A sucker for a sunset

We've been praying for rain.  However, it's August in Victoria.  It's unlikely to rain much before the end of the month.

And even less likely after a sunset like this, brief as it was.

 

A standard sunset

Hurrying home from Demeter's, I saw a crisp, not-quite-full full moon swinging up into the sky. I glanced over my shoulder to the west, and picked up my pace, heading straight through the building entrance to the elevator, where I rose to the fifth floor, turned right, and through the door that leads to the roof.

There's talk of moving to Pacific Daylight Time permanently. I'm not sure how great an idea this is; plenty of health researchers are not in favour.

This may be the last Pacific Standard Time sunset in British Columbia.

Reverse sunset

On the eve of the longest day of the year, and it's pretty long in Victoria - we're farther north than you'd think - we looked east out our window, and were startled by what appeared to be a sunset in the east, glowing pink and mauve.

Click on this if you'd like it to be bigger.

Sunlit

You may want to click on this one to enlarge it.

So I'm running back and forth, collecting laundry for the laundry-room, because I live in an apartment, and that's what I do now. I look out the window, and wonder why the lights are suddenly blazing at the school across the way.

It occurs to me that they're not blazing from the inside. The bright golden light of a winter sunset after a cloudless day is reflecting back from the windows.

This is totally unconnected, but I'm feeling a wee bit ill. Time for bed.

Thar's gold in them thar winders

To say the last thirty hours have been stressful is an understatement.

This evening, I looked across the street and saw gold. I've been striving for better thoughts, my higher self. I fail several times a day, but that's no excuse.

To sleep, perchance to dream

Horatio and Hamlet survey the Elsinore rubble.

We have discovered that there are more Cumberbitches in Ottawa than DT fan girls. Two years ago, we attended a "live-stream" cinema screening of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Richard II, starring David Tennant. It was well-attended but not sold out.

A couple of evenings ago, I decided to check out the ticket situation for an encore presentation of a not-quite-live-stream (not live in Canada, anyway) performance of the National Theatre's presentation of Hamlet, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. (Just as an aside, Mr Cumberbatch has gone on record as saying he prefers to refer to his female fans as the "Cumbercollective".) When I logged on to the Cineplex website, there were exactly 27 tickets left for this afternoon's showing.

Keeping that in mind, the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter, and I turned up at the Silver City cinema nearly an hour early, and this was only partly due to the unreliability of weekend buses in Hades. About a dozen people had already staked out seats - Ottawans are very territorial about their vantage points - so we grabbed our favourites: last row, centre, and savoured the schadenfreude of watching later arrivals trying to find seats where they could a) sit with their friends; b) see the whole screen.

The production? A little too clever for its own good, and the tinkering with the order of the scenes and the rather heavy-handed use of stages-within-stages, slow motion, and rubble failed to tell me anything new.

Mind you, I'm hardly one to talk. The problem with a full cinema is that there are over 300 bodies warming the place nicely, and I kept dropping off, despite my best efforts. Also, there was only one intermission, which meant two-thirds of the play had elapsed before there was an opportunity to dash for the long queues to both washrooms. The length of the first "half" effectively finished younger daughter off, so she and the Resident Fan Boy made a break for it.

I stayed, and the cooler extra space next to me, in combination with the events hurtling to their violent conclusion on the screen, kept me awake and attentive during the final "half" (third). The cast was good, but the one stand-out for me was Karl Johnson, one of those madly busy British character actors, who played both the ghost and the gravedigger.

Mr Cumberbatch gave a flawless performance, but while I enjoy and admire his work, I'm not a Cumberbitch. I find it a struggle enough not to be any kind of bitch.

Clicking on the screen makes it way bigger.

The show had started at about 1pm, and when I emerged from the theatre, it was past 4:30. I rarely see spectacular sunsets in Ottawa, but we got one of a British Columbia calibre this evening.