Sunday Epiphanies

On any given Sunday, you’ll find me awake before sunrise.  Old, very old, habits die-hard.  I embrace being a morning person.  Only causes an issue when I want to toast in the new year since I generally turn into a pumpkin around nine o’clock.  Today was no different from any other weekend.

Yesterday was Twelfth Night, the official end to the Christmas season.  When Dickens was a youth, Twelfth Night was ‘THE’ biggest day of the winter holiday in England.  Between his Christmas Carol and Prince Albert’s importation of German Christmas traditions (namely the Christmas tree), Twelfth Night began to fade out of fashion during Dickens and Queen Victoria’s lifetimes.

I did not stay up late celebrating or hosting a Twelfth Night party.  I had servers to upgrade and test bright and early on January 6th, also known as Epiphany.

I woke up before my alarm (I almost always do this; my alarm only woke me up once in the last six months) and got logged in and ready to upgrade a server.  It went much smoother than the last time I tried, right before Christmas, and I was done within 20 minutes (leaving an hour forty minutes of my maintenance window unused).  Server patch testing took another fifteen minutes so I was done ‘working’ before seven o’clock, still before sunrise.

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Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Four out of Five Stars

My husband and I braved the last-Sunday-before-Christmas-crowds at the Legends shopping center to watch this latest installment in the Sherlock Holmes universe.  Strangely, our theatre (the largest one at the Phoenix Theatre complex) was sparsely populated for the mid-afternoon matinee.  Be that as it may, we thoroughly enjoyed the film. The musical score grated less on the ears this time (more classical orchestration instead of the out-of-tune upright piano cacophony overused in the first movie). I can’t wait to re-watch this on DVD so I can pause it and examine certain scenes minutely. Even with my photographic memory, modern day editing gives viewers nanoseconds to absorb an incredible amount of relevant detail.  Despite the dreary gray British and French winter countryside, the cinematography was gorgeous, the highlight being the Swiss Alps.  The action frequently sported ultra-high-speed slow-motion sequences, punctuated with excellently choreographed audio.