A Week in the Life

So here we are. A new blog. Sounds exciting. This blog is partially so friends can keep up with me, though things like Facebook and text messages do a decent job of that. This is also partially to show off my knitting prowess and culinary skills. I considered a specialized blog for the knitting and the food and decided that while the knitting one may still happen, I don't cook enough for an entire food related blog. Essentially, this blog is going to be real random, but all me. Cliche, right? Too bad. My blog, my randomosity. (Warning: I apologize in advance for the scatter-brained-ness of this post.)

I just finished one of those 1000 mile, multiple-day-long road trips. I say "one of those" because this is the sixth I've been on since 2008. This time it was Iowa to Pennsylvania. Thankfully I have friends dispersed around the country and they let me crash on couches and in spare rooms. It's normally an 18 hour trip and at one point I could have done it in 2 days, but I am too old to do that sort of thing anymore. I get sick of my own company after a while and there are only so many times you can listen to the Harry Potter 7 audio book (which is, incidentally, 21 hours long). Here's what I did this time 'round.

Tuesday: I left Iowa at an easy mid-day time. I met up with the FoodPlay National Troupe in Watseka, IL and got some quality hanging out time with Carlton and even better than that...

Wednesday: I got to see a performance! It was a lot of fun to see the set-up, warm-up, and show as a regular, non-troupe member. After the show, which was somewhere between pretty good and great in my opinion, I drove a leisurely hour to West Lafayette, IN where I was entertained by a friend I met at the Texas Shakespeare Festival back in 2007. Oddly for a theatre person, most of his friends are NOT theatre people. They were pretty awesome though. A good time was had. There were beers, $1.50 wells, and maybe a phone call or four.

Thursday: It was on to Columbus, OH to stay with a friend from high school. She pulled out a bunch of yearbooks and it was crazy to remember things from an entire decade ago. Then I felt really old.

Friday: The last leg took me across the rest of Ohio and the western half of Pennsylvania to lovely Hershey, PA. After only 2 hours in town, friends stopped by with my ticket to the Hershey Bears game and we set off for dinner. My first hockey game was awesome. Bears won, 3-2. Karyn then had the less awesome idea to trek from the Giant Center across the extensive parking lots to a bar on the other side of the park. Her theory was we'd get there before those who had to fight the 10,000 people leaving the game. It would have been great if not for the rain that plagued us. By the time we got there we were soaked through. Great time though. As Lydia put it, we are now "intrepid". Really? I thought I was just cold.

So that brings me to today. There was some grocery shopping, a little more unpacking, and the best part: a little bit of lunch-having. I created a pasta dish: whole wheat penne with canned diced tomatoes, asparagus steamed with garlic and basil, and a little extra-virgin olive oil, black pepper, and red pepper flakes. Super easy, super tasty. I'm on a healthy cooking kick. It's too easy in this kind of environment to go out to eat with people all the time. It gets pretty costly AND not always healthy. So there's a goal. Work on that. Easier said than done. I have a friend coming back this year who does horrendous things to my diet. So many indulgences...

I'm back at Hersheypark for the summer, stage managing two shows and (hopefully) having another fantastic summer here in Chocolate Town. Even though I am REALLY going to miss my cast and crew from last summer, I think we've got some good things in store. There are several people returning, a few friends of friends, and lots of new folks. That's one thing I really love about the nomadic theatre thing. I meet more people at each new job than I ever could in another career.

Also, there are sea lions in one of my shows this year. Does your job have sea lions? I didn't think so.

(Photos from top: I-65 in Indiana, the FoodPlay performers juggling around their stage manager, the "intrepid" and thoroughly soaked group at Parkside, penne with olive oil and asparagus, some of the cast and crew from "Beyond the Dragon Gate" 2009.)