Hump Day, Tacos and Slides

As most Wednesdays seem to be, it was a very slow and very low energy kind of day.  Work was good, the painters (which includes me) got off work 30 minutes early since we were out of things to paint. But the best part of my day didn't start until dinner.  Then all of a sudden it wasn't hump day anymore....it actually felt like the weekend had come early.

After work today all of my coworkers plus a couple of friends met at Sean's apartment for taco night.  We all brought different ingredients so we had tacos, refried beans, corn, chips, salsa and I brought chocolate chip meringue cookies for dessert.  It was a great dinner.....here are some pics from it.........

But the best and most energizing part about today was when one of my friends suggested that we go to a park that had a playground with the coolest slides.  So of course a handful of us went after dinner and I have never been to such a cool public playground. This is us having a ball....

Sometimes it is just nice to feel like a kid again........especially when you have lost enough weight to get around like one! 

Missing.....

Last night was the first big meal I have cooked in a while....especially by myself.  Usually I have my husband around to help cook the meat since that is his favorite thing to do.  Last night I cooked my first whole chicken by myself.  I made roasted lemon-rosemary chicken, seasoned fries with skinny garlic aioli, garlic green beans, and a raspberry pie for dessert.  All of them weight watchers recipes which makes me feel even better about eating them.

But I have really begun to miss the dining routines that Jeremy and I got into this past year.  Some evenings one of us would cook something small or we would just have left overs but every other night or so we would cook a larger meal together.  Jeremy would call me before I got off work and we would decide which meat to pull out of the freezer to thaw (or he would make a quick run to the grocery store for something new). Then when I got home Jeremy would mainly focus on the meat and I would make the side dishes and dessert.  Sometimes I would make larger desserts which I would then have Jeremy take the rest to work with him the next day so that his fellow students would consume it instead of us.  Most of the time I would make smaller desserts like cookies or brownies just for us. You never realize what you will miss until you don't have it anymore.....like my last job.

Although I don't miss the slow pace of being a nanny, I do miss the kids. I took care of a 12 yr old, a 9yr old, and (when I left) a 10 month old. Most of my day was spent with this cutie who is going to be 1 yr old this Friday...

 

I loved getting to pick up the older kids from school and taking the daughter to her Gymnastics practices.  It was fun cooking and watching movies with them on their days off from school and on one of their days off I even got to take them to the Sam Noble Natural History Museum. The kids were wonderful....this is a photo of them with me on my last day of work.

Some people have joked and asked me whether or not I am turned off of having kids of my own after 10 years of babysitting and a year of being a nanny.....No it hasn't...it has made me want to be a mom even more. Like life, kids aren't great 100 percent of the time but it is those small wonderful moments that make it worthwhile.

Carpenter for a Day

Unfortunately I woke up an hour late this morning which means I got to work about 10 minutes late.  Apparently the rule in this scene shop is that if you arrive late to work then you might as well be a little more late and bring everyone donuts.  Knowing that I was going to be late for work I decided to get bagels instead of donuts....which everyone at work actually seemed more intrigued about.  There is a great place here called the Bloomington Bagel Company and they make several different kinds of bagels and schmears.  I grabbed a dozen bagels for everyone that included pretzel bagels, blueberries, salt, and plain and some extremely delicious honey almond schmear. But my favorite bagel (not just by the name alone) they make is called a flagel which is a flattened bagel.  It is similar to bagel thins but a little wider and way more tasty.  So this whole idea of actually rewarding myself, in this case with bagels, for bad behavior is totally awesome. 

Besides my bagel induced morning within an hour of me getting to work Robbie and I finished the Sun/Moon drop for Comedy of Errors.  So far this has been our favorite thing to paint this summer.  In the picture below it might look small but the disc is actually 18 feet in diameter.  This is the largest drop I have painted in a while and so it is also the first time in a while that I have had to walk on a drop without my shoes to be able to paint it. Some of the other shop workers were also nice enough to build us a temporary bridge using I-beams, scrap plywood and a couple of skates.  Using that bridge was not only the coolest but most comfortable way I have used to paint a big flat like this.  The bridge gave us a place to store our paint and the ability to sit and scoot around the drop as needed.  You can see the bridge in the upper left corner of the photo.  Of course there was also a lot of spatter involved which always makes me happy.

Since we got done with the drop so quickly Robbie and I are again ahead of the carpenters.  We were going to wind up having nothing to do all day today but instead we decided to give the carpenters a hand to help speed up their process that way on Monday we will have something to paint.  Normally if we were under union contracts as painters we wouldn't be allowed near the carpentry side of the shop but because we are in a university no one cares.  I am very glad about that because I love me some power tools!

