Mrs. Claus

We went to our ward's Christmas Party last night, and it was a lot of fun. The food was great, and the desserts were even better. :) The best part of the evening, though, was Scott came in walking in with a loud, "Ho ho ho! Mehhhh-rry Christmas!" Yep, he was Santa Claus. It was awesome. He was really nervous - he didn't know what he was supposed to say - but I helped him practice by sitting on his lap and telling him what I wanted for Christmas. :)

I guess it worked - he did great. He's probably going to kill me for posting these pictures, but I have to.

This kid looked rather frightened.
(it's funnier if you click on the picture and view it full-size)


But most everyone loved him...


Even the teenagers. :)

And Here It Is!

I'm done! After 6 scheduled hours of final exams yesterday, I finally finished. The semester is over and I'm so excited. It still hasn't sunk in that I have no more school until January 24th. I love school, don't get me wrong, but I'm ready for a break. And here it is!

The first thing I did with my break from school was go to see the Festival of Lights at the DC temple with Scott. It was gorgeous! And the musical performance was a group from Annandale High School, and they were AMAZING. I was very impressed. We took a friend of mine, Jasmine, because I knew she would enjoy the lights and the international nativities. She seemed to have a good time, except when too many sister missionaries tried to convert her. I was a little frustrated with that. I know that's what the missionaries are there for, and as a member of the church I appreciate the importance of the gospel message, but I felt that they were too pushy. And my intentions for inviting her along were simply for her to see the lights, because they're so beautiful. I didn't bring her to be converted.

But for anyone who's thinking about going to see the lights this year, I recommend it. They're beautiful. But I still don't understand why the live nativity only includes a live Mary and Joseph and not live wise men or shepherds. It looks a little strange.

The First Snow

There aren't a whole lot of things that I miss about Utah, but snow is one of those that I do wish we had (along with mountains). Mostly Maryland gets ice and slush. When it snows, it often melts before it even hits the ground, or immediately upon contact. But the other day we got the first snow of the season, and it actually stuck! It was only a couple of inches, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

It makes me more excited than ever to go skiing for the New Year.

Brian Regan

My new Brian Regan DVD came in on Thursday! It was all I could do to wait for my husband to come home from school that night; he has class until 9:20 on Thursday nights. I put the DVD in the other room so that I didn't have to look at it! It's not as good as the old DVD, but the new movie is still awesome. I recommend it to everyone. Brian Regan is simply hysterical.

A cute call

This post is on my new blog, here, but I thought I'd post it on this one too.

My sister-in-law, Leslie, called Scott on his phone yesterday afternoon - but he didn't answer because he had left it at home (we were on our way home from the library). My 2-year-old niece, Sarah Ann, said to her, "Now I talk Aunt Tith." (That's how she pronounces my name.) Leslie responded, "Well, why don't we call Daddy?" But Sarah Ann was adamant. "No. Aunt Tith."

So Leslie called me and told me that Sarah Ann really wanted to talk to me, and I laughed and agreed. I could hear Leslie prompting Sarah Ann's responses in the background. I also got her to sing the ABC song and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", all by herself with no prompting from Leslie.

My niece is so cute.

"And we're going to Disneyland."

So "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged" is over. Finished. Kaput. I have mixed feelings, of course - I'm sad for it to be done, but glad to have my life back. Mostly, though, I'm glad. I'm exhausted and very sore - every muscle in my body aches from the final weekend of the run and Strike after the last show. I'm sure that in a few days I'll start going through withdrawals, but for now I'm very excited to have the Thanksgiving holiday to rest (as much as will be possible with my adorable nieces and nephews jumping all over the place, yelling, "Aunt Tarythe! Aunt Tarythe! Come play with me! Okay, you be It..."). And pumpkin pie...mmm...

The last show went very well. The size of our audiences increased as the show went on and word spread. During the last show we not only had the seating area onstage full (it was meant to be a small and audience-interactive show), but the balcony was holding quite a few more people. It was wonderful.

After the show we had Strike, where the whole set gets taken apart nail by nail, board by board. Costumes and props get put away too. It's quite the process, and usually requires a good amount of people. I stayed to help the stage crew and the Coordinator of Theatre Operations (the big big boss of the department) was so impressed by my hard work that he offered me a job at the theatre! Even though it usually takes a few months for the application and paperwork to go through, he said not to worry - that he would personally make sure the process was "expedited" for me.

In related good news, an adjudicator from the American College Theatre Festival came to judge our show last week and she nominated me for the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship.

Facebook

It's official. Under peer pressure, I caved in and...created a Facebook account. For so long I was proud to not have a blog, to not be on Facebook. And look at me now - 2 years with a blog, 36 hours of Facebookness.

But it's great to be in touch. I went through and found a bunch of people I used to hang out with - at school, work, church, whatever. I did this by going through my friends' friends lists. "Oh I know that person! Add friend? Why yes, please." Click. It's so good to know that now my friendships with these people are official, secure - well, we're friends on Facebook, so our relationship must be stable. Oh, good. Now I can sleep better at night.

