05.22.05 - 10:57 p.m.

I saw Barber of Seville for the first time yesterday, and enjoyed it, although at three hours long, well, I started to get restless toward the end. It's just too long to sit that still, especially after working hard all day. All of the imported singers were excellent - although the gentlemen who played Dr. Bartolo and Basilio were especially good. In the middle of the third act, Berta, the maid, has a solo aria - completely unnecessary to the forward movement of the suitably convoluted plot - which thoroughly irked me. It was pretty enough, and of course the crowd loved it, because the woman playing Berta was home-grown, as such things go, the wife of some bigwig attorney.

I was drawn back into the production by the final ensemble piece - especially the comic trio when Figaro, Almaviva and Rosina discover that they can't leave by the front door and hit on the novel approach of... going down the ladder from the balcony, which Almaviva and Figaro used to get in, only to be foiled because... someone removed the ladder! Oh, sure, it sounds uninteresting, but in a live performance, it's great fun: all that fuss over a line about a ladder, and reminescent of the big build-up in Act II when the quarelling quintet hear someone knocking at the door and there's all that drama and then: oh, the law! Damn it all!

For whatever reason, the translation stopped 10 minutes before the end of that act, and the chaos of the chorus' entry and all the scrambling about to escape and singing about escaping (or, maybe chocolate covered strawberries. I don't know. I don't speak Italian, and as I mentioned the translation stopped almost as soon as the big number started) was just chaos. I suspect that a. they weren't singing anything that you couldn't already guess from the action; and b. the whole situation was too confused to be translated well, particularly in a house with just a screen above the stage, unlike many opera houses, with translation screens popping out of the ceiling, everywhere.

Overall, I think I like dramatic/tragic operas better than comedies - bel canto better than the stylized acrobatics of Rossini's Barber - but if someone gives me tickets to another production of Barber, I won't say no. I want to remember the production, but I can't think of much more to say. I'm exhausted this evening, as well. I'm still working on digging out my second - and larger - foundation bed, a project made more difficult by massive amount of gravel throughout the bed.

The pictures are not particularly good - the camera is a webcam, and the sunlight just saturates the frame. I took this in the morning, when the sun was still behind the house and the bed was in shadow, so you can see some of it.

In the bed: a number of plants, most hidden by the weeds and/or by the great big rose; a layer of weeds; a layer of old mulch and dead weeds; a layer of breatheable landscape fabric; a layer of gravel; some actual soil; a layer of brittle, non-breathable plastic about three or four or five inches down; and yet another layer of gravel. I am in the process of taking the gravel out and up, but it's a difficult process. I wanted to just dig it out, but wasn't sure what to do with all the dirt/gravel, so I started trying to sieve the gravel out by the spadeful, which was ridiculous and tedious.

My neighbor said, first, that the gravel wouldn't hurt anything - until he saw how much gravel there was - and then he said I should dig it out and dump it in the alley. So that's what I'm doing. I think I've dumped about three hundred pounds of soil and gravel in the alley and I'm barely 1/3 of the way through the bed and I'd touched, maybe, 50% of the gravel. If feels like a Sisyphian task, since everytime I turn some soil over - there is more gravel underneath. It's possible that I've found a heretofore unknown wormhole to another universe populated by gravel alive with a semi-malevolent intelligence.

I also managed to dig out and transplant three peonies and a handful of grape hyacinths. I don't know if the peonies will be able to withstand the shock of the unkind transplant, mid-growing season, but the only alternative was to toss them, so ... we'll see. They were planted to deeply to bloom out front anyway, so maybe next year I'll see some blooms.