ship_go_boom: (Default)
Okay, so, in the time since my last post, I have:

Teal deer. Well, I don't HAVE a teal deer, just this post is one. Big, giant teal deer. ).

So was the last three days.  And now, if you'll excuse me, it is waaay past my bedtime...

ship_go_boom: (Bird Golem)
Firstly, thank you ever so much, lyrstzha, for the virtual milk & cookies and also the recycling goat.  <3  (Good grief, I do get behind, don't I?)

This is one of those days where I have to look back at my recent posts and figure out what I've actually posted and what I've just thought about posting.  My busy-ness has reached a sort of critical mass where I just sit down and go "Wait... what?"  Finals are next week, although on the upside, I don't have any tests on Monday or Tuesday, so I effectively have a four-day weekend (except not, because there's theatre stuff this weekend - more on that - and an office hours meeting with the physical anthropology class on Tuesday and returning textbooks and STUFF).  And next weekend is the RenFaire, and I need to get ready for that - most especially, I need to find someone to carpool with to and from the faire grounds... Actually, that's important enough it gets its own paragraph (LJ/DW peeps may feel free to ignore the following paragraph).

I NEED A RIDE, Y'ALL.  Do I have any Faire-working friends living near-ish Downtown/Student Ghetto EC?  If yes, do any of them/you have room in your car for a wayward gargoyle salesgirl?  Please?  I am smallish, quiet, fairly smiley, and willing to cover a portion of the fuel cost if need be.  Sorry for being a little last-minute in my request, my entire life is a little last-minute right now, in past faire years I've had access to the family cars, and my apartment is just enough out-of-the-way for my employer that I'm not about to ask him to swing by at holy-crap-o'clock in the morning while towing a trailer full of concrete statuary.  Thanks in advance!

Moving on.  Theatre stuff:

The on-campus performance of Mischief Makers, the Touring Theatre class' play, is this afternoon.  Even if I didn't feel obligated to watch as much of the department's work as possible, I'd be going to see it, because I have a serious thing for trickster spirits/gods, and this one has two of my favorites (Raven AND Anansi, also Fox and Nyame, and could someone please explain to me how Anansi ended up in a children's play?)

Romeo & Juliet is AMAZING, I took [personal profile] moss  to see it as a late birthday/earlyish Mother's Day Thing, and I'm going to usher for it tonight (closing night ::sadface::).  Really, I should've ushered first, then watched it up close, because it was the first time I'd seen the frogs in action and I wasted the almost-front-row seat watching them, checking that they worked the way they were supposed to, and hoping Romeo's didn't come up with some new and exciting way to break (if the frogs are my babies - which they kind of are - then Romeo's dagger frog is the colicky one that refuses to sleep through the night). 

Anywho, the biggest testament to how awesome this production is only makes sense if you know my preexisting opinion of the play, which is this: R & J has some of the finest supporting characters you'll find anywhere, but it's very, very rare that I manage to become invested in the story of the eponymous characters.  Romeo and Juliet themselves?  Kinda blah on paper, and most actors I've seen can't overcome that.  But Tybalt?  Has that great combination of asshole and admirable that I can't resist in any character.  A bad actor can make Benvolio as bland as biscuits, but a good actor can bring out the ten different kinds of awesome hidden in the text.  And Mercutio, on the page and usually in performance to varying degrees, is one of my favorite fictional characters EVER.  Given who I just highlighted, do I really need to say where, exactly, I tend to stop paying attention to the play and start critiquing set and costume design?

And given that this production featured excellent (and I do mean belly-laughs-to-tears-in-the-course-of-one-scene EXCELLENT) performances for those three characters, you'd expect that to hold true here, right?  WRONG!  I stayed focused and invested in the play right through to the end, which was a new and different experience that really made my day.  :)

Finally, tomorrow is the annual Theatre Banquet.  It is a pot luck, so I am taking that as a challenge, an opportunity to prove that I am not pulling their legs when I say that I am a good cook.  Therefore: spanakopita.  WITHOUT phyllo dough.  Because I don't have a car, and my grocery options are limited.  Yes, I found a recipe for spanakopita with homemade crust.  It's in metric, so I will be budgeting all of Sunday for cooking.  (Damn, I still need to solve the transporting food to campus issue, as well...)

