gypsygirl

OK, so I don't often let people know when my birthday is, because, though I don't mind celebrating my birthday, I feel uncomfortable getting mobbed by well-wishers and being sung at, but thanks to facebook more people have found out when it is. I had to go to rehearsal on my birthday, and I was about two feet away from the back door at the end of the night, when I heard the rest of the cast start into 'Happy Birthday'. No one could see me, so I quickened my steps and snuck out before anyone could catch me.

The following night I had tickets to Broadway by Request with Betty Buckley at the Hip. The 'by Request' part means that as you go in, you have the option of filling out a form requesting her to sing a song from her Broadway or recording career. I went with Regan, and on our way in, we saw MB, who was ushering. About halfway through the concert, Seth Rudetsky, who was acting as her emcee, accompanist, and foil, pulled out a request form (she'd been reading them all up till then). He called MB's name and then read out her request: "It was my friend Karen's birthday yesterday. Would you sing to her?" So, Betty Buckley sang me happy birthday in an auditorium full of strangers (at least I didn't have to stand up!!!).

It was a fabulous concert, though.

So a few weeks ago, the Cachinnator wrote a post in which he asked whether they still made whole Heath bars, or if they only ever came in crumb form these days. I am happy to announce that I have found the answer to his query. Yes, Cach, you'll finally be able to get some sleep, instead of pacing the room all night wondering about this. Yes, Virginia, they do still make whole Heath bars.

This particular specimen was found at a convenience store in Georgetown.

'Course, now I have a Heath bar on my desk. I guess I'll have to eat it. Honestly, the sacrifices I make.

I got Lucy a new bed yesterday, since she has refused to sleep on her cushion (which she used to love) since I washed it about a month ago. I was in Ikea yesterday looking for little tables, and saw a bin full of cheap, Lucy-sized dog beds. She took to it immediately. I'm kind of shocked. It usually takes her a few days at least to warm up to new things. But not this time!

She napped in it while I took my nap, then napped some more while I was working on the computer, slept in it (as far as I can tell) all night, and is napping in it again as I type now.

I heard back from the publishing company about my audition. They were pleased with my audio (something about the accents making the text come to life ) and will be calling me within the next few days (all email so far), so fingers still crossed!

Bleh, I've let the whole blog thing slide again.

OK, let's see... highlights since the last post. Finished A Christmas Carol; as usual, it was fun getting to play with friends from previous shows and meeting new ones.

I've discovered that Lucy only gets along with humans that she meets with their dogs (at least, that's my theory). Mum and Nathalie drove in from California to spend Christmas.  I had suggested to Mum that she bring Lassie to play with Lucy, but in the end she decided not to. They were here for ten days, and Lucy never really warmed up to either of them. But people like Crista and Eileen she goes crazy over. Mum was a bit miffed (especially when Crista came home halfway through their visit and Lucy went crazy greeting her). I don't think she'd ever before met a dog that she couldn't win over quickly. Maybe next time she'll listen to me and bring Lassie.

I made a sweater and a little hat for Tredessa's Jaxon. I finally finished the sweater over Christmas holiday. I found a pattern for a sweater with a train on it, and changed the colours so that it would look a bit like the Hogwarts Express. It was my first attempt at intarsia colour work. I don't think I'll be trying it again very soon. The knitting itself wasn't a problem, but weaving in all the fifty thousand ends I ended up with was a pain in the patootie. Still, it turned out quite nice.

Train Jumper for Jaxon

I was contacted by a lady from a small publishing company called I Publish. A lot of what they do seems to be out of print classics, along with some new authors. She had heard some of my LibriVox recordings and wanted to know if I'd be interested in reading for them (for pay!). Naturally, I said yes, and she sent me a couple of chapters of Clara Vaughan by Richard D. Blackmore (better known for Lorna Doone) to record as an audition piece. She wanted them by the end of this month, and I sent them in last week. She emailed me that she'd received my files and would be listening to them over the weekend, so fingers crossed!

I have my dad here for a while. With the help of some of his friends in the DR and Andy and Auntie Ruth, we got him out of the DR (we sort of hijacked him, since he couldn't make up his own mind). He's been here a little over a week, and will be here till Andy gets a permanent situation settled for him over in the UK (much as I love him, hopefully soon).

I've started working on baby projects for T. I've already made a little panda hat. I still need to buy eyes for it, but otherwise it's finished.

