Remembering Trinidad

I feel like I've been very busy all weekend and yet haven't accomplished much. The laundry is still unfolded and the floors still unvacuumed. But I did scan about three dozen photographs from my trip to Trinidad 11 years ago (my brother-in-law wants them for a slide show) and I cooked up a load of Indian food. There's chana dal and a couple of other curry vegetable dishes on the lunch menu for tomorrow.

I went and saw Sweeney Todd with some friends at the Aronoff Center downtown yesterday afternoon. I liked it - but didn't love it. I was quite dazzled with the skill of the cast even so; I don't know how anyone managed to find so many people who could play a musical instrument and sing and act.

At the grocery store this afternoon I bought some wine that was marked down as discontinued. One of the bottles I purchased was Boutari Kretikos (from Crete). I'd never heard of it before, but I did a little research and it's got some fine reviews. I think I'll swing back by the store on my way home tomorrow and buy the rest of the bottles; there weren't very many and it was quite a good price.

Wicked

As part of my personal effort to reduce my energy consumption, I've been hanging my clothes to dry rather than using the coin-operated dryer in the basement. Since I live in a one bedroom apartment, this does take up a fair bit of living space on wash day. I have one of the Frost drying racks from Ikea; I can get about one and a half loads of laundry on that, then I have a clothes line in the bedroom and another folding wooden rack. Since this takes up most of my bedroom, I turn on an electric box fan and aim it at the drying clothes to speed up the process a bit. On a normal day, everything but for the thickest socks and sweatshirts are dry in about four hours. This had me thinking about the energy savings (was I really saving energy by eschewing the dyer but using a fan?), so I used this calculator to tab it up. If I run the fan only for drying clothes, it tots up to 1.6 Kilowatt hours per month (about 20 cents worth at Duke Energy prices,) versus using the electric dryer for the same amount of laundry - 40 kWh/mo or $4.80. So I am saving both energy and money. That's cool.

I went to see the musical "Wicked" at the Aronoff matinée today. The stand-in for Elphaba was on stage today, Ms. Donna Vivino, and she was incredible. What a voice. Somehow or the other we scored box seats and it was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.