Ice Cream and Opera House Acoustics

I came home this afternoon to find my lamp on my desk. What's so strange about that?, you might ask. Lots of lamps sit on desks. Except that this one is a floor lamp.

"Emilia," I called down the stairs, "Is there a reason my lamp is on my desk?"

"Yes," she said, "I was cleaning the floor earlier."

"Oh," I said, "Thank you. Can I put it back now?"

Which of course was fine. But it was still entertaining. Added an element of surprise to my day.

My essay for Opera (the one I was researching in the National Library for over the weekend) is coming along. I have four of eight pages, and it's due tomorrow, but I have most of the day free to work on it. It's on the history of the architecture (acoustics, arrangement of seats, lighting, etc) of opera houses, using one particular Florentine theater (Teatro della Pergola) as a focus and example. It's interesting. But I would still rather go play in the sunshine than write it, which is why it got put off until the last minute.

It occurred to me that all of my paper topics this year have been... um... unusual? So far I've written papers on: straw hats, parties in the 1400s, a fresco of a saintly bishop, a disappearing physicist, zucchini (although that's technically a translation and not an essay), and now the one about opera houses. Although I guess I have a tendency to write essays about odd things anyway. Past paper topics have included an alley, school gardening at the end of the 19th century, and thrackles (a particular kind of mathematical doodle). And my very first research paper in 5th grade was about circuses.

Apropos of abosolutely nothing, I had a very excellent pairing of peanut and chocolate ice cream this afternoon. It was like a Reeses peanut butter cup, only in a cone. Or rather, in a coppa cialda, which is a cup-shaped cone. It is something I have been wishing existed for years (the ice cream never gets properly down inside regular cones, even the flat-bottomed ones), and discovered a few weeks ago in my now favorite gelateria near the Sede.

I don't remember what the original point of this post was when I sat down to write it, and it's late, so I think I will leave this as is and go to bed. Buona notte!