The other project is going to be a pullover with a train on it. I found a pattern, and I'm going to change up the colours to make it look like the Hogwarts Express. I had ordered the pattern a couple of weeks ago, but they had run out, and I had to wait for their new stock to come in. It finally arrived at the end of last week. Now I just need some yarn - I have some in my stash that I want to use, in red, black, white, and yellow, but I also need some grey, blue and green.

The melodrama goes up in less than two weeks. I'm not particularly excited at this point, but then, I hadn't wanted to direct to begin with. I wanted to be nice and rested when auditions for Children of Eden came along. Ah, well. We do get to use the theatre space as of tonight, which is a week earlier than we'd expected, so that's nice. Even though we don't get to do any set building as yet (the Children's Theatre are still officially in the space), at least the actors will get a feel for the dimensions and the acoustics.

I went downtown to watch the fireworks last Friday for the first time since coming to live in Waco. The closest I'd come to this before was hanging out with friends in one of the Baylor parking lots when I was an undergrad and setting off some of our own little ground based fireworks and then watching the big display from a distance. It was quite fun. I hung out with Beth and the 92.9 tent; and Eileen came and hung out with us too.

I've just started working on Anne of the Island for LibriVox. I had been working on Mr Hogarth's Will and Angelina, but I just couldn't get into them and I kept procrastinating and not doing any recording at all. I've turned Mr Hogarth's Will into a collaborative, and started up Anne as my new English solo. I feel sort of guilty abandoning Hogarth, especially because no one has shown any interest in it in the nearly two weeks since I turned it collaborative. But I've also started recording more often now that I'm working on a project that interests me. If no one picks up any of the chapters, I'll probably do one here and there just to keep it alive. Oh, and for the first time since, I think, my second project, someone beat Ans to signing up to PL one of my English solo projects!

I'm still working on Angelina too (more enthusiastically since I started Anne). Spanish is so under-represented in the catalog, that I feel it's my duty to contribute as much as possible, both in solos and collaboratives. I've currently got three collaborative projects going - part 6 of Aesop's Fables, Jose Martí's La Edad de Oro, and I took over part 2 of Don Quijote from Gesine when she needed some time off. Angelina is only the third solo Spanish work in the catalog, and one of the other two is mine as well.

Tomorrow's Evita at the Hippodrome, part of the season ticket package MB and I bought. I hope it's a good production. Evita was my favourite musical growing up, I think, because it was the first professional production I saw (the second was Fiddler on the Roof, and I fell asleep during it. Don't judge me! It was the tail end of a long day of school field trips and I was tired!). Next weekend BU and MCC both have productions going up, Bye Bye Birdie and Anything Goes respectively. We already have tickets to Bye Bye Birdie, and she also wants to go to Anything Goes. I don't really know much about either of those two shows (although I'm familiar with some of the songs), but I think it'll be fun. The weekend after that is the Producers, also part of the season ticket package at the Hippodrome. And then the following week are auditions for Nunsense at the WCT. Phew!

Well, I survived the week in CA, but I was glad I was only there for a week. The place was hectic. Ten people and two dogs, and then the last couple of days, one additional person. Two people had colds when I arrived, and by the time I left, they'd traded them with two others - myself and my mother. So, I was glad I'd asked for the rest of last week off. It gave me time to get better before having to come back to work. With so many of us sick, it was interesting to see how each of us reacted to the same virus - one had really bad chest congestion; another had horrible post-nasal drip and cough; mine was all in the sinuses; mum's had just started when I left, so I don't know what hers was like.

I got a great new lap quilt from mum for Christmas. I'd told her how cold it gets in my office, so she made me one that folds up into a pillow to keep at work. I'd been a bit worried about the gift I got for Andy - a physics kit (like a chemistry set but with gears and wires and things), but apparently his parents found him playing with it when they went to bed Christmas Eve (an hour or so after he'd said he was going to sleep).

MB and Sherry and I got to have a couple of SKVE meetings while Sherry was here for her holiday. We went to see P.S. I Love You one day and met for coffee another day. I'm not a great fan of Hillary Swank, but I enjoyed the movie ok. Sherry hadn't heard anything about it before going, so she was disappointed that Gerard Butler dies; but then relieved that he comes back in flash-backs and hallucinations. She just likes to look at him. I made them each a short scarf with a slit in one end that you can tuck the other end into. MB opened hers while Sherry and I were waiting for our coffees, and we watched her trying to figure it out. She kept looking at the length of it, then opening the slit, then folding it back up. When she heard us giggling at her she asked me what it was, "It's too short to be a scarf, and it has this opening thing only on one end..." Once she figured it out, she liked it. Sherry, having spent some time in a colder climate now, knew exactly what it was and how to use it.

