I haven't posted in a really long time, it seems like. I got frustrated with how long it was taking me to upload photos, so I don't think things were properly captioned last time, but I think things are pretty self explanatory. Things have just been busy lately.

I started working on a new show for TRP; set for Room Service. I'm really excited about it! The whole thing takes place in a hotel room in 1937 NYC, so I'm going with a strong Art Deco vibe. We started construction this past week, and I'm so far ahead I'm actually already starting to paint stuff. (Two weeks before I even get in the space, that's incredible!) I'm actually far enough ahead that I'm putting in a cove ceiling piece and I've been designing furniture that's being built for the show! That hasn't happened since college. We'll see how long I continue to be ahead; I have wallpaper coming to cover the modesty panels and electroluminescents coming to make mock neon to see the hotel sign through the window, and those both will take some time. I've been working very hard for several days now on making the stained glass transom windows for over the door and window, and those are getting close to done, thankfully. I really need to head out and get fabric for all the upholstery in the next day or so. My props lady has been so great in helping me find the best furniture for set dressing and folks to help reupholster all the stuff she's found. I really think this is going to be one of my best sets to date!

I helped out with nimbus's Trial of Mother Teresa, and have been getting a lot of compliments on my paint work. (I was scenic charge for it- set painter.) The set was a number of different surfaces; red and white marble for the trial area, wood grain on one of the platforms, stone work on another, and red and golden marble on the statue porticos. I forgot to take my camera to the night I saw the show, but I need to get back and take some pictures, and I'll try to remember to post those here when I'm done.

On the home front, we've started working on another bedroom that we're hoping to finish up this week. (We spent a whopping $6 on paint. Ooops paint at Home Depot or Menards is the bomb if you don't have a really specific color you need for a room. Just checking it every time you're in the store can yield a really cheap way to redo an entire room for super cheap!) This is the only room in the house where people who owned it before us painted the trim, and we decided we weren't ready to take the time to strip it all and start over, so we're doing a warm grey on the trim and a deep purpley-red on the walls. We've also been talking about redoing the kitchen and will have an architect friend coming to see how much of the wall between the kitchen and dining room we can take out and not have our house fall down. This all started when we were standing in Sears and decided we want a dishwasher and couldn't agree on what color to do. Currently our appliances are white, but I really want stainless steel, and The Amazing Boyfriend(tm) wants black. Thus began the endless discussion and research into what we ultimately want the kitchen to look like. I did manage to convince him that an island (even a small one) would be really great in the kitchen; I did this by bringing in the counter that I used in the Perfect Pie set and putting it in the kitchen. Poof!! We have counterspace! It's amazing! I need to get a book on code too before we get too excited.

The house next door is still on the market. We've seen people coming and going; no one we've been terribly excited about. The Amazing Boyfriend(tm) finally went ahead and took down the rest of our wood fence on that side of the house as well as the chainlink fence on the other side of it, and has sunk the posts for the wood fence again. He's even taking into account how tall the fence is on the other side of the house due to the grade of our lawn and evening it out. (Living with an engineer is so cool!) I've been getting excited about gardening and researching what does well in shade or partial shade. Today I'm going to be planting some Columbines that I bought (a little tribute to my home state) and some ivy, and as soon as the fence is in, I'll put in some nice, big lilies, and maybe a rose bush, since that's one of the only areas with good sun. I also want to break up some of the sidewalk to the garage and put a mosaic patio there since the grass won't grow around our fire pit and we really like using it. The grass has been kind of a pain in the ass actually; we've seeded and watered and seeded and watered, and the damn stuff still won't grow. I got the back porch, my balcony, a bunch of the trim, and the trim on the garage painted too, so the house is looking really fresh.

