February 14
[Taken February 10, 2006 | Basimah | Centerville, OH]
I love snow days. This is likely a holdover from growing up in a snowbelt portion of the US. Unfortunatly once you are out of high school, snow days just don't come around all that often, if ever. Yesterday I got lucky - I got a snow day.
Pretty much all of the midwest was being hit by nasty weather, and here is Dayton we were getting that lovely "winter mix" of snow, freezing rain, ice, and sleet, and we were getting a lot of it. I got up, looked out the window, thought "eh, it isn't that bad", and went to work anyway. If I had bothered to call the "weather hotline" that the office had set up for such eXtreme conditions, I would have known that the office was on a delayed start. But by the time I found that out I was already at work. (Which is not a big deal as I live about a 5-10 minute drive - on a good day - from the office.) By 9:30, the "delayed start" had been upgraded to "we are closed, everyone go home". So I went out to the parkign lot, chipped the half inch of ice that had accumulated off of my car and headed home.
I love stormy weather. Any kind of storm is delightful.
I actually did work from home for a while... had some coding I needed to finish and a conference call I had to be in on. But around about 1:00 I started to lose interest and just kind of took the rest of the day off. Edited and uploaded a bunch of photos to flickr (The photos are from the Student Show at the Oasis with Tamalyn Dallal. I actually danced in the show, but, as usual, have no photographic proof of this. You will just have to trust me.), did a workout, changed into flannel pajamas, and then just kind of lounged around for the rest of the day. (Well, I also did my taxes... but that took only about an hour with the help of TaxCut Pro.)
I love snow days. They never happen often enough, and I am glad that I was able to appropriatly take advantage of this one.
February 5
[Taken January 13, 2006 | White Tribal | Centerville, OH]
The Schuster Center gig ended yesterday evening, with a show that was surprisingly well attended, considering that it felll on the Super Bowl. I danced every night and took photos and video (and was available as back-up in case someone failed to show up and another dancer was needed) during the two weekend shows. I enjoyed it. I had fun, and I think that I learned a whole lot about performing. Dayton is a tough place to perform in... this is a pretty white-bread, conservative place. The people who were coming to the Schuster Center to see Aida were probably some of the most conservative of the bunch, and the didn't really know what to do about us or how to react to us. They certainly weren't expecting a bellydance troop to be entertaining them in the lobby while they milled around waiting for the doors to open so they could go fine there seats. We got some friendly people who seemed to genuinely enjoy seeing us there (and the staff at the center loved us) and we got some smiles, and happy looks, and people asking us to pose for photos, and applause, and a couple of brave souls who joined us for a few dance steps, but mostly we got confused looks and some slightly embarrassed glances. Eh. Ah well. I still had a load of fun.
Another plus to the gig was that I got to wear some of Kira's cabaret costumes, and Kira has a hell of a well stocked costume closet. Seriously, her costume closet is like Aladdin's cave.
One of the days that I was taking photos instead of dancing, I got hit up by the marketing director of the theater, wanting to know if they could use some of my photos. I wonder if I will get money for them? If they do end up wanting to use some of my stuff, I had better at least get photos credit and copies of whatever materials they use my photos in.
Aida itself was pretty good - for a modern, rock-opera, interpretation. I enjoyed the show on opening night, even though we were up in the nosebleen section. We still had a pretty good view of the stage. The set was sparce, but still nice, the staging was well done, the costumes were good, and the songs and dance pieces were also quite good.
We did get quite tired of the music after several nights of performing... the sound system for the theater was also piped into the lobby area, and every night after we were done dancing and changing out of our costumes, we would always come out of our dressing room at the same point of the opera, during the same song... we could sing along with it by the end of the run. ("...build another pyramid... Build it! Build it!...")
In other news, we had quite a bit of excitement at home today. I came home for a late lunch and was greated by water pouring down the wall of the garage, water all over the floor in the laundry room, and water starting to drip from the basement ceiling. Burst pipe. I called John in a panic, he rushed home, we turned off the house water, I called work to let them know that I would be delayed, and we began the process of cleaning up and fixing the broken pipe. As awful as it all was... we got really really lucky. Lucky that I had come home from work when I did and saw the break when it had basically just happened. (John had been home earlier for lunch, there had been no problem then, and said that he had been back at work for maybe 10 or 15 minutes before I called.) We were lucky that the water on the floor was pretty much confined to the tiled laundry room. We were lucky that nothing got ruined. We are lucky that John knows stuff about plumbing and knew what to do, and that he knows enough about plumbing to be able to fix this over the next day or so. We got lucky. Damn lucky.