On Thursday, I drove to a restaurant in Cape Coral off my beaten path and overshot by a few blocks and had to double back. On getting out of the driveway, I backed into our mailbox. Now that we have two cars, sharing the driveway is tricky. Ed was p’d about the mailbox. The top was rusted out, so we’ll get another one and put it on the existing pole which was pushed back up but not entirely. It hangs. It will cost $250 to repaint the fender. It isn’t dented but there is a deep scrape.

I joined my bff Nadine and our friend, Toni, and we had a great lunch. It is rare for Nadine to get time for such events lately as she is consumed (and don’t I know how that is) with caring for her husband who is almost deaf and almost blind, now making lip-reading that he had relied on very difficult.

Driving on unfamiliar roads taxes my energy ï‚– my super vigilance tires me out. But I have to do it more and get used to it. And I made it home, only missing one turn off ï‚– no biggie, because I took the next one and it worked.

Ed dislikes going out on a holiday because of the crowds, so we did not do a Valentine dinner last night. Presumably we will go out on the weekend, but don’t count on it. I mean, if you have to remind someone, what’s the point?


Earlier in the week he said if I wanted to accept a theatre invite from Nadine, that it was okay because he knew he wouldn’t want to go out. So Nadine drove us to Fort Myers and we saw an ingenious farce presentation of the Sherlock Holmes classic, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by the Florida Repertory Theatre. Three actors performed about 6  7 roles, with split second timing and costume changes as they bounced around between characters. The mostly older crowd loved every minute. The play had almost nothing to do with the original story, which leads me to order it from the library and put it on my Kindle so I can refresh my memory. I enjoyed it without also being bowled over, much as I appreciated the difficulty of the production and how beautifully the actors handled things.

One unusual comedic device: On returning to our seats after the intermission, the actor playing Sherlock came on stage and said that someone in the audience had tweeted a critique of the first act and specifically mentioned the action was dragging because of him. He was irate and vengeful. Just for that, he snarled, we are repeating the first act and we’ll just speed it up if that’s what he wants. And they did, whizzing through costume swaps, and confrontations with lightning speed, while telescoping scene changes, and substituting a dummy for a corpse  it was a triumph of staging. Then they returned to traditional pacing and finished the “story”.

I rarely get to the theatre down here so it was a welcome diversion. Last time I attended anything, it was a Met Opera performance in New York City some time in 2008. Before that a piano recital during another trip, at Lincoln Center. Before that an off-Broadway play my friend Susan treated me to, during yet another trip. All these events separated by at least two years. I saved the playbills, of course. My piano mentor, Sophie, died in December of 2008, days shy of her 100th birthday. Since then I haven’t traveled to New York alone. Ed and I went on a four-day visit in March 2012. I’m set for a long dry spell, and will have to satisfy myself with looking at TV series set there for my city fix.

I got home at 10:30 and Ed, long-faced and looking removed, sat in an attitude of solitude, staring without affect at an action movie on Netflix. He is disappointed that Netflix doesn’t offer more (after the lengthy “I’ll figure it out tomorrow” period of techie angst he went through to get it working). I, however, would love to see some old favorites. I’ll have to write down how to access the menu.

And how was your week?

xx, Teal