Ok, here we are the day after Saint Paddy’s day and it’s a beautiful high 70s day with clear skies, low humidity, and slight winds here in SW FL. But…it’s getting on towards summer when we’ll need the A/C. For that, Neil did filter and drain pipe maintenance items the other day and we discovered a potential problem with the drain system. Going to turn it on in a couple days and see if it’s really something we need a repair guy to come and look at…the house is 10 years old and 13 is the average life so we’re not there yet but who knows.

Anyways…we moved Date Night from today until tomorrow (Wednesday) for the good news below…Connie’s off to choir practice and then we’ll have leftover stuffed shells for dinner. Neil made the sauce but we buy premade stuffed shells and manicotti because they (like lasagna) are just too much trouble to make for two. We found a nice brand at one of the higher end stores here and always get 2 meals out of a $7 or $8 package. This time he made bacon, onion, mushroom, and green pepper marinara sauce instead of his normal Italian sausage just to be different.

(Short timeout here for preparation of an Old Fashioned cocktail…Connie’s gone so us fellas are on our own)

So…sorta bad news but there’s some good news in it as well (in addition to the actual good news). We were supposed to go to San Antonio on Friday for a Saint-Saéns Organ Symphony #3 concert, got the tickets right after Christmas and had flight/hotel/rental car we paid for as well. This morning Connie was just verifying the venue for the concert as the orchestra there plays in 2 different places and it turned out that after we bought the tickets they changed the program. Now I understand things like that happen…soloist gets sick, organ breaks or whatever…but really…no notification to ticket holders? The symphony (we’ve heard it probably 50 times around the world and use it as an excuse to travel since we like pipe organ music) got replaced with something we know of but at getting on towards $2,000 for the whole trip to hear something we don’t really care about seemed dumb. So we cancelled the flight/car/hotel and since we paid for refundable tickets for those are getting money back. She emailed the orchestra to see if they’re going to refund the tickets as well…it says all sales are final but we feel like if they bait and switch on the program audience members should get a refund. We’ll see what happens there. So sorta good news is that at worst it will only cost us the 200 bucks for the venue tickets…and also sorta good news is that we now have some free days this weekend where it was pretty crowded this week before hand.

And the good news is that the other day Connie happened across a reference to the National Symphony Orchestra (they normally play at the Kennedy Center in DC) are in town for a concert tomorrow night at Barbara B Mann arts center. So…we had already moved Date Night…she’s in a six week course over at church on Catholic doctrine…she’ll just dress for the evening and Neil will go with here then we’ll head down to Logan’s Roadhouse down that way for dinner and then on over to the concert hall. 

Neil his new 48 TB RAID array all setup and in operation…so the only thing left is to order another big hard drive for some additional backup. The new one make more noise than the old one since it uses full size rotating hard drives instead of the quieter slower spinning laptop size…but the old array was maxed out on size and was getting close to full…making it time to upgrade anyway. He doesn’t really need 48 terabytes at all…but that’s the sweet spot on price per terabyte in full size hard drives. He’s also got our taxes about ready to go…just need to go over them with Connie to make sure he didn’t fat finger any of the numbers as he typed them in.

She just pulled back into the driveway so I’ll be back later after dinner for some funnies.

Well…dinner was wonderful but after cocktails and wine I never got back to it on Tuesday…and then yesterday I got caught up in other things so didn’t get to it then either. However…I can confirm that the National Symphony Concert was excellent. Connie got dressed for Date Night before heading over to her course at the church…then after that we went down to Logan’s Roadhouse for dinner as it is close to the concert venue. Dinner was pretty good…much better than we thought it would be…and we got to the venue an hour ahead of the concert for a pre concert glass of wine and some of their pretty spectacular candied pecans…but unfortunately the candied pecan lady wasn’t there last night so we just had wine for her and some Jameson Irish Whiskey for Neil. The first piece was advertised as being based on slavery era spirituals and while the basic themes may have come from there art wasn’t spiritual sounding at all. All 4 movements of that piece were pretty musical and we enjoyed them…but they weren’t spirituals at all. Then Hilary Hahn played the Brahms Violin Concerto…she was a child prodigy who made her professional debut at age 12 in 1991 in Baltimore. We heard her play while she was still a teenager there before we retired and moved into the RV and have heard her a couple more times over the years…she’s pretty darned good. After intermission they played the Beethoven 5th Symphony…that’s the one that starts out with duh duh duh daaaa…anybody that watches TV or the movies or listens to the radio would recognize the opening notes of the first movement. The piece was again excellent although the tempo was pretty fast…in fact faster than we’ve ever heard the symphony…but conductors routinely ignore the beats per minute the composers have always noted on their composition…in this case it’s marked as 108 beats per minute (I googled since I had no idea what it was) and the conductor used 150 or 160 instead. The NSO is here on a 5 concert 8 day tour in southern Florida…the moving around leaves no time for rehearsals so it is the same concert 5 times and they obviously had completed rehearsals before arriving here. 

The other difference was the enthusiasm of the conductor…we’ve never seen as much movement and jumping around as he did last night; too many Red Bulls maybe I dunno…but overall it was a highly successful evening.

Let’s see…what else I got…

Oh yeah…up in DC the idiocy from both sides continues to mount. The President seems to have ignored several court orders and both he and other admin officials say that the courts have no legal authority to stop executive actions…but longstanding SCOTUS cases say that they do have such an authority so I guess we’ll see what happens there. Then there is the DOGE claims that there is massive fraud in Social Security payments which just isn’t true (or at least they haven’t presented any actual evidence of it beyond “we say it’s there”). There might be some fraud…but according to SSA staff it’s minimal and there are not any 150 old year people still receiving benefits. According to the left however…this is all an insidious play to kill Social Security altogether…ya know, “the sky is falling”. I’m sure the actual truth lies someplace in the middle. And then there’s Mr. Bannon who went on a podcast the other day and said that the President would run again and win in 2028…at least according to him they’re working on a solution to get around the 25th amendment. In reality…just like the statement on birthright citizenship in the 14th the wording that you can only be elected President twice is pretty clear and either of those getting overturned seems even less likely than if I decided to transition from being a bear to a new species…say a cephalopod…nah, it ain’t happening. In the foreign policy arena…the current admin is obviously throwing the Ukrainians under the bus and cozying up to the Russians…which is about as dumb as most of the things happening in DC.

Interesting things found on the net.

Dog dating service.

And finally…Neil’s fave one of these. I don’t remember using it before but when I moved it from Funny Pics folder into the Done subfolder the ‘outer told me it was already there so mebbe I did…so whatever.

Cyas.