Pool party!

Sunday was a fun-filled day in the sun and my skin proves it. R&T recently bought a pool – shallow enough for the visiting three year old to stand in but big enough to fit seven adults and a teenager comfortably having a water gun fight. To celebrate the purchase, they had a holiday-style cookout. Burgers and hot dogs cooked on the grill, potato salad and coleslaw recipes competed for side dish space, ice cream packed the freezer and beer filled coolers. Couples and kids showed up to play in swimsuits and the day lasted forever.

The Bald One and I determined that we now need to designate a beach/pool bag. While we knew what we needed for the pool, we don’t seem to have it in a central location. As we were walking out, the cooler of beer & jug of iced tea in the car, both of us started to remember the stupid little things you realize you don’t have usually as your feet hit the sand. Where did we leave the sunscreen from last season? Oh – should we grab saline solution for your contacts? My hat is by the door, can you grab it since you’re right there? Finally, we had our bag of clothes/towels/gear and off we went.

We arrived to chaos. There were people everywhere – an unusual event for R&T, as somehow everyone ends up in different places and is either late or nonexistent at most of their last-minute-ish shindigs. We had a few water gun fights, hilarious moments watching the 3yo on the slip’n’slide and general cavorting in the sun. The burgers were a highly fought-over dish, where the Bald One stole more than his fair share claiming he wouldn’t be around for the second round because of work…then managed to eat two more later that night after his return. The coleslaw, I’m told, was the usual expected excellence and the potato salad I know was fabulous. Red velvet cupcakes were out to celebrate a birthday, but nobody was targeted for bad singing.

Later, after many of the folks packed up and went home, the remaining die-hards took naps or relaxed in a shady spot. I finished off another book and enjoyed just being able to sit in the sun for a bit. After naptime, we all jumped back in the pool, enjoying the ability to be submerged up to one’s neck and having a conversation. As the skies grew dark and the temperature dropped with the impending storm, we moved inside for another round of food and hilarious television. The hour being rather late, we finally headed home twelve hours after we left.

Despite my sunburnt shoulders arguing with me, I’d class it as a satisfactory day.

 

T13: Reasons I’m Working for the Weekend

It’s been one long spring and I’m ready for summer. The past ten weeks have been one of the longest shows I’ve worked on since I left college. We started a week early and this production company likes to run for four weeks instead of the usual three. No biggie, but at this point we’re all looking at each other thinking “done.” Luckily, this one ends on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. I’ll have two glorious days where I have no commitments that I don’t make myself. So here’s a list of why I’m counting the minutes to the weekend.

13 Reasons I’m Working for the Weekend

1. Three Day Weekend! Three whole days where I don’t have to go to my little cubicle and listen to other people have conversations I’m not supposed to hear right outside my wall.
2. Closing night Always a great time to reach that point in a show, where you can all look at each other and say “we made it!” This one culminates with a party at Spice Street.
3. Spice Street on a Saturday Throughout this show, we’ve tried to have a drink over at Spice Street and routinely been blocked out by some chickie in some scantily clad yet oh-so-stylish outfit saying “it’s a private party” Once was the annual Latino thing, another time was a white party, and still another was just some odd event where we got no explanation. It’s nice to be on the guest list this time and tell them off.
4. Brunch The world stopped turning and the Bald One and Five Diamond (T) have Sunday and Monday off. This means we’re getting the long awaited brunch. Hopefully with cheese biscuits.
5. 5 hours of BBC I acquired the 5 hour version of Pride and Prejudice recently. Part of brunch is going to involve curling up with the hubby and our friends and watching this epic.
6. Gardening! With both of us off, we might actually finish mulching our front flower beds. Will wonders never cease?!?
7. Lazy Monday The other benefit of having both days off with the Bald One, we can be lazy and sleep in on Monday until the indecent hour of 10am.
8. new iPhone (maybe) Mercury went into retrograde and took out my cell phone. This means I lost connection with the world. Today (well, Thursday is almost weekend…) I go to the Genius Bar and if they can’t fix it, I get a new one. Woohoo!
9. new tattoo? I’m hoping to go visit the tattoo parlor and get the one that has been in my head for a while put on my body. It’s going to be a garland of gerber daisies around my ankle.
10. Ez Clean House Having had a “professional” come do the place last weekend means I should be able to rock through cleaning the house this weekend.
11. No more quiet office Things supposedly start to get interesting here after Memorial Day. Growing season kicks in and people start doing things fun.
12. Cheese Biscuits Have I mentioned these enough???
13. Sleep I miss it so. I’m looking forward to spending quality time with my bed.