But back to the house next door; we had dinner on Saturday with a couple that are friends and just got married. It turns out they were looking for an apartment in our neighborhood, so we told them about the house. They don't have the best credit, but the house is only $40,000, and the FHA loan seems to be built for folks like them. They came yesterday and looked at the house, and they love it! They called the realtor and are really serious about it if they can get the money worked out. So we're super excited that we might not only have decent neighbors, but good friends that we like and would love to hang out with! Right now they're living in this tiny 1 bedroom apartment, and they were counting on paying $1200 for an apartment; paying $700 for a house of their own is way better. Way better! If they move in, our dreams of removing the chain link fences will definitely come to fruition!

That's a pretty good analysis of what's been going on with me. Mostly house stuff, theatre stuff, and looking for paid employment. I have an interview on Tuesday for another retail position. We'll see what happens with that, I have a few shows lined up, but hopefully we can keep things organized and I'll be able to do both. Fingers crossed!

A kind of nice lighting look over the whole set.




The upstage area, lit for the TV soap opera part of the show.




From a different angle.



















I'll finish captioning these later. Check back.

The Amazing Boyfriend(tm) and I celebrated our year anniversary tonight by going out for sushi. We've only been out for sushi a couple times, and it's one of my favorite things. His mom gave me "The Zen of Fish" at Easter and I loved it, so this was the first time I'd been out for sushi since then. It was really great, and at the end of the meal we noticed that Uni was on special.

Uni is Sea Urchin. We're pretty experimental, and we actually tried some Uni at our first sushi date, which was only our third date ever. The Uni we had last year was nasty. The gag reflex went into full drive. It was barely palateable.

Fast forward back to tonight. Uni is on special. We laugh, remembering how horrible it was at the other restaurant last year. Still, sheer curiosity gets the best of us. We order the Uni. The chef says he loves Uni. We each get a piece. It looks like caramel colored frosting curled on top of rice and wrapped in seaweed. I smell it, then douse it in wasabi and soy to attempt to stop the gag that's already rising in my throat. I throw it down. I am able to swallow. Looking at The Amazing Boyfriend(tm) I can tell he's experienced something similar.

So here's the deal: Sea Urchin is the poop of the sea.

Thankfully, we're able to be amused and know that we'll potentially order Sea Urchin again someday. We also had a bottle of bubbly and went out for ice cream after (even though we were both stuffed with sushi, we had to get the taste of the Uni out. It's still kind of lingering, an hour and a half later). A year! Huzzah!

We decided not to buy the house next door.

Yes, $40,000 is low, and the house really is worth more than that. But without knowing if we can turn a profit sooner than 5 years from now, and with the added complication of the loan we want requiring us to move to that house for at least 3 years, we decided to let it go. It's a bummer that we couldn't make it work, but I think it's for the best.

In the meantime, he's decided he really wants to re-do the kitchen. More on this to follow...

Still no news on the house front. We're trying to figure out what kind of loan would be best (and by we, I mean he, since I've been working my butt off to get a show opened) and he's been less than impressed by the options. The best would be an FHA loan, but we'd have to make that place our primary residence, at least for awhile, which neither one of us is excited about. Sure, the houses aren't THAT different, but we've come to like this house, even with all the crazy wood paneling. It's our home. I don't want to move.

Speaking of work, there's nothing terribly promising on that front either. Sigh.

Had a show open yesterday morning, and feel like I've been fighting the design the entire time. It's super frustrating. I suppose over the last month I feel like I've lost a little bit of my sparkle, or just can't quite breathe that life into my designs like I normally do. Pictures forthcoming.

So the last few weeks have been challenging. I've been officially unemployed for two weeks, and while I've had a few gratifying moments, my self esteem and notions of worth have plummeted. We had a barbecue last Friday night with many of our friends that helped out, but quietly I still am feeling pretty crappy about my whole employ-ability. Should I look for another theater position? Should I go to nursing school? Train to be an EMT? Go back to retail?

My Amazing Boyfriend (tm) has been living up to his name. Completely compassionate, playing Monday Morning Quarterback with me (and arriving at the conclusion that this was in no way my fault, bless him), he is incredible. (Now don't get me wrong- I'm not saying I haven't learned anything from this. I have my list of things that I want to improve when I go to my next job. But having someone around to remind me that I have valuable skills, etc.)