There's more (there's always more), but I need to separate myself from the computer soon if I want to make it to Mischief Makers.

ship_go_boom: (Default)
The Friday I planned:  Get up promptly, read The Piano Lesson, have a nice run in jogging class, kick ass in my afternoon classes, come home, shower, rehearse toned-down version of monologue, eat, put on neat clothes and just enough makeup to keep my eyes from disappearing on camera, return to campus, and kick yet more ass in my first film audition.

The Friday I actually had: Doze for an extra hour and a half after alarm went off, dash out of the house without reading or eating breakfast, attempt to run with shoes on* and reawaken nearly-healed shinsplints + mysterious left calf ouchies, realize I forgot to pack lunch and have to buy an overpriced sandwich, bluff my way through quiz on The Piano Lesson, get rained on (read: soaked) while walking to anthropology/forensic osteology class, get completely drenched upon leaving said class, decide to hide in the costume shop until the rain slacks off, discover that the latest rehearsal report (which I didn't get) included orders for yet another frog and to permanently attach Romeo's dagger scabbard to its frog, spend three and a half hours doing that, fend off low blood sugar with a cold vending machine Pop Tart, and go into my audition with greasy hair and scruffy clothes and not a speck of makeup to cover the dark circles under my eyes.

In other words, yesterday was less than excellent.  The only bright spots I can see from here are the portabella & foccatia sandwich I paid too much for at lunch (which had slightly soggy bread and a watery tomato on it), and the fact that the sky had cleared and I was at least dry by the time my sucky audition rolled around.  Actually, no, that's not quite true.  Despite how frustrating the rain and the not-getting-the-rehearsal-reports things were (just my luck that the three I don't get are, with one exception, the only ones in the entire rehearsal process so far to include information that directly pertained to me), I'm really glad to be involved in this production (which is going to be SO AMAZING I can't quite comprehend it), and it was very cool to have the trial-by-fire proof of how far my leatherworking skills have come in such a short time.  I mean, it took me forever and a day to finish those first few frogs, and now in the last two afternoons I've designed & built three frogs and modified a fourth.  That's pretty damn cool.

In other news, VolumeOne (the local arts magazine) posted pictures from the 24 Hour Project HERE, as well as video of one of the musical pieces from the project.  They're pretty spectacular, if you ask me.  (I'm in the foreground of picture #7, dragging a very large and not at all suspicious hand prop, and standing on the far left in the big group bow.)

Oh, and I was finally seduced by Twitter and MySpace.  Twitter is really very fun, which surprised me.  And I wasn't quite sure why I decided to get the MySpace account, but then I decided that impulse was made of win when the first (and so far only) friend requests I got were from Jen Gloeckner and Gruesome Boys.  O_O  I'm particularly pleased by Gruesome Boys - I hadn't heard of them before, but their music and overall style is COMPLETELY AWESOME, and I wouldn't have found out about them if they hadn't randomly decided to friend me on MySpace.

