Sallyacious: November 2008 Archives

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November 26, 2008

Sitting

I am not, it turns out, particularly good at enforced leisure.

I'm quite good at just hanging out. Especially if there's a beach and a bar and good conversation. Or just gorgeous scenery to walk in.

But any more, I get bored easily. If I'm home, I can address that by practicing avoidance, by thinking about all of the things I ought to be doing and then not doing them. That cuts the boredom out of the picture immediately. Or I can go into my studio/office with the impulse to do something, look at the mess, feel faint and totter back to the couch to rest.

However. I am currently sitting in a lovely room in a small town on a lake, and I am BORED OUT OF MY SKULL. I took a walk "downtown" this afternoon, and after looking through three art/craft stores and one toy/bookstore, I was done there too. Then I read for a while. Then I played Final Fantasy on the PSP and ate the leftovers from dinner last night and now I am bored again. Bored bored bored.

I have no attention span. Until the nephew (and the rest of the family) arrives, I am stuck here in my head. And there's apparently not enough to do here. Which I thought was going to be a good thing. Enforced rest. Turns out? Not so much.

Update: I very cleverly left my charger at home. So I will not be posting much this week. Since my laptop is fast running out of battery. (I didn't realize my mistake until I had less than 50% of my battery left.)

Cat Update: I spoke with the vet yesterday afternoon. Katala is cranky and sore, but they're pretty sure it's arthritis. In her spine, poor baby, but until it affects her neurologically--which isn't an issue at this point, her reaction times all appear to be quite strong--we just need to manage the pain. Which doesn't seem to be that much of an issue for her, most of the time.

Also: I cured (or at least delayed) my cabin fever for a brief time this afternoon by playing in a brand new (to me) art form. I spent two plus hours this afternoon making a fused glass suncatcher. I won't get it back for a couple of weeks--they have to fire it and then ship it--but I'm very much looking forward to how it turns out.

Everybody who walked by told me it was beautiful, and the customers didn't have to, so I'm hoping it will be as lovely as it appeared pre-firing.

And now, Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American readers, and to all of my readers, thank you.

Posted by sally at 02:00 PM | Comments (2)

November 22, 2008

Choosing Perspective

Seriously, Universe? Really? You have to throw this at me too?

Last night, thirty three days after Polyphemos died, I once again found myself at the emergency vet clinic at WSU in the middle of the night with a cat who was clearly in distress from an unidentifiable source. Katala, who'd been treated at our own vet for constipation earlier in the day, started fussing and breathing rapidly and walking strangely and acting like she really hurt around 2am. I tried really hard to be calm and collected, but the cat woke me up after I'd been asleep for maybe 90 minutes, and I'm currently perhaps just a touch hypervigilant about beastie health right now. So I'm admitting right here that I may have overreacted. (Though given what it could have been, I could easily argue that prompt attention was the better choice.)

The good news is that she came home with me at 7:30 this morning. She's sleeping off a valium and ketamine cocktail on my fleece in the bathroom, and all signs point to her pushy sweet little self being with us for a while more.

The bad news is that she has to be on "cage rest" and regular painkillers for the next 6-8 weeks unless she improves more quickly.

They're not completely sure what ithe deal is, but after giving her a painkiller and sedating her and poking and prodding and pulling at her, followed by x-rays, she appears to have an issue with her spine that is causing pain and making her legs tense and stiff. They gave me their best guesses this morning around 6:30, and I must say that it took about 20 minutes for me to get the gist of it. Thank goodness the vet was very patient with me, because I think she repeated herself about six times.

What it isn't:
☸ Feline Arterial Thromboembolism (THANK GOD). She apparently has very strong femoral pulses in both legs. So that was a relief.
☸ A gut tumor. Also a huge relief.
☸ A perforated bowel. Again, a relief.

The x-rays look okay except for a possible area of smaller than normal disc space near the edge of one image, which their radiologist will be looking at today to see if it could related to this situation. If that acutally is an issue, it could mean one of several things: a slipped disc, degenerative disc disease, arthritis, a bone tumor.

It could be a muscle pull. Which wouldn't show up on an x-ray, but the cat had a massive bowel movement yesterday evening after getting two enemas. She could have pulled or sprained a muscle in that spot on her back at any point in time during that process. And the acute onset of the symptoms is a good indicator that that may very well be the problem.

This appears to be, for want of a better term thanks to the five and a half hours of worry sandwiched between a total of five hours of sleep, an architectural issue rather than a systemic one. And hopefully, given how healthy she is otherwise, a transient situation. Currently, we are practicing pain management and enforced rest.

See, the cat's 17 1/2. You have to expect some wear and tear on a body that's the equivalent of 87 in human years. But her little spirit is still so sweet and strong. She jumped up on a chair in the examining room, so I don't think it's a permanent thing. I really hope it isn't. I'm hoping it's just an old lady struggling while getting enemas thing.

Speaking of which, both the vet and her assistant couldn't get over how gorgeous and young Katala looks. They kept repeating that she didn't look 17. She doesn't. She's a healthy, active little girl whose fur, eyes, teeth and behavior bely her years. Actually, that's true for all three of our girls, though Katala has hybrid vigor in an exceptional amount, I think.

But where does the perspective shift come in all this? The deliberate perspective shift I hinted at in the title to this entry?

I've not wanted to post here lately. I've felt like all I do is complain about various aspects of my life, and quite frankly, I'm tired of whining. I expect you're tired of my whining too. So this week, since I couldn't really think of anything to write here except to bitch about various petty things, I've avoided posting. And last night, driving to Pullman again in just over a month with a feline emergency, not knowing whether my animal was going to come home with me ever again, all I could think about was how hard this year has been, in so many ways, some of which I've shared with you here, some of which I haven't.

