Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Work, Wedding, and Weight

Hi! So I'm back. Part of the reason I haven't updated in a bit was a 2 1/2 day tv/phone/internet drought  due to a service problem, which was truly tragic. I found ways around most stuff (baseball on the radio, streaming shows I missed online when we got service back, and using my iPhone as a lifeline for email/facebook/twitter), but man does life hurt without the internet. But anyway, another reason for the blog drought was that I was waiting for some things to be official before I wrote about them. Let's start with the biggest
  • I'M WORKING IN THEATRE AGAIN! A-friggin-men, eh? I was getting sick of sitting home feeling sorry for myself while Kris was out having a full, exciting life, so I decided to find and pursue some opportunities and I couldn't be happier with the one that I went with. I will be working (unpaid) as an Assistant Director/Stage Manager (hereafter, AD/SM) at the Spring Writer Director Forum at the Looking Glass Theatre. I am BEYOND thrilled to be working in theatre again and really happy to join this group, since it seems like there will be a lot more opportunities to work on future projects with them in even higher capacities, and they're lovely people besides. Show details to follow, but for now you can check out their site above and keep the first weekend in June open.
  • We have finally managed to check out all the venues we had picked out as potential wedding sites. Some we loved, some we hated, some we couldn't afford. We still haven't decided on anything, but I can tell you the following details: it will be in South Jersey and it will be late spring next year. We have to compare prices and let a few more people in on the decision-making process, but the ball, it would seem, is rolling.
  • I've lost weight! I'm now 9 pounds down and people are telling me I look skinny left and right. Of course, I think people tell you that when they know you're dieting, but I have heard it from a random stranger or two. I'm now halfway to my goal and then the next goal after that is to keep it off, but I am winning the battle against my weight, woohoo!

Monday, April 20, 2009

A Weekend in Status Updates

I had a lot of interesting facebook updates this weekend, I'd thought I'd use them to tell my story.

Friday night Karen thinks life's too short to drink shitty beer. Since being on Weight Watchers, I have had only light beer or wine when an alcoholic drink was called for. Friday night I had points to burn and needed to unwind, so I decided to open just one full-calorie, high quality beer. It was a Brooklyn IPA. It was sooooo delicious and just one was enough to relax me a little. I then resolved to try to avoid drinking light beer when dieting, in favor of earning extra points with exercise and using those to drink real, good beer.

Saturday morning Karen is heading to the gym to complete one full week of exercising every day. When Sarah first told me ideally people earned 28 activity points per week on WW, I laughed out loud. (If you're unfamiliar, that's like, a half hour of intense or an hour of moderate exercise PER DAY). I ended up with 24 last week. When I had to get somewhere far away in the city, I walked. When I didn't have any other opportunities, I went for a walk in my neighborhood. One of the days, I counted helping Kris unload his VG collection from the rented van, 'cause that was a lot of work. And of course Zumba. I'm going to the gym tonight and that brings my streak up to 9, go me!

Saturday noon ish Karen is hitting the showers and then time to make it work! After a kickass workout, big delicious breakfast, and a little relaxing, I took on the task of searching out some theater gigs. My search yielding four applications to various things, none of which have I heard from yet, but I will keep it up.

Saturday 2 pm ish Karen is running some band errands with her fiance. Due to a newly decided upon band dress code, I went around with Kris, helping him pick out all brown pieces for his band wardrobe. Despite the hecticness of Saturday afternoon shopping, it was nice to get out in the warm weather.

Saturday 4:18 Karen thinks that in the 2nd inning, it's already time to pull Wang. Dammit. In a game that began at 3:40, the Yankees starting pitcher had given up 9 runs in the top of the 2nd inning. Shortly after I typed this, Girardi did pull Wang out of the game, and then put in a rookie who proceeded to allow, like 6 more runs. At which point I turned the game off. I later found out the final score was 22-4. Abysmal. (Also? Pull Wang. Tee Hee.)

Saturday 8 pm ish Karen is walking to get ice cream with her guy. Kris and I have been making a habit of this, walking to local places to get ice cream when the weather's nice. The DQ is 3 miles roundtrip, but this time we opted for a local mom-and-pop, only a 20 minute walk. The exercise earns us the ice cream and it's a nice cheap, kinda romantic date. The ice cream cone was an ideal reward for my consistent exercising.

Saturday 9:45 ish Karen just got back from watching a little league game. Both teams played better than the Yankees did today. On the way, home from the ice cream parlor, there is a little league field, and two teams happened to be playing as we were headed home. Kris suggested we watch and we sat for the last inning and a half, rooting for the red team. The kids were great to watch, really enthusiastic and pretty talented for their age. It got us to daydreaming about our own kids (I hope they want to play baseball) and generally it was just a nice sweet fun thing to do. And the game ended in a tie so I didn't feel bad for the kids on either team. And yes, they both played better than the Bronx Bums.

