Ordered new furniture for the family room today - sofas, chairs, ottomans. Little by little I'm replacing the entire room. Next we'll have the oak mantel and marble hearth (which never really looked good together) removed and replaced with glass tiles up the entire wall around the fireplace. I wanted to have it faced with stone, but apparently there needed to be some kind of footer poured when the basement was being built for the stone to rest upon. Replacing the TV would be nice also, but $18,000 for a large screen plasma one seems a bit excessive.

Movies: Swimming Pool. A few nights ago I half-watched a PBS show narrated by Stockard Channing on diamonds. The most rare diamonds in the world are the colored ones, and pinks are the rarest of the rare. Perhaps even more so because no one really knows what causes the pink color. This movie is one of those pink diamonds - small and sparkly and very unusual. Charlotte Rampling's performance is so finely cut that there isn't a spare motion or gesture in it. The way in which she places her laptop just so on the desk in the house in which she stays is representative of this economy of motion. There is a surreal atmosphere swirling through the time she spends in France and you wonder how she can progress with her life in such a straightforward manner after being a party to such a horrific act. And then the final scene appears and you sit up, and shift in your seat, and wonder if you even understodd anything that had occurred in the entire movie.