Iphone troubles.....with puppy resolutions!

A week ago I wanted to make a post about my Halloween weekend. It would have had a great picture of the awesomely geeky Phillip J. Fry pumpkin I carved, a photo of all 4 of us housemates together in our costumes, as well as pics of smore makings and beer pong (I know...very classy).  Unfortunately I lost all of the pictures on my phone thanks to (a long story short) my computer putting Jeremy's old iphone settings on to my iphone.  So I got all of his old pictures and contacts instead of mine.  I might have lost all of my pics but in getting all of Jeremy's I gained tons of photos I didn't even know existed. Mainly those of Leela (our dog) growing up.  So yes....what was going to be a post about my great Halloween has turned into a puppy post.  The following are pictures of Leela growing up...relish the cuteness. :)

 8 Weeks Old

Catching well deserved Zs

First Halloween

One of two odd napping positions that she still does: the chicken

First Christmas

6 months old

Second odd napping position: un-lady like

With the dog-igloo that she never uses. She prefers to get soaking wet. Go Figure.

Likes being close to things when she naps, but metal fence?

On top of her first mountain: Pinnacle Mountain in Little Rock

Leela and I dancing in the empty dining room of our Oklahoma home before we unloaded the moving truck.

After a long day.

Ready for her close up.

My pooped baby this Halloween. I heart you too baby girl!

Suffice it to say that I miss my dog.  I realize that this post makes me seem even more like a mom posting tons of photos of her baby but that is exactly what I am.  I can't wait to see her when Jeremy brings her with him for Thanksgiving!  Only a week and a half left!!!

My day of Blues....well....a Blues Brother

Last Saturday my friend Meghan and I got to meet a man I have grown up adoring.  My Dad even dressed me up like him for Halloween when I was little. Oh yes the one and only....Dan Aykroyd!!! He is on tour promoting his new vodka called Crystal Head.

Meghan and I jumped at the chance to see him in person.  The liquor store took $10 off each bottle you bought and Dan would sign it.  Plus they took a nice photo of you with Dan for free. I only wish that I had thought of having him sign other photos as well. Unfortunately Dan's eyes are covered with aviators and it happened really quick but it was totally worth it.  Plus the signed crystal skull bottle is making a wonderful decoration for Halloween in my kitchen so far!

It's been awhile

So I realize it has been 6 weeks since I last posted...so I apologize. As I am sure you can guess grad school is proving to be just as busy as everyone said it would be.  But it has been a very interesting 6 weeks and in a way a welcome change from my life as an undergraduate. So....

I began grad school with those same feelings that many students have on the first day of school (especially in a new school). Did I have all the materials I need? Why can't I find the right backpack at home? Did I pack a large enough lunch and snacks for my 9 hour day? Did I remember my steel toe shoes? You know the usual stuff any student asks themselves. But my biggest worry was whether or not I would live up to everyone's expectations of me.  I fought to be in this program for an entire semester and then I had to defer for a year.  Was I going to be rusty? Had I lost any of the skills I had already learned? The questions ran through my head constantly.  But the answer I have come up with is that yes, I can not only do this but I can and will exceed everyone's expectations including my own.  If I am rusty it is ok, I am a student, and I am here to learn.  But this answer took a month to figure out.

As school started I looked over all of the syllabus' and realized that luckily homework wise things weren't going to be too crazy yet.  They were giving me time to adjust.  But on top of whatever homework we have in class we are also working on 4 productions a semester during the 20 hours a week we have to work in the scene shop as our assistantship. So that is where for the first couple of weeks I got a little stressed. Our first show of the season is Hair and I am the props master and puppet designer for it. At first I wasn't a huge fan at being given a production team role on the first show since I am a first year grad student but now I am kinda glad for it. Now 6 weeks later, I attended the opening night of Hair last night and although it had some sound problems it was a very good performance. I will post pictures soon. Now for the other three shows this semester I am either a painter or carpenter so I won't have anymore production responsibilities outside of shop time.   So now I can focus on my homework and working on my design for Dangerous Liaisons which I start meetings for on Thursday.   I'll come back to that later.

Besides the productions I also got to go to Canada for the first time 4 weeks ago.  As part of the Design Collaboration Class the 1st and 2nd year Design students (lighting, costumes, and scenic) take a trip every year with the 5 professors who teach the class to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.  The trip lasts only 60 hours and 24 of those are spent driving on a bus so it is an extremely quick trip.

