All smiles (and yawns)

I woke up in the middle of the night last night because I was too hot. So, I took off my socks and then tried to absorb whatever coolness I could from the wood paneled wall that is smack up against my bed. I then tried to fall back asleep by clearing my mind of worry about thesis junk and whatnot by playing a version of my alphabet game. This time I was going through the alphabet and for each letter trying to think of a celebrity I found attractive, as well as someone who I knew in person who I found attractive over the years… and when I got to “H” I started having problems. I could list several “H” celebrities… Harrison Ford, Hugh Dancy, Hunter Parish. But then I couldn’t think of any person I knew in person whose name started with an H. After awhile I wasn’t even trying to think up a guy’s name anymore, I was just trying to think if I knew anyone whose name started with an H. And instead of my alphabet game helping me fall asleep, I was up for awhile trying to come up with “H” names. I looked around on Facebook today and saw that I had 2 or 3 friends whose names started with H. But if my life depended on it last night, I would not have been able to come up with H names… sadness. (For the record, I don’t have any friends or know people named Henry, Harry or Hannah… but I totally forgot about people named Heather. Ridonkulous!)

I did finally get back to sleep and I woke up this morning and my mom and I watched another episode of Studio 60 with breakfast. Then she asked me if I was ready for ping-pong… I had to say yes.

I changed into some ping-pong clothes (OU sweatpants and t-shirt, obviously) and got a Glee-mix out of my CD binder. We must have played 7 or 8 games… and I won 3 of them!!!!!

I beat my mom in ping-pong once with my left hand and twice with ye olde right hand. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up the neighbors, I was whooping with glee (Glee!) so loud. And that left-handed game, I was down 11-1 and I came back to win 21-19 (or something like that). Victory tasted good… and it was extra sweet when I defeated my mom while my dad was watching later on, because he was cheering for her. Mwuhahahahaha 🙂

After ping-pong we got pizza for lunch and watched some of the US Open (Tennis!!! We loves watching tennis!).

I changed out of my ping-pong clothes into normal people clothes and headed over to Molly J’s house (when I left, my parents were playing ping-pong… I live in a crazy house).

Once there, we chatted and played some board games 🙂 We played a game I had never heard of called Wreck the Nation… what a depressing game! I don’t want to believe that all of the facts on the game cards are true, but I think they are… yikes! Then we played some Balderdash… that’s a great game! I love vocabulary words 🙂

Then she showed me her Etsy page and the ADORABLE little worry dolls she makes 🙂 Check them out!!!

So, as you can tell, I didn’t work on school work again today. I plan on doing some Lit Review stuff tomorrow and this week. I promise. I do want to get my thesis proposal defended before the end of Fall Quarter. I know I need to be working on it, but I have to do that during the morning or early afternoon because then some epic headaches set in and I can’t focus or look at the computer for the amount of time I need to. Blah!

When I got home from Molly’s, my mom and I watched another episode of Studio 60. She’s really digging it, and I like it a lot, but the cheese factor has risen exponentially. And Harriet is a freakin’ nut job! Yikes

Well, speaking of nut jobs, I’m going to read some more of my Dexter book! I can totally head Michael C. Hall’s voice in my head when I read the books… awesome. I still like the show better, but this will tide me over till I get Season Four!

Have a good one!

 

Sooooo thankful for Glee reruns :)

Two hours of Glee reruns was exactly what I needed today…

Sure, I have Glee Season One Volume One DVDs – The Road to Sectionals, but I needed some of the Back 9, and tonight FOX aired Sectionals AND Hell-o!!! Oh, Jonathan Groff, how I love thee… (but more about Glee later!)

I woke up at 6 thinking about my paper and then somehow willed myself back to sleep until 8:30 again. I would love to sleep all the way through the night like I used to do… friggin’ worrying about everything all the time. Oy.

I got up and found my mom doing a Crossword puzzle on her computer. I made myself some breakfast (yogurt with chopped banana, granola, chocolate chips and star-shaped sprinkles… breakfast of champions) and sat down to watch the first half of Episode Three of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I paused several times to explain to my mom who the characters are and what the show is about… she will likely be watching this with me from now on as she seemed intrigued.

