Every year, San Jose Rep has a special “holiday” show — usually something light and frothy, such as The 1940’s Radio Hour. Today was our day for this year’s holiday show is This Wonderful Life, described as “Superbly adapted from the most irresistible and entertaining ‘what if’ story of all time.” But that didn’t really help me, because I’ve never seen the movie.

Still, we had the tickets, so we went. We even stayed for the after-show discussion with Timothy Near; she opened it by confessing that she’d only seen the movie once, and then she asked for a show of hands of those who’ve seen the movie — I’m not positive, but I suspect I was the only person not to have raised his hand.

I definitely enjoyed myself — Dan Hiatt is a very good actor, and the play is self-contained. But whether I ever will watch the movie is still an open question.

Five-day weeks should be stamped out — I’m not sure I got any more done this week than I did in last week’s three days, and I know I’m a lot more frazzled than I was at this time last week.

About the only truly constructive thing I am sure I managed this week was getting my oil changed before the “Maint Reqd” light went to solid yellow, and the only reason I did that was because my department had lunch at Pluto’s in Santana Row, and I didn’t want to drive all the way back to work afterwards — so I sat at the dealer’s and did email, much as might have happened in my office. I would have liked to have worked on “Think Fridays” programming project this afternoon, but the dealer’s waiting room wasn’t conducive to that much thinking.

I also started improving my vocabulary this week at Free Rice; I managed to donate 3000 grains during a conference call, and another 3000 grains while writing this sentence. I haven’t managed to get above level 49 yet, but I’m trying! Definitely a worthwhile endeavor, on at least two fronts.

I kept playing after originally writing this post and made it to level 50:

But other than that, it’s been a rather scattered week. I’m ready to call it a month, too.

Shabbat Shalom!