Life with WOW

Wow Wow: She phoned at 4:50. My glasses were ready, so I bolted to the store to get them. Two pairs: one for walking around and the other for the roughly 35% of my time awake that I spend at my computer.

Walking home from the store—in fact all the time, so far—I read EVERYTHING. And seeing people's faces with one mouth and two eyes is amazing. And that night when I watched something on TV, it was like communion with God:  HD TV plus 20/20 vision is amazing. I am constantly giddy.

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On another front…. I have been getting love letters. Two former students from the two academic years that began my working life wrote to recall my positive influence in their lives. How great a gift is that? It is particularly lovely because a decade ago I wrote to every teacher who did the same for me. they wrote because they saw my final column in the Opus Newsletter.

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Boo Hoo: The Grand Budapest Hotel gets a very bad review in the New Yorker. But the criticism is all directed at Wes Anderson.

I am still going to see it because I truly love seeing great acting and actors and I am going to see Ralph Fiennes. Unfortunately, I saw The English Patient. It is one of my all time Most Hated Films, but I had no trouble accepting Mr. Fiennes as the romantic lead. He is a hottie.

Then came In Bruges, one of my all-time favourite films and he very convincingly played a psychopathic killer. I could watch that film every year for the rest of my life. And then there were the Potter films. Life is too short to take in Harry Potter either in print or film for me, but the Internet was overrun with images of Finnes as a villain.

And now, comedy. And from the clips I have seen, he aces it. The guy is an amazing actor.

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Yay: And speaking of talented actors, I went to see my dear friend Nicola Lipman in Driving Miss Daisy at the Arts Club. I loathe the script but the extraordinary actors made caviar out of macaroni.

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Big Step: I have lived in this condo for six years. When I moved in, I gutted the place and remodelled but I never finished neither the kitchen cupboards nor my bedroom closet, I have never been satisfied with the closet doors on my two closets so…. Yesterday Pablo and Sam were here to do the measuring and the talking to enable them to come up with an estimate.

In May, they will do the work and I will live out the rest of my life in a space designed exactly to my needs and desires: Small but (my) perfect, and my closet doors will be shoji screens built to my choice of materials. I am set.

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Spring is like bipolarity: One day is warm and bright and dry and you feel inspired and have to be outside, and the next is cool, dark and wet and you want to stay inside.