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Weekends are for social insanity

Last weekend, amid opening Clean House, we had a full schedule. Kicking off the weekend early on Thursday was Opening Night which – for the first time ever – was attended by the Bald One. He seemed to enjoy the show and meeting the people I’ve been spending way too much time with and we escaped to our home at a decent hour.

Friday, the actual start to the weekend, had me enjoying a fabulous apple martini at Spice Street after the show with some of the cast, the director and our house manager. When I left at a decent hour, I was cajoled into driving fifteen minutes past my house to R&T’s new digs. After about an hour of checking out the nifty place, sitting on their deck enjoying the weather, the week caught up with me. We all migrated in to play Mario Kart and I started to fight sleep in the comfy leather recliner. I eventually give up, the boys run off to play loud music and I’m prodded awake around 4am to go sleep in a real bed.

Saturday – blissful bed as long as I want – followed by an attempt to clean and do useful things before running off to my show. The big deal this time around was that following the show, I was meeting the gang at our favorite little downtown bar for the Class of 1985 Prom. Complete with costumes and more AquaNet than I thought still existed. I can’t think of a song that they played that we weren’t singing word for word. What a deranged bunch we are.

Sunday was quieter, as suits the day of rest. Our matinee audience was refreshingly unexpected. After the show, we closed up shop for the next three days and I went off to a small house party in the opposite direction of my home. The party was a good mix of theater and civilians from all walks celebrating the Rites of Spring and the Fifth of May. After enjoying some excellent imported cheese in quesadilla form, I headed back home for a lazy evening with my husband.

You would think I’d learn to take a weekend of down time? Nah, why live that way…it’s too quiet.

 

Darnit, I want my deck

Today is the absolute perfect day to have a deck.

There are twenty gazillion things I should be doing right now, ranging from scrubbing six weeks of life off the interior of the house to mowing the weeds. What I really want is to have some kind of cushy recliner set out on my non-existent deck and enjoy the cool breezes as I doze in the sun. It’s been that kind of week.

Our show opened on Thursday, which was quite excellent. I felt loved and admired as one of the actresses proceeded to say how fantastic I was. I made bonus points with her daughter as well by recommending that she check out the Maine State sumer theater camp. Just the fact that I knew about such a thing apparently was awesome. And, for the first time ever, the Bald One was in attendance. That made my night.

This show’s tech wasn’t a particularly hard one, but the week before of running and notes and discussion every night and will we/won’t we get the set elements in time was a little taxing. Add to that opening on the first of a month when bills are due and being in that odd limbo at work of being on the cusp of being busy but not being busy yet and you have one whacked out little Rae.

The yippy-skippy news is our federal “economic stimulous” package arrived. I should throw it at a bill and make it go away, but at current, I have a plan where we actually are managing to pay things down in a reasonable fashion. Combine that with the couple that gets us to go downtown and have a beer with them so often moving out to the boonies and we have an instant extra money supply. So the majority of the funding went into a savings account.

The not so yippy-skippy news is that the Bald One’s employer officially filed Chapter 11 yesterday. Blaming the sagging home market and the lack of retail confidence and you’ve got a failing home-goods store. Oddly, they’re not closing any stores in this area - despite our bets that one of them really should be. The Bald One does have his resume all shined up and has already applied for another position with a prescription home delivery company. Normal hours and theoretically better pay? If he’s happy, I’m all for it.

But now, I’ve delayed long enough. The house isn’t getting cleaner with me playing online. The bills are paid though, the one odd charge is gone and the breakfast has long been finished. Time to get cracking on life.

Even though the breeze is blowing and the birds are singing. Damn reality.

 

Spring! Well, maybe…

After it warming up to the upper 70’s and low 80’s for a week followed by a cold snap that brought all our plants indoors, we’ve started to warm up again. Just in time for my show to open and me to have time on the weekends to think about making it pretty. The Bald One has put in many hours while I’ve been at the theater or at my day job and all but one island in the front has been weeded and mulched. Since we were starting from a complete lack of mulch and a mess, this is an amazing feat.

The fact that our front has gotten this far has made me realize that we need a lot more work to make the front yard match the rest of the neighborhood. We don’t live in a showstopping community. It’s more of a tired, real community that your see inmore established areas. The picture perfect houses scare me. But even with a quieter set of standards, we still look too new, too disorganized.

