Giants game with PALS

After a glorious weekend in the 80s the Monday cold breeze in the 50s took us for a loop. We wanted to go to a Giants baseball game anyways and enjoy each others company (Carol and Mary, Colleen and Jennifer, Jaynie and Maggie, Rachael and me). After picking up Jayne at her house we drove into the city by 6pmish. We found Danny who gave us tix at not so great a price (35-40). Jayne and I had beer outside a pub before meeting up with Maggie, Colleen and Jennifer, around 7pm. Shortly after, Carol and Mary showed up. We gave everyone tix and they went to the game on time. Rachael and I found each other after 15min standing at different statues. It was a great feeling to see everyone together. Jayne came by and sat next to me, not sure by choice or to avoid Maggie tangential convo. It was surely great to see Rachael, but I realize how much she has changed, looked older. Carol and Mary went up and sat with Colleen and Jennifer after a while. As the game progressed into the nite, we stood cheering, eating garlic fries, and drinking beer. ahhhh after the 7th inning it was time to head home. We all needed to get up early for work.

Is Chivalry dead?

Summation of Saturday nite at the SF Symphony

Thuy and I really enjoyed Strauss string (cello, viola, violin), wooden precussions(kettle drums), and brassed winds(flutes, trumpets) variations. It was vibrant enough to keep me awake, although i did sleep about 15min. We even had a nite cap of champagne, cheese/crackers, and strawberry ice cream dessert at Jardiniere restaurant across the street.

Don Quixote (aka the Man of Mancha), a novel by Cervantes, a folk-tale or poem by Nietzsche, and the opus 35, composed by Strauss, was performed last nite by the SF Orchestra. Strauss certainly caught and has nobly conveyed, not merely the humor, but the humanity and pity of Cervantes's tale.
Richard Strauss exhausted the ordinary orchestral effects and invented new instrumental variations of this work, in Munich in 1897 and the premiere took place in Cologne on 8 March 1898, with Friedrich Grützmacher as the cello soloist and Franz Wüllner as the conductor.[1]
Strauss, whether or not his esthetic is faulty, has given us prodigious variations of music from in the pizzicato notes of stringed instruments-violin and viola trills, to the ingenious yet strange woodwind effects of the flutes, bassoon and trumpets, ever-useful kettle drums, crazy cadenzas of the harp, cello rhapsodizes over somnolent harmonies of wind instruments.
The score is of 758 measures duration and is written in Sinfonia concertante form, with the solo cello representing Don Quixote and the viola depicting Sancho Panza. The second variation depicts an episode where Don Quixote encounters a herd of sheep and perceives them as an approaching army. Strauss uses dissonant bassoon fluttertonguing in the brass to emulate the bleating of the sheep, an early instance of this extended technique. Strauss later quoted this passage in his music for Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, at the moment a servant announces the dish of "leg of mutton in the Italian style".[2]