No Iron Man this weekend

My parents have come and gone, taking my brother back to our hometown with them. It was a nice visit, culminating in a lovely dinner at Bricco's, one of the best restaurants in the North End. I am not as a rule a pasta eater, but the pasta at this place was authentic, homemade, and delicious, so even I couldn't resist. It's so good that Jared and I would like to buy some of the homemade pasta from the specialty store owned by the restauranteur and make it at home.

The new Iron Man movie is out now. We were going to go see it with a group yesterday, but I didn't feel well (big surprise there) and Jared wasn't done with the takehome final he had to finish for today, so we didn't make it. I still want to see it; I heard it was pretty good. Other than Dark Knight, I thought the first Iron Man was one of the best comic book movies to come out in forever, so I have high hopes for the sequel.

As a side note, I dislike when an actor plays more than one major superhero in the movie versions. I just heard that Chris Evans, the guy who played the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four movies, is up for the role of Captain America. That irritates me, especially when they're from the same comic universe. It's like they're not distinct entities. It was bad enough hearing that Ryan Reynolds was Deadpool and might be (will be?) the Green Lantern, but at least one is Marvel and one is DC. Captain America and the Fantastic Four are both Marvel. Not that it's particularly necessary, but now they can never appear together, and now they're too much the same person. I don't like that. I'm not a huge fan of either title, but still, it gets on my nerves.

Parents for the weekend

My parents are supposed to be in town this weekend to help my brother move out of his dorm, so that means that pretty much all my time must be set aside to be available. That kind of bugs me, but it's true that I don't get to see them that often, so I should make an effort to be able to spend as much time as possible with them. We're all going out to an early Mother's Day dinner Saturday night at Bricco's, this fantastic Italian restaurant in the North End that my mom's always wanted us to take her to, so that will be nice.

Now that the weather's finally warming up, I am resolved to walk as many places as possible instead of driving. My getting of exercise recently has been very spotty, so I want to overhaul my schedule to make sure I make time for it. And not using my car for everything will help, I think. In the cold times I use Constantine just to avoid freezing my tail off. And to be honest, since getting a job my free time has been a lot scarcer, so I find myself not wanting to waste it in extended transit if possible, so I drive just to get from one thing to another more quickly. But that's not good for my health or my wallet. I am resolved to get back in shape this summer, and this seems like an excellent place to start.

Just out of curiosity...

I was making a list of the Hold Thy Peace shows that I know have been or will be put on to get an idea of the club's history. Here is what I know:

Twelfth Night - Fall '05
Macbeth - Spring '06
The Tempest - Fall '06
Dr. Faustus - Spring '07
Hamlet - Fall '07
A Comedy of Errors - Spring '08
King Lear - Fall '08
A Midsummer Night's Dream - Spring '09
Romeo and Juliet - Fall '09
To Think of Nothing - Spring '10
Julius Caesar - Spring '10
A Winter's Tale - Fall '10

I know that before my time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was done, and I have a vague memory that the Merchant of Venice was done, but I don't know exactly when, or any shows beyond that. Could any Hold Thy Peacers who came before me (like zapf* or flyingstalins*, for example?) maybe fill me in? What came before my list, and when? How far back exactly does the club go?

Good things right now

Making an effort to focus on the positive, so here's some of the good things in my life right now.

Hold Thy Peace has a show for next semester! It will be A Winter's Tale, directed by the lovely and talented katiescarlett29*. She has a full prod staff and a strong vision going in, so I'm very excited for her project. Additionally, she is will be HTP's new president for the coming year, with Plesser to be secretary and Jenna treasurer. I feel good about all three of these new elections. Steph and I will be hanging out today indulging in my personal guiltiest of all guilty pleasures, watching Sex and the City. I shall have to get some snackies for us while we watch.

I found one more grad school to apply to. It requires that I take a GRE English subject test, which I can't sign up for until at least July, but it's got both fall and spring admissions, so I just have to get it in before December. It's not my first choice, but it's nice to know that I have possibilities.

Financially I am doing pretty damn well, considering how tight my budget is. When I got my current job, I set an amount I wanted to have in my savings account at all times as a goal, and with the deposit from this week's paycheck (only seven or so months later!) I am just $117 dollars away from it! Yay! I will still keep saving once I've hit it, but I will feel a lot more secure having that financial cushion.

