. Our season of short plays opened this week, to successful audiences. There was apparently a positive write-up in the local paper, but I didn't hear about it until it was too late to get hold of a copy. The play I'm in is a collection of skits on Shakespearean topics, with premises such as "What if Julius Caesar had asked the soothsayer for clarification?" and "What if Lady Macbeth had had a really good lawyer?" and "What if Richard III had been taken at his word on the 'my kingdom for a horse' thing?"


. I didn't make it to any board game meets this week because they all clashed with dress rehearsals.


. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice trays has established that using orange juice instead of water makes the ice irregular enough that it doesn't cling to the mould. It also established that I don't really have a regular use for blocks of frozen orange juice shaped like cat heads, so I'm probably just going to stop using the ice tray.


. I didn't get around to watching the National Theatre Importance of Being Earnest during the week it was available free to watch on Youtube. This was partly because I was busy, and partly because, despite the stacked cast, I've never been particularly enthusiastic about this production. My least favourite kind of production of a classic comedy is the kind that seems to think that it won't be funny without a whole bunch of new gags slathered over it, and if this production isn't one of those then the trailers I've seen are doing a bad job of representing it.

. At the weekly boardgame meet, we played Cockroach Soup (which is like Cockroach Salad but with more slurping, although one player refused to slurp and just said "slurp" instead), Flip 7 With A Vengeance (which is like Flip 7 only more so), Lovecraft Letter (which is like Love Letter with the option to unlock forbidden techniques that are more powerful but increase the chance that you'll go mad and get disqualified), The Mind, and Cheating Moth.


. Further experimentation with the cat-head ice cube tray has established that if I leave it out of the freezer for about fifteen minutes, the ice blocks will melt enough to relent their grip while otherwise retaining their shape. I will probably continue to use the dog tray more often, as I'm not the kind of person to know fifteen minutes in advance that I'll be wanting a cold drink. I have made a mental note to try with fruit juice and see if that affects the grippiness.


. I've played through all the prequel missions in the XCOM 2 "Tactical Legacy" DLC. There's a state I get into sometimes when I'm reading a book that I'm not really enjoying, where I'm still interested in seeing what happens next but what I'm really looking forward to is getting to the point where I've seen what happens next and can move on to something else; that's how I felt when I was doing the last few missions. One thing I can say for them is that they've given me a new appreciation of how the main game works as an ongoing story with a cast of familiar characters who grow and develop over time, with the player getting involved in guiding their development, and isn't just a bunch of arbitrary missions featuring an arbitrary bunch of people with random skill sets.


. Auditions have begun for our next production, which will be the Peanuts-inspired musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I remember auditioning for something years ago (it seems likely it was Putnam County, though it might not have been) with Charlie Brown's kite song from this musical, but I haven't been able to find where I stored the music for it. (I was undecided about whether I would actually audition with it this time, since usually I make a point of not auditioning with a piece from the musical I'm auditioning for, but it would have been nice to find it again regardless.)


. The BBC has announced the recovery of two more missing episodes from early Doctor Who, both from near the beginning of "The Daleks' Master Plan". This means we now have substantially more than we previously had of Adrienne Hill's run as a Doctor Who companion, and of Nicholas Courtney's first appearance on the series.

Coincidentally, the day after the announcement, I was poking around in my digital archive looking for the kite song, when I found a mysterious folder containing a single file with the informative name of "scan0003.jpg", which turned out to be a newspaper clipping from the last time an episode of "The Daleks' Master Plan" was recovered.


. The family walk continues.