* The week before last, I forgot my running shoes, and my run went SO WELL that I kept with it for a while.  It was awesome, I was able to run without slowing to a walk for much longer than before, and my legs felt like they were getting more of a workout (before, my shins and left calf would hurt lots and I'd be busting a lung and exhausted, but the rest of my legs would still feel relatively fresh...  Which, overall, made for a very unsatisfying exercise experience).  But, since I will not always have a bouncy indoor track to run on, I decided to try shoes again, hoping that maybe I'd just turned a corner in my running fitness.  Um, no.  Not so much.

ship_go_boom: (Uhura smiles upon you)
So!  As of last entry, one week ago, I believe all I'd mentioned of the 24 Hour Project was that I was missing an airsoft game to participate.  I'd even forgotten to put a link to the website (not that I expect anybody on my Flist is close enough to Eau Claire to have attended, but every bit of promotion helps).  Said website has footage from all of last year's project (24 hours of single-angle coverage of work in the theatre space, compressed into 30 minutes, plus multi-angle coverage of the finished pieces), which is probably the best way to convey how the whole thing works.  Although, alternatively, these guys did a pretty good job.  Seriously, watch those guys.  They're funny.  And if you think they seem sleep-deprived and peculiar there, you should've seen them at about 10pm last night, when they'd all been up for over 36 hours (students, remember?  They went to class and then started working on the project).

So, I shall compensate with a blow-by-blow rundown.  Spoiler free, because the project was filmed and when the videos are released, I will link to them.

Seriously, blow-by-blow. Big ol' teal deer of a post. )

Not bad for my UWEC stage debut, huh?

ship_go_boom: (Default)
...Except I really don't have much to say.  I keep making blog-notes in my head, but by the time I have time to write them, I have forgotten them, or am far too sleepy to write them, or whatever.  And so the pattern continues today.

Let's see... I'm going to have to miss the second home-field MOA game in a row next weekend.  I forgot what weekend it was, and signed up for a theatre thing on the same day.  On the upside, it's a supremely awesome theatre thing, known as The 24 Hour Project.  Wherein all the craziest theatre students meet up for a smallish shindig at 7pm on Friday, and shortly thereafter, the writers wander off to do their thing.  They have until roughly dawn-ish to write a selection of short plays (one per writer), and then the actors (that's me) and directors and techies show up and start rehearsing said plays.  Curtain goes up on the finished product at 7pm Saturday.

Umm, what else...

There's more theatre yay with the R & J gear... I know what basic design I'm using, and I've got most of the specifics of Romeo's and ...I think Mercutio's frogs.  There's all manner of uncertainty yet, like I still need to figure the exact number of frogs required, and I don't know if any of the pertinent cast are lefties, and I'm just a little nervous about actually getting the construction underway, since that's when I'll figure out for sure if I can actually do this or not... yeep.  But it's a fun sort of yeep.

There's academic woe.  But it requires ranting, so due to the proximity of bedtime I won't go into it (in brief: craptastic prof + required course I'm not interested in = grr).  Well, some of it requires ranting, the rest requires bashing my head against the wall and panicking (or: so that's why I couldn't find graduate anthropology programs that specialize in Greek archaeology).  

And, although I've already failed spectacularly at the daily poem thing, it is still poetry month:

HOME by Viggo Mortensen

He's got a deep, abiding respect
Verging on idol worship
For where things end up.
There are unopened letters
In his refrigerator, a fake
Fingernail in his soapdish,
Shoes everyplace.
These things, and many more
Leavings, fragments, balancing
Reminders of a breeze
From a slammed door--
Configurations of sanctified loose ends--
Have become the living net
Above which he performs
The movements that make
The clock work.

ship_go_boom: (Not Awake)
I seem to have brought home some sort bug home from spring break.  My disease-catching skills know no bounds, apparently, as I spent break hiding in my parents' apartment, trying (and failing) to do homework.  'Course, I also didn't get as much sleep as I should have last night... figures.  Guess I really do need to exercise almost every day to keep my insomnia under control... and also stop doing homework after dinner.  Seriously, my wind-down time after homework (after anything, really, but especially homework) is insane.  I quit mucking around with pleather (more on that later) around 7pm, but still only five-and-a-half hours of sleep.  :P  So.  Called in, kinda-sorta napped, am now watching Quantum of Solace and mustering energy to do something productive with my inadvertent day off.