We saw three shows: Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus, and Camelot.  The were all amazing performances but the best and most gruesome was Titus Andronicus.  The shows we saw were performed in two different theaters and they are both thrust theaters (seating on 3 sides of the stage) but only the director of Titus really knew how to direct a show in a thrust, so that no matter where you were sitting they were all good seats. But the production of Twelfth Night that we saw was directed by Tony Award winner Des McAnuff and it featured actor Brian Dennehy. The acting was great but I wasn't sold on the design collaborations for the show. The lack of being able to see the actors well from where we were sitting because Des directed it as if it was performed in a proscenium theater was very annoying too but overall it was a good show. We also managed to squeeze in a tour of the Festival Theater (it is the oldest of the 4 theaters used for the shakespeare festival) and we got to watch a change over.

Dan (the other 1st year MFA Scene Design student) and I in front of the Festival Theater.

Each of the 4 theaters has more than one show performing in it during the festival so after each performance they have to change all of the scenery for the next show.  Watching the change over wasn't that impressive because I have had to be a part of those.  But what was impressive was seeing the change over for scenery that cost tens of thousands of dollars.  Man, having money makes things simpler, cleaner, and faster in theater. :) Who knew?

I do love my food, as I am sure you know, so I wanted to try something new on the trip...I mean if you are going to Canada than you need to try something Canadian, aka poutine (french fries and cheese curds covered in gravy). For lunch a group of us went to this little place called Boomers Gourmet Fries.  We found out from the owner that they are going to be featured on the Canadian version of Food Network's "Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives." 

Barbara (1st year MFA Costume designer & fellow tall girl) and I eating our Poutine. 

After seeing our last show, Camelot, we had to drive back through the night to Bloomington so we arrived back to campus at about 8:30am. It was a good trip, I only wish we had had more time to explore and sleep.

Since our trip to Canada my life has been full of homework and Hair. Although I love my work I look forward to times like last night. After attending the opening night of Hair two of my roommates (Alex and Matthew) and I went out.  First we hung out with some of the other theater people at a bar called Atlas but it was a little dull so the three of this went to this "bar" called the Root Cellar, underneath my favorite restaurant here, Farm Bloomington.  A couple of Alex's professors who are from Portugal and Belgium were the DJs for the night at Root Cellar and it was great European style techno music. Some people might not like it but it makes me feel at home. (Since I was an exchange student in Belgium) The three of us and a lot of other people from the Informatics department (Alex is getting his PhD in Informatics) had a blast dancing!  I love the European style Discotheque dancing where everyone just dances and there are no couples. It is ten times more fun and inclusive.

Dancing is my favorite way to relieve stress. Now that the stress of Hair is done it is time to focus on other things like the show I am the set designer for this season, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I have had a couple of small meetings with the director and some of the other designers but Thursday starts my official meetings.  Our production meeting process is much more extensive than what it was at my undergrad.  That is good because although there are more meetings it means that everything we have to do for the design process is spelled out more and we have due dates for everything. That makes planning our time much easier. I am much happier with the level of organization IU has.

All I have done is talk about school.....so...life....that thing I try to have outside of school.  My life outside of school consists of hanging out with theater people or my roommates, trying to start a garden, and making sure I do my share of chores around the house. So not much right now mainly from the lack of husband and time. This is the longest Jeremy and I have ever been apart and it is proving to be harder than I expected. I would have thought that after getting married that being apart would get easier, since there is less stress than a "dating" relationship where you are still worried about something going wrong.  Now I don't have stress but more strain, romance is even more important when we are apart but at the same time having romance makes us miss each other more. I will be glad when grad school is over.  If I wasn't doing this for the good of my family (and future kids) than I would never have left Jeremy.  I just have to keep reminding myself that this is worth it. I miss him constantly; he is my best friend and the love of my life although I never thought it would be easy to be apart from him, I never thought that it would be this hard especially since we were long distance in undergrad. Last night this was very apparent when Hair became the first school show I have done in 5 years that Jeremy hasn't gotten to see. I admit when I realized that I cried a little, when you get used to something or someone it is hard when they aren't around. That whole "not knowing what you have until you don't have it anymore" bit is what I wind up living through everyday.  

