Another Week: Number 148

Winter’s vise is slowly closing on us. This was the week of our last 6 p.m. sunset until next March. This was the week of our first freeze warning (this close to Lake Michigan, we didn’t quite freeze) and our first briefly frosted grass on Saturday morning. People are bundling up, and activities are moving indoors.

The weather was blustery at times — great for testing coats and hats, and listening to wistful, rustic songs about solitude.  I wore my army jacket and  Carhartt hat for the first time on Wednesday in the windy drizzle.

Because I have a couple of new clients, I spent more time working this week than usual — and pretty much my entire Friday was taken up in tagging Google Fonts in the Typeface font manager app. It was a tedious chore, but it brought a sense of organization when I was finished.

When this week began, nobody seemed to be paying any particular attention to the East Wing of the White House — yet by Thursday, it was completely gone, demolished to make way for Donald J. Trump’s colossal and trashy new ballroom. His design sense is as aberrant as his stream of consciousness tirades, but there apparently is no way to stop him from doing anything he wants.

I walked 6.56 miles this week.

Angel Face (1953)

Saturday night, I scrolled down my mom’s cloud DVR library and we settled on Angel Face, a crime thriller directed by Otto Preminger and starring Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons. She’s a designing young heiress in the Hollywood Hills, and he’s a wannabe racecar driver with a girlfriend — until the manipulative Simmons drives an immediate wedge.

The plot is psychological and fairly mechanical — my mom winced and complained whenever Mitchum fell for her ploys — and yet it’s well-assembled and rolls along moderately for just 91 minutes, so we were entertained enough, and happy to check off a movie that neither of us had previously seen.

It did one special-effects sequence that’s somewhat hair-raising the first time you see it — even if those are obviously mannequins.