Sunday, January 29, 2012

Odds and Ends 1-29-2012

Sitting here at home, I am only slightly annoyed about not being able to go to church today. Mainly that is because  I am so tired I would not remember anything heard there anyway. Last night was worse as the week caught up to me at last.

After Tuesday’s very early expedition to retrieve the car from Madison, I was out of commission that afternoon through Wednesday. To my relief, I was able to handle another early morning expedition up to the St. Paul Temple on Thursday – only because I was not driving either way. It was very good to get to the temple again and get a well needed spiritual recharge.

Once again, I fell apart afterward and spent Friday being completely brain dead. Saturday was not much better though a test run out to see how I was doing and meet with Congressional District 1 candidate Mike Parry in Winona went well. I like his stances and hopefully he will get the GOP nomination. Politics will begin in earnest next month after everyone finds out what districts they will be in.

Unfortunately, that trip out exhausted the last reserves of energy I had. Last night was not fun because I hit that nasty little area of fatigue where I cannot sleep but am unable to do anything else too. Not even watching movies or television is possible when I get there and an attempt to watch Star Wars failed abysmally.

At the moment, I am listening to Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky soundtrack and for some reason it fits the mood I am in. When I am tired, I tend to get very grouchy and that would be how I am feeling. There is no reason to be and no target for my annoyance other than all of existence. At least I am not being discriminatory.

It is time I replaced the ancient cassettes of Der fliegende Holländer with MP3’s. The quality of Amazon’s downloads has gotten quite good and while I still prefer CD (or better), I can afford this version of it a lot more easily. According to serious opera buffs, this is the performance to have. Tomorrow I’ll purchase it, since it is the Sabbath and I do not shop on it.

I may have to do a full review of the Samsung BD-5700 Blu-ray player. I only have two features yet to try out, but it has been a terrific buy. Upscaling has lived up to its good reputation and animated material is my torture test for that. Hard contrast and lots of straight lines will show every flaw when resampled to bigger resolutions.  DVD’s of Studio Ghibli films and Bleach were my choices, since the latter was not optimized for progressive scan widescreen TV’s. Both look fantastic to my surprise since I was prepared for a quality hit with Season 1 of Bleach.

A tiny USB flash drive will be ordered to enable Blu-ray live and see what that is all about. Also, I will enable my Hulu Plus account to see how well that works. Using set top boxes and Blu-ray players to access the Net still seems like a silly way to do things. My media center PC is a much better solution using dated components, but I can see price being an issue for people who have no technical expertise (or spare parts).

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