I don't want it to be like that anymore. I don't want to dwell on the parts that suck. That's not to say that I am going to push it all away and pretend like it never happened. That wouldn't solve anything. I'd just have to deal with it all later, and I prefer instant gratification, even in my agonies. But this last week, I threw a fairly large and well-attended pity party for myself on the couch. When I wasn't teaching or grading, I was avoiding my responsibilities and moping. Which solves things not one little bit, and in many ways actually makes them worse given that the things I wasn't dealing with continued to pile up and fester.

So. I have decided to work very very hard to focus on the positive from here out. I know that I can't necessarily keep horrible things from happening, but I can choose to look for the good, rather than automatically assuming the worst will befall. I can recognize that it's possible, but I can also take steps to be ready for the best, should it happen, and focus on working on the things I can control, rather than lying about on the couch waiting for all the awful things I can imagine to actually occur. I know from previous experience that I can choose how I approach the world and the things it brings me.

Trust me. I'm not turning into Pollyanna here. This is going to be tough. Optimism is much harder to achieve and maintain than pessimism--just ask anybody on Wall Street right now--but it's necessary to my soul's survival. I'm sure I'll still grumble and curse the sky some days. The things that make me crazy aren't vanishing in puffs of sparkly pink smoke, after all. But they don't have to be my main focus. I'm going to take a page from Inland Empire Girl's book and count my blessings.

My first blessing? You.

Posted by sally at 01:15 PM | Comments (4)

November 20, 2008

Also,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN!!!

I hope it was wonderful, Baby Brother.

Posted by sally at 11:18 PM

Done!

In a huge push yesterday I graded all of my outstanding student assignments. Today I taught and then got all of their grades entered and posted. So now, I'm done. Except for writing a brief note to go with the invitation to our gallery and figuring out when I need the people who will be helping me to set up on site to actually help with the setting up, I'm done for the next week and a half. D. O. N. E. done.

I have a vacation. An until a week from Tuesday vacation. That is Bliss.

Oh my. Just now I walked into the kitchen and glanced out the window. The sky was on FIRE. From the living room, you can't tell, that window looks to the east, and everything is just grey over there. But in the west, goodness.

You know what? I don't feel like writing any more right now, so I'm not going to. Maybe I'll add something later, but maybe not. I may just enjoy my evening off.

Posted by sally at 04:00 PM | Comments (1)

November 19, 2008

Cold Brain

I haven't been making sense lately. This frequently happens when I have a cold. Logic and clarity of thought go right out the window. It's as though I begin thinking through cotton batting or something.

I could tell there was a problem when I reread comments I made on a few of the blogs I regularly read. They made sense at the time, right up until just after I clicked "post comment," but when they actually showed up online, they took all kinds of odd twists and demanded some interesting logical leaps of the reader. (If you got one of those comments from me, now you know why. Sorry about that.)

The same thing happened in an email exchange I just had with my teaching partner. We're getting ready to do an end-of-year major project gallery for our students' artwork. I put together the invitation yesterday afternoon and sent it to her for proofing. Here's the exchange that indicates what an idiot I am:

The invitation has the following time and date information :
Wednesday, December 3
4-5:30pm

She sent me an email that said, "I'd put 4:00-5:30pm"

My reply: "The time is on there. But if you didn't see it, I'll see if I can highlight it more.

And she responded, "The time thing... I was suggesting an expansion of 4-5:30 to 4:00-5:30."

I looked and looked at that, completely confused as to why she was giving me the exact same time parameters twice. I had to read that sentence THREE TIMES before I noticed the extra zeroes.

Cold brain in action, ladies and gentlemen.

And now I have to go to my office hours and grade student artwork, and I'm very, very afraid of what's going to happen there.

Posted by sally at 09:41 AM | Comments (1)

November 18, 2008

Nothing to See Here

Duuuuude.

I am drinking raspberry hot cocoa. And eating a graham cracker, honey and peanut butter sandwich. Dayum, is it ever a tasty snack. I put a little chocolate Silk in with the cocoa, and it's sooooo creamy and good. MMMMmmmmm...

The last several days have been kind of icky. Mostly because I've had this stupid cold--which now seems to FINALLY be going away, thank GOD--and all I really had the energy to do was lie around, despite having slept for most of the weekend. Seriously. Even today in class I was yawning like I hadn't been to bed in decades. I checked, and I had no fever, so I know it isn't a mono relapse, even though yesterday I was flashing hot and cold. Very strange illness.

Anyway, when I wasn't asleep, or lying on the couch playing lame-ass video games because I refuse to pay to play online, I was working on some fabric gift bags. Let me just say here that when doing ANY job, having and using the right tools makes things go so much faster. For this job? I did not have the right tools. Still don't, really, and it's been a pain in the ass. However, tonight I finally sewed three of the fuckers, and they look pretty good for my not being a particularly brilliant seamstress.

Oh. The other thing I did yesterday was try to slice off part of my finger. I bring this up only because the typing appears to have possibly started it bleeding again, though that may have been the shower I just took. I'm not sure I could even get stitches in it if I went in to the hospital because of where the slice is.

I was using my rotary cutter. I'd just changed the blade (I finally broke down and went to the fabric store to get new ones and in the meantime scored a bunch more remnants at 75% off) and I wasn't really paying attention to where my fingers were as I held my straight edge down on the plywood I'm using as a cutting surface. The plywood, by the way, is doubling as my ironing board. Remember what I said about using the right tools? Yeah. So anyway, I drew that rotary cutter back along the straight edge and right into the tip of my left index finger. Right next to the nailbed. Which is why I'm not sure stitches are possible and why typing is proving troublesome.

