Ni!

[jaala]

Despite appearances to the contrary, life has been going at a fairly good clip, with enough happening to be interesting. Mum and I rented Best In Show, which I recommend for people who enjoy weirdness in their movies. The ballet subscription trilogy was completed in just a few days with the final performance of James Kudelka's fairly nifty new ballet The Contract, and the always exciting and awe-inspiring Erik Bruhn Competition in Toronto.

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Thrice in the past week I have held a field mouse, usually quivering and stunned with fear, in my hand. Current theories suggest that they are living in the garage or coming in through the basement. The younger and more active cat was discovered with a mouse three times; being an indoor cat, she was wondering what the h*** to do next after batting it around. (She somehow managed to inflict something lethal the third time.) Mum surprised a fourth mouse while mowing the lawn today. All were placed in a sheltered area of the lawn and left to recuperate, though some follow-up action was required for the aforementioned third mouse.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I've had several very good looks at field mice, after only catching fleeting glimpses until now. (Previous cats only caught voles, which are more common.) It's not very often that one gets to hold a wild animal that would, if it were fully conscious, almost certainly bite me and run away. They reminded me quite strongly of the four pet rats I've had; I was struck by how subtle the difference can be between domesticated and wild animals.

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This past Tuesday, I managed to haul myself out of bed much earlier than usual to accompany Mum and Deirdre on a drive to the Stratford Festival. Deirdre needed to meet up with her high school group, but I tagged along as navigator and map reader in the hopes of getting a ticket and seeing the play with Mum. Which I did. The play was a student matinee preview of All's Well That Ends Well by you-know-who, and after much mad dashing about I had the pleasure of inhabiting the best seats I have ever managed to obtain in the Festival Theatre.

The King of France is William Hutt's only role in the Festival this year, and anyone who is familiar with him knows it must have been a good performance. Benedict Campbell can also be relied upon, as I have noted when seeing him as Friar Laurence and Henry VIII (in A Man For All Seasons), and he does bawdiness (playing the Clown, of course) delightfully well. Parolles was played as a complete fop, and I do love a good fop. Bernard Hopkins was also good. In fact, can't really say any particularly negative about the play, except that Helena shouldn't chase after that creep Bertram and that the ending is plot exposition and not much more.

In the car on the way home, I noticed a familiar face in the cast list, and on second examination realized that she had attended my high school! I hadn't really known her personally, but we were both involved in musical theatre and so ran across each other several times. I was kicking myself a long time for not noticing during the performance...

* * *

Come to think of it, the only thing I really did not enjoy about the play was that my throat became progressively more and more sore. And now I have a cold.

I'm signed up to attend a short Pathfinder camp tomorrow at the zoo, supposedly serving as a leader. Though the skin on my nose resembles sandpaper (very sore sandpaper), I think I'm getting better. And the chance to see the zoo "backstage" is difficult to resist. And it doesn't matter a great deal if I act as a leader or not, because the girl to leader ratio is nearly 2:1.

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BTW, these are Bowser and Blue. Sometimes offensive. Sometimes not. Sometimes riotously funny. Sometimes not. Sometimes rather stupid. Sometimes not...