I may have found a possible theater opportunity over the summer. I thought I already had an acting opportunity which would suitably occupy me, but to my great disappointment it fell through, leaving me with a much emptier summer than I'd hoped. I shall have to buck up the courage to ask the director if she would mind my auditioning, since she'd previously asked me to stage manage. I was very interested, since I like her and have never had that experience before, but since I thought I'd be busier I reluctantly had to turn it down. But I hope she wouldn't mind my asking to audition instead.

Those are all very good things, hopeful things. I need to hold on to those.

Nesty-nesty

Been feeling very... nesty... lately. I keep messing around with things in my space, trying to make them look nicer or get them more organized or cleaner or what have you. It started with just putting away all my winter coats and packing up all my sweaters for the summer. Then, itching to do more, I rearranged my bookshelves, organized my closet, and lined up my shoes. This afternoon, now that the sweaters are out of the way, I intend to redistribute the clothes in my dresser so that they're not so crammed into the drawers. It may get cold enough in the near future for me to need access to my sweaters again, but I'm hoping I can make do with just jackets and pashminas. I am thoroughly sick of the cold, and of the articles of clothing it has forced me to wear for so long.

I'm just feeling unusually compelled to get my living space in order. I'm not sure what brought all this on. I'm feeling particularly cramped by disorder, clutter, and stuff. It might be a reaction to stress, manifesting in cleaning, organizing, and the extreme desire to get rid of ugly and junky things. As I've mentioned before, completing domestic tasks to good effect has a soothing effect on me, so perhaps that's why.

Look, Ma, no meat!

Had a very nice dinner party last night, my first one in a while. It was a vegetarian meal for once, something I never do, but since it was an excuse to have Michael Hyde over it seemed like the proper thing to do. Amusingly, I had a tough time remembering who else I invited to the party, since I didn't follow my typical method of meticulously engineering the guest list in advance to maximize positive social interaction. ;-) Instead, I just kind of invited people as I ran into them, with a slight preference for people whose vegetarian sensibilities I could impress with a rare non-carnivorous meal. I made the artichoke pie that Jared likes so much, plus my favorite butternut squash soup with apples and onions, and a mocha cake for dessert. Bernie was extremely helpful with the cooking; it's nice to have someone who's good with a knife helping out with all the prep work. The time I made this pie for my parents marks the only occasion in all of history in which a dish containing tofu was prepared in their kitchen. Not normally a fan of the stuff myself, but it works well in this dish as a sort of neutral layer in the filling. Also, this is the first time I ever made this cake myself and managed to get it out of the pan without breaking it into pieces. I didn't let it cool long enough before I frosted it, so the middle layer of icing ended up melting, but it looked so good I couldn't wait to serve it. Michael brought delicious lemon squares, which Bernie warned me to anticipate; I figured he would bring a side dish for some reason, but Bernie turned out to be right. Ah, well, it was all extremely tasty. This combination, despite containing none of the flesh of the living as I prefer, made for a satisfying meal. Jared unfortunately could not be there, but I saved him some of the dinner and made sure he got to eat it.

But on the upside of him not taking time out from his work, Jared has finished his thesis! Late last night, when he finally got through all the edits he wanted to make, I read the extremely thoughtful and intelligent piece in its sixty-six-page entirety, and then he sent it in to his advisor. I'm so proud of him for doing it. He's still got work and studying for finals left to do, but this is a big important accomplishment and a quite a burden off his shoulders. Congratulate him when you see him; he worked very hard.

Stupid obsessing over LJ stats

Did some quick calculating on my stat page yesterday across the four months of this year so far. Since it occurred to me that I'd posted so many fewer entries in April than I did in March, I decided to see how many hits I got a month for each entry that month.

8,875 hits/41 public entries = 216.46 hits/entry in January
10,324 hits/41 public entries = 251.80 hits/entry in February
12,933 hits/41 public entries = 315.44 hits/entry in March
11,271 hits/29 public entries = 388.66 hits/entry in April

That's actually a fairly significant increase. Especially if it's true that some people are reading the cross-posts in Buzz instead of coming to my LJ. If I keep my level of new entry production up, I will probably in turn keep my hit count up, or possibly increase it as the trend shows. I worry it's likely to lead (if it hasn't already, see some of yesterday's entries) to me posting stupid stuff just to increase production of new content, which is a bad idea because if people quit enjoying reading, then they won't come back for new content. But it's nice to know that people haven't gotten bored of reading me.

