Home again home again jiggety jig. I wish I were jiggety. Tired again, still, always, again.

If I ever saw Man of La Mancha it was so long ago it's lost in the mists of my memory. I read Don Quixote about four years ago, in a new translation by Edith Grossman. I didn't enjoy it as much as i expected to. I was like someone coming too late to .Shakespeare's "cliches". Cervantes's highlights are so familiar that the best, immortalized parts came as no surprise. So the windmills at the back of the set of this musical production were overdone, especially when they started to move, and kept on moving. The set itself was versatile and busy, so busy I had trouble sometimes figuring out who was speaking as I looked for someone in that busy space.

The libretto is nicely structured, fitting together the bizarre, comic and touching parts of the novel, and the music, of course, is a pleasure. Several of the best-loved songs of 20th-century musical comedy resonate with me whether or not I remember the source. In short, I enjoyed the production.

I've said it before and will again, that we take in more stimuli, ideas, entertainment, information and just plain pastimes in a week than people used to enjoy (?) in a year. The trick is to sort it out, assimilate it and file it. Is it all grist for the mill? What kind of mill are you running?