We had a few weeks of utter hell heat-wise, where temperatures pushed up into the nineties and it was stifling. So it was perhaps ill-conceived that myself and three friends chose to follow it up with four days in Las Vegas in the middle of the Nevada desert, where temperatures were well over a hundred. (Plenty more on that in a bit.)

The weather has been bi-polar… the heat-wave came out of nowhere, and during it I could barely sleep and had near-constant headaches. The moment it ended the temperature dropped right back down to the 60′s. I think I’m gonna start looking for a portable air conditioner I can use for the two weeks or so of summer that it’s like this, and keep in storage for the remainder of the year. My barbecue, unfortunately, hasn’t weathered the summer so well. It was in storage during the construction, and I then brought it out for a very successful party, but my next attempt to use it the middle burner simply wouldn’t light, and I could find no problems with the assembly. I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement ever since, but I’ve had no luck finding a good price on a grill that has an infrared rotisserie burner (one of my upgrade criteria) that can also fit on my rather narrow patio. I’m hoping that prices will come down sufficiently as the season winds to a close for me to pick something decent up.

I’ve been doing a lot of improv lately, some quite successful and some not so much. We’ve been doing theme nights this past month, probably the most interesting of which was our Shirts vs. Skins night, where I eagerly volunteered to be on the skins team and do topless improv alongside two other performers almost as pasty-white as myself. It was a very good show for both myself and the team, and the audience was on our side and hysterical the entire time. This weekend I will be representing Canada in our Natives vs. Non-Natives matchup… it’ll be interesting to see how the audience treats us in that one.

Without a doubt the biggest thing to happen to me recently is the trip to Vegas that I went on with Elizabeth and our two friends Colin and Ashley (you may remember them as Brad and Janet from the production of The Rocky Horror Show I was in). We’d planned it nearly two months earlier in particular because people in the group really wanted to see two Cirque shows: Kà and O. So we booked our tickets and rooms at the hotel and went this past weekend.

It was a pretty fantastic trip overall, and I took a bunch of photos with my iPhone. We stayed in the pyramid at the Luxor, one of the older hotels on the strip but also a well-renowned and regarded one. Our rooms were a bit dismal, but one does not go to Vegas to stay in the rooms, so we were okay with it, until Elizabeth found a leaky pipe in our bathroom, at which point I was able to negotiate an upgrade for the four of us to much nicer rooms in the East Tower with more space, better amenities and an impressive view.

We were there from Thursday night to Monday afternoon, and it was pretty much a whirlwind. The Cirque shows were incredible, fantastic, and all sorts of other adjectives I cannot do them justice with. They were both so much more than the touring show I’d seen in Marymoor by my condo. If I had to choose a favourite to recommend it would be Kà, which is far more story-based than most Cirque shows, and I found it both intense and positively gripping. O was pretty spectacular as well, and truly gorgeous, but unfortunately I had an allergic reaction in my eye that made it difficult for me to properly enjoy most of it.

In addition to this, Elizabeth and I went to see Penn and Teller, whose Bullshit! series we are both afficianados of. This show was a ton of fun and a great time. I was pleased with my ability to figure out how some of their tricks are done, although there were definitely some that stumped me. I don’t agree with all of their politics, but it’s hard to deny their charisma and what generous and genuinely well-intentioned guys they are. Probably the most telling indicator of this is that after every single show they wait outside the lobby while their audience (easily over a thousand people) mobs them, and gives each and every one of them the chance to get their picture taken with them and an autograph signed. It’s how I increased my collection of celebrity noogies to include both Penn and Teller.

Other highlights included my gambling at the blackjack table and turning $30 into $100 (although the next day I lost another $50). And the four of us also made the heinous mistake of going to a timeshare pitch in order to score free tickets to the Bodies and Titanic exhibits at the Luxor. We justified it as being a rite of passage, as none of us had attended a timeshare hard-sell before and it felt like we should know if we could make it through intact. It turned out resisting the sale wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as getting out of there in any reasonable amount of time was… it was supposed to be for two hours over lunch at 1 PM, but we didn’t even begin until 2 PM (by which point we were starving) and didn’t get out of there until 4:30, which cut into the time we had to spend with friends of Ashley who lived in Las Vegas. There were some highly entertaining stories we got out of it, but I think we all agreed that the stories still weren’t worth the hassle.

All in all the trip was a huge success, and it was a great idea to go with a similarly-interested couple that we could have fun with. It’s a shame to go back to work, but I don’t think I’ll miss the desert heat. You can check out my photo album of the trip, and here are a few teasers:

I also took a couple of videos…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ml0R0vRwVU

Kà preshow, featuring balls of fire! (Make sure to watch through to the end.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=77VqdTlLzmc

Musical fountains at the Bellagio hotel.

Dan.

