what's up

1. It's been raining, a little. Not quite the first storm of the season, as one hit while I was in LA (where it did not rain at all). Owing to Berkeley's more exposed location, I should have expected it'd be worse there went I went to see The Magic Flute on Wednesday. It wasn't so much that it was cold and drizzly as that it was windy. When I emerged from the BART station, my original plan had been to walk 3/4 of a block in one direction for dinner before coming back and walking 1 1/2 blocks in another direction to the theater. But both weather conditions and (as it turned out) time available argued against that, so I walked directly towards the theater in hopes I'd find a quick place to eat that way. On previous occasions I've stopped at a little East Asian place that serves the blandest chicken and rice imaginable, but this time I noticed an outlet of a local chain that does sub sandwiches. I don't really like subs, but I went in anyway and ordered one on their screen ordering device, then did what I usually do with meat sandwiches, which is take them apart and eat the pieces separately.

2. I do the crossword puzzles in the magazines I subscribe to. (Just in print; I've never figured out how to do an online crossword.) I fill out as much as I can, then hand it to B. who can usually do all the rest. But yesterday I could not hand it over, because for the first time in my life I succeeded at finishing a crossword puzzle. It was the one in The Week for Nov. 22. It didn't have any particularly clever clues, but it did tempt me with a few clues that were screamingly obvious, at least to me, like "Debussy composition whose title means 'The Sea'" and "Country between Ukraine and Romania."

3. I'm reviewing a Very Difficult symphony on Saturday. I know the work, but not as well as I'd need to. So I've been listening and re-listening to recordings, with online scores and with commentary from the books I have on the composer. In addition to being Very Difficult, it's also Very Long, so this is taking a while.

4. We bought a new tv set. Our old one, which must be at least 20 years old, was fading in color saturation. I confirmed with Consumer Reports that Samsung, which we had, was still the best brand for smaller sets (our new one is 32", just small enough to fit on the table we put it on), and I went down to Best Buy - the independent retail appliance stores around here are mostly gone - and bought one off the shelf. To my astonishment, all the cables from the old one still fit the new one. What we had problems with was the new feature, access to streaming services. Some of the ones we have subscriptions to worked OK, others failed loading in eccentric ways. That was the first day. Over the next couple of days, they got better. Still, the number of times I had to enter a code from the screen into the company's web site on my tablet before it would let me in was irksome.