However. My point is that I've been feeling cranky and pestilential and useless. There's not really anything entertaining or even interesting about that, and along with everything else, my will to write dried up, and I didn't feel like posting. So I didn't. But now that I have these three lovely looking gift bags, I'm feeling like maybe I'm not so useless after all, and I thought I'd publish it here so you'd know.

Our anniversary was lovely, by the way. Thank you for the kind wishes. We went out to brunch at the local Sunday buffet, and Dave told them it was our 11th anniversary. (I think it was to explain why I was greedily sucking down a mimosa at 9am. Dude. It's orange juice. A perfectly suitable breakfast drink.) And they comped our meals. I am loving all the free food we're getting lately, though I expect that's about to come to an end.

Then we just took it easy all day. I cut out fabric and swore at the board, my cutter, my straight edge, the fabric, myself. Dave watched an entire football game--Denver, his team--for the first time all season. We hung out. He made spaghetti for dinner. We watched The Holy Grail, which is still one of the best silly movies I've ever seen. (It had extra bits put back in. I know this because I KNOW that movie, and there were parts of it I'd not seen before.) Then we played Scattergories and lounged about. Totally relaxing, comfortable, lovely day.

Now I'm gonna finish up the hot cocoa before it gets cold. Mmmmm... Hot cocoa...

Posted by sally at 10:24 PM | Comments (3)

November 16, 2008

Happy First 11th Anniversary, David

Thank you.

I love you.

Posted by sally at 10:05 AM | Comments (2)

November 15, 2008

It Felt So Much Like Stealing,

I actually wanted to apologize to the woman at the cash register at our local/national fabric store. (The one with the name that rhymes with WoeMan.)

I went in last night to check out their red tag completely out of season three years ago and/or not enough to make an actual piece of clothing section to see what might be available for giftwrapping. I decided this year, you see, to use something that's reuseable, as opposed to paper giftwrap, which isn't exactly sustainable. I may end up sewing bags and pouches of the stuff I found, rather than just randomly winding it up in the cloth. I just had that idea, and I'm pretty sure it's a winner. I did, by the way, find some great stuff.

And here's why it felt like it was stealing. I'd come across these two awesome 100% polyester satins with glittery bits glued on them, one a sort of peachy-orange and the other one in watermelon. I really wanted them, but they were $5/yard, which was still a bit more than I wanted to pay for what was essentially wrapping paper. Which is when I saw the VERY unobtrusive blue sign that said, "Veteran's Day Sale - 50% off all previously marked Red Tag Items - through November 15." I grabbed the two silky bolts and headed for the counter. Yes, they were indeed now $2.50/yard. Which is why I immediately ordered two yards of each. I was spending the same money, yes, but I was getting TWICE THE FABRIC. (Fabric that was originally $14.75/yd, I might add.)

That giddiness continued throughout the store. Because I did indeed find some great remnants in their remainders bin, 25" of a slippery blue/green fabric with gold embroidered roses for $1.38, a sparkly cranberry gauze for $2.77, that kind of thing, but then I decided I needed ribbon. Which is where I found the stuff that was marked 50 cents a spool but rang up at 25 cents/spool for 10 yard spools of 1/8" and 1/4" ribbon. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I had been tempted to make that noise as I wandered through the store finding these awesome deals, but I actually did when the ribbon rang up at .25.

All in all, I bought over $50 of stuff for slightly more than $22. As I said to the clerk at the checkout, "I feel like I'm stealing from you." "Enjoy it," she said. "It doesn't happen often."

No kidding.

Other lovely things that don't happen often? Being recognized by an assistant manager at a local restaurant who was so appreciative of our work in Tartuffe that he bought us dessert. And the next door neigbor telling me to please, walk in his yard, because I could get a better shot of the great horned owls from there than from the alley. He's an artist too, he gets it.

Yesterday was a really nice day.

Posted by sally at 09:28 AM | Comments (1)

November 14, 2008

And Then I Came Home to This

(Yes, I know it's out of focus. Hello. It's a digital camera. Nearly dark. Zoomed all the way in. And the only tripod I had was me.)

A pair has decided to nest in a great big pine tree near our house. They're chatting to each other right now. How lucky are we?

Posted by sally at 04:21 PM | Comments (3)

From the Vendor's Point of View

I took notes in my journal all day, in-between customers. (Look busy so you don't make people nervous is my motto.) What follows are my jottings. So it's kind of like I was live-blogging the art fair, only not really.

9:55am - Great variety of vendors this year. The ballroom is full and booths are spilling out into the lobby.

10:10am - Dear, Sweet Jesus, I may have to kill somebody. The booth I am covering is RIGHT NEXT TO a booth selling candles made of rocks. Not a big deal, except that they're oil lamps using scented oil. I'm REALLY ALLERGIC to the fake chemical scents they use in those things. It's going to be a long morning*.

10:15 - The scented oil rock lamp lady, while very nice, accosts Every. Single. Person. who walks by to explain the lamps. I have her schpiel memorized now.

10:22 - I finally broke down & called Dave. He will be bringing me a Claritin when he walks to campus later.

10:25 - I must admit, she's really good at sounding conversational and chatty as she repeats the same thing over and over and over. Though I'm finding the line, "So I get fire from my rocks," more and more grating.

10:29 - Also, "You're welcome to come in and see the colors that come from the earth."

10:35 - 1st sale. Four pop bottle cap magnets for $1 each. Now I can relax and feel like I've done something.

10:45 - Somebody recognized me from Tartuffe! Told me how much she enjoyed it. That was sweet, she didn't have to.

10:56 - As often happens, I have been proved an ass. The oil lamp lady uses unscented oils because of allergy concerns. It's the soap booth behind us that's using the horrible fake scents. And now I feel terrible about everything I wrote earlier.

