranged fencer's head poking up through the floor) for a little while in the evenings. That's hardly energy efficient, though, so I guess I need to call maintenance.

Was in a used bookstore over the weekend flipping through their old cross stitch and knitting mags and found this knitting leaflet from 1972 (click for up-close detail, if you dare):





Where to begin? The hair? The "tans?" The shiny pants? The silky neck scarves? Maybe it's because I live near San Francisco, but this leaflet seems to be some kind of early example of soft core gay porn... from the knitting section.