A long-awaited delivery arrived today from Amazon. (With Amazon, if you order over a certain amount, the shipping is free. Rather than fill up the order with things we don’t need, we tend to wait until there are enough things that the limit is reached anyway. This does mean sometimes waiting on a few things.)

Exciting goodies included in this package are:

  • The latest audio CD from RUSH, “Vapour Trails”, hopefully it won’t be too pungent – it got mixed reviews, but we’re seeing them in September so at least I’ll be familiar with the new songs;
  • An audio CD from EMI Classics, a collection of French Opera Arias by Natalie Dessay with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra. I heard one of the pieces on this on the radio several months ago that kind of blew me away (Air des clochettes from Lakme) and Lisa tracked down the appropriate disc for me.
  • The original Broadway production soundtrack of RENT
  • Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science”, a humongous hard-back with 20 zillion pages of small type and many pictures of cellular automata. Is this guy a genius or a madman or both? I expect I will take quite a while to digest this one, and to decide which he is.
  • The just release DVD of “Yes – Live in Amsterdam”, from their Symphonic tour with an Orchestra. We watched some of this during dinner, and it is really good. A much more polished and well-balanced rendition than the 2nd show of the tour we saw in Henderson last July.

For dinner this evening I went crazy and cook/prepared two recipes from one of Lisa’s Thai cookbooks: A very hot green soup based on Tom Yum Gai; and a simple tomato and lettuce salad with a dressing of crushed garlic, chilies, lime juice, sugar, and oyster sauce.

Now we’re almost out of food, so I think tomorrow we *have* to go shopping.