I'm off to my first programming conference this week. It's a three day conference on XSLT. It's the first conference I've gone to for Baylor. I need to do a bit of research on Austin (which is where it's going to be), so I can visit stuff after hours.

I've started a new project on LibriVox to work on in conjunction with The Elusive Pimpernel. I started Anne of Avonlea last night. I had a sudden craving for some more Anne. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to get done on these two projects this coming month (while Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is in rehearsals), but I'll always have weekends.

I'm in the middle of rehearsals for The Man Who Came to Dinner at the WCT. I got cast as Lorraine Sheldon, bombshell. The thought still makes me giggle, because I so don't think of myself as the bombshell type. I wasn't actually up for the part originally. The director only had one person read for it the night that I auditioned; but when she got up there and started to read (in the same normal voice she had used for all her other readings), I happened to glance at the director and saw her shuffling her papers, shaking her head and muttering to herself in reaction. Well, based on the description she'd given us of the character and the fact that her first word in that scene was "Darling" I had a decent idea of what she was looking for, in the voice, at least. So at the end of the night, when she asked if anyone had wanted to read for a part and hadn't gotten to, I raised my hand and asked to read for Lorraine. The producer told me later that the director cast me in the part as soon as I started reading. It's been a fun show, quite apart from playing a vamp, because Tredessa's in it too (as the female romantic lead), and it's always fun to play with her! Plus in this show we play rivals, so even more fun.

I'm working on two projects at LibriVox right now; I'm still working on Pride and Prejudice (on the sly, so to speak). I'm more than two thirds of the way through it. And for my "public" project I finally decided on a compilation of short stories by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. I have one left to go, and it's the longest in the bunch, so I've broken it into three sections, to keep the file sizes manageable. I'm thinking of going back for more Scarlet Pimpernel after this; specifically, the Elusive Pimpernel, which is the book that comes between the two I've already done. My output has dropped lately, though, as I'm spending my evenings at the theatre and can only record on the weekends.

I went out to CHS with MB last Saturday to see Mandy's production of Seussical. It was fun to compare similarities and differences in the costumes, because Mandy costumed the production we did at the WCT a few years ago. It was lots of fun, anyway. And Mandy played Mayzie; I'd always wondered how she would have played the part if she'd auditioned for our production (because I'm pretty darned sure she'd have gotten that part), and it was fun getting to see.

I spent part of the weekend finishing my Hallowe'en costume. I had wanted to go as Tigger, to co-ordinate with MB's Pooh, but, although I was able to find a pattern that would work to make the costume, I couldn't find fabric in the right colours that wouldn't kill me from heat exhaustion. So, I had to find something else instead. I went with a Regency period dress - I'm going to be Lizzie Bennet.

I found a fabulous dark purple cotton fabric with sort of roses (or some other flower) in lilac all over it. All I have left is to tack down the seam between the bodice and the skirt, wash it (it's stiff and itchy from the sizing they put on the fabric) and iron it! I'll post a pic from the Masquerade Ball next week. I think I want to change the sash a little bit too - it's a little too wide for my taste right now, and I think I might also sew it onto the front of the dress so that it just has to be tied at the back. I just had another thought for it... maybe I'll do some gathers on it to narrow it, rather than cutting it down. I'll have to see how that looks.

It was a very busy weekend, quite apart from sewing. I went to a Barrage concert on Friday night with Eileen. This is the group I got to see at Disneyland with Pabis. He was mesmerized by them, and is going to be horribly jealous when he finds out I got to see them again. I think I'll get him one of their DVDs for Christmas. On Saturday I went to look at houses during the day, and ushered for and watched Amadeus in the evening. Good Gad that show was long - three, frickin' hours!!! It didn't help that I kept wanting the guy playing Salieri to turn into F. Murray Abraham (not his fault, he did a decent job... but he's no F. Murray Abraham).

I'm considering auditioning for the Christmas show tonight. It'll be the first time I've acted in one of the Christmas shows (though I stage-managed last year's). I've heard conflicting accounts of what it's like to work with that particular director, which is why I'm only "considering" right now... but I probably will, because I don't expect to do any of the other shows until the spring musical, Nunsense. The director for Steel Magnolias asked me to audition for that, but it's right before the musical, and I hate overlapping shows.

