Quilting and singing and games
I started the quilting!
I did get quite a bit further than that today, but by the time I thought to take another photo the light was no good. So you’ll just have to wait 🙂 I managed to get just over a quarter of it done, though, so I’m making good progress. And the quilting is working out exactly as I envisioned it, so it should look pretty good when it’s finished.
I went to see the NZ Opera production of Carmen last night with Lytteltonwitch. It’s actually the first “proper” opera I’ve ever seen, and it was really good. I was very glad of the surtitles though, as otherwise I’d have had no idea what was going on (Lytteltonwitch summed up the plot for me as roughly “Boy meets girl, someone dies at the end, and in between there’s a lot of singing”). It took me about half an hour to figure out what language they were singing in, let alone be able to make out any of the words… yeah, I probably should have bought a programme or something 🙂
Anyway, I really enjoyed it, and was surprised at how many of the tunes I recognised – a lot of them are ones that are just in the popular consciousness, without you necessarily knowing where they come from. The staging was really good too – they did some really clever stuff with lighting, like casting shadows of the actors onto the walls during the bar scene, which gave quite a threatening feel to it. The bar scene also cleverly put the women in a position of power, so that it switched gradually from a group of drunken men demanding that the women (not sure if they were supposed to represent prostitutes?) dance for them, to the women totally controlling the men and making them perform – the confusion at the end of the scene when the men suddenly realising the roles had been reversed was quite lovely.
And of course, as you’d expect, some really powerful singing, especially from the performer playing Carmen.
On Friday night I went round to Dana’s after work (this is becoming a regular thing). There was quite a large group there, so rather than play video games (as is usual on Friday nights – they have a Nintendo Switch connected to a projector, so the screen is pretty much the entire wall), we played a few board games. One was totally new to me (and I can’t remember the name of it now), but the others I’d played before with the Gwilks – Dixit and Codenames. A lot of fun, even if I did feel a bit old at times (most of the people there were in their mid twenties). And I was on the winning team for two of the games, which is always good 🙂