After breakfast I went with my mom to run a couple errands – got gas for the lawn mower and then went grocery shopping. I love grocery shopping with my mom… I remember going grocery shopping with her when I was younger. She always has her list, and it is arranged in the order of how one finds things in the store… something I wish I would have picked up on. My lists are always just in the order of how things come to my mind as I’m writing the list. But not my mom – she’s super organized.

We got home and unpacked the groceries. After a drink and a couple rounds of Yahtzee we went about our respective chores. I attempted to finish the Introduction of my thesis proposal (it’s kinda done… enough so that I will start my Literature Review tomorrow) while she mowed the grass.

We reconvened at 11:30 for pizza and more Yahtzee. Toward the end of our lunch break, Mom kinda brought up jobs… she’s not pressuring me to get one tomorrow, but said how that even if I worked a little, any money I would make would be like savings. I tried to tell her that I have been job hunting, but that I am hesitant to get a job right this very second as I have plans to go away in September and have a weekend conflict in October and how I hate going into a job with days I will already need off. She kinda rolled her eyes at me, so I said that my resume was updated and I’d keep looking.

So instead of working more on my paper, I tried to job hunt. I spent over 30 minutes on a bajillion different job search sites and I could feel my soul crushing to pieces. There wasn’t much that looked even remotely interesting. Then the jobs that I thought would be good were ones where I didn’t have enough job experience, or with the hours I wouldn’t physically be able to work on my paper.

Conundrum, folks.

See, I have a BSC in Telecommunications… I majored in Video Production and minored in Film. A bulk of my undergraduate classes were spent watching or making television and movies. I am excellent at breaking down what a certain scene means in a movie, or can tell you what kind of shot to use to evoke certain feelings or thoughts from an audience. I can break down a script and know my way around a television or film set. None of these skills are very applicable to almost all of the jobs I have found online… No one wants someone who is capable of film theory and criticism. They want someone with 5 years of managerial experience or a person who is a professional at a bunch of computer programs I’ve never heard of.

I did find a job that looked kinda okay and began filling out their online form. They had a spot where you could copy and paste your resume, which I tried to do, but I had to reformat the whole thing. It took a half hour. Then I tried to submit it, but besides the resume, they still wanted you to fill in all the boxes that has the EXACT SAME FRIGGIN’ INFORMATION AS A RESUME. I had to save my form and will finish it tomorrow… I wanted to throw my computer across the room.

Luckily Mom needed help moving our new dining room table, so I took that as a sign to stop being on my computer for awhile and go help move stuff around. The table looks nice. I can’t wait until the holidays when the whole family is sitting around it 🙂

Mom also went through the drawers of the furniture that is in the garage… lots of moose and duck stuff. Some old board games. Wall hangings I remember from my great-grandparents house in New Jersey. This awesome plate that says “Cheese” on it with a glass covering that looks like a mini cake box. Lots of odds and ends. We also inherited a deer head that is going in our foyer… my mom’s dad shot it and had it mounted for a wall-hanging. We’re going to be one of those families with a dead animal front and center when you walk into our house.

My dad got in around 6:15 and we finished getting dinner together – BBQ chicken nachos. My mom still can’t smell or taste… which sucks for her because the nachos were pretty awesome.

We sat as a family and ate dinner and watched the two episodes of Glee. As much as my dad rags on the show, he actually was aware of most of the plot points and characters. I know he doesn’t like the show half as much as I love it, but I know he’ll tolerate it for me by time new episodes air in September.

I love Glee. I *LOVE* it. I love the music, I love the characters, I love the actors… Jane Lynch is freakin’ amazing as Sue Sylvester. And I love that one of tonight’s reruns (Hell-o) was from the Back 9 because I LOVE Jonathan Groff. My sister and I saw him and Lea Michele in Spring Awakening a few years ago and I have loved him as an actor ever since. (BTW – I recently found these two Tumblr pages dedicated to Jonathan and Jesse/Rachel… they are sooooo great!)

The best part from Hell-o is when Rachel first meets Jesse and they sing “Hello” together. Brilliant!!

I am behind the times, but I just found out today that Glee Season One Volume 2 – The Road to Regionals will be available (as will Season One in its entirety), as well as a Karaoke Revolution Glee Wii game!!!! That comes out in November, just in time for my birthday… WOOT!