Maybe you folks remember last fall when I mentioned that the house next door was up for sale? Yesterday we thought about that again and figured we should take a look at it sometime, just to see what it's all about. After all, from the outside, it's very similar to ours, and we figured there must be something horribly wrong with it for it to only be $70,000 last fall and not purchased all winter. Today Rob called me while I was out and about getting free paint (!) to let me know he set up a showing at 3 pm. So I raced back to the house and met them next door for a look around... and it wasn't that bad. In some ways it's even better than our house. And the best part? It's only $40,000. What was that? $40,000? Why yes. I'll type it out longhand just so you can be sure I didn't miss a zero. Forty Thousand Dollars.

We're putting in an offer. I figure we can have it ready for rental by the start of June, and with me being around so much, I can be on hand to be the site manager. So excited!

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball.

Today's curve ball was courtesy of my former employer.

I've never applied for unemployment before. I suppose there's a first time for everything.

(Cross Reference: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished; I'm Getting Old).

It's quarter to 10 and I'm already bored.

I suppose I should start from the top, since I have plenty of time.

Yesterday, in an effort to rebuild a bridge that had been damaged some time ago, I went to help someone that I haven't worked with in a long time. Their theatre company needed help painting the floor, and another friend asked me to do it, so I agreed. I figured it was good to be helpful. I wasn't completely together when I went. I initially left my brushes in the car, I completely forgot my kneepads, didn't take lunch, etc. Still, I helped out, spending most of the day kneeling on the floor.

Once I got home I was exhausted. Mentally I told myself that this was no excuse to miss my workout, so we went to the gym and I cycled for a bit to warm up before yoga. Once I was in yoga, I was really struggling in a way that I don't normally. My balance was off and I wasn't able to do leg stretches as deeply as I normally do. I chalked it up to spending the day on my knees and didn't think much more about it.

We came home and ate, and at that point it became pretty clear that something wasn't ok. My legs and butt were killing me! I iced my knees and hip, and My Amazing Boyfriend(tm) was kind enough to give me a massage and work some camphor into my sore muscles, after which I went to sleep pretty quickly.

Cut to 3:30 AM. I wake up in SEETHING pain. Oh, man, did it hurt. Aching on both sides of my knee, a band burning across my thigh about 5" above my knee, and aching all the way up my outseam to my hip. It took me about an hour to find a position that was comfortable (flat on my back with pillows under my knee), and I finally fell back asleep at 6 for another couple hours.

This morning I called my cousin, who has been a personal trainer for a few years and has a degree in Kinesthetics to see if I should go to the hospital. (Yes, it hurts that badly. I was seriously concerned that I had a preexisting hairline fracture that was compounding. Any lateral pressure at all hurts.) We talked for a bit, and she said she didn't think it was a fracture. Her guess was that it's a pinched nerve in my spinal column possibly. Keep icing it, rub the outside of the leg, test it gently but not too hard, take the time to relax over the next couple days if I can, and if it still hurts in a couple days, then consider going to the doctor.

So that's where I'm at today. Resting. Rubbing. Icing. Elevating. *sigh*

I should be either cleaning up after dinner, working on my next show, or just generally being productive, but I'm feeling a little tired and moody. I was FB stalking a little bit (anyone who says they don't is a liar) and I really wonder why some of the people on my friends list are there. Basically everyone I've ever worked with finds me, and I feel obligated to add them. What's up with that? I suppose sometimes I'm not so good at being a grown up.

Speaking of which, the NES won't load. *annoyed*

I got my certification in First Aid and CPR today. Man, those videos. It's so hard to watch them without laughing sometimes. It's all instructional/work DVDs, that staged, overly processed feel. Still, I have my little card, and I can breathe twice and compress 30 times, and check, call, care. Go me.

