Tuesday

Soooooo tired today. The premiers of just about all my must see shows were on last night and I had to do some time shifting to watch them all. My comedy block started at nine with "The Big Bang Theory" (Which I am loving more and more each time I see it), "How I Met your Mother" (fantastic show...if you aren;t watchig it you're missing out.), "Two and a Half Men" (One of the strongest comedies on TV right now), and the series premier of "Worst Day" (Should never put Worts in the title, it's like "Super Bad" why watch the movie, when they've already told how it's going to be?)- not really feeling this one. It is trying, but didn't grab me. There was also some dialog lifted right out of an episode of Roseanne - I gotta say.. probably not gonna last.

Of course the biggest most anticipated premier of them all, and the reason I'm so tired, "Heroes". I love Heroes. It is so good, and the two hour season premier did not disappoint. Now I just need them to switch it to a night when sucky shows are on, so I don't have to start watching it at 11 on an Alberta station.

The weekend was good. I didn't get as many things upstairs done as I had wanted to, but there are two coat of drywall mud onthe windows and I should be down to just fine sanding and touch up mud now. I'm excited to see how this little experiment turns out. I already like the look of them much better, even without the sills yet.

Sunday was the first reading of Chicago, and the first time the cast and crew got to sit down and see who else is in the show. It's a really strong cast and lots of really fun people. There's a few brand new people who i've never met before which is great, some who I haven't done anything with since Guys & Dolls, some of the Cabaret cast has returned, and there's some people who have done a lot of other stuff but this is their first musical..... I'm really excited for them. This will be the show they measure all other musical shows by. Guys & Dolls was my first and I still compare nearly every other experience to that one.

Ticket sales for the show are already going very fast. There is someone booked for the theatre for the Sunday after the show so unless they cancell there won't be a chance for an additional matinee like Cabaret, so the theatre company is going to open up the Student Dress rehearsal to the public as well. Students will still get their special price and get first priority, but the general audience will also be able to come and see the show on Wednesday.

Wednesday Sept. 17

Okay my bad, the read through is Sunday not Saturday. Good thing I ran into Anthony on the street, or I would've shown up and been the only one there...hehe. It Says Sunday in my e-mail and everything, but have my moments.

Life is about to get busy. I started back into my classes last night. I had 5 kids and 1 adult in my animation class, and 4 kids and 1 adult in my beginner painting class. Those are nice sized classes, which give me the opportunity to spend a lot of time with each student to help them get the most out the class. My Thursday night painting class is also a go. It's intermediate painting for adult, and I've been told there is one beginner in it as well. I'll be able to catch her up easily enough.

I still have a huge disaster on the main floor of the house. I haven't had a chance to touch anything since the weekend, but plan to get quite a bit done today when I get home. I have molding to rip away from two more windows and corners and mud to put up on them, then I need to sand and finish mudding the kitchen window. Once all that is done and dry and sanded and perfect I can paint. I also have a pile of boards to plane down to thickness for a cabinet I'm building for Mike, so I have to sit down and figure out a time management strategy. I have to extra careful as well, because I tend to drop things on my foot, when I start into a play and injure myself. (my toenail has finally completely grown back since Cabaret a year and half ago....dropped a cabinet door I was building on it first week of rehearsals. Brenda still has the bloody sock pics from the costume fittings I'm sure. I also dropped an end table on my foot during Christmas carol, and had to limp around for part of that...so I'll be extra careful of my feet for the next two months. When everyone else is breaking a leg, I'll be watching to not break a foot.)

I am in the process of installing programs and goodies to my brand shiny new animation computer. It is sah-weet. It had a dual quadcore board, and the potential for 32 gigs of ram..... that's not a typo. I only have the one processor in it at the moment and the ram is no where near maxed out, but it still sings like no ones business, and is more than thrice as fast as our other computers.....it is a little on the loud side as there are a tonne of fans in it, but I'm learning to tune it out.

Busier than a One Armed Paper Hanger

School starts this week. I still don't have a nailed down schedule, because I still don't know which classes are full enough to go and which ones aren't. I know for a fact my animation classes are booked up, thanks to some great press last week.

There was a press conference for the school's announcement of the 3d animation course's launch. It will be a postsecondary, full time schooling course. I will not be the instructor, but I may teach a portion of it, that remains to be worked out. I was asked to be part of the press conference because I am a 3d animator working full time in Saint John, so I have a little insight into the market for people with skills in 3d animation....who'd've thunk it...me...an expert witness.

I am gearing up for our first read through of Chicago, this Saturday. I'm very excited to see who else is going to be in the cast and hear the script for the first time.

Just in time for all this schooling and rehearsal to start I went ahead and gave myself a big project to do at home. I've spent the past couple weekends painting the main living area. Since it's open concept that means, kitchen, dining room, livingroom, hallway. I've finished the hallway, the accent wall, and the ceiling. Then I got the bright idea that I hated the molding around the windows. It wasn't a new idea...I've always hated the molding around the windows...it looks cheap and unfinished. It reminds me of a trailer, and makes me feel like the contractor, just slapped it up, and said "There, that looks finished, and once you buy the place you can do it properly." It's not poorly done by any means, that's just how I've always felt about windows framed by molding. I ripped down the molding on the kitchen window and got some drywall corner strips. Then I put them along the top and sides of the window and mudded them yesterday. I have to finish that today. When I'm finished the window will have no molding at all, it will just be nice sharp corners along the sides and top, and I am going to install an oak ledge/sash. Even unfinished the window looks larger and the wall area looks sharper. It just means my simple painting job will be more complicated and take more time, but in the long run it will look so much nicer. I'm also considering opening up the wall above the fron window and running some wires off the light switch to install some pot lights up over the plants and take down the hideous fixture we have there now. When you're getting ready to paint is the perfect time to do these things, so you can rip open your walls and fix them back up again before the paint goes up.

