Yay! The spring is up!

We checked the level of the water in our spring earlier today and it has come up to the twelve-foot mark! That's up six feet from just a couple of days ago! We are so happy that we can do laundry and shower once again! We never had to actually haul water, so that was good.

Yesterday I downloaded four articles from JSTOR which all deal with issues relating to the interpretation of Falstaff, who figures prominently in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2. I picked them randomly from hundreds available, and they turned out to be nicely interrelated and quite fascinating - to me, anyway. They deal with the fundamental question of Falstaff's "humanity." He is a comic figure, and audiences have laughed at him for centuries. But is he fundamentally a coward? A despicable character? Is he a caricature, a stock theatrical clown who has no basis in reality? Or is he a kind of "everyman" despite his deplorable behavior? The scholars are all over the place in their views on this. I tend to lean toward the more appealing, human side. I'll try to report more on that. It's been great getting back into Shakespeare.

I went to the recycle center this afternoon. Tonight is River Singers. We're going to soup before rehearsal, but hope the soup is better than it was last week - it was pretty thin!