Random Thoughts from a Stuffed-Up Head

• I Hab a Code id by dose. Ad id by chest. I. Do. Not. Like. It. In a way, I would rather have major surgery, or the flu (but wait -- I have a shot for the flu).  
• No hurricane here, but it did rain quite a bit and one nearby section of a state road washed out twice. It's nice and warm though, about 60 when Rusty and I took our walk mid-morning.
• Last night I watched The Shadow in the North, the second of Masterpiece Mystery's(well, really BBC's) adaptations of Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart series. Sisterfilms and I enjoyed these books about 10-12 years ago, so my memory for the plots is imperfect. I felt the adaptations used some fancy camerawork to the detriment of keeping the plot and characters understandable, so that the shows seemed squashed compared to the books (which were not nearly as long and wordy as his Golden Compass series) and I often found myself thinking, "Wait, where did that character come from?" Also, the color-blind casting was confusing in a costume drama. Although the main characters were believable as Victorian Englishmen and -women, minor characters and "extras" were more representative of England today. I'm generally a fan of color-blind casting in the theater -- Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis has made a practice of it and I've seen some great theater there -- but in this case it added nothing and actually distracted at least one viewer from the story. 
• One of the events I missed this past weekend because of the cold in my head was the first event in a months-long farewell to my old high school building (well, one of them). Since the building of a new school in the late 90s, the old school has had some use but has also been allowed to deteriorate. Despite many volunteers' work trying to come up with a plan to reuse it, the final decision was to tear it down and build our new Grades 3-5 elementary school on the site.  This has spurred the creation of an Alumni Association (which didn't exist before) and there will be several events before the demolition in February or March 2009.
• I attended three high schools. The first, Roger Ludlowe HS in Fairfield, CT, was closed in 1987 but reopened in 2003 under the name of Fairfield Ludlowe. The school newspaper, which was The Fox when I worked on it, is now The Prospect.  The second school, Ludwigsburg American HS in Ludwigsburg, Germany, changed its name regularly as Department of Defense school-naming rules changed; sometimes it was Ludwigsburg, sometimes Stuttgart. As US military presence in the area declined, and the school building aged, the high school closed, and a new one reopened at Patch Barracks nearby, called Patch American HS. The building now houses the Erich-Bracher-Schule which appears to be a technical or business-oriented high school. And, the third was Brunswick HS, whose fate I have detailed above. 
• From first through eighth grade I attended six different schools. The first two were Burnet and Coldwell Schools in El Paso, TX, which appear to be still in existence in approximately the same form. Coombs School in Bowdoinham (where my mother also went all 12 years, as it included high school then) has given way to the Bowdoinham Community School, but the building is still in use as the town library and town offices. Hoyt S. Vandenberg Elementary in Wiesbaden, Germany is still there, under the name of Hainerberg Elementary (that's the housing area where it is and where we lived). Point Beach School in Milford, CT is now a community center, and Mill Plain Junior High in Fairfield is the same building which is now Fairfield Ludlowe HS -- the addition was under construction during our eighth and ninth grade years. 
• That's a lot of changes!