TGI...Pre-Black Friday Five

It's the Friday before Black Friday making it...??? "Save your money and get ready to binge on turkey" Friday? Everytime I open my email or sort through the mail it seems like another notice for the next great deal is waiting for me. As J Word and I start to figure out what our first set of holidays together will look like, we've discussed all kinds of options and traditions. I can pretty confidently say, Black Friday shopping will probably not be one of them!

But it used to be. Mookie will remember well the years that we ventured out at midnight (when stores actually kept their doors closed until midnight!) and saw all kinds of shenanigans. There was the year we went to Target only to find the line out the doors and wrapped around the parking lot. There was the year we went to Walmart and realized they were about to cut open their "midnight special" boxes, and that we were probably going to get trampled. (This story ends with us hopping a store barricade and getting yelled at by the security guy.) There was the year we were waiting in line at Kohl's at about 2:00AM, falling asleep on our feet, only to realize we were buying something that wasn't that great of a deal anyway! These are fond memories in that they were goofy times spent with my sister. These were not fond memories in the sense that I got the greatest deal imaginable, and therefore NEED to Black Friday shop. It was just a weird part of quality, holiday family time. Last year...in her Thanksgiving night absence...I shopped on Amazon...

But that's next weekend, this weekend is all about not shopping, getting ready for our Thanksgiving road trip to Tennessee, and football (as J Word and I prepare for Round 2 of "A House Divided" Packer/Vikings showdown). To help launch you into your own weekend festivities, here's a Friday Five!

1. This week I dyed my hair. It's very brown, and very different then it was; but I think I'm over the initial shock of it, and will probably even come to love it (though my stylist assures me that, it I don't, she can have it back to blonde by the wedding!) I did this on a little bit of a whim, but in the full assurance and confidence that I was paying a professional a decent sum of money not to ruin my too horribly. Had I done this by myself, with a box in the bathroom, I guarantee this would have been my inner monologue...which is why I'll never do it at home by myself!

2. Last weekend J Word and I took our engagement pictures in the snow, which sounds cute until the photographer confesses that the camera lens can't focus through the flakes anymore, and you end up in the skyways downtown taking creatively shot indoor pictures, while still slightly soggy from the winter mess outside. (It's all totally fine though. It was a ton of fun, and our photographer was grand!) Nevertheless, winter seems to be sticking around for good, and this depressing little story seems to prove it.

3. ...But I'm not really complaining about the winter weather, because at least I don't like in Buffalo!

4. In the event that you do plan to go Black Friday shopping...good for you! Might I suggest picking up Lammily, the realistically proportioned Barbie that comes with acne stickers and stretch marks. Yes...this is a real thing!

5. And last but not least, J Word has recently gone gluten free, and as a result, I'm in the process of learning how to cook and bake all over again. Ok...that's not totally true, but I read A LOT more ingredients labels than I used to, and I used to read A LOT of ingredients labels anyway. So tips like these common baking mistakes are very helpful, and I offer them to you in the event you should ever need to go GF yourself!

Happy Trails, 

Friday Five

Oh sweet week of being home before 8:00, getting a decent amount of sleep, having dinner with J Word...at home...which wasn't prepared by Chipotle or the staff lounge microwave. These are all good thing, and they have me in a much better space heading into this weekend, which will hopefully continue to feature sleeping soundly, quality fiance time, and relaxation!

I knew that it wouldn't be an automatic shift to "normality" as I caught up on those things that I let slide a bit as I went into musical crisis mode (I'm looking at you three loads of laundry!), but it has been nice to reacclimate to a schedule that is a little less crazy and much less stressful. I even got back to a workout this week, finding two chances to fit in an hour of spinning while watching movies that have sat long neglected.

So things are headed back in the right direction, and with the promise of a new auditorium in the future, and 101 things I will do differently next time, I'm not TOTALLY dreading doing another show. (I'm also not all that torn up over the fact that the musical only comes around every other year, either!) In the meantime, I'll just keep catching up on two months worth of lost sleep, enjoying home cooked meals, and getting back to all the other important things that took a backseat to musical mayhem. Here's to a great weekend! Let's kick it off with a Friday Five.

