The last few weeks have been busy, busy, busy. Most notably, Spelling Bee opened and had its first weekend of shows, and we are upon our second weekend as I write this. I was terribly exhausted by the time we opened but we put on a good show and folks are enjoying it, so you should go see it. (It looks like tonight and tomorrow are already sold out, so that’s pretty excellent.) It’s hard not to have a good time at this show!

One of the great things I get from theatre is the opportunity to work with new people, and there are some very talented and skilled people in this show that I’m very pleased to have had the privilege to perform with. Over the years as my circle of friends and colleagues has expanded the size of the community has continued to shrink, and it’s been very enriching feeling like there is a tangible network of these hard-working, dedicated people out there that I am a part of, and towards which I have been able to make a positive contribution.

Still no word about rescheduling of our annual condo meeting. Are we going to just shut down like the federal government?

In tech news, I at last received the final component for my new, home-brewn DVR system, and I’ve had it up and running for about a week now. There have been some initial glitches with its operation but in spite of those it’s lived up to expectations and is proving itself to be a vast improvement over what I had previously. I intend to document the thing in its entirety in an upcoming post.

That’s all for now,

Dan.

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…

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

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

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

Musical fountains at the Bellagio hotel.

Dan.

Friday’s SecondStory show was nothing remarkable, but Saturday was my first Theatresports performance since December and I was both anxious and excited to get back on that stage. I was on a team with one apprentice and two veterans, all three of whom were women (I was a bit disappointed we didn’t go with the team name “Token Male” one of them had proposed). It was a really fun combination of strong performers I don’t often get to play with, and when you are, in fact, the token male on the team it means you get to play just about every guy role that comes up. We ended the first half with a five-point deficit but managed to come back from it and win by three points, which means we’ll get to play again next weekend. We had a good audience and I felt like I had a pretty solid show overall, with the opportunity to do some respectable scenework, which is what usually concerns me the most when I’m in Theatresports, so that felt good.

I bit the bullet and finally joined Netflix over the weekend. Technically I started a month-long free trial but I know I lack the willpower to quit something like that once I start it, and at $9/month it doesn’t exactly break the bank. The catalyst was getting this fancy new Internet-enabled television that hooks directly up to your account and lets you stream movies and television shows directly over the Internet. You see, I know I’m not enough of a moviephile to ever make a traditional, mail-based Netflix account worth the money, and in fact am likely to find it more onerous than just renting DVDs from a retail shop because I will worry about whether I am watching them and sending them back soon and often enough in order to make it worth my investment.

The Internet streaming is something new and very cool, though. So far I’ve watched a few episodes of the first season of Weeds on it and am surprised by how good the quality is. You can tell it’s been compressed and every now and then it jumps a single frame or so (almost unnoticeable), but by and large it looks almost as good as an actual DVD and doesn’t stutter or stammer like I’d expected it would.

The downside is that while there are a lot of streamable titles on Netflix, only a small percentage of their total library is accessible through this feature. So I am still trapped with the DVD-by-mail conundrum, even more so as I now need to work to keep my DVD “queue” full, but many of the things I want to watch are available by streaming, so it takes a lot more browsing to find things to put in the mail queue.

Netflix apparently has a “friends” feature, so if you use Netflix you should befriend me and share your ideas for what I should watch!

Dan.

I’m kind of caught between wanting to downplay the morbid significance of the occasion and embracing the landmark that it is. I don’t feel remarkably older, and most people are spinning the positive side of it… I think my favourite comment I’ve received over the Internet is from improv legend Joe Bill, who I’m not especially close to but I’ve taken several classes with and was kind enough to drop me a note saying “congrats on surviving the Dumbass Decade”.

The theme for this week was, coincidentally, “survival”… I had a stomach bug early on which took a lot out of me, and then got passed on to my girlfriend and took even more out of her, so much so that I had to take her to the E.R. on Wednesday, causing us to miss both the holiday party at Unexpected Productions (which I was totally psyched for) and a holiday show that our friends had set aside an extra Wednesday performance just so those of us with heavy schedules could make it. We are both much better now, but it took a pretty significant toll.

