It's show week! 'After Hours' is now supposed to be ready to go. Or rather, we have two more tries before it has to be truly ready to go. Tomorrow is going to be dress/tech, and then Wednesday will be our full dress rehearsal, and Thursday is opening night! Exciting times, huh? This year, I have to admit to feeling a little un-ready. The degree of difficulty of the pieces has gone up from last year, but the amount of time for us to get things right hasn't, so I feel like I'm missing a lot of nuances to certain pieces. I'm not forgetting any steps anymore, but there are little tiny details that I wish I could get just right every time.
And after the show is over, I'll have about a week and a half before Jamie and I are off to Japan! I'm going to try and blog here while I'm traveling and show you all the places that we visit. Yes, I know this is going to be my third trip to Japan, but I just really like going there. Besides, there were still places that Jamie and I wanted to go to, or other foods that we wanted to try. Plus I get to practice my Japanese, which is something that I hardly ever get to do.
Tick, tick, tick....Can anyone else hear the countdown to showtime?!
About Me
This morning I was listening to the radio and a commercial for a Boston Pizza promotion came on. They were advertising some Italian special, and the ad was sung in an operatic fashion by some contralto with too much vibrato, which would have been amusing...EXCEPT they set it to the music for Carmen, which is a FRENCH opera. Written in French, by a Frenchman.
I was instantly turned off by the ad and wondered just what uncultured buffoons came up with that commercial. After a few moments of calm, I wondered if perhaps I was being too critical since it is just Boston Pizza, and not the Canadian Opera Company. But still...I can't help but have a not-so-favourable impression of them now.
Am I being too much of a snob?
Today, for the first time in my life, I got stuck in an elevator. I was stuck in my building elevator for 40-45 minutes at the P4 level. The crappy part about that was that my cell phone wouldn't work. So, pressed the 'Call for Help' button. I cannot tell you the number of times I got hung up on. So, I kept pressing it until someone finally answered and told me to just hang on. Like I could even do anything else. In the meantime, I can hear the building fire alarm start to go off, and figure 'Just great. If this was a real fire, I'd be stuck in here.' So, I press the call button again to see if someone can at least update me on what's going on. I get nowhere - another hangup. I sit and listen to some music. Then I can hear that the fire alarm has stopped, so I figure that the elevator should be okay soon. Wrong. I wait...and wait...and the elevator buzzer is still going despite the building alarm being off. So, I press the call button again. The ultra helpful person there tells me that the other 2 elevators are fine, but elevator 1 doesn't seem to be working. And I'm yelling at this point that "Of course it's not working!! I've been inside elevator 1 for the past 20 minutes!" So uber helpful person tells me to hang on, at which point I get hung up on. Again. I let another 10 minutes go by before I hit the call button again cuz no one even told me if someone was coming or not. At this point, a different voice comes on, so I yell into the panel that I'm still stuck in elevator 1, and could someone please let me know what's going on. This person, who in retrospect was probably part of the fire department, told me to try and stay calm, and that they were sending people down. Three songs on my iPod later, I hear someone on the other side yelling "Hello!", so I yell back. Five minutes later, the door is pried open, and I'm greeted by the sight of 3 firefighters. They asked me how long I'd been there, and were pretty surprised to hear that it'd been that long. They apologized, though it wasn't their fault, and asked me if I was okay. I was fine, but mostly a bit pissed that no one let me know what was happening. After I got to ground level, I called Jamie and we've decided that we're going to report this incident. There were a lot of things that weren't handled properly.
Man...I'm glad this week is over...
Okay. I'm totally failing at this blog thing. I often really don't know what to write! I think today will just be a point-form list of things that I've been up to lately.
- Celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Rat by doing a TV gig for a Roger's cable show called Daytime - York Region. Driving there was crazy thanks to all the snow we've been having
- Went to parents' place for super-awesome dinner for Chinese New Year
- Getting ready for Dragon Ball, which is happening this Saturday. Looking forward to having that done
- Still doing Skule Nite choreography. I need to come up with something to the Pokemon theme song (I'm still thinking about this one). This is definitely going to be my last year of SN - I'm not enjoying it like I used to, and my patience for dealing with the cast is getting shorter as I get older. I totally yelled at them the last time I saw them
- Knitting! This is mostly documented over at Yarn for Brains, but I've been enjoying myself with it greatly
- Saw the Spice Girls in concert with Ian. Great way to relive my younger days (haha!). And Posh Spice totally fails in the singing department. The back-up dancers were amazing though
- Trying to keep up with my Japanese studying - this isn't going so well because I don't always feel motivated
- Wanting a holiday cuz the daily grind is starting to get to me
Monday morning, and I think I already had my excitement for the week! This morning, Jamie set off for work, and all seemed normal. And then he rushed back up to the apartment to tell me that our car was gone. He's all panicked, so now I'm all panicked, and I start thinking about what it is that we should do now that our vehicle has been stolen. And then I think a little more and realize that our parking garage has video surveillance, so it would be stupid to steal it out of there. And then Jamie turns to me and asks, "Oh. You parked it in E11 last night, right?"