Part of the solution will likely be adding more color. We’re slowly getting there as the roses take more presence in the yard and the burning bush is loving taking center stage against the blue-grey house. Our winter honeysuckle has established and is climbing insanely on a different side. To contrast, the jessamine has overgrown the trellis on the side of the house. It just takes time and I’m impatient.

the other thing our yard desperately needs is grass. Currently we have a mix of three different types of weeds along with bermudagrass and some kind of fescue. Pestering some of my coworkers, I discovered that the best bet for the moment is to keep the lawn and weeds closely trimmed and spray a broad-range herbicide to kill what survives trimming. This should keep things down until fall when we can re-seed. At that point we should be able to keep things at bay and crowded out by the grass root structure. Hopefully.

Really, I don’t give the Bald One enough credit. A majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to getting things done around the house - inside and out - is done by him. I guess it makes us even - I’ll get the bills paid and do some of the artsy point of view nonsense, and he gets to buy power tools. As I type this, supposedly I am getting wall mounted shelves put up in the office which will give us more book stashing space and a place to display his action figures.

I have a good one.

 

see why I love him?

Conversation via text message with the Bald One this morning:

Rae: Journey, Heart and Cheap Trick at the Creek this summer. We going?

Bald One: Fuck ya!

Rae: Love you!

Bald One: love you too

See why I love him?

 

My brain, she leaks out my ears.

Thank baby Jesus, it’s the weekend. Tonight, the Bald One and I will venture southeast to the in-laws domicile to help navigate a blackberry and talk to our favorite jeweler about my engagement ring. That was actually probably the start of my brain turning to jelly.

Wednesday, I noticed the stone in my engagement ring looked funny. The stone had fractured and the larger part was still in the setting. A coworker and I spent twenty minutes searching the dark carpeting for the dark stone chip so I could at least pretend I have the full stone. The Bald One is sad for me, and we plot to go to the jeweler who originally set it to see if we could replace it and perchance re-facet the original stone for a different setting.

Thursday starts with a “are you in this meeting?” - only to discover that while I am not in the meeting, I am in the meeting. I leave that one for another meeting that I was officially having. From there I went from one thing to another getting little fires here and there put out. I reached the end of the day and past it, as I tried to finish this thing and that before running off to meet the Bald One for a quick dinner at Panera’s before my monthly Stampin’ Up! fix with the gals for scrapbooking. I get home to my husband walking out the door (not quite, but close) to see our friend’s new puppy.  He promises to be home by 1am-ish. I check people online and keep up with my friends only to make random connections and stay up way too late.

Staying up late can make one cranky in the morning and prone to a touch of over-sleeping. When I dragged my butt out of bed and finished processing the fact that the day began with duplications, I was already behind and forgot to prep the coffee the night before. I plead with the drowsy Bald One, who swore he might beat me out of bed on his day off, to go make the coffee…but to no avail. Showered and feeding the brain with a half of an asiago bagel from yesterday, I watch the slow percolation as the seconds tick by making me later and later for work.

I stroll in late and slightly guilty but am confident I can tie up a few loose ends left from yesterday. I get my computer up from its nap and I’m about to logon when one of my regional managers starts a discussion with me. This results in two things I need to do for him today. One is immediately started, but not finished until Monday at the earliest. The other takes me until 4:45pm begin as my phone rings. That call finishes and I realize my voicemail is blinking. Those get followed up on only to have the light go on again. The email (which, I started reading during the first call due to the fact we were discussing it) is getting chipped away and other items are either completed and filed, forwarded on to another party or creating a new list of questions. I think I was on the phone more than not from when the manager left my office until some time after lunch. I actually made a quick call as people were waiting for me in a warming-up car…and during that call, the VM light came on again. Instead of compulsively checking it, I left it.

Lunch brought a brief respite, after checking my email on the way to find out we officially lost one actor, replaced him with an actor already cast and cast a replacement in that role. We’d also gained someone to read stage directions and an assistant to the producer had been contacted. All good things on that front, and I created some duplication by not finishing reading an email before sending out a question. We got back from lunch just in time for me to run quick to a meeting I almost forgot to attend. After this meeting I got back to sorting out the twenty things I knew I needed to work on in some way shape or form. The phone stopped ringing. Email stopped pinging. I sent off reminders to folks who hadn’t gotten back to me, hunted down information from one person, made arrangements for a meeting on Monday and realized that oh-heck…I should leave in a few minutes to beat the insane Friday night traffic.

But first, let me get this done. And this. oh - and did I tell them? no…send email and cross that off the mental list. Next thing I know, there’s someone reminding me that there’s a gentleman who wants to walk us out to our cars so we don’t have problems in the dark. It’s 6:30pm. I have two voicemails on my phone, luckily from friends and not theater people who need me that moment. I return one to a voicemail and return the other while driving. That leads to a ninety minute conversation interupted once by the first call calling me back and again by cats demanding food. I scarf down a bite to eat (grapes and chips!) and then call the other back again. This leads to catching up that ends when I go “oh shit, time to get ready to go to Wilmington…” only to have the phone ring saying the Bald One is on his way.