Not so fortunate, however, is my poor laptop, a MacBook Pro that I co-purchased with my then-employer back in 2007. It has been having trouble playing DVDs since, well, forever. I got the DVD drive replaced several months ago but surprisingly the troubles quickly came back. Still under AppleCare, I took it back a second time when I had a DVD that I could consistently reproduce the problem on within the first ten seconds of it playing. I left the DVD with them while they ordered and replaced the drive for a second time, and when I returned I thankfully had the foresight to try it out in the store, only to confirm that replacing the DVD drive hadn’t fixed the problem.

I then spent about an hour in the store with their technician, who suspected it was a problem with the memory and was trying out various configuration of memory in the device. At the end he concluded it wasn’t in fact the memory but the logic board, which meant ordering yet another part to be replaced. I left the DVD with them again, and when I got the call and returned for a third time I was incredibly frustrated to try the DVD only to find it still crashing within the first ten seconds.

I explained to them that my issue wasn’t that they were having difficulty fixing this problem so much as each time they called me and said it was fixed I returned only to try it out myself and find out that replacing the part hadn’t fixed anything, and if they had so much as tried the DVD themselves (which is why I had left it with them) then they could have saved me a trip to Bellevue Square which, at Christmas-time, isn’t exactly a holiday.

After admitting that they had dropped the ball and didn’t know exactly what was wrong with my computer they (finally) decided to replace it, so the good news is that I will be getting a brand new MacBook Pro with even slightly better specs than the one I have right now. The bad news is that I might not be receiving it in time for my next scheduled trip to San Jose. I received a call from the manager today and as penance for their errors and putting me in a bind he’s going to cover new AppleCare on my machine and throw in a backup drive as well, so at least that’s good.

The rest of the week has been ok, illness notwithstanding. My Theatresports team won last Friday by a single point against a very formidable team, although I think they did better narrative work than we did. Unfortunately we didn’t come back yesterday because the regular teams were usurped by special teams celebrating the departure of one of our ensemble members. We’re supposed to come back again, but with the Christmas holiday and then the new year frankly I don’t know how that’s going down.

On Thursday I was treated to a surprise birthday party that I knew about in advance, on account of the E.R. visit on Wednesday and scepticism as to whether or not it would still be happening. It was really nice to see people there from all walks of my life, and I am grateful to everyone who made it out to it.

It feels weird having left my twenties behind. They had their ups and their downs and in many ways were very successful and in other ways not so much… I am sad for the failures that were most profound, the wasted days and missed opportunities, and feel a strange sense of mourning for the closing of a chapter that I am no longer writing but instead has been written, and knowledge that the last chances to make any alterations to it have finally slipped away.

But then, there is every reason to believe that thirty will be the best year of them all so far, so I shall be happy. After all, having written the past is a small price to pay to get to write the future.

Dan.

I was one of the earlier arrivals as I had gone to work beforehand so I would be able to park in the vicinity. It was still a good 25 minute walk or so, and I was ready to hit the lake pretty much on arrival.

Turns out there was a boat across from us on the slip where a bunch of folks were having a blast harrassing the legion of tourist ducks that were creating almost constant traffic, entering and exiting the water from the boat ramp right next to us. We got into it, loading up waterguns, swimming up to the ducks and firing mercilessly at the passengers as the boats kept crossing by. The reactions were mixed, but most of them seemed to take it pretty well. Word got out we were doing it, though, and some of the drivers tried firing back at us with their own waterguns, while a few of the more boring ones lowered the window covers on their vehicles in an attempt to block us out entirely.

It was about the most juvenile sport I’ve been a part of in a long time, but it was great. I took a few photos of the view from his houseboat:

Everyone brought meat of some form to the party, and the barbecue was fantastic. I’m not normally a big pork eater but the owner had marinated a huge tenderloin that got grilled by one of the ensemble members who doubles as something of a chef, and was without a doubt the most succulent pork I’ve ever tasted. Others brought sausages, steak shishkebabs and more. Once we were loaded up on meat and drink we hung out on the rooftop patio of the boat to watch the fireworks:

… I suppose that’s about the best quality I could expect from an iPhone taking pictures at night.