11:29 - So here's why I'm not good at these things:
1) No time to make stuff. And you need LOTS of stuff for a weekend art/craft fair.
2) If it's handmade, I am FAR more likely to think, "Hey! I could do that!" and not buy it. Though I don't usually actually make it myself. But if I could do it, I fail to see why I should pay for someone else to do it.** And I assume every other person in the world is the same way, so unless I'm doing something super-amazing, why would anybody want to buy it?

11:49 - After two years of doing this--I was an actual vendor last year--I'm DEFINITELY learning what works:
     ✘ Have something amazing to draw people over.
     ✘Have something really inexpensive for those people who really want to buy something. (Hottest item at the table I worked? These pretty little bottlecap magnets that cost the artist less than five cents to make, but cost the customer $1.05, including tax.)
     ✘ Have something to do, both to keep you from getting bored and going mad, AND to keep you from frightening potential customers with your vulture-like stare.
      ✘ And if you're able to do something along the lines of your work, you can replenish your stock. Of course, the potters, candlemakers and book binders are SOL.

12:36pm - Aaaaaahhhhhhh... The Claritin is working.

12:40 - It's so much easier not to take things personally when the stuff you're selling isn't yours.

12:48 - Festival fashion is amazing. One woman just walked by wearing a tube scarf boa thing that at first glance appeared to be made of astroturf.

1:35 - Aaaaand the novelty has worn off. I'm sleepy and staring.

After my friend finished work and took over, I wandered the show. There was some great stuff. And some not so great stuff. I ended up getting some awesome flannel pants for my nephew and a very soft sock monkey at a 20% discount from the friend I covered for today. The nephew will also be getting that.

* I'm not sure why I kept referring to it as morning, since I was working 10-2.

** This is why our bathroom doesn't get cleaned as often as it should.

Posted by sally at 04:20 PM

Women's Works

A friend of mine has a table at the local women's arts & crafts fair this weekend. Unfortunately, as most artists do, she also has a day job. I'm a nice person. I have Fridays off. I'm womanning her table from 10-2 today.

I'm going to try very hard to not sneeze on anybody.

Posted by sally at 09:38 AM

November 12, 2008

Prop Storage

I still remember the moment I walked down the stage right/house left vom--short for vomitorium--and into the backstage storage area of the Hartung. On the stage left side, there's an office and an empty hallway leading to furniture, linen and rug storage, as well as to the pit and the props contstruction room. But on stage right is prop storage, and it's glorious.

Ever since I first saw it, I've been wanting to take pictures. I figured this show would be one of my last opportunities, so I stole downstairs with my camera when I had a chance. I don't really have anything to say about these, aside from the fact that the ceiling is at about 7', I think (I have to duck to get through the doorway to the pit--to the immediate left in the first picture--which is up three steps from the hallway floor). I just love to look at it. So I'll allow you the same opportunity.

Don't your fingers just itch to go through it and discover treasures?

Now a few explorations of the particular piece that caught my eye that November day five years ago. I don't know about you, but I have such an urge to pick some of these items up and appreciate their weight in my hands. Oh. Be sure to read the labels.

There's something about the sense of age and the muted colors in prop storage that really appeals to me. I wish I'd had more time to spend down there with the camera, as it was, I rushed through to get the shots before I was needed anywhere else. And I'm leery about heading down there to shoot on a day when I'm one of the only people in the theatre because of Oscar*. I don't really want to run into him, and I figure there's safety in numbers, so I only took the pix I could manage in the little time I had.

*I think I mentioned the Hartung ghost elsewhere. He and I met up once, and I'm really not keen on a repetition.

Posted by sally at 12:20 PM | Comments (6)

Backstage

I have time, since I'm not moving my butt off the couch until I absolutely have to, so I decided to edit the rest of the pictures I shot during the Tartuffe photo call.

Being an actor, despite my frequent references to the gross/sillyness of it all really does have a touch of magic to it. Acting is a privilege. I'm very lucky to get to do what I do. Interestingly, I am most fully conscious of this backstage. When I get to see all the secrets of the theatre that the audience never does. When I'm crossing through the pit to set a prop or sitting in the dark quiet of the wings, watching the lights shift on the cyc.

So what follows are some bits and pieces of the experience. An attempt to share the magic with you.

This is the cyclorama, cyc for short. It's a piece of canvas, in this instance a painted piece, that the lighting designers bounce light off of to indicate mood or sky. It's not normally meant to be realistic. The above photo is of the cyc under house lights, so not lit by the ground row (the lights on the ground) or the hung lights.*

But look what happens when they shine lights on it.

See what I mean about magic?

Also magical is what a good designer can do with ridiculously cheap materials.

That chandelier is made of pvc pipe, dollar store cereal bowls, a couple of other cheap plastic bowls, balsa wood and black paint. Oh, also crystal strands, which were probably the most expensive part of the whole thing. It's so gorgeous I want to hang it in my dining room, and they made three of them. From scratch, out of ridiculousness and imagination.

And here's a sense of how it looked in action:

So that's what I saw most nights, as I sat in the dark waiting for my cues. I could have played cards in the greenroom or gossiped in the makeup room or sat in the women's dressing room and read, but I always felt more comfortable in the wings. Partly, I'm sure it's because I didnt' want to miss an entrance, but I think for this show, it had a lot to do with needing to be with my own thoughts, and not distracted by everything else. I needed to be in touch with the play for as much of the way through it as possible. So I spent my time in the wings.

I'm going to check my email now and maybe take a nap. Later, I'll post the pics from prop storage.

**The thing to the left of the photo is a scrim, a piece of fine black netting that filters the image that gets out to the audience. So for Tartuffe, they saw the cyc through a bit of a veil, which added a softness to it.

