It's Just That Easy

So I plugged in the card, installed the drivers, unpacked the scanner, and hooked it up. I figured I was in business since, when I plugged the scanner into a USB port on the card, I heard the hard drive working. And yes, I was able to successfully scan a photo into my computer:

Yes, it was just that easy. It's a Mac, after all!

I didn't really have a good place to put the scanner in the layout of my study, so I spent a chunk of today moving furniture around to make a better space for it. So things are in different places now. I haven't yet decided if I like the layout better or not. It's definitely better for some things, like my computer layout, but I'm having trouble figuring out where to store stuff like my standing fan. Basically, I've improved it for some purposes but not others. No big surprise, I suppose!

It's amazing how much work it is to just unload and move two bookcases. Paper is heavy.

While doing all this, I wondered how much time people spend just doing "busy work": chores which aren't really necessary, but which people convince themselves are necessary. Or are fun, or something. Rearranging furniture is that way for me, I think. It's not really productive, except in certain limited instances. And it doesn't give me a feeling of accomplishment, not like building bookcases does.

I think I was only slightly doing this to have a better study layout. But I think I was also doing it to avoid doing something more productive, and to avoid my usual weekend pitfall of feeling glum about my apartment. It's a distraction. I can be very good at distracting myself (but, sometimes, not quite good enough). Do other people do stuff like this for the same reasons?

I did also do a whole bunch of laundry, and I picked up my glasses from the eye doctor. It's been many years since I got new glasses - several prescriptions ago. I guess the last time I got the ultra-thin lenses, because these lenses are anything but thin! Now I understand the term "coke bottle glasses"! Since I only wear my glasses at night and in the morning, I think they will be okay, but if after a few weeks or months I decide they're really not, then I will get new lenses and figure I'm just paying the stupidity tax or something. And next time, hopefully I'll know better.

Trish drove up this evening to go see movies at the Stanford Theatre. We went to dinner in downtown Palo Alto first, and I whined for a little while about my housing unhappiness. (Yes, you are all going to be really, really relieved when I finally move and stop whining about this.)

I did say though that I keep thinking that something seems 'not quite right' about living out here. I think the near-lack of seasons out here is just plain weird. The weather has basically been exactly the same since about May. Some days it's uncomfortably warm, but mostly it's bright and sunny and temperate and there are only a few clouds in the sky. Sounds nice, you say? But, there's no rain, there's very little breeze, there's none of the variation I'm used to in Wisconsin. And I think it's just strange. And now we're heading into winter and it's getting windy out, and a few (but not many) trees are changing color, but there won't be any snow.

John once remarked that when he moved out here a few years ago, it felt to him like he was moving into the perfect climate for him, this being closer to the clime of his Italian forebears than Wisconsin was. Trish, though, says although she hasn't had much basis for comparison, she's never felt quite right living in California. And I'm still sorting out whether I do, too.

But, then there's something else: I can't say for sure, because I don't have objective evidence of it, only my memories, but it seems like every time I've moved to a new part of the country before, I've had profound feelings of disturbance for a year or more after moving. I remember some stretches of unhappiness my first year of college, which I guess is to be expected. But I spent most of my first year in Madison (in grad school) feeling extremely unhappy. Granted, I'd broken up with my first girlfriend before moving there, but I felt quite alone for much of that year. I did have some friends I hung out with regularly (John, Charlie, a few others), but it was in my second year there that I made some of my long-term friends like Karen, and of course it would be more years before I met Colleen (whom I dated for a year and a half) and the whole SF3 crowd.

As Jim recently observed to me, I'm pretty tentative and cautious socially, not really aggressive at all, and I guess I tend to gather friends very slowly. And of course only a handful of friends really become close friends.

Do people ever change facets of themselves such as these? I wonder why my personality ended up developing in this way?

