Proust Update and Peony Pavillion full review

For all three of you that like Chinese opera, my more substantial review is now available online. I'm afraid writing it this morning might have made me a bit late for work, but, in fact, I made it in on time. Yay!

For the two of you that are keeping track of my Proust adventures, I'm at page 472 of The Prisoner and The Fugitive. The narrator is still grieving, but also reflecting on the randomness of love, how it might be someone not showing up somewhere that leads you to fall in love with someone else, or how someone might console you for being ignored by another and either of these two people might become your eventual love. He also had a fantastic metaphor about how there are many different gates to a memory, and sometimes you are led to think about something through a completely unexpected avenue.

I am guessing at this rate that I will wind up just completely taking Thursday night off - the event I had blocked out on my calendar isn't happening (at least not with me), so, rather than seeing a movie, I think I might just have a night to recover from two solid nights of Chinese opera and actually get some sleep.

Today is made of ... fail

I spent four hours today trying to do a simple XML post to the site at work. I thought my problems were that I didn't understand the naming conventions for the fields (because I was working with a foreign language site). I dug and I dug trying to figure it out.

Then it turns out the tool I was using was in fact the problem: it was incompatible with that website (something about only being able to do XML posts via SOAP for those of you who know what that means). Apparently what I had been trying to do to test it would have worked with any other website except for that one. So I spent hours and hours futzing with the data I was trying to put in (once I got something I thought would work), trying to make it exactly right (and thinking, surely I've just missed a little thing and that's why it's not working), and I was TOTALLY wasting my time.

I've accomplished almost nothing today. At least shadowdaddy and I went out and had a lovely lunch at Pu's Brasserie, the Most Unfortunately Named Restaurant In Central London (I even mention the possibility of "pus" brasserie until I looked at their URL), and lunch was really, really good, with a stunningly generous mixed appetizer starter in addition to the main (and no extra charge for rice).

I am now waiting for the videos of Hillary singing, "Soy un perdidador..." to come out on YouTube, but I think she just can't handle the concept.