Mmm. Yoga tomorrow. Maybe that will make me less crabby.

63! Sunny! Amazing!

I'm only sitting for a minute, but I've been working outside all afternoon. In a tank top! I broke up all the ice on the walkways, swept the porch and the walks in the back yard, and cleaned my balcony off my office. Next up is to clean up my office and get ready for my folks to come this weekend. If I find the paint scraper, I might scrape the porch and put on a layer of paint, but that might have to wait til tomorrow.

Woo! I love being outside working on my house!

The Snowpocolypse is here!

My normally 10 minute commute took me about an hour today, and considering that I went into work on my day off, I was moderately annoyed. Particularly because I went in for a meeting, and before it even started to snow the people came in half an hour late for a meeting that I could have done over the phone. I seriously wanted to slap these girls, they came in and gave me attitude.... What is up with this? They didn't call, they didn't offer any excuse. This is the age of cell phones, people! Being that late without letting someone know is completely unacceptable. Being rude on top of that... well.

I left about 40 minutes after it started to snow, and before I could even get to the interstate I needed to pull onto a side street and wipe my car down again. It's pretty wicked, so I canceled all my evening events and am whipping up some homemade chicken noodle soup for dinner. I'm happy about an unexpected evening at home. :)

Think of 25 albums that had such a profound effect on you and changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that, no matter what they were thought of, musically shaped your world.

No being cool, which albums have you actually listened to hundreds of times? Readers should feel free to guess (or ask) why particular albums are there.

*Alright, I'm adding to this intro to put that I was having a hard time organizing these, so they're in order of when I remember them in my life instead of in order of importance.

1) Peter and the Wolf, by Prokofiev
2) The Top Gun Soundtrack
3) Tiffany, by Tiffany
4) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles
5) Greatest Hits, by Elton John
6) So Far, So Good, by Bryan Adams
7) Greatest Hits, by Tanya Tucker
8) Eat the Rich, by Aerosmith
9) Stone Temple Pilots, by STP
10) The Soundtrack to Rent, the original Broadway Cast
11) Tragic Kingdom, by No Doubt
12) Surfacing, by Sarah McLachlan
13) One Hot Minute, by Red Hot Chili Peppers
14) The Braveheart Soundtrack
15) Abbey Road, by the Beatles
16) The Empire Records Soundtrack
17) Black Dog, by Led Zeppelin
18) The Wall, by Pink Floyd
19) Love Sensuality Devotion, by Enigma
20) Fumbling Towards Ecstacy, by Sarah McLachlan
21) Rockin' The Suburbs, by Ben Folds
22) Fairy Tale Banshes, by Jack Johnson
23) X&Y, by Coldplay
24) Eyes Open, by Snow Patrol
25) The Bird and the Bee, by the Bird and the Bee

Honorable mentions, in no particular order:
The Presidents of the United States of America
Graceland, by Paul Simon
Jagged Little Pill, by Alanis Morissette
Tori Amos Collection, by Tori Amos
Traveling Roots, by the Jinnies

My set design for Perfect Pie in January.


Moonlight in the kitchen.


The working swing.


The barn.


The train tracks, and the effect of the train coming at the girls.


The construction of the tracks. They needed to be a permanent fixture onstage, and the backdrop inspired me to think about Salvador Dali's use of antigravity and partialism.


The kitchen.


Close up of the kitchen.


Close up of the linoleum floor. Unfortunately I didn't have room in the budget for the glaze that would have really made this pop, but it still turned out alright. I had to force the perspective in only 10' so that the floor would spill out in an arc over the floor.


And these are from an upcoming project: a sceptre and an orb, created from scratch. Styrofoam, rubber balls, lace, beads, pearls, a wooden dowel, paint, glue, wire and appliques.

~I have health insurance for the first time in 4 years.

~My high school band teacher died yesterday.

~We have a chaise lounge and an antique couch in our living room now.

~The Christmas tree is finally outside.

~The cats are starting to get along better.