Immediately following the holiday I had to spend the entire remaining week on a business trip to my company’s headquarters in San Jose. The work itself went fine, but the trip was fraught with bad judgment and timing. As this was a longer trip than normal I thought I might stay in a nicer suite instead of the hotel I normally bunk at – the cost is the same to the company, but the suite is farther away so I normally don’t bother with it. I was thinking Elizabeth might join me for the second half of the week as she still had a little time off before her classes began, and the extra comfort and recreational amenities of the suite would have been perfect for that. I confirmed availability and priced out the tickets, slept on it to be sure, and when I went to book the next day the suites had become entirely booked up overnight, and the flight had gone up $100. So that plan went out the window… then to make matters worse, I managed to book my own flight for the wrong day, which caused a whole additional heap of last-minute stress.

Things have calmed down a little since then. Last week we finally had some nice summer weather (although nowhere near as hot and brutal as it apparently had been the week I was gone in San Jose), and I even cracked the barbecue out of storage this past weekend as they’ve finally gotten around to painting most of my condo. There is a light at the end of the tunnel for all of the construction in my condo complex, and it is a welcome sight.

I’ve been managing to do some improv pretty much every weekend, which has also been good for me. This past Saturday I had one of the best Theatresports shows I’ve had in a long time… it was a full, boisterous house and the most epic scene of the night was between myself and another improviser in the style of Dr. Seuss. Both teams did well but ours edged out a victory, which means I get to go back next weekend. It felt really good to experience that kind of success on stage again… I was in need of a night like that one.

Dan.

• A mere three days after purchasing my new car, it got a flat tire. Part of the incentive for the car was free roadside assistance, but when I called they said I wasn’t in their system. What followed was a harrowing couple of days that finally ended with me getting reimbursed by the dealer for my trouble. I was relieved when it turned out the tire was punctured by a nail and that it wasn’t a more systemic defect with the new tires. Other than that the car has been relatively trouble-free, but I still miss the features that my previous Corolla LE had.
• And Then There Were None had its three-week run at Driftwood. It was an extremely challenging role for me with a lot of lines that were difficult to memorize, and a dialect that regularly kicked my ass. We ran Thursday through Sunday which was extremely tiring (and a big part of why I haven’t updated this blog). The show itself was quite well-received and had very good houses on the whole (the silver-hairs come out in droves for Agatha Christie, it seems). One nice side effect of having done this show is that I can now sort-of fake my way through a Standard British dialect, which may prove useful for improv and other theatrical endeavours.
• Work has been extremely busy for me. Lots of dancing and negotiation with various stakeholders in the project while trying not to lose any inertia on the development itself. This included a one-day trip down to San Jose on a Friday in which I was also meant to be performing in Theatresports, but I couldn’t get a nonstop flight home… and the second flight got delayed by about an hour, causing me ridiculous amounts of stress as I raced to the theatre, bursting in only moments before I needed to be on stage.
• I naturally haven’t been performing in Theatresports while I was doing And Then There Were None. But I have been participating in other ways, including rehearsing for a crossword puzzle show that opened last week and I’ll be doing my first performance in tomorrow. I have missed improv while doing the other show, and it will be nice to get back to it.
• Elizabeth and I are taking a long weekend to head down to Las Vegas with some friends in August. Should be good times!

Hopefully that catches everyone up, more or less. I’ll try to write more detailed/regular stuff in the future!

Dan.

Nobody was seriously injured, thankfully… I suffered some minor whiplash but that seemed to be about the extent of it. A cop happened to pull up within about a minute or so of the collision, so we didn’t even have to call 9-1-1. Driving the car behind me was a seventeen year old girl, who immediately confessed to not paying attention to the road (she was trying to adjust her floormat) and was tearfully apologetic. Her car needed to be towed away… mine was drivable back into my parking lot, but barely. (The SUV didn’t suffer any visibly significant damage.)

There was no question of who was at fault, and her insurance accepted responsibility without a fuss. Monday I took it to an auto body shop to have the damage estimated and was provided with a rental car by the insurance. There was a good question as to whether the insurance would pay for repairs or write it off as a total loss, but when the estimate came back at over $9,000 I thought they would do it, since my car’s blue-book value was at least a third higher than that. So I was extremely surprised when the insurance called and told me that they were writing it off, and offered to pay me the full amount it was worth… I suppose with the engine still working and most of the damage to the exterior enough of it was salvageable to make it more cost effective to junk it.

With that, I was forced to say goodbye to my dear Audrey Two, purchased when I first moved to Washington back in 2005 and faithful servant for the past five years.

It took until the middle of this past week to get to that stage, and I was suddenly put on the spot to purchase a new car before my rental expired on Saturday. My instinct was to just purchase another Corolla since I didn’t really have time to explore all of my options, but after talking with my parents I also test drove the Hyundai Elantra, which was actually quite a nice car and I might have even purchased one had things been slightly different.

I didn’t have much success negotiating with dealers in person, so I wound up discovering TrueCar.com, which was able to give me a good summary of the way prices range between dealer cost and sticker price in my area, and even quote me on a better-than-average price with a specific dealer. So I wound up purchasing a new Corolla LE, which I have named Audrey Junior:

It cost me about $5K more on top of the insurance settlement. I wish I could be happier about my purchase, but before long I discovered that a good number of features that were in the 2005 LE had been removed from the 2010 LE, including the variable adjuster for the intermittent wiper blades, and general quality of the driver’s compartment and console such as the wood-grain trim and several of the storage compartments. So while on the one hand I guess I can’t complain for upgrading to a brand-new car for only $5 thousand, I miss my old car quite a bit.