1. J Word and I are having our engagement pictures taken this weekend, and while I did not expect there to be snow on the ground for the occasion, it looks like our November photo shoot may be in a bit of a winter wonderland. I'm going to embrace this idea seeing as our first date was in the middle of a snowstorm and the beginning of our relationship was mostly spent leapfrogging from snow day, to cold day, to "how bad do the roads really have to be before I wouldn't try to get to Rochester/La Crosse" moments. I rarely think about the fact that J Word and I are an "online couple" anymore, mostly because it doesn't really matter once the real relationship is in place. However, I came across this assessment of the stages of online dating while browsing Thought Catalog and thought, "You know what...this is REALLY true!"

2. I have barely run a step since Chicago, mostly because the musical ended up taking my free time, daylight's savings time stole all my daylight hours in the afternoon, and Mother Nature dropped a premature polar vortex onto Minnesota that brought snow, and uncomfortably cold running temperatures. But I have been cycling again, and when I came across this list of the world's best marathons, I did think that I should either tough it out in running tights, or suck it up and get on the treadmill. Ugh.....oh well.....spoiler alert, Chicago is #2. Now you can just skip the list altogether!

3. Cards Against Humanity...that is all! Buy it, play it, dig through the cards making your own crazy, inappropriate hilarious combinations. I guarantee you won't be disappointed!






4. This week Kim Kardashian's butt "broke the internet," but really it just broke out everyone's chance to be ridiculously sarcastic. If you haven't see any of the numerous responses to said images, you can Google search on your own time and at your own risk, though I highly recommend the MET's response! It's classic. (Art that is...)

5. OMG! This woman apparently died from eating raw cookie dough! It's not an urban legend after all!? Be warned before you start your weekend baking!

Happy Trails

This one time, I started losing my mind...

It had been over a week since I had slept soundly through the night when I woke up one morning and couldn't remember how or when I'd fallen asleep at all. In fact, I was fairly certain I must have fallen asleep mid-conversation as I remembered being awake, lights-on, talking to J Word, and the next thing I knew, my alarm was going off, and I was groggily fumbling in the dark for the snooze button.

This was both disorienting and a bit of relief. I have not slept well in the run-up to the musical because the musical has left me with far more on my mind than I am able to shutdown at night, and so my thoughts race through those things that I haven't been able to deal with during the day. The power going out (and thus eliminating the possibility of our much need tech rehearsal) on Saturday, did little to help me unwind over the weekend, and our 7 hour replacement rehearsal on Monday during the school day, was not exactly the nerve soother I would have hoped for. I have been woken repeatedly by nightmares ranging from bad things happening on stage, to bad things happening in life in general. I've been exhausted for days.

So the fact that I had fallen asleep without even recognizing it, and stayed asleep long enough that I was confused in the morning as to how it had all happened, meant one of two things. Either 1. Things had started to go well enough that my body finally let itself relax, or 2. I had finally lost my mind, reached the point of physical exhaustion, and had gone into self preservation mode. Actually, both options probably hold an element of truth! The show is better...not great...but better; but regardless of how things go, I'm also not sure I could have made it on many more nights of limited sleep.

Time gives perspective to all things, and there will come a time in the future that I will look back on Honk! as the little show that could...almost didn't...but then could again. There will come a time when I'm home before 9pm, in bed and sleeping soundly without nightmares of scene changes and show disasters. Moving forward, I know what I'd change, what I'll do differently next time, and what things are going to always be variables when directing high school theatre. I also know who stands in my corner, who's willing to step up to the plate, who's always going to have my back. These are important lessons, lessons I know linger amid the chaos of everything that the last two weeks have been, and, in time, will come to mean much more than mere "silver lining" afterthoughts of an otherwise challenging stretch.

Honk! If you love theatre. Honk! If you're ready to watch someone else perform it for a while, from a seat other than the director's!

Happy Trails,