Sunday afternoon I started feeling the tickle. The pre-bronchitis tickle.

By Sunday night I was starting to hack.

Monday I stayed home and felt like hell. My Amazing Boyfriend(tm) didn't feel a thing, of course. Dude is immune to everything, I swear. We went to work out anyways, and I did a half workout and sat in the steam room.

Tuesday I really wasn't sure, but I thought maybe I'd caught the Black Death. I spent the night at my cousin's with a humidifier.

Today I've started feeling better. Around 11:30 I got a call from My Amazing Boyfriend(tm): "I'm sick. I'm going home."

I still have little or no voice, I'm not quite at full lung capacity yet, and I'm still moving a little slower than usual, but this seems to be wrapping up much sooner than I thought it would. Still, not a fantastic way to spend our Valentine's week, especially considering I'll have to work on Saturday.

Now I've got to go wrap up the chicken noodle soup I'm making. Hopefully My Amazing Boyfriend(tm) feels better soon too.

Well, I just dusted the hell out of the staircase going upstairs. All the newels and balusters, the rails and everything. It looks better than it did before, but I still need to go after it with a can of Pledge and some linseed oil to try to really clean it up since it looks like it hasn't been dusted in a very long time. (Probably hadn't been dusted for a long time even before Rob moved in, so it's not like it was him.) I got one of the special microfiber dusting clothes and really went to town. It's tasks like these where my compulsiveness kicks in and I dust and dust and dust until I feel a little crazy. But the end result is worth it, even if only until they get dusty again in two weeks.

I've really started trying to have a cleaning cycle now that things are calming down a bit in the house, and so far I think it's working. There's just so much of the house to keep clean! It's part of the overall organization/discipline plan that has been going ok. We did indeed sign up at the gym and have been going frequently; I typically swim the whole time and have gotten to 30 laps in 45 minutes, which isn't too bad for someone just getting started again. My times have gone down as I've cut drag problems: I've been swimming in a proper lap suit instead of just a regular bathing suit, and keeping my hair in a swim cap has done a lot as well to help out. I love that I can just swim and swim and swim; my muscles ache and I can feel myself getting a good workout, but there's no shin splints involved, there's no joint pain which I really think is the difference between being able to go every day and swim and giving up after a week of working out. Plus my heart doesn't feel like it's going to explode the way it does when I do aerobics on land. I can keep a steady 160-180 heart rate for an hour, which is right where my target heart rate is supposed to be for weight loss. The only thing I don't like is what the chlorine does to my skin and hair, even after washing and scrubbing after every swim.

Work has been challenging of late. I'm getting ready to start a new show, and that sounds good, but I sometimes find it hard to approach new designs with the same enthusiasm I did a year and a half ago. I suppose they wouldn't call it work if it was easy, but I also find my two year slump creeping in at my other work too. It's obviously a pretty bad time to consider quitting, so that won't be happening, but I do find myself dragging my feet quite a bit lately, even though a lot of my goals are getting met (2-3 years earlier than planned!) and I know I'm doing a good job.

I've also been helping Rob run the Minnesota Arts Meetup (MAMU), which is a chance for artists to get together and art (draw, sculpt, paint, whatever) together and give or get feedback as desired. I'm getting set to curate a show this fall, and so far I have a band, a dancer, Rob is going to compose a few pieces and hopefully put together some mechanical music (look up theremin), and potentially some of the U of M's men's gymnastics teams to do stuff. I'm supposed to perform for this as well, but I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet.

Rob has been working on his robot lately, but he seems to have hit a hard spot since he's having a hard time figuring out how mosfet transistors work. Mostly I hear the air compressor working in the basement, and over the past couple days it's been peppered with obscenities as he's blown through two transistors already and is about to pop the third. It's a pretty awesome thing to see what he's up to; it really blows my mind to see it working. Super cool.

Soooo.... that's about it on our end.