I realize I might be ending this post on a sappy and sad note but that is what life is like for me right now: missing Jeremy and working hard.

The Mouse Debacle

Last night after dinner Jeremy and I continued our routine of him studying and me watching something on netflix when out of the corner of my eye I saw him........the mouse.  We have had a mouse problem the past couple of months but for some reason the mouse seemed to be getting more brazen as of late.  So we did the normal thing and put out mouse/rat poison in hopes that we would finally be rid of him.  But with some odd courage/idiocy the mouse decided last night that it would be good to make himself known.

As I am sitting in the big blue chair facing the tv I see him run like a bullet across the base molding underneath the bar and behind what is our game cabinet, behind which he has no way to escape. Without taking my eyes off the game cabinet I pause my movie and text Jeremy that he is cornered. Jeremy was in the office at the time and I didn't want to scare the mouse by yelling for Jeremy.  At first we don't know what to do.  Jeremy grabs a flashlight and one of his bow staffs from taekwondo and begins to slowly pry the game cabinet away from the wall.  But all at once the mouse jumps for it and runs into the living room and underneath our sofa.  So I came up with a plan: I found a small clear Rubbermaid tub and decided that as Jeremy either moved the couch or swiped with the staff underneath it that I would pounce on the mouse with the tub the second it tried to run.

So of course what happened?  It was like the plot from Mousehunt. Every single time we thought we were ready for him and Jeremy would move the furniture the mouse would run in the opposite way from where I was and go hide underneath another piece of furniture in the living room.  So one by one we would move each piece of furniture out of the living room and into the dining room once we knew he wasn't underneath it.  finally the only place he could hide was under the big blue chair. Unfortunately through out this whole process my dog Leela was not a big help because she thought of the mouse as a toy she had never seen before so she had no idea what to do with it, which meant she didn't come close to catching it. That's what I get for raising a dog as a pacifist. But luckily she did chase the mouse under the blue chair. We thought we had him cornered. The big blue chair is a recliner so we decided to switch roles and Jeremy would try catching him and I took the staff.  I very slowly reclined the chair because then we could see underneath it. With the flashlight we couldn't see him so I took the staff and started jabbing and swiping under the chair but to no avail.

We were confounded. There was no way he got past us and even after we tried picking up and moving the chair to the dining room like everything else he had just vanished. We were disheartened thinking that he somehow got past all of us because there were no holes in the wall for him to get through. So I pulled out the vacuum cleaner and decide to clean the floor while we have all of the furniture moved out. When I was done we slowly start putting things back in the living room, first a bookshelf and then the big blue chair. Then all of our adrenaline came rushing back because as we sat down the big blue chair the mouse came running out from underneath it and he went under the book shelf. Somehow the mouse had clung for dear life under the chair as we had moved it to the dining room in the first place and I guess he never thought it was a good idea to run from the dining room into the kitchen where we know he had been getting into the wall.

Knowing we have him trapped this time we move the big blue chair back to the dining room and actually put obstacles in the mouse's way so that when Jeremy lifted up on the bookshelf the mouse would have no choice but to run into the open room instead of along the base board. Just in case it ran his way Jeremy grabbed a trashcan. So we are standing there and as ready as we could be Jeremy lifted up the bookshelf and sure enough the mouse first ran toward Jeremy.  I love my husband so I got permission from him to tell you that it was I not him that got points for being the man of the house last night.  As the mouse ran at Jeremy unexpectedly he jumped and screamed which sent the mouse running, like nothing I had ever seen, in my direction.  Before I knew it I got him! Holding the Rubbermaid tub tightly on the floor my plan actually seemed to work! It took us a few minutes to figure out what to do next but we wound up taking a piece of clear plastic from the frame of a sketch of Gandalf and carefully sliding it underneath the tub.  Jeremy proceeded to duck tape the tub to the piece of plastic while we discussed whether to kill the little guy or set him free.

In the end we did the humane thing and drove 2 miles away then set him free. This entire little battle took about 2 hours, so it unfortunately ended Jeremy's studying early last night.  But I think it was an adrenaline rush and a laugh that we both needed so in the end it was totally worth it.   