Chicago

I heard from Stephen last night aboout his choices for the cast. It was nice to finally get all the waiting over with. I don't want to say too much about who is or isn't inthe show, because I don'tknow who has or hasn't been contacted yet, but I can say that I got a part in the show. Okay...I won't try to be coy and draw out the suspence....I got Billy Flynn!!!!!!! I am so excited! My first Lead!!! I'm also a little terrified, but just a little. This is a big part and I have a lot of work to do. Guys like Bertis, Bob, Jeff, and Stephen have set the bar pretty high so it will be a real challenge. I'm excited to accept the challenge and give it all I got. Congratulations to everyone who got the parts they were after in the show...you know who you are, can't wait to see everyone at rehearsals.

Three Little Fishes

I a now 15 days into my clownfish raising experiment. I started with about a hundred or more freshly hatched little clown fish larva, and over the past two weeks have watched them grow, and watched several of them die, and watched three of them morph into actual little fishes. I am left now with three very little baby clarks clownfish, which is actually a 3x as many as I had originally thought I might have at this point. Keeping mind that this is the very first time I have attempted to grow them out once they hatch, I think I've done surprisingly well. I 've made some mistakes that cost some lives, but at the same tim, none of them would've survived the first night had they been left in the tank and I hadn't tried this to begin with. Plus my success rate is a hell of lot higher than the success rate in the wild. That said, I now have three very tiny (just over a cm or 2 long) little baby clarks clownfish, and hardest part is over. Now I juast have to keep their water clean and their bellys full, and they should grow into healthy happy adult clownfish.



It's hard to get a good picture of these little guys.
I have been keeping a photo diary of the process on my flikr site in a set call trying to raising baby clowns


Flikr site


The parent fish already have another batch of eggs set to hatch on wednesday and I might try again.

Called back to call backs

Last night was my second callback for Chicago, although for some of the ladies it was their. The boys (Bertis and I) did a little soft shoe number, which was fun because I've never done that before. Luck for me Stephen had an apartment emergency that made him late and I was able to use the extra time to get the routine down, but wouldn't you know it, I danced it flawlessly when we practice it, and the only time I screwed it up was when he was watching. Murphey's law. We both sang a portion of All I Care About is Love, and then we read some scenes with the various girls present. I did the best I could and felt fairly good about it, now it's just about the look of the show I guess. Should hear something soon.

Still so sick

I still feel gross. Achey and snuffy, and my guts ar churning. I threw up a couple times duing the new 90210 last night, I don't know if it was the cold/flu or the show... wasn't the most exciting television experience of my life. It's like degrassi next generation or whatever it's called....they should've called it 9021 - oh no whatever possessed them to do this show show again?
I have my second call back tonight....just once I would like to audition for a show without being ill. Seems to be my luck, I get my seasonal 'whatever' just in time to go sing and dance for a part. Should be a hell of a night.

Loooong Weekend!!

True to form, we took Friday off as well, and stretched the long weekend into four days. My sore sore throat from earlier in the week, worked it's way into a full fledged cold with coughing, sneezing, and nose running a marathon. Still have it, still feel awful, and have have a second call back tomorrow. This time I get the honour of going up against Bertis, so I won't be holding my breath for this part, since leads tend to go to 6 foot tall men and I am never gonna be 6 feet tall.

Friday we spent putzing about the house, Darrell also has the cold, so we are quite a pair at the moment. Brian and Helen came by to visit. We had all planned to go camping on Deer Island, but just couldn't get it together to get there, and the way I was feeling I was relieved it didn't happen. Plus I have my little clown fish fry to fuss about as the larva make the transition into actual fish.

Saturday we got up with the birds and took a road trip to Maine. We hit all the Aquarium stores and had a very enjoyable day. We went to Bangor, Fairfield, Bucksport, Ellsworth, back to Bangor, then headed for home. We got two gorgeous fish, an Orange Shoulder Tang, and the fish Darrell has wanted since the very start, a juvenile Queen Angel Fish.



Both these fish will look a lot different when they are adults. We also got a few supplies and accessories. It wouldn't be a road trip to Maine for us, unless we were traveling home in torrential precipitation, last time it was the worst snow storm of the year, this time the sky waited until we were about half way to Calais and then it dumped rain on us so hard you could barely see out the window. The rain made the journey to Calais very slow, but it finally let up once we were nearly there and then all we had to contend with was the NB fog and poorly marked, wet roads.

We got home around 11:30pm and spent a great deal of time acclimating the fish and just chilling out. It was 2am before we hit the hay.

Sunday was a wasted day, since we were up so late the day before. We were supposed to head down to Deer Island and meet the Bonds for cake, since they had actually gotten brave and camped there on Saturday. After the rain we drove in I'm glad it was them and not us. A friend from Sussex paid us a visit, so by the time he was gone, it was just too late to head down to the Island.

Monday was another lazy day. Just kicking back and dealing with the colds. I did a little (very little) cleaning and generally spent the day fussing over little things and watching the fish swim. The little clownfish fry numbers dropped significantly from day to day as the morphing phase hit. As of this morning there are two that actually survived the change and two others that have yet to go through it, quite a drop from the hundred or so we put in there to begin with. I'm quite happy with the result so far though, as I never expected any to really make it this far since it was my first attempt and I knew I would make some mistakes. The bright side; none of them would've made it through the night after hatching if I hadn't tried this, so to have two (potentially four, but not counting them til they change and survive) make it this far is pretty impressive and encouraging.