Really Crazy Week

A truly crazy week has begun for me, but at least I started it with a yoga class and then going out for tea with the yoga class, so maybe I'll have some balance. It's the big rehearsal week for Mary Poppins, when I have to actually attend rehearsals Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights. Meanwhile, it's my final week to wrap up home preparations. I'm down to mostly just cleaning, other than getting a plumber in. I have my usual Wednesday night stuff, though there is sleet in the forecast, so we'll see if that gets cancelled. But next week will be light, as it's spring break, so I won't have yoga, ballet, children's choir or musical rehearsals. I might have regular choir, but I haven't heard about that yet. And my house should be already clean.

I got my office mostly clean over the weekend. I still need to tidy around my desk, but the rest of the office has open floor space instead of boxes of stuff (mostly books). It was so exciting to find the floor.

Meanwhile, I finally watched The Grand Budapest Hotel on HBO. It wasn't quite what I was expecting it to be, as most of it doesn't actually involve the hotel, but still it was a fun and quirky film. For some reason, it reminded me a lot of Raising Arizona -- probably something to do with the tone and the quirkiness. It also gave me a real nostalgia jolt in an odd way. The parts set in the late 60s, when Jude Law's character is visiting the hotel and hearing the story about the events in the 30s, reminded me so much of some vacations we took when I was a kid and we were living in Germany. In the movie, it's an opulent old hotel whose glory days ended in the 30s, and in the "present" it still has some of those bones, but has fallen on harder times and is now a little shabby. It's furnished with utilitarian mid-century furniture, and the signage is those felt boards with the little plastic letters. That reminded me so much of the hotels at the US military recreation areas in Germany. They were these old, pre-war buildings that looked like they had once been very luxurious, but the furnishings were pretty much 1960s general issue office style, almost institutional, and the signage was those felt boards with push-on plastic letters. The dining rooms always looked like a base cafeteria (and I think were run by the same organization), even if they were these grand old hotel restaurants. I remember always being a bit jolted by the disconnect between the buildings and the furnishings, and I'd try to image what these places had been like in their glory years.

At the first shot of the hotel during that era in the movie, I had this burst of familiarity, and it took me a moment or two to place it. I think they were trying to depict the hotel during the communist era, but it was just like the way the military ran hotels.

Now to get on with tackling the crazy week.