A Bit Much

Put stamps on the DVD mailers last night, and dropped them in the office out box this morning. Also gave the boss a copy - his wife is Thai and they have a house upcountry. He has been telling me that he's been looking at them on Flickr, and is amazed at how much 1975 looks like 2012.

He especially liked this one, which is one of my favorites.

He asked if it was posed. Nope, candid. It's a scene which could be easily found almost anywhere in central or NE Thailand today.

This is one of my faves:

I love the expressions on the faces of the two on the left. And the markings on the wall which say DDT was sprayed on this place (part of a Peace Corps program).

Finished a major document at work on how to test a certain new feature which I am the "expert" on. In the process I found two more bugs, both relatively minor GUI cosmetic things.I'm pretty sure one of them used to work correctly.

Managed to test a couple of fixed bugs, but most of the ones I wanted to hit I couldn't because the equipment I need to borrow is stuck in long-term testing of something a lot more important.

Lunchtime went home, there were 4 things to pick up from the office. I had only expected 2. Glad to have them all because now I have nothing en route. At least nothing I ordered. Lunch was a microwave meal made in the new low-powered Oster machine. It took longer to cook, and needed more time than the 700W instructions said. This for a 1kW device.

Not much to do in the afternoon, but managed to stay till 6. Rehearsals are about the same distance from work as home is, but in the opposite direction. Traffic is about the same either way. So I headed for the Starbucks in the Staples/Costco complex about a mile from the rehearsal hall, only to find it is empty, a "for lease sign" on it. Starbucks still has it listed on the web site and on their app. :-( I sent a note to their webmaster.

So I went to the McDonald's across the parking lot, and slurped up their insanely slow wifi. And a partially unmixed chocolate shake.

Got to rehearsals on time but nature called, so I missed the opening salvo. The director starts with dancer exercises, which I mostly can't do because of my munged knees. There is a lot of dancing in this show, but not by me.

It was a very long rehearsal, another stumble-through of the first four scenes. The leads mostly don't know their lines yet, the boom box effs up the chorus learning the words to the songs. We start in on music next week, which we should have done first. The director is good, has a plan, he's also the choreographer and knows the dance steps, and is a good teacher. I would be a lot happier if he was not obsessed with having all the chorus members dancing.

All in all it looks like a show I won't be embarrassed to be in, unlike my last two shows.

There is an extremely pretty girl whose husband is also in the cast, and it's clear to see she's deeply in love with him. I finally figured out tonight that she is someone I had a big crush on when we did Pirates with this group in 2004. I've been following her on FB for about a year, she has 3 kids, and there is no way I would have believed that if it wasn't for FB. Anyhow, I told her I had finally figured out who she was. She said she knew me from day one.

This rehearsal we had a lot more of the cast than last week, two or three more attractive women showed up. I'm still calling the Pilates instructor the most attractive to me in the chorus, and the gal playing the romantic lead is easy on the eyes, but a bit young for me.

We have an autistic boy in the chorus, he looks to be about 16, and he is doing quite well. His mother is taking a lot of notes, but it's clear he is pretty sharp, and he figures out the dance steps by watching the people around him. Which is pretty much how all the non-dancers do it. His communications skills have improved since we started rehearsing, and we all treat him the same way we treat everyone else. No one on the staff has mentioned his autism, probably because they know it's obvious, and they would not have cast him if they thought he would be harmed in any way.

Anyhow, there is a massively too-long dance number to I'll Go Home To Bonnie Jean which had been about half choreographed, and he kept us late to finish that and tun it. And then he kept us later to run it twice. We were done just before 11.

And we get to do it all again tomorrow, though probably just the run-thru, and maybe we'll be out by 9.

Plans for tomorrow:
Quiet day at work
Maybe go out for lunch
Rehearsals