Right, mucking about with pleather.  I'm designing the rapier frogs & belts for our campus' production of Romeo & Juliet.  EEEEEEE!  \o/  It's going to be so awesome!  I'm making pleather prototypes/mock-ups at home now, then once I get feedback from the director and the costume designer, I'll be in the shop doing for reals leatherworking.  :)

Also, I'm told that this is National Poetry Month, or something?  Well, given that, I did get a shiny old copy of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost (hardback, 1949 edition, 1964 printing) last weekend (for a dollar!!), and there was a paperclip on this page:

THE PASTURE

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)
I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother.  It's so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too.

The farm I was raised on, although cowless for all my lifetime, has a spring out in the woods by the pasture.  It gets all clogged up with leaves, and needs to be raked out around this time of year.  So I thought this was a good poem to find a random paperclip attached to.  :) 

ship_go_boom: (Lost Time)
Although I occasionally feel as though I am. Yes, zombification is not out of the realm of possibility. This is the first time I've even glanced at LJ in a week. I'm still at skip=300 (good thing I have a small flist), and I'm about to go to bed.

But! Antigone went really well, and I went to see a production of Noises Off (which I have to write a paper on. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pay attention to design elements while trying not to die from laughter?) which featured in the role of Tim someone I vaguely knew from the WI RenFaire. So I've had fun, but the last week has been kind of a crunch, as in I got to watch an hour or two of TV a night, but otherwise all hours of my days have been spent doing homework of some sort. Which, as you may know, is very exhausting. Between the excessive schooling ("My head hurt like a warehouse / It had no room to spare...") and the cold I'm getting, my eyes are so puffy blinking feels weird (seriously, I'm turning into one of the Mole People from Planet Word), and I just looked at the clock and thought: "Damn, I meant to get myself to bed 45 minutes ago." It's not quite ten o'clock. Dear Lord. It's a good thing Thanksgiving Break is coming up, I think my delinquency/layabout skills have gotten corroded from lack of use...

Oog. Bedtime.

P.S. I'm registered for next semester's classes! Yay!

P.P.S. I'm going to be very disappointed if no one gets the song quote...
ship_go_boom: (Needs Coffee)
Great googly moogly, I'm tired.  This may have more to do with theatre crunchtime than with the election frenzy, but the fact still stands.  (And I've just realized that despite my involvement in SOAP and suchlike, I managed to not to say a word about it in this blog.  Must fix this.)  I went out and picketed for about an hour yesterday afternoon (I had a "People of Faith Vote NO" sign out on Veterans Parkway), and was pleased to see more thumbs up than middle fingers (a few rounds of whoops and applause, as well), which made the whole experience very rewarding.  Plus, I feel more justified in being bummed about election results since I've done a bit to try and influence them.  As readers in the U.S, are likely aware, Democrats took the house, which makes me happy, as does Arizona deflecting the Marriage Amendment.  Wisconsin's version of said amendment, however, went through (the swing vote swung the wrong way).  I plan to keep wearing my "Vote No" pin and bracelet for a week out of mourning (true devotion - the bracelet may be classic red, white & blue and kind of pretty, but the pin is blue & orange and ugly as hell...).

On the bright side, Rumsfeld stepped down.  Yay!  Although it did produce this quote from Dubya, which I found in the LA Times: "To our enemies, do not be joyful," Bush said. "Do not confuse the workings of our democracy with our will."  Umm... what?  ::is confused::  Can anyone make sense of that sentence for me, please?  Also, I won't be surprised if that phrase makes it to Newsweek's Perspectives.

In other news, Antigone seems to be shaping up fairly well, with opening night on Friday.  I'm still having a great time, but honestly?  I'm going to be very happy when it's all over and I can sleep for a week.  ::collapses::
ship_go_boom: (CrazyFred)
I don't want Halloween to be over....  ::pouts::

"People in ancient Greece had tattoos of Jesus, didn't they?" -- A chorus member, learning on Monday that his costume had short sleeves.