Since I still haven't gotten back my knitting patterns book from Meredith, I've decided to start a project of my choice for Asa. I figure if I don't start it soon, I may as well give it to him for his high school graduation. So, I found this pattern for a stuffed elephant that looked really cute, and I decided to do that for now. I'll probably still do the other when/if I get the book back from her.

Cute, isn't he? I'm making two of them, one in a darkish blue-grey for Asa, and one in yellow for Jana, since I don't yet know what her baby will be. I'm about two thirds of the way through the first one and I only started Friday night, so it's knitting up really quickly. I'll post photos of my two versions when I get them finished (this photo is one of the ones on the pattern).

I did finish A Little Princess last weekend, but I didn't get around to finishing cataloguing until the end of the week. I decided to do a collection of Alarcón short stories for my next official project. Ans is proofing both that and P & P for me, because I was starting to run out of room on my laptop with all the audacity files for P & P that I'd been saving up. She can't understand a word of what I'm reading for the short stories, so she's reading along and just comparing sounds.

Life's been pretty busy since my last post (hence no posts since then).

So, first off, I started the new job. It's been fairly quiet for these first few weeks. The whole first week and part of the second all I did was read, because they'd ordered me a new computer (a nice, shiny new macbook!) and we were waiting for it to arrive. The rest of the second week I spent trying to install Windows and Linux on it (some of the things I'm going to be working with run on Mac, some on Windows and some on Linux, so I have to have all three OS's). Then I went on vacation for a week, but I did finally get the various operating systems running when I got back. Since then, they've slowly been getting me started on some of the things I'm going to be dealing with. Oh, and kind of cool coincidence, one of the first things I worked on was a problem a professor was having with his website, which he was running with wordpress... so this blog? Not just for fun! Actual work related learning experience gained from it!

Now back to the vacation. I went out to Mum's for ten days. This is the first time I'd been out there since she moved to Palmdale and Paul brought the family up, so I got to see the new house, and of course, all the family. The times at home were fairly quiet. The boys are sort of between activities right now, so they spend most of their time online or playing video games (sometimes both). Mum and Natalie and I had fun though. Mum and I usually try to get out to the Hollywood Bowl whenever I visit during the summer, and this year Natalie came with us. We got to see South Pacific, with Reba McEntire and Brian Stokes Mitchell. It was awesome! Then a few days later, we went to see Wicked. I'd been wanting to see this since I first found out that the book was being turned into a musical, so I did a quick search to see if the touring company might happen to be in the Los Angeles area during that week, and found that there's a permanent (well, probably semi-permanent) production at the Pantages! I treated Mum to both shows for her birthday present. Natalie came with us to this one too. They didn't know anything about Wicked, but they were excited to be getting out of the house for something other than work. On the Friday before I came back Natalie's daughter Debbie was playing in the orchestra for a community college production of Once Upon This Island, so we went to that too. Needless to say, after South Pacific and Wicked, this was a bit of a letdown. Maybe if we'd seen that one first. I mean, it wasn't terrible, but it was definitely an amateur performance (I like to think that we're a little pickier about our lead roles at the WCT... but I'm terribly afraid we aren't always).

I haven't been doing much outside of work since I got back. Though yesterday was my birthday and I did get taken out for lunch. Apparently, the Preservation people adopt whoever works in the office across the hall from them, regardless of what department they're in, so Eric and I get included in all they do. It's fun, and I'm enjoying getting to know that group better. I used to see them some when they were on the first floor, but we're in much closer proximity here and it's easier.

Annie opens next weekend at the Civic. I got cast in it, but then I found out that Linda had cast about 60 kids! I told them that I'd just started a new job and we were starting a big project and that I wasn't sure how much spare time I was going to have in the evenings (all of which is true), so thank you but I was going to have to turn down the part. I will be ushering, though. Beth is playing Miss Hannigan and I've heard that she's hilarious, so I'm looking forward to watching her.

I'm still working on El Dorado for Librivox. It's an interesting story, but I keep putting off recording because Armand, from whose perspective most of this story is told, is driving me spare. He's being such an absolute infant that I keep wanting to smack him upside the head. This one's longer than the other Orczy book I did too, much longer. I originally picked it because it's the other book they generally use when they're making a film adaptation, so I know parts of the plot.