Posted by sally at 11:00 AM | Comments (1)

November 11, 2008

Dabbit

I have a code, ad I ab craggy ad irritable.

I suspect it's the reason my final two performances were so odd, why I couldn't really seem to ground myself and felt all weak and shaky. I suspect it's also the reason I found myself contemplating whether a temper tantrum might actually be the best use of my time earlier today. (I decided--wisely, I think--against it.)

Anyway, now I'm coughy and sneezy and several other of the dwarves, including dopey, grumpy and sleepy. But not happy. Definitely not happy. I have too much to do. Too much that I WANT to do, not that I must do, just stuff I've been waiting to be able to get to, and this cold is not going to be helpful. I wanted to spend my evening making something, not sitting like a nasty, dripping lump that occasionally rouses itself enough to sigh.

At least I haven't started crying for absolutely no reason yet. That's a frequent symptom for me, and probably one of the most annoying. I hate how weepy I get when I'm sick. As if I needed another opportunity to generate snot.

I can tell you this much. I am definitely going to bed early tonight. And most likely cancelling my office hours tomorrow so I can sleep.

Mmmmmm... Sleep...

Posted by sally at 07:40 PM | Comments (1)

November 10, 2008

We Made the Right Decision

Oh how I hate second guessing myself, but that's exactly what I've been doing almost since the moment Poly died. What if I'd killed a perfectly good cat? What if he was actually healthy and it was only temporary and I'm a selfish asshole? What if we made the wrong choice?

Today, I spoke to the doctor we'd worked with that entire awful weekend. As you may or may not recall, we'd agreed to let them do a teaching necropsy on Poly. In case they could get any good information about him that could help advance veterinary medicine. (And also because I desperately needed to know that I hadn't killed a perfectly good cat.)

She had a lot of really helpful information for me. And, bless her, she asked first if I was in a place where I was ready and able to hear it. I think I astonished both of us by not crying at all during the conversation. I didn't need to. (I'm sure the woman who took my credit card and left the message for her when I collected Poly's ashes told her I was a weeping mess. Plus, she'd seen what a weeping mess I was the night we put him down.)

He definitely had FeLV.

His bone marrow was trying to regenerate, but on closer inspection, it was doing so in a very wrong kind of way, the kind of way that isn't helping at all.

He'd bled more than expected in places where he had blood drawn or had an IV inserted. (We knew from a previous test that his platelets were low, along with both his red and white blood cell counts. That's what prompted the vet to do an FeLV test in the first place.)

He did not have any signs of lymphoma.

He had a brain hemmorhage. Which affected his frontal occipital lobe. Meaning the blindness would have been permanent. But upon closer inspection of that, he had a whole bunch of smaller clots, indicating that this had been going on for some time.

Here's the bit where the teaching necropsy potentially becomes worth its weight in gold:

FeLV with no sign of lymphoma but cerebral issues is VERY RARE. (Of course our Boy was an anomaly right to the last. Of course he was.). There have been some situations in which there are central nervous system issues with FeLV but the connection isn't all that clear. They're not sure how the two are related. Thanks to Polyphemos' brain, however, they may be gaining a better idea of how/why some of these things happen. Which could help other cats in the future.

The doctor will be contacting me again if/when they get any more answers.

But for us, this news was the best news we could hear. Because it meant we made the right choice, no question. Apparently, he went and went and went and went, being his tough, ornery little self, until he just couldn't any more. And when he couldn't anymore, but while he was still Polyphemos, before he had huge amounts of pain or suffering, we let him go.

I'm glad he went quickly. And I'm so glad we listened to our hearts and made that choice. So glad.

Posted by sally at 08:47 PM | Comments (4)

Time

So this is what it feels like to have some.

I took another killer suck you into unconsciousness nap on the couch last night after the show. I didn't have to strike because I'm technically a guest artist, and instead of paying me, they don't make me strike. (I wouldn't mind a paycheck, if anybody's listening.) And then I went to bed early and slept in. It was glorious.

So far this morning (which ends in about 60 seconds) I have done some laundry and some dishes, unpacked all of my theatre gear and answered a whole passel of emails. I'm going to get my butt off the couch in a couple of minutes and walk to campus to catch up on the grading, and then I shall wend my way home. Where I might spend another evening lying on the couch or clean my office and then finish up all of the art projects I started ages ago. Because aside from Wednesday evening, when my students and I will be watching a movie, my evenings stretch free and open in front of me like a series of lovely promises.

I'm not sure whether I will use any of that time to work on Copy Central, my NaNo novel. The last 2500 words or so were really boring for me to write, and I've sort of lost interest. I learned an interesting lesson from that and from last year's failed entry: the stuff that's boring to write will probably also be boring to read, so why not just go ahead and skip it like you really want to, rather than forcing yourself to do it? There is a difference between boring and difficult, I get that. This stuff wasn't difficult to write. It was just boring. Ergo, I need to ignore it and write about the interesting stuff, like human sacrifices and secret, after hours copy machine rituals and maybe a half-hearted copy machine exorcism.

The thing is, at the rate I type, I could easily catch up and be at 20K by the end of the week if I really wanted to be. If I let myself write the interesting stuff instead of dull, yawn-inducing filler. Not sure why I made myself do that bit, really. I wouldn't want to be forced to read it, after all. And my favorite authors (Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Christopher Moore, Elinor Lipman, Barbara Pym, Georgette Heyer--how's that for an eclectic bunch?) trim all of the fat out of their stories. So why I should suddenly feel a need to include long, pointless passages about nothing much at all is beyond me.

And from what I remember about the two years I won, I wrote stuff I enjoyed every step of the way. The conversations and the action were interesting and non-stop. There weren't boring bits. Which is vastly different from last year and, frankly, 2/3 of what I've written so far on Copy Central. Maybe now that so much of my waking creative energy isn't being focused on Tartuffe I can pour it into the novel.

