1) MORNING: Up at seven, parlor coffee and devotional, breakfast, laundry, and two hours of yard work with my third floor neighbor. Mostly we tamed the front hedge and weeded, but the more important task was to add a few bricks into a small space of ground near the front steps.
1a) For about 20 minutes of all this we were really talking with our next-door neighbor, the local handyman, who hadn’t met the new third-floor neighbor - AND happens to be a good friend of the soon-to-be-new owner of the second floor!
2) AFTERNOON: Lunch at home, an adventurous Etiquetteer project (look for it to be posted tomorrow . . . ), and then I slept like the dead for about 90 minutes. Y’know, both my parents mastered the 20-minute nap. Every day of his work life Daddy would come home for lunch and then nap in his recliner for 20 minutes, and go back to work. After he left Mother would have her 20-minute nap. I just cannot nap for that short a time! At least an hour, more often more.
3) Musical obsessions will just seize me, I admit. Because I’m going to see the BLO to I Pagliacci next month, I happened to look up Nedda’s aria, “Qual Fiamma Avea Nel Guardo!... Hui! Stridono Lassù,” and I just can’t let it go. I’m so grateful I found it, because I was being worn out by the musical numbers in Erich von Stroheim’s The Great Gabbo. “Every Now and Then” and the march-tempo “I’m in Love With You” have always been favorites, but damn . . . they were killing me.