Until next time I am going to drift off with sawdust filled dreams.....Goodnight!

When One Show Opens....

I have had a very fun week. Last Thursday after work all of my co-workers and I went bowling. I think I bowled the best game of my life I bowled 132!!  I was at least the highest scoring girl :) .

On Friday we had a lazy day at work since there was hardly anything left to do for Music Man, most of our scene shop staff even got the day off because of the lack of work.  Saturday (but really all weekend) became a very geeky day. My buddy Sean came over and we did a SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis marathon.  But the really fun part of Saturday was going to The Taste of Bloomington which is the annual food festival here.  All of the local restaurants and bars have tents and you get to go around eating fairly cheaply from a very wide variety. Below you can see some of the tents although the festival is much larger than you can see here.

Here is a cool little jazz quartet. The kids look like they are middle/high school age and they were very good just having a jam session.

 

Here is Sean being goofy...although it makes it look like his tongue is touching the top of the chair next to him...weird

After my geeky weekend it was back to work on Monday and now after a few touch-ups and some minor annoyances The Music Man is finished.  It will open on Friday to I hope a good crowd.  I have been to a couple of dress rehearsals now so here are some production photos (although these aren't the best quality). 

 Opening Train Scene

 

 Street Scene

 "Marian the Librarian"

 Marian's Home Interior (check out specifics about the piano below)

 The same interior flat but on our scene shop floor just after we finished it.

 

The Mayor's Porch with Harold Hill

Marian's Porch

The Gymnasium

It was the job of the properties department to take an old piano and build on to it to make it look like a vintage upright player piano.  But Robbie (my undergrad scene artist) and I were asked to paint the added pieces to match the real piano....and I have to say I am pretty proud of it.

The original piano

Here is Robbie doing some of the base painting

The top piece base painted

 The way it turned out onstage (the piano did double duty as a regular upright and when you removed the blanket it became a player piano)

Now that Music Man is finished we are on to even more interesting painting projects for our last two shows: The Comedy of Errors and Ah! Wilderness. I hope to post some pics by the end of the week of the really cool sun/moon "drop" that we are painting. 

On a side note...only 10 more days until I get to see my hubby!!!! YAY!!!!!! It has already been about a month since I've seen him but this visit will be special since we will also be celebrating our first (married) anniversary.  But it feels like it has been so much longer than that since we have been a couple now for 5 years. Man time flies. I love you baby!!

Full Speed Ahead

So an update about my work at the Indiana Festival Theatre.......

I don't think I have ever worked on a build for a show that moved so quickly and that everybody stayed happy with extremely little stress.  I am seriously loving this atmosphere.  Within 2.5 weeks the show has been entirely built and we are only a few touch-ups away from being done with the painting tomorrow. This show has also been a great way for me to use traditional painting techniques while using some of my new favorites.  My newest favorite is using automotive gravity-fed spray guns which I first learned how to use at my undergrad....this is me giving credit to my undergrad scene design professor. :)   Below are a couple of pictures of the kinds of guns I own.

 

As my final project in my undergraduate scene painting class we had to choose a photo of a sunset and paint it using our guns. I chose an African sunset and the painting is about 4' x 7' in size.

For this show I have used the spray guns on all but 2 pieces of scenery to create an "ombre," or gradient, effect. Sorry it isn't a more up close picture but in the photo below you can see several of the different set pieces that (they were testing space and weight on the fly system which is why so many are down at once) have an ombre effect on the tops of them.

Something else cool that you can see in this photo is all of the 2D set pieces that were cut out of MDF that back in the day would have had to be cut out with a jigsaw by hand and it would have taken forever.  But luckily my new scene shop is equipped with a CNC router.  It is a large piece of machinery that allows you to enter in your drafting in a computer and the machine is then large enough to route it out of a 4' x 8' sheet good.  Below is a picture of the kind the shop here has.

That is pretty much everything on The Music Man for IFT so hopefully by the end of the week we will be moving on to either Ah Wilderness or The Comedy of Errors almost a week ahead of schedule.  Until next time....Sweet dreams!

Another year gone by...

