An Unplanned Day

I had been seriously planning to go to a Lutheran Hymnfest at the Cathedral, and had been looking forward to it for at least a month.  Singing hymns is one of my funnest things to do.  Sunday morning, I told my friends at church that I would see them the next evening.  Then Monday morning, with my usual pre-tea stupor and post-work hangover, I lay in bed and planned my day.  I do this every morning, and then when, as usually happens, things don't go the way I had planned, I can get all frustrated and feel inadequate.  As a rule, I plan to do a lot more than I possibly could, so I am doomed to failure from the start.   On that morning, as I planned my day, it seemed like a good day to fix Dakki dinner and watch a movie with her. So I called and asked her to come join me for dinner, and of course she accepted.  Dakki is not one to turn down free food, no matter what the source.  As soon as I hung up the phone, I remembered the Hymnfest!  What to do?  Disinvite Dakki, or bag the Hymnfest.  I didn't really have another available day in the near future to have Dakki, so I decided to stay home and fix a nice dinner.  I had been planning to make a bean entree, from a nice bag of giant white Greek beans that were hiding somewhere in my pantry.  But I had recently rearranged my dried foods so as to foil the mousies who were helping themselves.  Tobias has taken care of them, I am happy to add.  Anyway, I could not find the Greek beans, no matter how hard I looked.. I had a box of  haricots verts and so decided to use them instead.  Unfortunately, I put in too much water and they turned into bean soup.  No problem! Bean soup is yummy (sometimes).    

Our dinner was good, and our movie was better. We watched Otto Preminger's "Bunny Lake is Missing," a rather quirrky Hitchcockian sort of mystery from the early sixties.   I have watched several Otto P films lately, and enjoyed them quite a bit.  While I had heard of this one, I had not heard much.  The title didn't sound too promising, and the review I read was not that enthusiastic  either.  However it turned out to be very enjoyable.  Carol Lynley was the young mother who, days after moving to England, went to pick her child up after the first day at the new school, only to find that Bunny is missing, and no one has seen her.  No one at all!  Kier Dullea plays her handsome but somewhat sinister and overly affectionate brother, Sir Laurence Olivier the suave police inspector, and Noel Coward her amusingly perverted, Chihuahua carrying, alcoholic landlord, owner of an original whip once belonging “to the Master Himself,” the Marquis de Sade, or so he says. As he is being questioned, he asks the Police Inspector if he would be so kind as to give him a few lashes with it.  As the movie progresses, we begin to wonder whether the child, Bunny, has ever existed, as no one,  has seen her – or if she is a figment of her fragile mother’s imagination.

 The next day I was telling Becca about my missing beans, and she walked into my pantry and spotted them immediately.  Grrrr!