No Regrets

She's Come Undone

The view from the island. It's a treasure, all right.

It was a great weekend to get unpinned from a punishing packing schedule and flee the hinterboonies: unusually warm weather in the City, tickets to Lucia Di Lammermoor at the San Francisco Opera, and a day on the Bay with Jessica and John in their boat.
Lucia was one of the operas I cut my teeth on, back at the dawn of time when mastodons trod the boards. Joan Sutherland worked the Lucia franchise hard and long, endowing the role with sublime soaring vocals and static stagecraft.
These days, jumbo divas have given way to singers whose physical abilities are more closely aligned with the extraordinary suppleness of their voices, giving the visuals a dynamic upgrade. Natalie Dessay, a wee pixie of a soprano who has critics swooning over her quicksilver voice and finely drawn acting skills, delivered a dewy and perhaps slightly dim Lucia who skipped about the stage with girlish abandon until she was driven bonkers by the machinations of the men in her life. Her Mad Scene was accompanied by the beautiful, unsettling sounds of  the glass harmonica, an instrument aptly nicknamed  "the ghost fiddle."

I'm awfully impressed by how Jessica and John got it into their heads one day that they'd like to have a sailboat and then set about making it happen. If you read John's blog then you know how much pleasure they get from it (or her—all boats are female), and this weekend we got a hefty dose of it ourselves. We left from their slip at Treasure Island, where a day-long festival created an obstacle course getting out of the marina, and sailed over to Angel Island and Paradise Cove, where we anchored for lunch.

Answerjack and I were staying near the foodies-nirvana Ferry Building, and bought what the family calls beef porn to grill in a cunning little propane contraption that hangs off the side of the boat. Here the seductive steaks are ready for their double close-up: Jessica is in the galley, shooting it for John's blog, and I'm on deck shooting her for mine. Just a typical family outing in the 21st Century...

Answerjack, looking toward our new home. This is the Bay side of Marin County; our house is further inland.

Apparently seagulls love stale hamburger buns, and once they figure out it's feeding time respond with a photo-op frenzy. Here they're trailing John's buns back to Treasure Island.

Supporting the Fecal Face brand. Hope you do, too!

Digging and Defusing

This is a great video clip with which to start the new year. Everyone knows a little bit about Edith Piaf: she made a career out of suffering, endured years of bad hair days, and kept right on singing, her voice piercing the hearts of fans worldwide until her life ended at age 47. She sang the words "Non, je ne regrette rien" as if she really meant it. Here is what today's New York Times has to say about regrets:
"...Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.
"Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones..."

And here's the complete article The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters.  Happy New Year.