Hmmm.... I guess it HAS been awhile since my last post. I suppose lets hit the big stuff:

~The holidays went well, the Engineer and I split the holidays between our families but had to come back a little earlier than anticipated so I could catch up on my work before the start of the new year. My boyfriend is the awesomest: hand decorated Converse All-Stars, a necklace, the entire series of Sex and the City, and a router.

~We went to a wine dinner on New Year's Eve up in a little remote town north of the Cities and it was wonderful. Most of the wines on the list came from my old place of employment, which was a bummer simply because I would have liked to have tried new things, but the food was stellar and obviously the company was lovely.

~Three weeks into the new year and I already have one show down! I put up a set design in the Garage, maybe I'll see if I can get some pictures in here. (I know, I know, I keep swearing to put pictures on here and then forgetting.) It's a pretty good design, if I do say so myself, but there were a couple road bumps as there always seem to be.

~Thankfully work has been staying busy. Even though I've been assured that my business won't be enacting any cuts in the economic downturn I'm a little paranoid and think it's best to fill my hours with incontrovertably valid work. Not that I slacked off before, but it's certainly helpful that I can be really specific abut every little thing that I do and know that no one's going to question whether I really need my hours or not.

Also work related, I started my retirement savings at the beginning of the year, in high risk mutual funds. And I believe I have health insurance now. Huzzah!

~My working out visions have crashed and burned (again). We're talking about a gym membership before the end of the month though, and I know that I can do this. The gym has a really nice pool and all the other normal amenities, and you get access to all the other of the same gym in the metro, but it's not the meat market that Bally or Lifetime is. Other small changes: eating breakfast. EVERY DAY. (Typically yogurt and granola.) Food journal. (Ugh. I HATE doing these.) As my dad always said: How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

~This house is so big I can barely keep up with it. I keep feeling guilty that everything is dusty and whatnot, but I like to spend my free time drawing or with my boyfriend, not on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor. As it is, we've been working with the cats to correct the aggressive tendencies since his has been really emotionally upset since mid-December. (Read: his cat wouldn't go downstairs, which is where the litter box is. :/)

So that's what's new for now. I suppose I *could* stop complaining about cleaning the house and go do it, since it technically is my day off... yeah, that's probably what should happen now.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2009/01/06/eco.harrison.for.chest.wax.cnn

It's here!

And I'm already behind. Ah, well. Here's what's new and exciting:

~Still living with the E. Happy that he got along with the fam over Christmas and everyone seems to like everyone. Feeling lucky and thankful every day that we found each other and that he's awesome.

~Learned today that our meat thermometer wasn't one that you can leave in the oven while the meat is cooking. Whoops...

~Was reminded that you never know unless you ask, and may have just eased a great burden on myself at work because of it.

~Am getting a ton of free materials from one of the theatres closing locally to do my big sculptural piece for the Cab. Yay, found stuff! I'm so excited for spring to come! Now if I only had an acetelene torch...

~Dropped my cell phone in slush and finally killed it for good. Got a new cell phone on New Year's Eve! It's awesome!

~Am excited for another show opening next week. Am moderately worried about pulling it off in a timely manner, but lining up ducks for said execution.

~Am really working on goals for 2009. Will update when I get a better list than currently amassed.

~Am worried about Isabel. She's been severely emotionally upset for a couple weeks and has been taking it out by peeing/pooping in the gaming room. So far has done so only twice since we got home last week.

~Am happy at Ruby's recovery. I have my same old happy, clumsy pussy cat back.

~Had a fabulous Christmas and New Year's. Some highlights: Christmas eve mass with my boyfriend's family for the first time in a gorgeous old church, having the E meet my family and having it go smoothly, a 6 course wine dinner on New Year's Eve, and a subdued midnight. I got fantastic gifts, and the best boyfriend ever got me the entire series of Sex & the City, a router, a necklace, and made me a pair of Converse All Stars that rock my socks off. Pictures to follow!

Alrighty, time to go start veggies for dinner. w00t!