I'm pleased to report that I am suffering no ill effects from my collision, other than a tendency to get a little twitchy about things on the center line.  I seriously did a full-body flinch when a leaf blew across the road Monday night.  Then I felt silly.

Today was the last of midterms for me.  Good, right?  Erm... theoretically.  Things did not go well.  The mostly multiple choice half went okay, considering that I've been running around so much (and freaking out over my speech, which actually went quite well)  that I didn't have any time to study.  Which wasn't a big deal with the more general textbooky questions, but the couple play-specific ones....  And in-class written portions aren't my forte even on the best of days.  Don't know why, as I've been calling myself a writer for ten years.  I blocked.  It was bad.  I nearly had a Patented Cerys Academic Meltdown when 3:50 rolled around.  But I managed to pull myself together and scribble a paragraph (in the place of an essay).  Yeek.  The one upside is that I was given the night off from rehearsal and told to get some sleep (need that.  My life is not meant to be lived by someone who needs 8+ hours of sleep a night).  And this exam covers a relatively small portion of my grade, so I should be okay.

But I'm sick of being all emo.  On to the fabulousness of yesterday! There's something wrong with that sentence.  I don't know what.

All went well.  I got in to do decorations for the Farrago (the campus literary magazine) reading with plenty of time to spare, so I had a leisurely hour or so to stretch cobwebs on things (just one of little 67-cent packages covered the whole door and the podium.  I was impressed.), and fiddle with table arrangements.  The event went really well, we actually had an audience, and there were nine people (including myself) who read.  I did The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, which was by far the longest piece (I was faced with the choice of either being the 13 gazillionth person to read the Raven, or go with something long and very pretty-sounding.  In hindsight, I could have something from my French fairy tales book - perhaps Blue Beard - but I was in a Poe mindset).  Everybody did really well with their readings, and lots of fun was had.  We're hoping to do this again.

I made the trip home instead of lurking on campus, because I had homework to do, and I needed to paint my nails (painting your toenails and reading a sociology textbook at the same time is harder than it sounds, BTW).  Plus between his work and my school/rehearsal schedules, my dad has proven an elusive being, and I hadn't seen him since Sunday evening despite living in the same house.  So I took the opportunity to go home partly so I could have dinner with him and [profile] moss6886.  Actually, a not-microwaved dinner was also reason to spend the extra hour in the car.  And I got to make one last bid for them to come with (their response : "*whivel whivel* Worknight..."  Party poopers.).

Then there was the main event: Rocky Horror Picture Show!  I happily got all tarted up in the leather mini, cutaway jacket, and precious little else.  My not-so-dedicated slinky-walk practice over the past couple weeks paid off, as I was complimented early on how well I worked my 3" stiletto heels.  I'm not certain, but I think I may have had the second-most outrageous outfit there.  The most outrageous undoubtedly goes to Patrick, on merit of boots alone, with wings and makeup merely an added bonus.  (BTW, it was discovered that the women on campus really don't appear to care if there's a man in their bathroom.)  I am, unfortunately, short of pictures of the event.  I got about a dozen, but a lot of them are blurry (my camera will produce some of the most amazing pictures ever in the proper setting, but it's hit-or-miss when it comes to quick people pictures), and there aren't any of me in my ensemble 'cause I feel weird and narcissistic asking people to photograph me. 

We managed a crowd of about 40.  The movie itself was relatively sedate, largely because we didn't want to clean stuff up afterward in the theatre, but also because the percentage of people who had seen Rocky Horror before was small enough that we all sat in our seats not wanting to be the only one up and doing the Time Warp.  I think it was a success, though, and I had a great time.  Sad-that-the-night-is-over great, although given the way today went and the homework I had to finish, I'm kind of glad I didn't join the group that went to startle people at Perkins (although it would have been very entertaining).  But I don't want Halloween to be over!