The Little Things

I was going to post about all of the things that I have done in the past couple of weeks which admittedly doesn't amount to much since Jeremy has been busy. But then something awesome happened which sort of trumped everything else.  Jeremy has been a little stressed out while I have been here thanks to these 5-hour long qualifying exams that he is required to take to continue in his program.  He has to take 4 in all and 2 of them this week, one in Classical Mechanics and one in Quantum Mechanics. Believe me, I don't understand it either.

Anyway yesterday he took the day off from studying. Yay! So for date night he took me to a nice dinner and a movie. At dinner after we had some awesome entrees we ordered a molten chocolate souffle.  When it arrived at the table our waiter told us that someone was anonymously paying for our dessert. We spent the rest of dinner trying to figure out who bought it for us which we never did.  But Jeremy and I decided that sometime in the distant future we hope to be sitting in a restaurant and look over and see a young couple and buy them a dessert too.

As I have been reflecting more today on dessert last night and Jeremy's exams I realized just how much grad school consumes your life, no matter if you are in astrophysics or theater.  Because we are doing grad school apart I know that we will let our work consume our lives even more just to help fill the void of us not being there for each other.   Jeremy and I have so many great stories from adventures that we have had together and I don't want those to end while we are apart. So to counteract the work and to continue the adventures I came up with an idea.  Every week we are going to trade off  "daring" each other to do different things and to get photographic evidence of it.  That way even in the midst of craziness in our lives every other week we will have to do something that enriches our lives no matter how goofy it is.  I never want my entire life to be my work and because I am putting off a lot of my own personal wants for grad school (which will be better for my family in the long run) I don't want to lose other parts of my life as well.

So basically my own life lesson for the week: don't forget about the importance of little things (like getting a free dessert) that happen in life because sometimes it is the little things that make the big things (ex. being apart for grad school) worth it.  

And the heat continues...

The quick version of what I have done the past 13 days: celebrated, visited, baked, eaten, packed, moved, driven, sweated, chopped, planted, cleaned, cuddled, and relaxed. Needless to say it feels like I have gone from one end of this country to the other....oh wait I did that too.  :)

The week after my Harry Potter Day was my last week of work for the Indiana Festival Theatre's inaugural season.  I have to say that IFT has been one of the best summer theater jobs I have had and it makes me look forward to starting school in a few weeks! During my last week we celebrated one of my co-worker's (Jared) birthdays by buying him an ice-cream cake but once we got it back to the shop we realized we didn't have a knife to cut it. So another co-worker took a saw out of the tool room, cleaned it and handed it to Jared. Yummy...

On Wednesday of that week my mom and step-dad came from Little Rock to visit me.  We had a great visit full of awesome and unique food like this Tibetan restaurant...

 They were able to see 2 of the shows I had worked on this summer, Ah! Wilderness and Comedy of Errors. This is me with the set for Ah! Wilderness in the background and my mom almost got us in trouble for taking these pictures.

They also got to meet my mentor/professor at IU and tour the facilities of the theater department. You can see the River City portal (my first thing to paint this summer) from Music Man in this pic which was the last piece of scenery to get struck when the show was over with.

I took them to the really cool restaurant that Jeremy and I went to for our anniversary, Farm Bloomington.  They were very happy with not only the awesome food but with the fact that it is a sustainable restaurant.

On Saturday my aunt and cousin joined us in Bloomington. They had spent their summer vacation going to a music festival in Canada but since they were driving they decided to go through Bloomington on their way back to Alabama. After a late morning we decided to go to a movie to beat the heat and humidity.  We wound up seeing Captain America which was a refreshingly good comic book movie. This is my step-dad and my cousin.

Our last big meal together was Saturday night before we went to see Comedy of Errors.  A friend of my mom's who had attended IU a long time ago recommended we eat at The Trojan Horse, which is a Greek/American restaurant, so we did.

We all loved Comedy of Errors and after the show, while standing outside the theater my mom decided it would be a good time to do some on-campus gardening....aka stealing. So now there is an Indiana sweet potato vine in Arkansas. :)

 

After a wonderful visit with everyone they went home on Sunday morning, driving to their different southerly locations. I relaxed/napped for most of the day after they left but in the evening I got a second wind which meant it was time to pack.  I spent Sunday night and most of Monday packing/boxing up the rest of my stuff.  I had to get everything packed because I needed to move all of my stuff over to the permanent place I will be living in during the school year before I could visit my hubby in Oklahoma.  But I got a great break on Monday for taco night. Everyone from work got together at a friend's place for our potluck taco night as our last big dinner together of the summer.  We ate so much good food that the shop workers reverted back to their natural state of rest.....and no I didn't pose them like this.

