howeird | You would think (Reply)

the way the government is running these days, April Fools' Day would be a Federal holiday.

This morning was quite the time suck. I was intending to sleep till 10, do my morning routine, change the litterboxes and relax or read until 1 when it was time to go to rehearsals.

But Kaan wanted to play fetch at 9, and I had the GoPro by the bed with the battery charged, so I snapped it onto the headband mount, fired up the app on my cell phone, and recorded some rounds of fetch. And that needed to be transferred to the PC, edited and exported for Youtube. But the transfers take a while, and I had read the help page on Turbo Tax which showed what I had been doing wrong in trying to amend my taxes, so I multi-tasked between the two, and before I knew it it was 12:45 and I hadn't done any of my morning stuff.

So I took meds and grabbed my reading glasses and jacket, punched the address of the rehearsal into the GPS and headed for some middle school in San Jose, which was more like in Cupertino. It only took 20 minutes to get there, and rehearsals did not start till 2, so I had a lot of time to walk around, watch soccer practice and discover I had forgotten to bring my Kindle.

This was the first rehearsal with the orchestra, and it was okay. Cast and musicians wandered in over the course of the first half hour. Seating was inadequate for such a large cast, and that orchestra is twice as large as it needs to be in most sections. I recognized a few of the musicians, one has worked several shows I have been on, a very good double-reed player. At least one of the two cellists sounded great. String bass player was familiar, and excellent. Overall, they sounded okay. Intonation was pretty good, they mostly played all the notes, and by the time we open they should be fine.

I'm still worried about our leading man, though. Excellent voice, but I have not heard him project well either in dialog or singing. We have a woman singing tenor and playing a man, and she is having a tough time learning a very difficult part and making herself heard. She's really an alto with a very low bottom note, I think. Lovely person, fun to be on stage with. There are three or four very weak soloists in the ensemble who have one solo line each. I like the share the wealth idea, and none of them will destroy the show if their line is not heard. But I'd rather have strong singers all around.

Maestro managed to work it so the chorus could eave early, which was about 4 or so. By 4:30 I was waiting for a manicure, a half hour wait and once again I regretted forgetting my kindle. I think it was tattoo special day, several of the women clients had a lot of ink on them. Two of them were very large canvases.

Next stop, my local PO to get another priority mail envelope (I had one for the IRS, needed another for the Franchise Tax Board). They have a display in the unlocked section for all the various free envelopes, but it was empty. So I went to the little PO near Sunnyvale CalTrain, and they had about a thousand express envelopes, and almost as many small flat rate boxes, but only padded flat rate envelopes. Around the corner is one of those contract stations, and he was open and gave me the kind I needed.

Home, took care of the litterboxes and staged them by the door then crashed on the recliner until I was ready to take them to the dumpster.

Printed PO labels from the USPS.com site for the tax stuff, and now those are ready to drop off Monday.

Launched Quicken, saw that both my paycheck and bonus arrived in my account, so I paid off my Amex Blue, Capitol One and Discover cards. The first two were small amounts, Discover was about equal to a paycheck. Will have to wait another paycheck to pay off Amex Costco card. That one's a 0% interest card. Actually, so is the Capitol One and Discover, but the latter is coming close to the end of its grace period.

With Things Being As They Are In The World™, I want to be as solvent as possible.

Broke for dinner. Last night I'd baked a 10-lb honey glazed spiral cut bone-in ham, the first time I have ever even thought of doing that. I did it in honor of Good Friday, and all my superstitious non-meat-eating friends. Before I went to bed I pulled all the slices off which I could, bagging them and throwing the bags in the freezer. Whichever company does this ham poops out before they cut the last few inches, so those I had to chop off in ugly chunks, which went into a bag in the fridge for further processing. Tonight I threw the chunks into the Cuisinart and made chips and slice-lets, and took about 1/3 of them, threw that into the cast iron skillet with some eggbeaters, string cheese and American Singles, and had a nice ham & cheese scramble. The remaining bits went back into the bag, and into the freezer.

Took the litterbox cartridges out to the dumpster, where a Chinese mover was trying to understand an Indian tenant. It was not pretty.

It rained intermittently all afternoon, but it's still pretty warm.

Fed the cats their Fancy Feast, caught up on LJ, FB and Twitter. Part of that was looking at the Hugo nominations (science fiction fans vote on these). The Bay Area club is very strong, and works up a list of nomination suggestions for members by gathering them from the membership and posting them on the web site. I think LA, DC and maybe Boston does this too. There may be others. Anyhow, I was not surprised to see us well represented. Also not surprised to see

seanan_mcguire on there 5 times, and actually wondered why she wasn't on there for graphic novel-ish things too. I'm a fan of her, but not the genres she writes in. I was bothered a bit that she was running against herself in one category. Officially the Hugo is for the work, and not the author, but I'd bet real cash dollars that most people vote for the author as much as, if not more than, the work. I'd be in favor of a limit of one nomination per author per category. Which would also widen the "short performance" field which had three Dr. Who episodes running against each other.

And once again I have a dilemma on voting for fan artist, because

dinogrl and

maurinestarkey are both nominated, I love both of them and their work, and it's apples and oranges because Mo does stunning drawings and paintings, Spring does the most amazing genre jewelry. And dinosaur poop. Mo won last year so I think I'll vote jewelry this time.

I was tempted to throw my name in the ring, my photos have been seen by fans in the Bay Area, Denvention, Chicon and Boskone. But photography never draws the ooohs and aaahs of hand-crafted art. And I think that's probably As It Should Be.

My left knee has been hurting a lot the past few days, and not responding much to Tylenol. Can't take Ibuprofin because my liver is already waving the white flag.

Plans for tomorrow:
Fry's, buy a couple of reams of printer paper. I made a couple of mistakes printing the tax forms, fed the shredder a lot of paper.
It may continue to rain, in which case I'll catch up on Tivo & maybe throw Princess Bride on the blu-ray. My newest great-nephew was named Wesley, which made me want to puke at first, but on his first posted FB photo a light went on and I wrote a comment: "As you wish..."
I also may try to have a late lunch at Shoreline Park, especially if it rains.
Oh yes, Easter Sunday. Time to bite the head off a hollow chocolate bunny.