I’m high on Glee right now, but I should get back into Dexter mode… I finished the third book last night and will start the fourth one shortly.

Oh yeah – my dad is the cutest! We just finished Dexter Season Three yesterday. So today he asked me if we should get Dexter Season Four on Netflix next. I told him I’m 6th in line at the library to get the DVDs, but he was insinuating that he wants to watch it now! I’m so proud that my dad is into a show that I like too!! Besides SNL, we really don’t have the same taste in television, so I’m glad we are both fans of Dexter 🙂

Have a fantastic evening!!

(P.S. I saw that someone I was friends/colleagues with in undergrad just got dumped 😦 I haven’t talked to her in awhile, but I still feel bad. I doubt she reads this blog, but I’m going to just throw this out there – It’s okay to be unhappy or sad, but that relationship did not define who you are. You are going to be stronger because of this and you will meet someone who is right for you. Maybe not tomorrow, and maybe not next week, but sometime. Love yourself first 🙂 )

 

Thankful for this past week with the family :)

As I get older, I appreciate the time I get to spend with my family members because it’s rare that most of us are in the same place at the same time anymore…

I mean, yes, I am living at my parents house for awhile while I work on my thesis proposal (whoops – haven’t done that in over a week), so I get to see one or both of them practically every day with a few exceptions, but it was great having my brother in town this week. He’s in grad school for architecture, so it’s not like he has ample free time throughout the year to just visit. He starts his GA position for school next week so he’s headed back from whence he came tomorrow, but it’s been so much fun having him around the house and getting to spend time with most of my immediate family! (My sister is in Kansas for a doctoral program and could not come up and visit… my family seems to be uber fond of higher education.)

I wonder how often other people my age get to see their families like this – or even if they would want to see their family members this month? I’m a super family-oriented person, so I am loving that I get to see my parents and have gotten to see my brother a few times this summer. I lived with my sister for these past four years, so I got to see her more than I thought I would after we both went away to college after high school. I love my family. We don’t get along all the time, but we love each other regardless… so I am super thankful that four of us got to spend this week together. It’s been super fun, super busy and at times super tiring, but it’s been great 🙂

Today we took it easy again after being out on the boat for most of the day yesterday. My brother and I finished watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this morning. During lunch, Spud connected his computer to the living room TV and clicked through the 1800+ picture slide show of my mom and sister’s road trip around the county w/live commentary from my mom. It was cool to get to see pictures of the things she had told me about along the way!

After that, some Yahtzee was played, and then we started watching Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. It was super fun watching the last four HP movies this week… especially because we got to watch them with my mom. Mom has only seen bits and pieces of most of the HP movies (though she totally took us to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone when it came out back in the day… and *this* was her favorite part which we all quote on a regular basis – “Not me, not Hermione, YOU!”). So, she’s all caught up now for when the first part of the seventh HP movie comes out in November. It was *priceless* when we got to the end of the sixth movie and (SPOILER ALERT) Snape kills Dumbledore – my mom was like “What? Did he really just kill him, or did he just *pretend* to kill him?” My mom is so cute 🙂

The weather finally broke around here so we made a fire on the deck and made some smores! I had the genius idea to use two chocolate chip cookies instead of graham crackers… yum! My mom and I also made some Pina Coladas and blended in some leftover grilled pineapple from dinner – double yum!!

It started thundering during smores and my brother suggested that it was a dinosaur instead of an incoming storm… if only he were right. But, the storm didn’t last too long… some quick rain, some thunder and lightning. By the time that hit, we were all in the garage taking turns playing ping-pong, so all was well.

After ping-pong, we went inside for a round of Cranium. Mom and dad won, but only during a tie-breaker. Dad and Spud are watching The Jackal (I can hear it through my ceiling), but I’m tired so after I post this, I’ll read some more Dexter and go to bed. I just checked the library website and I am next in line for the Dexter Season 3 DVDs – I can’t wait!!!

Have a good one 🙂

 

In the middle of a Harry Potter-athon…

Word.

I am super tired, so this will likely be short. I will link out to stuff sometime tomorrow/Sunday… no time to look for proper clips!