Now, I really need to leak my brain out my ears.

 

Snoring Beast-thing

We occasionally live a life of excess. I’ve started to cut back in some things - I’m eating better, I’m not buying frivolous books and I’m paring down our closet. There are a few things that still go to the extremes. One is our Super Bowl shenanigans.

The Super Bowl is the one day a year where the Bald One makes his infamous wings. We usually end up with three different mega bowls of it - one straight up Frank’s Red Hot and two that are doctored. This year one had a dose of Scorned Woman and the other was West African Voodoo. For those not spicy sauce aficionados, those are both on the 10+ range. Regular tabasco is around a seven. This year we got to watch someone sweat as they nibbled at the mildest flavor. Through years of living with my spice-addicted husband, I’ve developed a palate that allows for me to survive such food.

To add to the decadence of the wings, we had brownies, crackers and cheese, chips with three different kinds of dip (salsa, bean and con queso) and a veggie platter. The veggies and brownies were actually quite decimated by the end of the evening. The wings were packed away and my chef did dishes while I continued to pack up the remains of the munchies.

Clean up was completed just as House came on after the football festivities and we watched the beginning together. The Bald One disappeared during a set of commercials. I yelled it was back in case he was available…but he told me to go ahead without him. I didn’t, and puttered around a room I’ve been working on while waiting for him. Still no signs of life came from the room he had closeted himself in, so I went off to something else for a few minutes. That’s when I heard it.

The walls were shaking with the vibrations. There was a growl of an undertone to a breathing…sure enough, my husband was snoring. I found him curled up in the fetal position on the cold tile - a position I usually only see him in after drinking excessively. I didn’t think this was the case this evening so I badgered him into coming back to the living room with me where I could keep an eye on him.

Now he’s the snoring beast-thing on my carpeted floor while I type. Tomorrow’s a work-day for me, so I’ll be for bed shortly. Hopefully he’s not miserable for his one weekday off this week.

 

he might have to die for that

Picture, if you will, a loving couple having a moment in their kitchen. They’re hugging in a moment of affection while preparing dinner for themselves. Dinner is simmering on the stove and they’re goofing off. He lovingly touches her hair at the temple and then stops. He looks carefully at her head. She’s startled and looks at him intently.

BO: Hold on

Rae: What? is something wrong?

BO: I can’t tell. It might be the light.

Rae: (panicking now) What?!?

BO: I think it’s grey.

A battering around his chest and shoulders followed this statement. Yes, I’m going grey. At the temples and scattered throughout. It’s really amusing on some days, I have this grey halo since the lighter my hair is the more it curls. So I have these ringlets on top of grey, followed by a layer of wavy blondish brown, and a heavy weight of light brown and auburn tones.

But it isn’t like he has to point it out

 

Flashbacks

Gypsy wrote eloquently today on dating and the beginning of her relationship with her fiancee. This weekend is similar to the weekend the Bald One and I first met face-to-face.

He and I met online on an off-the-beaten-path dating site. I posted there and found him right around Thanksgiving. I went into tech shortly afterwards and started keeping odd hours. He was working then with a wine distributor and his two days off were the two nights I was guaranteed to be at the theater. Emails were common and conversations were fun.

Then it snowed. Have you ever seen a snow storm in Raleigh? The best time I’ve ever seen was actually three years ago this weekend and resulted in news like this being in the papers and on CNN. We really don’t know how to deal with snow. I had a show that night and I had no problem driving quietly and surely through the snow. My actress was with me, having grown up in Florida and no idea how to drive in this weather. The snow came down all through the show and we ended with a long, quiet drive back home. By the time I got home, it was quite late and I was surprised to see him online.

We spent a long time on instant messenger, then I couldn’t read straight so we moved it to the phone, until we both dozed off.  I figured I had work in the morning and was reassured I’d be able to go back to bed after checking the news at 7am. Sure enough, I did. And that afternoon I ventured out and bought supplies to make spaghetti sauce and other foodstuffs.

We talked again that night, and eventually signed off, thinking about how The Mummy, a movie neither of us had seen all the way through, was going to be on TNT…and I could make pasta. Dinner was excellent, the movie was fun and much snuggling was had.

This weekend we’re due for somewhere between two and ten inches - nobody knows for sure. But six years ago, a January storm got me where I am now - snuggled on a couch with the Bald One.