malvasia bianca

Vacation’s over now; back to work tomorrow. Some random notes:

• Miranda managed to last through all five plays we went to. She fell asleep during one; I, on the other hand, dozed a bit during two. All good, but our consensus favorite was London Assurance, which we’d never heard of before.
• It turns out that High Society wasn’t originally a stage musical: the film was the original form, and its stage adaptation is only a few years old. (With more songs thrown in, from elsewhere in the Cole Porter canon, to make it into a real musical.)
• Stratford is a pleasant place; I’d be happy to go to the the festival again some future year.
• It’s my first vacation where I’ve brought along the laptop and sought out internet connections regularly; that worked well.
• I did my first programming on a Mac. (Or at least my first in a decade and a half.) Which worked well enough; a decent set of tools available. A weird mixture of Gnu and non-Gnu environments – I was pleased to not only find autoconf installed, but even its info pages. (Good thing, since I’d never used it before!) But then when I had a make question, its info pages weren’t installed, even though it was Gnu make. (Fortunately, my brain managed to dredge up the answer I wanted.)
• It’s the first time I’ve done longish driving in the last several years. Surprisingly pleasant.
• We bought a radio adapter for the iPod – surely it won’t be hard to find unused frequencies in the wilds of Ohio and Ontario? Actually, though, the spectrum is pretty well filled; in fact, it was easier to find stations near Toledo and Detroit than in more rural regions. Fortunately, it was easy enough to find decent radio stations in Ontario. I might try using it at home; it depends if I start finding more podcasts that I want to listen to, or run out of CDs that I want to listen to. (I certainly don’t plan to start listening to the radio here regularly.)
• My range of (self-provided) vacation entertainment has broadened – I used to just bring along a ton of books, but this time I had several books, several magazines, the iPods, the DS, and the computer. I’m happy with the new mix: I managed to nicely work down the magazine and podcast backlogs, while still getting a half-dozen books read.
• I still don’t take as many pictures as I probably should, though the digital camera is helping.
• Yosha apparently went on a bit of a hunger strike again at the kennel – he’s noticeably skinner than he was when we left. And his hind legs seem to be weakening a bit. But the kidney dog food seems to be working well, so hopefully he’ll have a few more years ahead of him; we just might have to get used to carrying him up and down the stairs at times.