Sunday 1 am ish Karen must go in search of Knowledge and his bastard son, Truth. This is a reference to a sketch in an episode of The State. Kris's recent storage unit emptying unearthed some 90s nostalgia in the form of old yearbooks (Kris was an ADORABLE highschooler) and VHS tapes of the old MTV sketch comedy show we love. We knocked back about 5 episodes and laughed our asses off all night. Not a bad way to end a lovely evening.

Sunday 12:45 pm ish Karen is holding a container of frozen spaghetti sauce against her head. Banging around the basement, trying to get around the piles of video game stuff that lives in our basement now, I stepped somewhere you normally wouldn't otherwise step and clocked my head on a low-hanging pipe. OW! I have not done this since I was a kid. I would bet you haven't either. I came upstairs sobbing and Kris rushed to my aid. I asked him to get me some ice and then immediately remembered noting the night before that we didn't have any ice (and yet not making any, dummy that I am). He came back with a tupperware of frozen spaghetti sauce wrapped in a towel. It was the sweetest bit of TLC I've had in a while.

Sunday 2 pm ish Karen is crossing her fingers that Kris practicing drumming isn't too loud for the neighbors. Look, I love my guy, but we share a wall with other people that until yesterday had no idea a drummer lived next to them. He set up in the basement and made it as quiet as one can make drumming. We haven't heard any complaints yet, but I think it will take a few more practice sessions before I'm convinced they're OK with it.

Sunday 7 pm ish Karen is cooking and dancing. This actually started a lot earlier. I decided to play around with iTunes Genius (for the unfamiliar, a feature that analyzes your music collection and creates a playlist of similar material when you select 1 song). My guinea pig was the Otis Redding version of "Try a Little Tenderness," one of my faves. I got Sam & Dave, Ray Charles, Etta James, and the Jackson 5 in one delicious playlist that was the soundtrack to my afternoon cooking. I whipped up a loaf of banana oatmeal bread to eat for breakfast this week, and then a fancy Morroccan dish called a tagine that I'm eating for lunch all week, topped it off with brewing a pitcher of iced tea and heating up dinner. DELICIOUS.

Monday morning Karen is celebrating being 9 pounds lighter. At my Sunday night weigh in, I found I'd lost a total of 9 pounds since I started dieting, which is about halfway to my goal, which is incredible. I guess I shouldn't say I was celebrating, 'cause I didn't actually do anything, but still it's a good thing.

I hope you had a nice full fun weekend too!

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Remember Why You Do This

I've been sort of waiting to update till I had something to report on one particular venture I was excited about, but that has sort of fallen through. Being bummed about that and various other minor things made me not want to blog more, but then I remembered that this place is about cheering myself up and remembering the good things so here I am, back again.
  • As I said, the project I was hoping I would be working on has turned out to be a bit of a dead end, BUT to point out the silver lining, I did pursue something I wanted to work on creatively for the first time in a long time. I put myself out there, I made first contact, always a hard thing for me. The fact that it hasn't worked out is basically no fault of my own, and basically, I'm considering it a good thing because it means I'm free to pursue other things. It's a little like a job hunt. You can't just apply for one thing and hope it turns out, you have to apply to as much as you can and see what comes back.
  • I started on Weight Watchers, officially, under Sarah's watchful guidance. I have so far lost 5 pounds and managed not to exceed my allowances once yet (so far). I have never successfully dieted in the long term, so this feels promising. Also it is nice to be supporting Sarah as much as she does me, because doing something for someone else always feels nice.
  • We began the journey of wedding planning yesterday, in terms of visiting reception sites. We absolutely fell in love with one and felt definitively that the other was Not For Us (not least because of Wedding Coordinator Barbie, who works there). Ways This Makes Me Happy:
  1. There is something out there we know we like.
  2. I am not going to like everything out there (this was a concern for me, mostly).
  3. I have a very good idea know of what "what we like" and "what we don't like" is.
  4. We agree at least on the basics of what we like and don't like.
  5. Having at least started this process makes me no longer feel like we're so far behind in our plans.
So, we have a frontrunner for a reception site, the anchor to all the plans. It is not perfect (it's expensive, but what about weddings isn't) but all the rooms are lovely and so is the coordinator we would work with. We liked just about everything she told us. I'll give more detail about why this site is so great if we end up choosing it, but it's good to know there's something good out there for us.

So, I don't know. In the grand scheme of things, nothing is really going on, nothing of note. But life is happening and it's pretty good these days.