Musings & Thoughts for Monday, February 5, 2024, or: Weekend Update, Part the Second…and Back to Work Monday is Here!

Mid- to Late Morning, Monday, February 5, 2024, Madison, New Hampshire

Hello, dear readers. It’s a chilly winter morning here in Madison. As I write this, the temperature is 19°F (-7°C) under sunny conditions. With humidity at 64% and the wind blowing from the northeast at 3 MPH (4 Km/H), the feels-like temperature is 23°F (-5°C). Today’s forecast calls for sunny skies and a high of 36°F (5°C). Tonight, the skies will be mostly clear. The low will be 11°F (-12°C).

Weekend Update, Part the Second

Yesterday was another quiet day here in Eidelweiss, the Madison neighborhood where I now hang my many hats…and coats. I didn’t do much of anything, really; I stayed in my bedroom and watched a movie (Emmanuelle 2) until 9:30 AM, had breakfast between 9:45 and 10:15 AM, wrote yesterday’s blog post, and – except for a 10-minute walk along a short stretch of Huttwil Drive – stayed in my office while Marc, Patti’s husband, unpacked a box full of clothes and hangers that had been stored in the garage. (It would have been unpacked much sooner, but the recent spate of winter storms caused delays.)

After Marc went home in the afternoon, I half-listened to the digital version of Billy Joel: Live at Yankee Stadium – June 22 & 23, 1990. I bought the multimedia album – in addition to the Amazon Music digital version, it comes with a CD and the film version on Blu-ray – last year when I still lived in Florida. I started listening to the first track – Storm Front – with the lyrics up on my computer screen, but I just wanted the music as background rather than as an interactive experience, so I minimized the Amazon Music app and killed time on Facebook and X (the social media site formerly known as Twitter) so I would not be tempted to work on Reunion: Coda.

I did think briefly about tinkering with the lyrics of “Boy of Harvard,” a parody of a Welsh/British martial song, Men of Harlech. The real song has been around since the 18^th Century, and there are several versions of it, including a British Army regimental song and one written by composer John Barry for the 1964 film Zulu. When I was in the Men’s Ensemble (aka the Boys’ Chorus) as a sophomore at South Miami High, we practiced the song for about 10 days before our chorus teacher, Ms. Joan Owen, removed it from the set she wanted us to learn for the 1981 Spring Concert (“Let Us Entertain You”) and substituted it with Gee, Officer Krupke from West Side Story.

Anyway, I’ve decided to write a brief parody of at least the first stanza from Men of Harlech for a dream sequence in the chapter about Jim’s high school graduation ceremony in June of 1983. On Friday I wrote a rough draft of the entire Boy of Harvard (Jim, as established in Reunion: A Story, is headed there for the Fall term of the 1983-1984 academic year, hence the title.), but I’m only happy with the first two lines.

After I post this on WordPress, I might tinker with the parody a bit to at least fix two verses, which is what I considered doing yesterday afternoon but ended up not doing.

So…I had a modest dinner of one Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza (half of one box) and a can of Coke, stayed online until 8 PM, then went to my room and watched my Blu-ray of First to the Moon, a 2019 documentary about Apollo 8, the first American manned mission to the Moon – an orbital “pathfinding” flight (December 21-27, 1968) that was also the first manned space mission to go beyond Earth orbit.

I must have been exhausted, because even though I – uncharacteristically for me – started watching First to the Moon relatively early, I was drowsy well before the documentary – it has a running time of 121 minutes – ended. I tried to stay awake till the end credits rolled, but even though I never fell totally asleep till after I turned off the TV with my remote, I will have to rewatch First to the Moon during the day when I’m less likely to fall asleep.

On Writing and Storytelling: Action This Day

Today’s a working day for me, so I’ll follow my usual weekday schedule of blogging in the morning, taking a midday break to rest and eat something for lunch, then working on Reunion: Coda from 1 or 2 PM until sunset or even some time afterward, depending on my stamina and ability to “stay on task.”

If I feel inspired, I’ll work a bit on the Boy of Harvard parody first, then return to Jim’s reverie at his commencement ceremony. At this time, I have not decided – I do like the idea of creating one or two stanzas for my take on Men of Harlech, but I also don’t want to get sidetracked by a gag that might prove to be too difficult to write.

As James Garner and Mariette Harley used to say in those 1970s commercials for Polaroid cameras, “We’ll see what develops.