Rehearsals for Sister Mary are coming along. We need to be off-book this week, and I’ve been negligent on learning my lines so far… I will have to get on it this weekend. I’m grateful that I don’t have a huge line-load but still have plenty to do in the show. Our camel costume is unfortunately made of a very insular fabric and is going to make me sweat like a pig, but on the bright side it meant cutting holes in the top of it for our heads to poke out of, so we will actually be able to be present and acting in the scene instead of just a giant puppet.
Right now the biggest problem I have with the show is that we rehearse at our director’s house, and her dogs keep triggering my allergies. Even though she keeps them outside, the place is very clean and it’s on hardwood floors that don’t retain pet hair the way carpets do, when you’ve had animals living there for years it just becomes part of the atmosphere. I keep meaning to see an allergist again… I tried immunotherapy for a couple of years with no luck, but the science keeps moving forward and I want to keep exploring it, if only I had the time. My allergist is in Seattle, and driving there is already a pain, and the bridge tolls haven’t even begun yet.
I finally applied for a new credit card to replace the rewards one I had… an American Express Blue Cash card that gets 6% back on groceries, 3% on gas and department store purchases, and 1% on the rest. I was uneasy about getting a card with an annual fee, as I don’t like feeling like I need to spend money in order to make the card worthwhile, but it won’t take much in the way of grocery purchases to clear that amount. This will be an interesting experiment for me: as I enter the world of being an American Express cardholder I will finally begin noticing and paying attention to what cards are accepted where, as while I think Amex is accepted most places I do my major shopping I know that it’s nowhere nearly as ubiquitous as Visa and MasterCard. So I’ll still have my regular BoA Visa as a back-up, with its ill-performing World Points rewards and inability to do auto-pay.
I don’t often talk about the little things on the Internet that I enjoy, but Dr. McNinja is a brilliant webcomic I’ve been following for a couple of years now. The storytelling and the comedy are both top-notch, and the art is as good as most professional comic books I’ve seen. The author was at Comicon when I did improv there two years ago, but I missed meeting him (although Elizabeth managed to get him to autograph a copy of one of his print editions for me). This past year when I was doing improv there again, he wasn’t in attendance. I hold out hope that one day our paths will cross for real.
I keep meaning to get around to finishing off my blog post about the new entertainment system I put together… I’ll see if I can muster up the time this weekend. It is a holiday after all, but it is a busy one.
Dan.