14 posts tagged “life”

Every Christmas I am faced with a bizarre fact about myself. I'm a Christmas Light-ist. I have white christmas lights in my house - and ONLY white Christmas lights. Steve knows not to bring colored lights within 100 feet of our home. Thankfully he's also a Christmas Light-ist - although I think that just comes from growing up in a country where they didn't even have icicle lights until recently. For the past few years, we've sent boxes of icicle lights to one of his friends in England because his neighborhood has a Christmas decorating contest. Every year he wins because he's the only one on the block with the contraband icicle lights ;) And of course we only send WHITE icicle lights ...

When we're driving home each night ... my eyes are accosted with several houses with colored lights up. Do they not know? Weren't they raised right? How did it get so bad? Did no one tell them to leave those colored lights on the shelves and pick up the good stuff? The only thing worse than multi-colored lights ... are the solid red lights. A house about 4 miles from us has all their windows lined in red lights ... it looks like some evil den of demented elves or something.

Now I know lots of you have colored lights in your homes right now. I just want to tell you that its not too late. Leave your colored past behind. There's still time to come to the light ... the white light...

:propeller: At 12:44 PM on September 21, 1977 my mother was checked in by my frantic father to Bradley Memorial Hospital. I was born at 12:55 PM. :bday: According to my mom, they stopped on the way to the hospital at one of her friends house to drop off my brother - and it's lucky I wasn't born on their front porch! As my father said at lunch today - I was in a hurry then - and I have been ever since. Twenty Eight! That doesn't seem as old now as it did when I was a teenager ;)

I've turned off my newsreader this week. I was talking to a fellow blogger last week - and we agreed that it seems like every body can't stop talking about Katrina and who's to blame for the aftermath. People are either ranting about it - or linking to everyone elses rants. Other than my entry about HCA's evacuation efforts (which was a POSITIVE post), and displaying a Red Cross Donation link, I haven't felt the need to blog on the situation. What could I possibly say that would do anything for those people? But some people just can't seem to keep away from their keyboards.

Enough already. Instead of spending an hour writing a blog entry about how Bush, Brown, FEMA, black people, white people, etc are to blame for the suffering in the gulf -- get up and actually do something for the people. Drop off clothes and toiletries at the local collection point - donate some money. Clean out all the extra stuff from your house -- everyone's got stuff they can give. Blogging about it, rehashing every single thing that has happened, casting blame this way and that ... that does absolutely NOTHING for those people.

Woah! This morning I filled up for $2.59 -- on my way home tonight -- it's $2.99 ($3.01 at a gas station I saw later!!) That's a 40 cent jump in 9 hours! Pam says she read that it was $3.29 in LaVergne. Again - woah.

As a point of reference -- Steve and I drive about 60 miles a day round-trip just getting to and from work every day. $3 gallon quickly adds up.

I'm back from camp with my church's students ... and now I'm halfway through my ten year high school reunion weekend!

I can't wait for Monday :)

Tomorrow morning I leave for a week at camp with my church's students. As my internet access situation is still up in the air (or at least the speed of said internet access) - I doubt there will be much activity here this week. Well -- that and the fact that I will barely have time to breathe this week, much less have a few minutes to sit down and blog ;)

MacGyver is spending the week at his grandparents. They were up here in Nashville this weekend -- and we sent him back with them for the week. Steve's out of town this week too -- and since we're down at my parents next weekend for my reunion (more on that subject) -- we figured they could spend some time with the grand-dog -- and we'll just pick him up when we're down there next week. I think they're more nervous about watching Mac than they were about keeping Sarah, their grand-daughter, for the first time overnight. Maybe that's because Mac tends to get in trouble when he's visiting friends ;) Sarah is pretty easy to take care of! They do have one thing in common -- they're both complete cuties.

My ten-year high school reunion is two weeks away. I'm on the planning committee :censor:. (yes, I must have been smoking crack to agree to that.) We've been working on it since September of last year. That may sound like a long time - but not when you consider that we had almost 600 people in our graduating class -- so just trying to contact everyone in our class was a huge task. We divided up the yearbook pages amongst the committee members - so each person had about 40 people to locate.