Maybe.

I make no promises.

And now I really do have some stuff I need to do so that I can be caught up for class tomorrow and give back all of the assignments entrusted to my care. Then I'll have the evening to myself.

An evening to myself. Not promised to anybody but Dave. What a delightful prospect.

Posted by sally at 11:54 AM | Comments (1)

November 07, 2008

Resting

Photo courtesy of Dave's new camera. Attractive angle, no? No.

Wow, has it been an insane roller coaster ride of a week or so at the Sallyacious house.

Last Thursday - Opened Tartuffe.
Last Friday - Cleaned house, performance.
Saturday - Cleaned house, parents came into town, performance. Afterwards? Pie. I couldn't decide, so I had a piece of each: coconut cream AND chocolate cream. Began novel.
Sunday - Brunch with parents, winter coat & boot shopping, performance, photo call.
Monday - Lay on the couch a lot. Made dinner & watched Blade Runner: The FINAL Cut with Dave. Such a great movie. Worked on novel.
Tuesday - Taught. Voted. Went through the amazing emotional experience that was Tuesday evening as the election results were tallied.
Wednesday - Office hours. Grading. Drove to Pullman to collect Polyphemos' ashes. Sobbed in the car in the parking lot until I could get it together enough to drive. Quiet evening.
Thursday - 10:30am high school matinee. Well attended, well received. 7:30pm regular performance.
Today - I should be doing laundry and running some errands and grading stuff, but, damn, I have very little energy. And a performance tonight. But we're down to no towels or underwear, so the laundry must get done. (This is what happens in the 15 straight rehearsals/performances when you work on a show. Everything else goes by the wayside.) Also, novel? What novel?

What I want to know is, will my schedule ever get back to normal? Will I ever find that happy medium, that line of balance between everything happening at once and flopping around on the couch like a jellyfish because I have some time off? I've tried so hard this semester to cut back on my activity level, and still I feel like I'm careening out of control. I'm not sure what else I can do, short of retiring from the world completely.

Posted by sally at 09:49 AM | Comments (1)

November 05, 2008

Waiting for My Fingernails to Dry...

Sssssssiiiiiiiigggghhhh...

Only now that they're close to done do I remember I was planning on doing this and watching a movie. I completely forgot about the movie part.

Posted by sally at 07:14 PM | Comments (1)

Friendship Award

Vicki at Havenwood/My Maracas just honored me with a Friendship Award. What a sweet thing to do.

There are four questions I need to answer to go along with the award.

1. ?Do you have the same friends since childhood?
I have a couple of friends from high school with whom I am still in touch. (My very best friend from high school has got lost out there somewhere in the big, wide world, and I'd love to find her again. Cindy Frisby that was, if you ever stumble across this site, comment so I can contact you, will you?) But we moved several times when I was a kid, so I don't actually still know any of them, though I did end up graduating from high school with a whole bunch of kids I went to first grade with, in one of those odd twists of fate.

My brother, on the other hand, is still very close with the guy who became his best friend in first grade. We lived in the exact same house the entire time he was growing up, so he and Mike got to share all of their childhoods.

2. ?What do you value most about your friends?
Loyalty, intelligence, how very comfortable it is to be around them. The fact that they accept me for who I am. Their wicked senses of humor.

3. ?Are your friends your sounding boards?
Some of them. Though like Vicki, I use my online friends for that more than those I know personally. I don't have many friends here who I feel comfortable with in that way, probably because so many of the people here are so much younger.

4. ?What is your favorite activity to share with your friends?
Laughing.

Soooo. Now I have to pass this along. If you've been reading here at all, these names will be familiar to you, both because I plugged both blogs about two weeks ago and because they comment on here all the time. The award is going to two women who I do use as sounding boards, one I know (and visited with while I was in Chicago), the other someone I've never met but who I think is just a fabulous human being. We've exchanged some really awesome letters, full of all sorts of things that make you think. Laura at Rhinestone Armadillo and Heather at What Is My Life Going to Be? Thank you both for being such interesting, intelligent, creative, supportive, funny women.

Posted by sally at 03:12 PM | Comments (3)

Hope

As I said to Dave last night, it's so nice to have an orator heading for the Oval Office again. Someone who can talk in ways that inspire and bring people up, not disenfranchise those who "don't count" and make us doubt his intelligence with his inept linguistic mistakes. For the first time in my life, I think, I'm looking forward to hearing an inaugural address. I don't even care if I have classes on that day. I'll be watching that ceremony live.

I am so glad that we finally got a man who worked for inclusion, rather than shutting out the unpopular voice. If we are to pull ourselves out of the shitty situations we are in economically, environmentally, internationally, we need someone who brings people together and gets us all to participate, not someone who points fingers and blames unpopular groups.

I will now confess that I did not think America would be able to pull it together and get Obama elected. I thought my own country(wo)men were too immature* to get past the superficial and too dim to see past the messages of greed, hatred and fear that have kept the Republicans in power for so long. I mean, they re-elected W. How intelligent could those people be?

Plus, I come from a state where people actually say things like this about our elected leaders. "Well, he may be stupid, but at least he's a Republican." True story. Somebody said that to my dad about our current governor. Also a state where an incumbent who's a known criminal with a completely useless track record during his first (and hopefully only) term in Congress can hold such a tight race with a successful business owner and former political aide that they still haven't announced the winner. With examples like this surrounding me, I have a fairly dim view of my fellow citizens' ability to make an informed choice.

Thank you, Barak Obama, for proving that a uniter can win out over the dividers. That we are not as base, selfish and--frankly--stupid a nation as I had feared. I know it's going to be a tough few years, at least, as we dig ourselves out of this hole. But I think we've got the right guy up front, helping us figure out how to get there.