It is nearing 1am.  Methinks I have failed in my assignment to get some sleep.  I blame Steve Nash (OMG he cut off his hair!).  I thought of blaming the entire NBA, then the Western Conference, but I narrowed it down to the Phoenix Suns, and then I realized that it was the Canadian boy's fault.  However, game over and won, it is time to go to bed.

Oh, and one more reason my sociology professor kicks ass: she forwarded me this.  It's Rocky Horror in 30 seconds.  By bunnies.
ship_go_boom: (Snoopy Dance)
Today was a good day.

To start with, I got to drive [profile] moss6886's Sonata to school (though, gotta say it's quite a change of pace from the Passat.  Took a couple minutes to get used to).  Not a big deal, but the CD player is much nicer.  It was raining, but it was also very pretty and not to cold, and there was a refreshing lack of stupid people on the road.  Speaking of (kinda), have you ever had a moment where you suddenly realize that other people probably think your life is very strange?  I was driving along, when it occurred to me that a great many people would find it odd if they had to pass a buggy on a county highway.  I, however, do it at least twice on any given school day.

Anyways, the one hitch in the day was that I lost a piece of homework for Lec 100.  It was a little time management chart thingy.  However, I told the professor about this and she copied off a new one for me fill out and return later (yay!), which I did in the time normally occupied by said class (it was canceled).

To continue the goodness of the day, today was the first SOAP (Students Opposed to Acts of Prejudice) meeting.  The group had been defunct for the last year and a half, but when my Sociology Professor moved out here (this is her first year at the Wood) she decided to revive it.  Things went well, the people in the group seem like good people to be around, and the events we brainstormed all sound worth the time of thinking them.

The final thing of goodness (which was immediately after the penultimate thing of goodness, a class with popcorn and bits of movie) was news of my theatrical status.  The bad news?  Although I apparently read very well, I was not cast in any role.  The good news?  I was offered the job of stage manager.  ::blinks::  Whoa.  I didn't accept right away (although I did accept), because whlie a rather large portion of my mind was yelling "OMG liek squee!," the rather smaller portion that was going "Holy responsibility, Batman!  Run away!" was quite loud.  The more cowardly portion of me suitably suppressed, I can now say I'm looking forward to the experience.  Should be fun, even if it does mean that board-treading is not in my immediate future.

ETA:  SG-1:  Ba'al!  Dragon!  Ba'al! ::bounce::
Atlantis: Jack! 
ship_go_boom: (Good Luck)
You know what I wish?  I wish when you plug in a USB mouse to a laptop, the buttons on the touchpad disable.  I'm writing from the campus commons, and I've accidentally right-clicked with the palm of my hand four time in the ten minutes the computer's been on.  It's really annoying.

I'm staying late tonight (my classes usually wrap up at 4) so I can audition (first ever audition!  Eek!) for the school/community production of Antigone at 7 o'clock (meaning tonight will be my first solitary nighttime drive home.  Eek again!).  I had originally thought to go for a minor role, but as there are only three female characters...  Well, I think my new motto is "Aim high.  There are more things to grab on the way down."

So, chilling my heels in the commons.  I've got the computer (dammit, moss6886, it's not named BonBon!!!), I've got food, I've brought my guitar just in case I get really bored.

...

The Pepsi machine is evil.  Oh, sure, it took my five quarters.  But it must be unbalanced or something, because they just lodged right behind the coin slot, instead of falling down into the machine.  So I'm out $1.25, and I still don't have anything to drink ::dies of dehydration::.  Crap.  :(

...

Carrying on, there also should be a presentation a presentation to do with a study abroad trip to Ireland starting in a few minutes, so there should be enough for me to do without going insane from boredom.

To the Great and Powerful FList:  OMG!  I'm going to miss Bones!  Please, tell me where I can find a crappy low-res download of it tomorrow!  Pretty pretty please?

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ship_go_boom: (Default)
Cerys, The Great Whatchamacallit

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