Lesson one - we needed a bigger committee.

We gave ourselves til January of this year to locate everyone on our lists. That was about 4 months. In December, some of our committee members hadn't contacted anyone on their list yet. :banghead:

Lesson two - those people you didn't like in highschool? you still don't like them

Ten years isn't a very long time - but people have moved, their parents have moved, their friends have moved; so finding classmates was a nightmare for the most part. Our high school doesn't keep any type of alumni records :weep: - so we had nothing to start from except our yearbook. The girls were, of course, the hardest to find. We just had their names at the time of graduation. Who knows what their married name is - Nightmare.

So once we finally had a decent number of graduates contacted (just over 300) - we sent out our first mailing. This was a general info mailing, with a registration form, and a list of classmates we couldn't find yet. We were hoping that these 300 classmates we found could help us find the other 300 we couldn't find. And they did - which was cool. Everybody knows where somebody is ... so we found about 150 more people that way.

I had set up a very basic website early on -- which made it super easy to share information with our entire class. The committee has access to a section of the site where we can update the graduate database online - and we're all part of a mailing list through which we keep track of all the little details. The registration form dumps straight into the database too. So with the click of a button we can quickly see how many people are registered, paid, etc. That's handy so that everyone has access to the same info at all time -- I have to say that I don't know how we would have made it this far without the website, mailing list, and especially the online database. Saved so much time.

Lesson three: It's good to have at least one geek on your planning committee. :thumbsup:

An interesting fact about our committee is that only one person on the committee still lives in our hometown. Which means only one person on the committee lives in the town where all the reunion events are happening. Wheee! What fun for her! :dance:

Lesson four: You need more hometown people on the committee. Lots of running around/errands to do. All of us out of town people can do a lot via email and phone -- but some things just have to be done in person.

My mom has always been active in planning her reunions - her class recently had their 35th reunion. Her experience with this has helped us a lot - and maybe it's because of her that I knew that reunions have to be totally funded by the registration fees. The school doesn't have a fund for reunions. Everything you spend for the reunion has to be covered with registration fees. I think some people in our class thought our high school must have a slush fund or something for reunions - because some people thought $40/person was ridiculous. But when you break it down into facility rental, catering, printing fees, postage -- it all adds up. We're running an extremely tight budget. From some people's comments, it's like they think we're trying to make a profit or something. Grrrr. :headache:

Lesson five - you are going to have some cheapskates and belligerent losers. They would complain if it was $3 a person! Forget about them and move on. Did you really want to see that person at the reunion anyway?

So now we're two weeks out. We've done several mailings; we're now on a weekly email to everyone in our class (we're still missing about 125 people, but finding more and more every day); the newspaper has run lots of articles for us for free; I think we've done a pretty decent job of getting the word out.

The website has been a great tool. At least 90% of our class has registered and paid online. Less than a handful of people actually mailed in a physical registration form and check. People were more than willing to pay a little extra for the convenience of paying online (we tacked on the paypal fees to the registration cost).

The next two weeks are going to be crazy. The week of the reunion, I am out of town. (I'm a counselor at summer camp with my church's student ministry all week. It will not be a relaxing week -- it will be long, long, long days. :whip: But I'm sure I'll still have fun!!) We get back on Friday afternoon and Steve and I will have to immediately get back on the road and head to my hometown. The main dinner event is on Saturday night, and then the family picnic at the school is on Sunday afternoon.

Yadda yadda yadda. All this to say -- I've been slammed doing reunion stuff and I'm at the stage where I just want the event to be done and dusted.

Lesson six: it will definitely take me another ten years before I'm willing to do this again.

I filled up my tank yesterday at $2.20 a gallon - and while I know that gas in the US is cheaper than almost anywhere in the world - it still irks me to pay that much when I remember getting it for 98 cents a gallon not too many years ago. I have seen the bit below many times -- but it still makes me laugh (as I grab my purse to head to Starbucks for my frapp-fix)!