* Note to the various people I heard interviewed re: why they didn't think Obama was the right choice for America. If you begin your explanation with "I'm not prejudiced, but--" you should just stop right there because you're about to follow up with something incontrovertibly bigoted.

Posted by sally at 09:17 AM

November 04, 2008

Polls Are Closed

Except for Alaska and Hawaii, but I expect none of the local races here matter pits to them. But now I can start seeing the results of our precints. There are some big races here that I'm tracking (well, big for us, small potatoes for almost anywhere else), and now I'll finally get to see some numbers start rolling in.

The fairgrounds is where everybody who doesn't live on campus votes, and this year, for the first time in my memory, they were using both sides of the building to contain the precints. When I got there a little after two, there was one person voting in my precinct's area and--

HOLY SHIT! CNN JUST CALLED THE ELECTION FOR OBAMA!!! And people in our neighborhood just set off bottle rockets. They must have been watching CNN too.

You know what? That's the best news I've heard in years. (Aside from my brother telling me that I was going to be an aunt or an uncle. That's the best news I've ever heard.)

Posted by sally at 07:57 PM | Comments (1)

GO VOTE

Seriously. If you are a citizen of the US and a registered voter, head for the polls. As I tell my students, voting is the most grown up thing you can do. When you cast your ballot, you are taking responsibility for your future. How much more grown up can you get?

I mean, I live in a state where, thanks to the Electoral College and our perennially swinging to the right population pretty much guarantees my presidential vote will mean bubkis.But if for once in the history of history, Idaho could give up even 40% of the vote to a Democrat, that would ROCK. Plus, there are some very important statewide and local elections this year, and those are definitely dependent on my vote. When you live in a state of one million, they may not care about you on the national stage, but your vote certainly means a lot more closer to home.

So get out there and exercise your right to live under the government of your choice. It's the most grown up thing you can do.

Posted by sally at 08:31 AM

November 03, 2008

Passed Out or, The Glamour of the Theatah

After fifteen straight days of rehearsal, tech and performances*, plus a photo call yesterday, Dave and I went out to dinner on the way home (at one of the two new pizza places in town). It was nice. Along with a tasty pizza, I had two glasses of a cheeky little cabernet. Then we finished our walk and I settled down on the couch to check my email and write some more of my novel. Only, I fell asleep. And when I say I fell asleep, I mean I fell asleep like a drowning woman fell off a boat.

I held on to awakeness for as long as I could, and occasionally clawed my way back into consciousness, only to fall asleep again. It was a stealth nap, and it dragged me under. Several times.

When I finally woke up for good, it was after 11pm. I stumbled around the house doing my before bed chores (brush teeth, remove contacts, change cats' water, start dishwasher) and then crawled into bed. Where I lay, WIDE awake, for at least two more hours. The cats, on the other hand all curled up on/next to me and went right to sleep. Dave went right to sleep too.

I did not go to sleep. Not for a long, long time. And pinned as I was beneath various felines, I couldn't do anything but lie there. It was kind of annoying, though at one point, I may have had a vision. Of course, that might have just been exhaustion. I did, however, sleep in until 9:30. Which turned out to only be 8:30, thanks to the time change.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, yesterday was photo call. I will not get into the way it works here, or my annoyance with said arrangement, only enough to say that I knew I would have LOTS of time when I wasn't needed but still had to stay in costume and be ready to go at the drop of a hat. So I took my camera.

I'd been wanting to try to capture some of the backstage images I see as I sit in the wings because the makeup and green rooms are too noisy and crowded during the scenes I'm not onstage. The wings are dark and quiet, and I can just sit there and soak it all in. And there are some pictures I've been wanting to take of the theatre itself ever since the first show I did there in November 2003. I won't include those in this post, but I got some awesome shots of prop storage.

However, what you people have been clamoring for are the shots of me in makeup and costume, so here they are. Along with a gratuitous image of Dave whitening his beard.

Actually, I'm going to use that one first. Two versions of the same image, to give you an idea of just how bright the makeup room is. My camera was on auto and really dialled down the aperture to take the makeup room shots. So I played around in PhotoShop and got this approximation for you.

So this is the shot I got with the camera doing its thing:

And this is closer to what it really looks like in there :

That jumble of towels, brushes, solutions, unguents and cosmetics to Dave's left is my makeup station for this show, by the way. For you non-theatre types, the pictures stuck above our mirrors are our makeup charts. We are given very specific instructions about what to apply where to get the look the designer wants. You can also see a portion of my wig on the shelf above the mirrors.

The wig above David is the wig they originally planned for him to wear in the show, since his hair isn't exactly period upper class guy hair. The company that makes these wigs gives them all names. Mine is called "The Farrah." Dave's is "The Charles."

One other thing you should know is that the majority of the lights around the mirrors are incandescents. They're switching to compact fluorescents as the old bulbs burn themselves out, but the color is completely different from stage lighting, so I think the department may have to find another solution. (We have incandescents in our house still because the fluorescent lighting fucks so much with color and we need colors to be accurate when we work. Fluorescent bulb manufuacturers, get on that, would you please?)

Anyway, that many incandescents lit at one time in an enclosed space gets really warm, as you may imagine. There are 15 people in the cast, so all those bodies and all those bulbs, plus the dressers who help us with our wigs and costumes, means that the room gets so stuffy that we have to have fans going the whole time. And that during the show, you will often find an actor hanging out the back door of theatre, trying to cool down a bit.

And this is me, having applied all of my makeup including my false eyelashes, which were getting a little the worse for wear after seven straight days of use.**

Next, because I have very little vanity left, a shot of me in my wig cap. Mostly because of how much I look like a drag queen, a thought that strikes me every time I put it on.