Tuesday was moving day! It was a long day full of packing, renting a uhaul truck, and feeding good friends pizza and cookies. Thanks again to everyone who helped me move! After everyone went home Tuesday night I went back to my old place to finish cleaning and to make sure I had everything else ready for the next day.  Wednesday was an even longer day but with a greater reward. Very early Wednesday morning I made a quick stop by the Bloomington Bagel Company for some awesome bagels and schmear for later and then I hit the road. 

After nearly 14 hours of driving and plenty of road construction I made it back to Norman, Oklahoma. But  one good thing about my long drive was rediscovering audiobooks.  I had never been a big fan of audiobooks except for the BBC version of The Lord of the Rings since it is a full cast recording. But on the recommendation of my hubby and others I decided that getting an audiobook that would last me the whole trip might help me on such a long drive.  Thanks to Audible.com I got the first book in the Game of Thrones series for free and since the audio book is 33 hours long it will last me on my return trip to Bloomington as well.  Game of Thrones made me like audiobooks again. The narrator does an awesome job of distinguishing the characters especially because the story is constantly jumping focus between members of different ruling families in the book.  But besides Game of Thrones the best thing about the drive was getting home. I was greeted by my husband with a very delicious pot roast.  But before digging in the funniest thing about getting home was being greeted by my dog Leela.  I have never seen her so excited to see anyone else; with her I was greeted by being pushed to the floor and being licked all over my face. I love that pooch! 

The next couple of days reminded me of the significant difference between living in Oklahoma and Indiana.  Northerners might not understand real summer heat the way Southerners do but they do understand the humidity.  So after leaving the 90 degree heat full of humidity in Bloomington I was reintroduced to the above 100 degree very dry heat of Norman.  So during most of the day you can find Leela laying like this on the colder hardwood floor of our dining room.

Just as Leela is trying to stay cool so am I.  As part of my weight loss goal of reaching my goal weight by Christmas I was going to give myself a makeover by chopping my hair off and getting new glasses at Christmas too.  But since the temperature in Oklahoma has been above 100 degrees for the entire month of July and it is continuing into August I decided that at least one of my makeover wishes had to come early.  So yes.....I chopped my hair off. Below you can see....

or rather not see the new do. Sorry but the suspense will have to linger until I get back to Indiana. :) It is over a foot shorter but I am just glad to have my neck free and for the weight of all that long hair gone.  Besides the dramatic hair-do change (and bringing my garden here back to life), Jeremy and I are just enjoying being in the same place.  With only 3 weeks left in Norman before I go back to Indiana I plan to continue enjoying every minute of it.

Oh Yes.....Harry Potter!!!

Unlike my siblings I did not rush to go see the final Harry Potter at midnight, which I am sure was a lot of fun.  Instead I felt like I had to do the final film justice. So I invited some friends over to my place on Saturday afternoon to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and eat dinner before we went to see Part 2.

We decided to have breakfast for dinner just to mix it up from our usual get together dinners.  So instead of making pancakes or even normal french toast I made, for the first time, overnight blueberry stuffed french toast. I was very happy with the final product and it seemed everyone else was too. It was a very heavy recipe but I lightened it up to make it feasible for Weight Watchers.

 

After we got done with Part 1 and dinner we headed over to the movie theater.  We were smart and got our tickets in advance and got to the theater 40 minutes early so we got very good seats. Although it seemed a little fast the movie was awesome!! As a big fan of the books I wish they had put more about Professor Dumbledore's family in the movie instead of just the really brief mention of his siblings at the very end.  But that is just being nit picky, I really loved the movie!

It is kind of weird to think that the franchise is over both book and movie wise.  I am a part of the original Harry Potter generation; I was 11 years old (the same age as Harry in the first book) when the Sorcerer's Stone, Book 1 was first released in the US. So starting from the books and now through the movies Harry Potter has been around for half my life.  It is interesting that our parents and grandparents generations were defined by the wars and political actions of the time but my generation's adolescence can be defined by Harry Potter.  How the times have changed.