It has come and gone again, that magic time of year when you turn another year older! So new adventures that happened in this past year....my 23rd year: got married, moved to Oklahoma (my 6th state to live in), rented a house, became a nanny, avoided tornadic storms while driving across several states, my dog got out of her chewing phase, hosted my first Superbowl and Halloween parties, became a gardener, learned(ing) how to budget, first credit card, began refinishing my first pieces of furniture, bought my first Christmas tree, our house flooded, built bookshelves as a couple, got and learned how to grill, used yeast for the first time while cooking, first time we rode an airplane together (as a couple), camped in a tent in the living room, first time my husband and I have lived in the same city while being a couple, learned oil painting techniques, my husband's first stitches, moved to Indiana (my first northern state), and oh yes...I got married (important enough to repeat). :)  Now I have had my first birthday in Indiana and it was great. As I am entering my 24th year it is hard not to think about all of the adventures that are going to be coming my way this next year: starting my first year of grad school in August, spending my first holidays with only my husband and puppy, designing my first show in grad school, and of course all of the misadventures that will happen in between that I can't even imagine yet. Those of course are what make life interesting......all of the misadventures which turn out not to be a "mis" after all.

My 1st Indiana Apartment

I have to say I feel like I have gotten very lucky when it comes to my first place here. I got a great deal subleasing a very spacious apartment and rooming with an awesomely geeky girl like me who happens to be getting married in the fall.....Congrats Roomie!  The unfortunate part is that I will have to move again in a couple of months to a place that will be more permanent for the school year.  Below you will see photos of my place but it seems a little emptier than my next place will....I wound up deciding to get the rest of my furniture from Little Rock after I move to my next place but I also haven't done things like put my desk back together and my art supplies cart and etc, etc.

Our huge kitchen with enough space to possibly put a table and chairs in it.

The living room (again most of my furniture for this room is in LR)

My bedroom: my bedside table is finally down to the wood, so I only have a few things left to do before it gets stained and sealed. I am not sure if my grandmother has ever seen it without 6 layers of paint on it.

My own private bathroom

 I look forward to putting up photos of my next place but until next time this is a sleepy giant signing off.

The New Job

Monday I started my summer job as the Scenic Charge Artist for the Indiana Festival Theatre.  Although mentally I am loving it my body went into shock the first few days.  As a nanny I worked from 10am-4:30pm and during that time there wasn't a lot of moving around except to move a baby from one place to another. On the flip side my summer job is from 8am-5pm and I am on my feet and moving most of the time. So my endurance is no longer what it used to be in undergrad.  Fortunately it only took 4 days to get me back to my old self.  It is nice to get home from work and still have energy again.

Work......is awesome.  The carpenters are pumping out scenery almost faster than we can paint.  Luckily by the schedule we are keeping in our heads we are almost a head of schedule paint wise.  The first show we are working on is Music Man.  The set design is all 2D flat pieces of scenery that almost have that feel of Victorian lace but a little more colorful.  Below is part of the upstage portal we finished yesterday.

Today we almost finished the library desk for "Marian the Librarian" and we started/finished the train car for the opening scene.  So we are just trucking along at full speed.

My new professor and I are already getting along really well and it only took a few minutes before I felt at home in the shop.  It actually kind of feels like I have already been here a long time. So far so good, eh?  To give me some more to do while I am at home I told my prof about a design I had started while in Oklahoma and he suggested that I continue working on it.  He also offered to look over it for me so in a sense I have given myself homework which strangely enough is exactly what I have been wanting.  Go figure...me an overachiever. 

I guess that is all the news for now, so until next time....

Changing tides

I have now moved to my seventh state and my 9th place of residence in the past 10 years, for someone who isn't a military brat that is quite a few.  Although moving can be tiring (making "home" a fluid concept), change has for the most part always been a good thing that came at the right moment for me.  Choosing to live 12hrs away from my husband so that I can attend grad school to better our family's future was definitely the hardest choice I've had to make.  For those of you who know Jeremy and I, it is easy to think "that if any couple can live apart for that long it is them," since we lived 3hrs apart for my 4 years of undergrad.  But being a long-distance couple is never easy but as fortune would have it we were lucky enough to spend our first year of marriage actually living under the same roof.  So now, although I am so far very happy with IU, I am missing my life with Jeremy and Leela.  Now I come home to an apartment with nothing to do in the evenings except to fix dinner for one and go to sleep with no hubby or dog cuddling next to me.

I am sure I could go on for hours about all the little things I will miss but I'm not going to. Instead I am starting up my blog again (because keeping busy always helps) and although I was writing this as an anonymous online diary (which explains the previous entries) I have decided to go the other way with this.  I hope to share all of my adventures over the next three years of grad school with anyone willing to read this and fingers crossed that Jeremy and I will have some new adventures together to share too.  After all, being 12 hours apart means plenty of the U.S. between us that neither of us has really explored, so there should be plenty of interesting road trips in the coming years.

But until next time I hope you have enjoyed the ramblings of a giant!