Uhh.....I think so? But maybe check D11 just in case?
A couple minutes later, Jamie returns all smiles. Panic over.
Moral of the story: When Karen can't tell the difference between a D and an E, maybe someone else should be driving.
Happy Snow Day everyone! Here's a look at the view from my place earlier today.
Just as well that we were home-bound today. It gave me a chance to recover from our annual 0T1 Christmas bash. Jamie and I hosted this year, and it was lots of fun. It'd been a while since we hosted a large dinner event. This year, I took over turkey duty from Barry which made me quite nervous; after all, he'd done such a great job for 3 years running that living up to that kind of standard is tough. Nevertheless, we pushed ahead and got ourselves a 15lb free-range bird from Cumbrae's at Church and Wellesley (who was recommended to me by the nice people at The Healthy Butcher).
I got a turkey and stuffing recipe from a post-doc in our lab. It came out of the Canadian Living Christmas Book, so it was a time tested set of instructions that in the end were pretty easy to follow. I made the stuffing the night before, and the bird the day off. I think the biggest challenge was just dealing with the size of everything and finding fridge space. In the end, the turkey was deemed a success, and I feel like I've earned yet another cooking skill. In his ever-present geekiness, Jamie commented that having tackled the turkey allowed me to level up my proficiency in cooking (it's an AD&D or RPG reference so don't feel bad if you don't understand). There was so much turkey left over! I think Jamie and I will be quite sick of turkey before the month is over. I've already made turkey stir-fry!
The gift swapping was chaotic as usual. For those of you who read this blog who don't know how we do it, we draw numbers and then select gifts from a big pile in numerical order. The gift is opened, and the person after has the option to pick from the pile, or steal from one of the people before them. A gift can only be stolen once per round to prevent a gift from just going back and forth. So, you can see how getting a later number can be advantageous, and how everything can change in the last round. This year was no exception! A few hot items that got stolen more than a few times: Cranium, Krazy Karpet + 2 sled discs, and 365 Days of Duct Tape Calendar. Barry gave what I would consider the most altruistic gift: 3 books donated to children's hospitals across Canada. That item wound up getting stolen from Jia by Naana.
Lots of food, and lots of fun! I'm already looking forward to next year :D
I know it's Wednesday already, and the weekend feels like it was so long ago, but the story I have from this Saturday is just too funny for me not to tell.
My good friend Nick from PEI, who I met at Shad Valley all the way back in '96 (who is now in Calgary doing his Paed's residency), was in town for his cousin's wedding. Since we only see each other once every two years or so, he thought it would be a great idea for me to attend the dinner portion of the event with him since he has no significant other to bring. I figure, sure - why not? His joke was that since he missed my wedding, it was only fitting that I go with him to one so it could sort of even out.
We sit down, drinks are served, bread, wedding party enter - all the usual wedding stuff. And then the MC gets to the part where they start introducing out of town guests. Sure enough, they announce him...and then me as his girlfriend. We start protesting, and his parents who are close enough to the MC correct him by saying that I'm already married. What they neglected to say was that I wasn't married to Nick. So, the MC misunderstands and announces "Oh! Sorry. Didn't know they were already married." Gah! So now Nick's whole extended family is wondering how come they weren't invited to "our wedding", so we have to explain to them that I'm married, but not to him. We think it's all cleared up, but there's bound to be someone out there who thinks that Nick is dating a married woman (haha!)
Things get better when another Shad friend (who is also an old family friend of mine) arrives. So now it's me, Nick, and Krissy. Nick now has not one, but two dates with him, all of whom look very comfortable together. I bet there was more talking after that.
To top it all off, when the bouquet toss happened, Nick's cousin tried to get me to go up too. I laughed and said that it wouldn't really work since I was already married. Then she laughed and told me she thought I was joking when I said I was married. Guess the wedding band on my left hand's not a good enough hint (haha!).
Happy Wednesday everyone!