Think a gallon of gas is expensive?

This makes one think, and also puts things in perspective.

So, the next time you're at the pump, be glad your car doesn't run on water, Pepto Bismal or Nyquil!

Why is it considered romantic for your significant other to do something for you because a national holiday has reminded them to do so? Is it not more romantic, more special, and certainly more meaningful, for your significant other to give you flowers, send you a card ... give you a present ... on a random day. Just a normal day ... no holiday, birthday, anniversary. Just a normal day. March 19. January 5. October 4. Whenever. On those days ... it means more because they were thinking of you all on their own.

My husband gets this. He sends me silly little cards ... gives me flowers ... gets me a starbucks on the way to pick me up ... and he does all this quite frequently ... without a national holiday having to remind him. I love that. :heartbeat:

So, on this capitalistic-greeting-card-industry-created holiday, to my husband Steve -- I say -- thank you for knowing me well enough to know you don't need to waste your money getting me flowers on Valentines Day ;)

Whew. This is the first chance I've had to blog in two weeks. I've been covered up with web work (which is nice) - and then of course, it's musical time again. For the past two years, I've worked with my church's musical productions. It's a pretty cool endeavor - as the church does ACTUAL Broadway musicals. We've done Sound of Music, Brigadoon, Meet Me in St. Louis, Hello Dolly!, Oklahoma, Crazy for You, Bye Bye Birdie, Fiddler on the Roof ... and this year we're doing Anything Goes. As it's a church .. we do some serious rewriting of some of the more "off color" lines of dialogue and songs -- but not too much. We do several big dance numbers - yes - even at a Baptist church!! We usually have about 50-60 people involved ... and atleast two casts. An adult cast .. and a youth cast. The chorus sings with both casts. We do four performances -- and they are always sold out. It's a big thing at the church -- and a lot of fun. And A LOT of hard work.

This year ... it's a bit more work than I originally signed up for. I was signed on as the assistant director this year ... assisting a woman who has amazing talent in directing and choreography. She used to be a dancer on cruise ships -- playing the lead in most of the shows she was involved in. Now she's a music teacher in the local school system ... and directs musicals at her school - and also at our church. We've worked together on the musical for the past three years.

A little over a week ago, her dad was put in the hospital - and she had to go to Cincinatti to be with him. Which meant I was going to have to direct the weekend rehearsals. Something that isn't exactly my strong point. But hey ... it can't be that hard, can it?

Exhausting. That's what it is. You have everybody coming at you -- the whole entire time -- asking you questions that sometimes don't have anything to do with the scene you're currently blocking. And you have those high-maintenance people who think that everything is about them ... it just makes you want to scream! But we got through our big Saturday rehearsal ... and got a lot accomplished.

Our directors' dad just kept getting worse - so I ended up doing our weekday rehearsals. Those aren't as bad ... because you're only dealing with the principal actors. The chorus doesn't come on weeknights. Sigh. Thank goodness!

Then on Thursday, our director's dad passed away. She is completely heartbroken ... and it's so hard to talk about something like that over the phone. You just want to go give her a big hug. She is in shock - having gone up there thinking he was just really sick, and would come out of it -- to now -- she's having to deal with funeral plans and dealing with all the aftermath of a parent dying.

And yet ... during all this ... she's still worrying about the show. That saying "the show must go on" -- so true. Less than 2 hours after her father passed away, we were on the phone blocking scenes for the next few rehearsals that I'm going to have to lead.

I'm extremely stressed and think I'm coming down with a cold ... but I think -- at least I can do this for her. At least she knows the show is in fairly competent hands. I don't want her to have to worry about this. She should be back by Thursday of next week ... and then she can work her magic in the scenes we've worked on. You know ... adding in those extra touches that really make a show ... sing!

Sooo ... back to getting my schedule together for tomorrow's rehearsal. Maybe I'll have another chance to blog in March -- when the show is over ;)