Not what's expected.

I've spent the past week visiting my parents.  The timing was chosen so that I could attend performances of "Don Giovanni" staged by the North Carolina Opera.  We attended the dress rehearsal on Wednesday and they had some technical issues.  With all my years of backstage work on shows, I really felt their pain (as the saying goes) and heard later that they had many tech run-throughs on Thursday and again on Friday.  Friday night, the effects worked perfectly as the ghost of the Commendatore arrived at Don Giovanni's dinner party and pulls him into the underworld for his deserved torments.

     

Of course, I made our now-traditional weekly cheese soufflé, this time accompanied by fresh asparagus:

While there I finished two books:  Kimo, the Whistling Boy, a 1920's book about Hawai'ian people in the aftermath of the overthrow of their last Queen, who makes an appearance at the end.  The title character turns out to be a lost prince, and the other main child, Paulani, raised in hiding, is his sister.  It's sweet but has more depth about the Hawai'ian people than the equivalent books I remember reading as a child.  Being a children's book, this took me two days to read.

The other is Longest Reindeer Herder by Chester Asakak Seveck.  It is his autobiography and full of photos of his work and family.  I found it very interesting.

It was privately printed around fifty years ago.

And I knit, although not on a UFO.  I wanted something simple because I'm generally busy when visiting my parents.  So I started a charity scarf.  I have two skeins of yarn, one Caron Simply Soft Stripes and the other Caron Simply Soft in dark grey.

After a while, I decided I didn't like how the stripes were coming out - too wide, making the end scarf wide and narrow.  So I frogged and restarted, and like the current version better:

Yes, it's a lot of work to restart, and some people would have just chugged ahead and figured out another solution.  It wasn't coming out as I wanted, or expected, so frogging it was and the new version is 13 stitches instead of 19 and I like it better.  This is the center stripe and I'll put the dark grey on each long side.  The real colour is closer to what you see in the photo on the right.

The other unexpected item was getting home to find out my refrigerator died.  It still makes sounds and the light works, but there is no cold and that is what a refrigerator/freezer is supposed to do.  So I cleaned it out, taking bags of spoiled formerly-yummy stuff to the dumpster (I don't have room in my compost bucket for all of it, and it was already too stinky to keep until the pickup), cleaned up some of the mess, and called a junk removals company.  They will also take my printer with the worn-out head.  A mini-fridge will keep essentials cold for the immediate timeframe.