And finally, Dorine, in all her glory, standing in front of the stage door, complete with itchy wig (I actually caught myself scratching my head underneath it a couple of times onstage yesterday), eyelid dragging fake eyelashes, cleavage shading, fully hiked up and tightened pushup bra and sweaty plastic falsies. The glamorous life of an actor, indeed. (But I do look awfully cute, don't I?)

Later, I'll post some shots from the wings, if I can get any of them to show true color. The lights are so gorgeous on the cyc, but none of them came out true on my camera, so I have to fiddle with them a bit. I'll also post the shots from prop storage that do not include Oscar. He's the theatre ghost. I thought about asking him if he wanted to be in one, but then decided I didn't have the nerve. After one encounter early in my career here, Oscar and I have agreed to leave each other completely alone, and I must say I prefer it that way. There's no reason to stir things up with him again.

I was going to hike into campus and do some grading today, but I'm still really really tired. So I think I will give myself the day completely off instead and do some grading tomorrow. After I teach and--equally importantly--vote.

* As I said to one of the other cast members yesterday, it feels like I've been doing this show forever. As in, I didn't have a life before it started, it has been such a huge part of my reality for the past two plus weeks. I don't remember anything that came before. Did I even exist before rehearsals began?

** Hint: To get the most out of your fake eyelashes, straighten a bobby pin and use the tip of it to apply the eyelash glue, rather than trying to squeeze it straight from the tube onto the lashes. Also, gently remove the old glue after each use.

Posted by sally at 09:54 AM | Comments (2)

November 01, 2008

O-kay...

So I got home from the show last night, poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed some crackers and sat myself down on the couch to check my email, etc. Which is when I realized that NaNoWriMo began at midnight, which was a little over an hour away, and I still had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what I was going to write about.

My response was to fuck around on the computer for the following 70 minutes, post on the NaNo forums about not having a plot or even the glimmering of an idea and then to begin madly banging away on the keyboard at about 30 seconds past 12:00.

The first 600+ words were just me furiously typing anything that came to mind, to try to break the writers' block I've been suffering from. You wouldn't know it here, because I'm writing about me when I post here, but I've felt all storied out for the longest time. Usually I get an idea in August. This year? Nothing. September? Nothing. I decided it would be a good year to skip NaNo for that reason, but in early October I re-upped on a whim. Still completely sans ideas.

As of last week, I decided to do the studio thing I mentioned yesterday. Only, when I went there last night, I realized there was very little keeping me from falling asleep, so I opted to just type like mad instead and see if anything came to me.

So. Almost 700 words of spew, including an interview with my internal critic about the whole process. Venemous little bitch, she is.

And then a story began to emerge. Very, very closely related to my own life right now. I mean, my stories always tend to be autobiographical, though you might not recognize that in the elements that crop up. For instance, a princess who acquires a dragon at a magic store because it bonds with her without her meaning for it to bears a great deal of similarity to how I ended up with a small, mouthy black cat, though I didn't realize that until after I'd written the scene.

Anyway, the story I was writing was very literally my life, but I kept typing, figuring that the goal was 1667 words, not genius or literary brilliance. And maybe a story would come. A story I wanted to write, that didn't feel like it was cheating because it was just my life with different names.

I wrote a total of 1998 words last night in 50 minutes, just typing like mad, not letting myself stop to think or consider, just typing. An extended word sprint, if you know what I mean. The hope being that if I just kept typing, something would happen.

And near the end, something did happen. My main character, Stacy, sent an email to a friend she'd never met personally, an email about how lonely and desperate she was feeling. Only, somehow she misaddressed it and it went to a guy named Hector who was working at an office in London. Someone equally lonely who, rather than just deleting the email, decided to respond to it, to let my main character know she wasn't alone, and that "Linda" had never received her message.

That was where I left it.

Then I went back onto the NaNo site and poked around in the dares thread, to find some dares that might kickstart my imagination and help make the story grow into something I wanted to be writing. Because for NaNo that's key. Who wants to work that hard on something they're not enjoying? Anyway, NaNo dares are these wonderful, silly, challenging concepts that people offer up. Character names, plot elements, "Include a duck named Chester in your story whose bubble fetish turns out to be integral to the plot." Or "Have one of your characters killed by a folding chair." Things like that. I found a number of dares that tickled ideas inside my head, and then, since it was 2am, I went to bed.

Last night, I had VIVID dreams. I don't recall anything about them other than their intensity and fantastical nature. They were crazy and alive and full, that's all I remember. When I woke up, bits of Christopher Moore's stories were dancing about in my head, and so I am going to blame him for what emerged when I sat down at the laptop this morning.

I'm not sure how or whether Hector and Linda and Stacy fit into this new plot, if they do at all, though they still feel like they're part of the story. All I know is that I now have a privately owned print and copy shop where the employees worship the machinery because it's alive. In the most ridiculously Christopher Moore way you could possibly imagine. The owner and the two managers don't know about this. It's the underlings, the hourly employees who form the congregation/coven/ whatever it is you call a group of people who worship sentient copy machines.

There's a high turnover at the store because occasionally an employee gets caught "servicing" the machines, if you know what I mean (wink, wink), and, as you may imagine, the owner and managers have no idea why the kids (because they're all between 18 and 23) keep pulling these stupid stunts.

It's an utterly ridiculous story and I have no idea where it came from. I know I can make it last for a full 50,000 words, there's a lot of possibility there, but really. The sad part of this is that I don't think I'll be able to be nearly as sublimely insane as Christopher Moore's stories are. I want to be that good, otherwise I feel like I'm wasting the story idea. Like it should have gone to someone more deserving.

Anyway, I've got about 600 more words to go today before I hit my target count. So I'm back to it.