Anyway, it was pretty spectacular and a blast of a time with some fantastic friends. So glad I could make it out this year!

On Monday we shipped my big project to Apple, where it’s been in review ever since. If agreements hold up, it’ll be available on the 14th, which is when a massive advertising campaign begins.

It shipped with a few known and understood bugs and with some feature compromises in order to keep from jeopardizing stability of the build, but on the whole we managed to get it pretty damn stable in time for launch. I’m proud of it… the client is getting one hell of a deal from us. I’ve been taking it a bit easier this week, although they’ve already got me working on some other side projects while we negotiate and get a contract signed for versions 1.1 and 2.

Weather has been pretty great on the whole, with a few exceptions here and there. It’s as though we’re finally getting some payback for the lousy summers we’ve had the past couple of years. I was glad for the good weather Thursday morning, when I was on the highway driving to work and out of nowhere my front passenger-side window shattered in on me.

I shouted an epithet or two and navigated my way off the highway and into a nearby parking lot. I never saw what caused the glass to shatter but I assume it was a small rock or something kicked up by another vehicle. None of the glass hit me and fortunately there was nobody in the passenger seat, but I couldn’t very well continue the drive to Seattle. The next hour or so was spent learning what one does in these situations, as I called around to my parents, my insurance company, the car dealership and other glass repair places. There was no use going through insurance and the dealership said they could fix it for $300-$500, but also offered that an auto glass place might do it cheaper. They recommended a shop and I called them, and sure enough they would do it for $190 plus tax, but I became frustrated as the guy there had to make a call to check if they could get the glass for my car the same day or not, and after fifteen minutes still hadn’t called me back. I called him and asked how much longer it was going to take, as I had to make a decision about what I was going to do. He told me that it shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes… I think he said it, though, too quickly to stop himself as he realized in that same moment that fifteen minutes had already gone by. He quickly added he’d call the guy over there again in another five minutes, and I accepted that, a little beleaguered that it took them so long just to check the inventory over at their warehouse.

I checked on my phone for another auto glass place, and the woman there was able to put me on hold less than a minute while she checked their warehouse inventory. She told me they could have the glass in by 2 PM, and they were five bucks cheaper to boot, so I gladly made an appointment and was half-way home when I finally got a call back from the first place and was able to tell them thanks-but-no.

So by the end of the day I was 200 bucks poorer but now have a new passenger window in my car. I know it won’t stay this way, but at the moment it’s eerily clean and without any sign of wear, and is so transparent that it still kind of looks like my car is missing a window.

I’ve been away from Theatresports ever since Fiddler opened and on since it closed again as I’ve been so burned out from work, but I made something of an unexpected return last night when an ensemble member emailed me asking if I could take her place. I agreed, and it was good to get back on stage and do what I love. My team did a respectable job and we wound up winning, although I think the judging was wonky. So it looks like I’ll be going back again next weekend.

I had a horrible time getting there, though, as the I-90 bridge has been closed heading into Seattle this week for maintenance, which means traffic on the 520 has been brutal. In fact, I wound up staying and working from home on Friday, the bridge traffic was backed up so far. My plan was to wait until the middle of the day, or the afternoon, or any time other than rush hour to get into the city, go to work, and then head to the theatre from there, but there was not a single point in the entire day where the traffic maps weren’t blackened out. So I left an hour earlier than normal and made my way in. Of course, on the way home they unexpectedly opened the 520 bridge (how they can see fit to do that when the only other bridge is under construction I have no clue), so I wound up taking about a 20 minute detour because of that. On the whole, Seattle traffic and the constant construction we’re experiencing right in the way of my commute are pretty high on my pet peeves list.

That’s about all there is to report. Gonna go outside now and enjoy the summer while it’s still here.

Dan.