Dan.

Two weeks ago I went to a friend’s birthday party, who decided that for her 30th birthday she wanted flying trapeze lessons. So a bunch of went to the local circus school to do their introductory course, which consisted of a couple of hours swinging in the air above a giant net.

As with most things, the scariest part is probably the anticipation. This meant the whole phase of climbing up a ladder to a wobbly little platform 30 feet in the air, having them switch safety lines on you (and telling you to “hold on” while you’re being switched), and reaching out in an incredibly unnatural position while trying to hold a heavy bar at eye level, with nothing but air and net beneath you. We each did about four or five jumps, though, which meant I got to revisit the scary anticipation phase several times. In my brief time there I didn’t get to the point where it became second nature… in fact, I think I actually got a little more scared as I went to do subsequent jumps.

The first jump was straightforward and fun enough: jump from the platform and swing from the trapeze, then when given the command lift your legs into a sitting position and drop into the net. My eyes grew wide with alarm as she described the second jump to us, though: we were to jump off the platform, then at the far point of the first swing lift our legs up into trapeze bar, then at the near point of the swing release our hands and swing by our legs, then once we’d swung once grab the bar again, remove our legs and return to an arm-swing, then as the next swing began kick back-and-forth three times, release and do a backflip to land in the net.

Perhaps even more surprising to me is that I was able to do almost all of it. I had trouble getting my legs into the bar and that delayed me a swing, and then my kicking was pretty uneven so my dismount lacked sufficient speed, and I only did a three-quarter backflip. The next time I went up, though, I managed to do the entire thing (although I still took an extra swing to get my legs into the bar).

Don’t believe me? Well I’ve got proof:

Last few weeks have been interesting for improv. Same weekend as the trapeze, I was fortunate enough to get cast in two teams: one on Friday and one on Saturday. Unfortunately my Friday team didn’t do so well, but my Saturday team had a pretty solid show and I felt good about my performance. We ended up losing by a single point… but what was really odd was that the audience practically revolted against the judges with their booing, to the point that the emcee decided to give us one more challenge to attempt to settle the score. Due to a judge’s error at the end of that challenge, we ended up tying (something which isn’t supposed to happen), so we ended up in a “sudden death” skill competition that my team got shut out on. So it was about the most crushing defeats imaginable, and one of our team members (who happens to also be the artistic director of the theatre) proposed we come back the next week for a grudge match. This felt a little weird to me but I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to perform again. So we came back and we lost a second time, fair-and-square.

The whole judging thing in Theatresports is awkward. It’s designed as a way to engage the audience, focus their attention and galvanize them alongside the teams on stage against a common enemy. Whenever I judge, I always play the “arc of the show”: throwing lower scores at first and eventually opening myself up to higher scores at the end. But with King of the Hill and teams returning from week to week (which we’ve been doing for about a year now), the scores are a lot more significant and it’s a lot harder to get stage time if you don’t win, so it’s harder to keep the competition friendly. I, for one, would be happier if we returned to random teams, and we may do that eventually, but for now it is what it is. This weekend I am doing tech and judging, and who knows when I will improvise on stage again.

That said, I could certainly use the chance to redeem myself… Wednesday was Cinco de Mayo and my friend really wanted to do a tequila-inspired drunken improv performance with five players. I’m usually the first to shoot down drunk-prov as something that almost uniformly goes bad and is a bad experience for the audience, but he’d never tried it and I felt both obligated to him plus the need to challenge myself to something I expected to be very, very difficult.

So myself and four others showed up on Wednesday with bottles of tequila and prayers in our hearts. Now I’m a very light drinker to begin with, but knew I was going to have to show some mettle… we started downing the shots then eventually moved the table out to the right side of the house so the audience could see us getting sufficiently liquored up for our performance.

Now I’ve been plenty drunk before, but almost never to the point where I’ve had trouble walking upright. I did at least seven shots of tequila that night, and was a total mess. The improv went predictably similar to a car going at highway speeds through, say, a tree, but to my credit I at least tried to hold it together and had the sense to take my time responding, for all the good it did us. Elizabeth drove me home that night and put me to bed, and I was pretty much useless for all of the next day. It seems I just can’t recover like I could when I was twenty anymore.

In the midst of all of this, something rather unexpected has happened: I’ve joined the cast of another play. Driftwood Players is doing And Then There Were None (better known as Ten Little Indians), a murder mystery by Agatha Christie. This show isn’t normally the kind I exactly leap out of my chair to do (not the least of which reasons include I’m unable to do a British accent), but I got asked by the director personally to fill in after one of their leads had to back out for health reasons just before rehearsals were starting. It looks like a fun cast and a decent play, and I get to do a nicely comedic character role. Plus I’ve wanted to work for Driftwood in the past so it can’t hurt to do this show for them. I am going to need an unbelievable amount of dialect coaching, though.

Dan.