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Driving to Providence -- 10/27/09 |
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Oh, I am so glad that I work at home so all I have to do is walk into my home office, boot a couple of computers, and I am at work. I went to Providence each day for four days and it reminded me that many people have to commute like that every day. (It's about thirty-three or thirty-four miles.) Trip # 1 -- Friday night: On Friday night Jill and I went over to 2nd Story Theatre over in Warren, RI. That's on the opposite side of Narragansett Bay, but we didn't cross over the islands to get there because most of the time when we go to 2nd Story we like to have dinner at Sakura, a Japanese restaurant on Wickenden Street in Providence. The play was I Am My Own Wife (by Doug Wright) and it starred Ed Shea, a multi-talented guy who founded 2nd Story Theatre, is their Artistic Director, and is director of a majority of their productions. He is also an excellent actor, although he very rarely appears on stage, so this was a real treat to catch his performance in this play. He was the only actor in the play, playing more than thirty different roles. Marvelous! Trip # 2 -- Saturday night: On Saturday night Nancy and I went to Providence to see a play at TrinityRep. We often like to eat at Trinity Brewhouse but (as often happens) they were so crowded that we could easily see that we wouldn't be likely even to get a table until close to showtime. (A year or two ago TrinityRep moved their curtain time from 8 pm to 7:30 pm and I really wish they would move it back. My theory is that the reason for that is that too many members of the theatre-supporting demographic are senior citizens and they don't like to stay out too late.) So once again we were left to scurry about to find another restaurant. There many restaurants in this neighborhood. Since it was just the two of us we took a chance on Bravo Brasserie and we lucked out in being able to grab two seats at the bar. Guinness for me, Blue Moon for Nancy. The bartender warned us that a lot of dinner orders had just gone to the kitchen, so they were likely to be backed up for a while, so we decided to order dinner salads. I had a salad Nicoise and I think Nancy had a Caesar salad and we made it to the theatre (only a hundred feet or so away) with a good five minutes to spare. The play was Shooting Star -- with a cast of two -- set in an airport with all flights delayed because of a snow storm. A 40-ish man and woman are stuck there waiting to somehow get flights out of there... when they recognize each other... they had been lovers during their college days. It was done straight through with no intermission and ran less than an hour and a half. Good verbal thrusting, sometimes piercing, often very funny. A pleasant evening. Trip # 3 -- Sunday morning:
I had planned to get up at my usual weekday time -- about quarter to six -- but for some reason I woke up at four a.m. and could not get back to sleep. About 4:20 Tiger came patrolling the upstairs hallway, announcing quite loudly that he was hungry and bored and thought that some member of his service staff should get up and feed him and amuse him. So, since I was awake anyway, I got up and fed him and had breakfast myself and read a book and long about the time I had finished the book and it was time to get ready to go up to Roger Williams Park in Providence for the Making Strides fund-raising walk to fight breast cancer... I could barely keep my eyes open, but I tossed down a coffee (and stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts on the way there to get another coffee to go). I did manage to find a place to park on a residential street bordering the park. This left me with a bit over a mile and a half walk to where I was meeting my team (at the Temple to Music -- see this entry about the 2007 walk)... and then we walked (the course was only 3.2 miles this year compared with the four miles in previous years) along with more than ten thousand other people... and then I had another mile and a half walk to get back to my car. (Well... it was good exercise.) Trip # 4 -- Monday lunch: Our company has an office in Providence and on Monday there was a free flu shot clinic set up for company employees and, since a number of people (including many of us who work from home) were expected to show up, they decided to also celebrate the conclusion of our big employee charitable contribution drive by having a "thank you" lunch. A few days ago it was announced that due to a shortage of the flu vaccine (this is the standard "seasonal" flu, not the H1N1 "swine" flu) the flu shots were being postponed until some future date yet to be determined. Well, I'd already said I was going to visit the office and I had even gone to Google maps to find out where it was (yeah, fourteen years working for this company in Rhode Island but I had never been to this office) so I decided to show up. So... there weren't as many of us there as there might have been, but it made it easier for most of us to fit in a conference room and we had a pleasant lunch and I said goodbye and hopped back into my car and headed home so I could get back to work. And, just for a nice touch of Autumn, here's a colorful tree in Roger Williams Park...
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