. . . to WKAR on Friday morning, and I won two tickets to the MSU College of Music opera performance, Florencia en el Amazonas. It's a modern piece - the composer is in residence at MSU this year - and this was its first performance east of the Mississippi. I went with my college Dedria, another neophyte opera buff.

I have to say, I was not disappointed. After the benefit we attended in February, I figured that the singing would be good, and it was. The orchestra, too, was surprisingly good, I thought. The set was wonderful; the premise of the opera is that several people are on a boat going down the Amazon to hear the great diva Florencia Grimaldi sing in Manaus. The story is written in the Latin magical realism tradition (which I love, and is why I wanted to see it), and it did not disappoint. The sets were exquisite (although the boat was a bit noisy!). There's a butterfly motif in the story, and the stage was decked with six huge butterfly-wing-shaped screens that caught and reflected the light. In the midst was a revolving open two-level platform with a spiral staircase in the middle. The platform revolved at the scene changes, and characters walked on and around it in very interesting ways.

So that was the excitement for today. Other than that it's been a very mellow weekend; I went over to Louise's for an evening of knitting on Friday (gosh, that makes me sound old!), went for a bike ride yesterday, and today I've been generally lazing around and going to the opera. Emil went to Ann Arbor yesterday and brought back my mother's fake fireplace, which he put in his room. This necessitated moving out a bookshelf, which provided him with the impetus to rearrange the basement, which is now starting to look like a lived-in space. (But of course, we don't really live in it. We've got a 1,000-square-foot ranch house and we were joking that it's just too much house for us . . . we have a second bathroom we hardly ever use, and it's pretty rare for us to go downstairs . . . )

It sure feels like spring around here. I meant to plant radishes and spinach this weekend, but didn't quite get to it. Maybe on Tuesday . . .