It's stupid that I care so much. But I haven't been feeling so good lately, and little nice things are better than none at all.

Lightheaded rambling about my face and hair

Just took a shower so scaldingly hot I feel lightheaded. The shower at Elsinore normally never gets very hot at all, so I'm a little surprised. Maybe it just hasn't been used very much since the water warning went into effect and that's what it can do when it's not depleted. At least it temporarily cleared out my packed sinuses.

My hair is getting blah again. I probably need a haircut again. Sigh. It feels like my cuts don't last very long at all, but the most recent one was the day of the To Think of Nothing read through in the middle of January, which isn't really all that recent. I should probably just go to the salon more often, probably every two to three month at best, but my haircuts are expensive enough that I can't really afford to.

And I never feel like I condition it all that well. It's tough to specifically get the ends the way I'm supposed to, which on me split and roughen the longer they get. And then it looks flat and awful. Blah.

And I touch my face too much. I always have. I don't know why; maybe as a comfort mechanism, maybe as a nervous habit-- like I'm trying to "fix" my features and make them acceptable to look at. Every book and expert will tell you it's unhealthy for your face skin to touch it too much. Maybe that's why I'm such a pizza face. And I'm a compulsive nailbiter, so my fingers are always in my mouth. It's a wonder I'm not sick every minute of my life.

Gah. I feel funny. I should drink something. And stop touching my face with my grubby little fingers.

Stuff I'm doing

So I noticed that I wrote significantly fewer public entries in my LJ this past April than I did in March. I wonder if this, combined with ultimatepsi*'s suggestion that people may be reading my cross-posts to Google Buzz instead, contributed to my decreased number of hits between those two months. It would make sense.

Just finished my part of a fairly major project at work. Now I'm in the stage where I don't have anything particularly significant to do until I'm given a new assignment. It's a nice little reward for finishing. I plan to enjoy it until something new is dropped on me.

We are now at the stage of Labor Wars where we are editing sheet so that they may soon be sent out. All the first-run characters are written now, and most of the replacements too. I am very much looking forward to casting. Alleged Entertainment has a strict policy of casting "by the numbers," meaning that whenever possible characters are assigned based on how closely the numbers given on the questionnaire match up with the ratings for each of the characters' traits. It's a good system that has served them well in the past, and is probably more reliable than my occasional tendency to go with my gut. ;-)

For the first time in forever, I wore a skirt today. I've worn a skirt for the odd dress-up occasion in the past few months, but this is the first time it's been part of my regular outfit. Despite the rain today, it's actually warm enough for it, and I am sick to death of being cold. My pallid legs startle me with their stark whiteness, though God knows that's the typical state of them.

"Who do you think you are, Bruce Campbell?"

Saw usernamenumber* in Evil Dead: The Musical this weekend. It was a bit of a hectic process getting to it. Since Jared and I never totally settled on which show we were seeing, we never reserved tickets, so we were forced to get on the at-the-door list which, while they told us we'd likely be in with, made the waiting process nervous. And finding a parking space was hell, necessitating me leaping out of the car to stand in the waitlist line while Jared parked the car about a half a mile away. But fortunately all was well; we parked, got seats, and very much enjoyed the show. Everything was funny and Brad was phenomenal, such a great performer and so much fun to watch. I knew he was a great singer, but wow, was I impressed getting to see him onstage for the first time. I've seen Evil Dead 2 and parts of Army of Darkness, but never the musical. Jared is a huge fan of the show, so he had a blast, and I was impressed by the blood-splatter technology. I wonder if at MIT they have a bunch of engineering students on standby waiting to build weird-ass theatrical technical effects for shows just like this. :-) I'm so glad we managed to see it.

Now I think I am coming down with something. Again. This is getting absurd. I used to get sick exactly once a year. This is the fourth time since this past winter. My stress levels must really have done a number on my immune system. I am medicating with tea, which though it seems to be soothing I can barely taste. I hope I don't infect the people around me. Jared needs to finish his thesis this week, so he can't afford to be at reduced capacity.