So, the movies. First up was The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) starring Ronald Colman (star of Lost Horizon) and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. This is a very good and very intriguing film. For one thing, its main plot device is that of the 'twin double', which mainly seems to be used in comedies, not in serious dramas like this one. Colman plays Englishman Rudolph Rassendyll, on vacation in a nameless European country. It turns out that he's the spitting image of soon-to-be-crowned-King Rudolf. They meet, and the evening before the coronation, during a drinking party, Rudolf is drugged, and won't wake up until after the coronation. If he doesn't show up, then his brother Black Michael (Raymond Massey, who looks like a man who must have been typecast in roles as Nazis during his career) will sieze the throne. So Rassendyll is pressed into service in his stead.

Michael's right-hand man, Rupert of Henzau (Fairbanks) discovers the plot and captures Rudolf, so Rassendyll must continue with his charade, which he does while falling in love with Rudolf's betrothed, Princess Flavia. The movie involves issues of how to comport oneself as a King, romance under false pretenses, and the temptation of receiving one's heart's desire at the expense of another man's life. And it all ends with a terrific bit of swordfighting at the end. (Not quite up to Errol Flynn's level, but I suspect that swordsmanship was not Colman's stock-in-trade, as Fairbanks seemed like he could have swashed rings around Colman's buckle if he'd wanted to.)

The film also features an extremely young David Niven in a supporting role, which was almost as peculiar to see as the extremely young Vincent Price in Laura.

Before the film, one of the theater's proprietors (who I keep thinking I should recognize; something in the back of my mind makes me think he's somehow connected to Hewlett-Packard) came out to say that some years ago Fairbanks was a guest at the theater, and Fairbanks said that he had been uncertain whether he wanted the role as Rupert, since he was a leading man in his own right and didn't want to play a supporting role. But he talked to his father (the silent film actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.) who said that Rupert was one of the great villains in then-recent literature and he often steals the show, so Fairbanks took the part. I don't quite agree that he steals the show, but that may be because I find myself becoming quite a fan of Ronald Colman!

Anyway, it's a fine film. Go see it.

The other half of the double-bill was the comedy The Merry Widow (1937), starring the amazing Maurice Chevalier as Captain Danilo, captain of the royal guard of the fictional country of (I think) Mashovnia. He falls in love with the widow Sonia (Jeanette MacDonald), who owns 52% of the country (which works out to an awful lot of goats and chickens). Spurning Danilo's advances (but nonetheless intrigued by him), Sonia emerges from mourning and goes to Paris, where she's romanced by the city's elite gentlemen. Alarmed at the possible loss of half the country to foreign hands, the bumbling king sends Danilo to Paris to romance and marry her.

Well, Danilo turns out to be quite a womanizer (Trish says he's a slut!), and goes to the night club Maxime's his first evening in Paris, where pretty much every woman in the place knows him. Sonia spots and follows him there, and masquerades as a Maxime's girl named Fifi (since Danilo has never seen her face unveiled), where she and Danilo fall for each other, but she spurns him once again when he appears faithless in love. Which causes quite a problem for the Mashovnian ambassador Popoff (yes, once again, it's Edward Everett Horton, playing a character with three or four more I.Q. points than usual) in trying to put them together.

It's a fairly witty film, although I think they missed a chance to have two of the true hams of the era - Chevalier and Horton - play more than a couple of scenes against one another. But the script is generally pretty witty (especially since one line in Maxime's takes on an especially blunt meaning when seen in the 1990s), the sets are huge and impressive, and MacDonald looks gorgeous (as her character at one point states!) in the shimmering gowns she wears.

It's nice to see films like this every so often. I think a steady diet of them would be too much, but it's a good contrast to serious films like The Prisoner of Zenda. We were also told before the film that The Merry Widow was one of the last straight comedy-musicals of its era, as the first Fred Astaire-Ginger Rodgers film came out around this time, making simple musicals seem passe. Though, of course, Chevalier would twenty years later play a supporting role in a musical comedy of another era: Gigi.