Saturday 05/31/2025
Sooo intellectual. Well, a bit technical too. This morning I walked to the main library (2.5 miles for the day) and spent a while going through poetry books. Have I mentioned “Poetry Out Loud”? This is a monthly thing organized by Joanne where half a dozen people meet, and each reads aloud a poem they want to share. And it is coming up on Monday and I didn’t have a poem picked. Problem is, I don’t read a lot of poetry, so I needed to get familiar with some poet other than Shakespeare and Byron. I only got through the poetry stack from A through about C and settled on Billy Collins for this month. Very safe choice, one of the best known poets around, but for good reason, he’s very readable and read-out-loudable.
I also spent a couple of hours trying to make headway in the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and some other dude. Depressing reading.
Mary Beth, the queen of the gift shop, gave me an old iPad donated by some departed resident’s family, to wipe and restore. I did another one a few weeks ago and came up to the same problem with this one: you can reset it to factory settings, erasing all data, but when you try to initialize it for a new owner, the firmware sends the hardware serial number to Apple. Apple looks to see if this is in any user’s Find My list, and if it is, says no no no, you have to sign in to iCloud.com with the owner’s email and password before you can continue. So now we are in an email loop with the relatives, saying, can you please resurrect mom’s Apple password? If you can, here’s the simple instructions for the one-minute process of removing this device from her Find My device list.
Yesterday Joanne told me that she and her buddies Sherry and Tita were going to the opera tonight, would I like to tag along? So I bought a ticket to Otello as done by the West Bay Opera company, at our nearby Lucy Stern Playhouse. Joanne and friends went out to dinner in her car. She texted me about 6:30 they were headed back. She swung through the parking lot and I hopped into the car and off we went to the opera.
So I have seen an opera for the second time in my life. The first was Romeo and Juliet at the Sydney Opera House in 2005, on a Road Scholar tour of Australia. This one was — OK. The performers and the staging and the orchestra were really good. Wonderful voices. The plot is just ridiculous, but I guess that would be Shakespeare’s fault, not Verdi’s. Verdi could have picked up the pace quite a bit, though, and put some more tuneful melodies in it. Well he’s dead now so that’s that. Anyway nice outing with a group.
Codgerville 