It's amazing to me how much time can be spent on Facebook; I think it's going to be my undoing. I should have waited until the end of the semester! I'm also somewhat concerned with how excited I've been to watch my friends list grow, as people accept my request to be their friend on Facebook. It's a great way to realize the superiority you have over other people who don't have as many as you do. :)
"Scott, I have 7 friends!"
"Honey, I now have 21 friends! That's more than you."
"Hey, guess what - I have 56 friends - no, make that 58. It's great being so popular."

It's rather pathetic.

Opening Night

Opening night was on Friday. And it was awesome. We had a great crowd; most of the seats were filled, Scott came to support me, and the audience was very enthusiastic (the play relies very heavily on audience participation, so this is crucial). Towards the end of rehearsals, when you're running the same lines over and over again without an audience there to react to you, it gets frustrating. It's easy to lose motivation when you're reaping no immediate reward. But on Friday, I was loving it. "This is what I've worked so hard for these past couple of months!" I told Ruben during intermission. I love the adrenaline rush that comes from connecting with the audience and seeing your hard work pay off. It makes those long hours and late nights all worth it.

Tech

Yesterday was a long day. Saturday's play rehearsal was canceled due to some scheduling conflicts, so the entire tech weekend was set on Sunday instead. All 12 hours of it. Tech is that wonderful time where all the technical designers, actors, stage crew, director, etc. come together and we try to do the show exactly the way it will be on opening night - with lights, sound, set, costumes, and props. Coordinating all of that is harder than it might seem...even though the first time we ran through the show we went cue-to-cue (which means that we skipped all dialogue that didn't require a costume change, light cue, or sound cue, so we could get timing right) it took us 6 and a half hours to get through the 90-minute show once. And then we did it again. Faster this time, though. :)

It was certainly an entertaining day. We ran into many a problem - actors' pants falling down multiple times, both onstage and off (not mine though, thank goodness), props falling apart in the middle of a scene, a piece of scenery knocking someone (me) in the head, actors not being able to change costumes fast enough and missing their entrances (or coming out with only half of their costume). And we open in 3 days.

How I love the theatre.

death of an Object

I never thought I could get so attached to an object. I've never been the obsessive type. But from the moment I received my laptop the Christmas prior to attending BYU, I was hooked. Addicted. Absolutely entranced. My fascination was bigger than the novelty of it, greater than the coolness I felt owning my own computer. It was an escape; a freedom.

As long as I had my laptop with me, I was never bored. I could always read, write, or design whatever I wanted. There were always settings to be played with: backgrounds, fonts, and colors to be changed, new tricks and shortcuts to discover. "Hmm, I wonder what this so-called 'button' does?" My laptop offered me a chance to have something truly my own, changeable at my will. Nobody could tell me what picture to have on my desktop, or how to organize my folders - the computer wasn't theirs, it was mine. And yet, that something of mine could be shared. I had a commodity, a convenience for others that I was sure could be traded for friendship. I felt so...needed. "Hey T, could I borrow your computer for a minute?" my BYU roommates would ask. I loved saying yes. I relished in the fact that I had something they wanted; not because I felt superior in any way, but because I could provide a service to them. If not for my computer, my roommates might have had to walk all the way to the library! How useful I felt. It validated my existence in some odd way, and made me feel like even though I was a burden to live with, I was at least partly making up for it.

Of course, owning my own computer whilst at college was simply practical as well. No need to spend hours at the library on their computers, and - not that this was a good thing - no need to write papers before midnight the day before they were due. How convenient. I brought my laptop with me to school nearly every day, relying on it for note-taking in my classes. The downside? Sometimes I would connect to the internet and even chat online during class. I know, I know - no need to tell me how much better my grades would have been had I paid better attention and shown up to class more often. I've learned my lesson.

This all has a point, really.

A week ago Wednesday my computer died a terrible death, one of hard drive malfunctioning. Oh how I mourn! The greatest misfortune isn't the now-gone black casing or bright screen or pretty buttons, but the megabytes of data I've involuntarily relinquished. Without a working cd-drive, I never backed anything up. Stories, poems, papers, pictures. All of them gone. Documents of funny things my roommates used to say, songs friends and I wrote, crazy videos we made when we were sleep-deprived and somewhat delirious. A folder on my desktop entitled "Random Folder of Documents to Clean Up the Screen Because Christine Couldn't Handle It Anymore". I kept every email of importance that I ever received, every IM conversation. I loved going back and rereading them, remembering funny things people said. So many memories - 4 years worth - lost. My husband says that we'll just have to make the upcoming years even better and more worth remembering. He's sweet.

The most pressing issue right now is that I'm in the middle of midterms. Not only have papers from semesters at BYU disappeared into oblivion, but midterm and final projects from the current semester are gone as well. I have a lot of work to redo, and my rehearsal and class schedules don't lend themselves to much redoing of work.

The small consolation for this is that on Monday I will get a new computer, with a working D-drive and Windows Vista.