Storms last night = I was up for a lot longer than I wanted to be. Sadness! I woke up for reals around 8 and watched some Today show Good Morning America while I ate breakfast. The Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato were on singing stuff from Camp Rock 2. Not gonna lie… I saw the first Camp Rock movie a couple times on the Disney Channel. I’ve freely admitted to liking all of the High School Musical movies, so Camp Rock was right up my alley. I won’t be able to watch Camp Rock 2 for awhile because we don’t have cable. These aren’t great movies, but the songs are usually catchy and the cheesy plot is uber tame, but always about following your dreams, etc… Decent life messages for today’s youth. We also watched the first part of Regis and Kelly because they were interviewing Jimmy Fallon. Fallon is hosting the Emmys on August 29th – I can’t wait!

The weather person was calling for rain and storms so we weren’t sure if we were going to go out on the boat today. Around 10:30, my parents decided we would try to go out on the river, so we all had to get ready real quick and head out to pick up the boat in St. Paul.

The sky was dark when we got the boat in the water. We had some engine issues – there was junk clogging up something. But my brother fixed it, so we were on our way. The sky turned from dark to uber sunny as we fished. Well, can you call it fishing if no one caught anything? My spinner wasn’t spinning and I was super tired, so I gave up kinda quickly today even though I love fishing. It was hot and my arm bruise and neck sunburn were hurting super bad (I’ll post pictures of my arm bruise soon… I’ve been chronicling the different colors it has been turning). We opted to stop fishing and my dad took us on a boat tour up to St. Paul and back from where we initially took off from. We saw a bunch of birds – ducks, geese, cormorants, herons, egrets, turkey vultures, ospreys and bald eagles. One of the eagles even had a fish in its talons!

It started thundering and lightening, so we tried to boat back to where we parked before the storm hit – we were literally 5 minutes away from landing when these ginormous raindrops pelted us, soaking us and everything in the boat. As soon as we landed, the rain stopped and the sky cleared up – it was bonkers!

After a long day out on the river, we came home, made some chicken nachos and watched the end of Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire. After a family game of Cranium, we started Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We’ll likely finish that tomorrow morning and then watch Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince soon thereafter. HBP was nowhere near as good as it could have been. Sadness!

Well, I am super sleepy, but I want to get a few more chapters into the 3rd Dexter book! The 2nd one was super creepy and F-ed up… and it wasn’t even Dexter’s doing. Yipes Stripes.

Have a good one!

 

Clay birds 1, Katie 0…

Well, remember how earlier in the summer when I went target shooting with my dad and rocked the sniper riffle and handguns? Well today’s clay bird and handgun outing went the complete opposite…

I missed every single clay bird while my dad and brother pretty much demolished all of theirs. I did end up with a heart-shaped bruise the size of a 50-cent piece right by my right arm pit though, so it’s not like I walked away empty handed. We also used three different handguns and I didn’t do so hot with these ones… I emptied my first magazine without hitting the target once. Fantastic. I managed to hit the target a few times on subsequent rounds, but did not do nearly as great as my dad and brother. Personally, this was my worst day of shooting ever. Mind you I’ve only been to a shooting range four or five times in my entire life, but still… it was bad.

It also completely wore me out… the weather in MN has been stormy (like right now) or freakishly warm and humid. Tomorrow’s forecast is similar, but our golf outing should not be as exhausting as the habitat restoration work or even shooting today. Golfing should be fun, even though I’m not a great golfer… I have my outfit all picked out in my head… khaki shorts, a grey scoop neck shirt w/a neon pink shirt underneath with matching neon pink Chucks. Because with golf, the outfit is half the battle, right?

It’s been nice having my brother here… since there are four of us under one roof for a week, now board games are a legitimate option for indoor recreation. Last night we played Cranium. Tonight, my mom, brother and I played Monopoly. I got my ass handed to me… toward the end, I started offering my properties (including my “box sets” of 3 light blues or 3 greens) as payments as I had no cash left… it was bad. Usually only Spud and I play together and we have a system. Mom totally threw a wrench in said system – and I bet she won (I went to my room before the game was officially over to type this up and then read the last few pages of HP7 and then continue with the Dexter book I started this morning on the way to the shooting range).

What else, what else?

One of our dogs, Yukon, was acting super weird today. My mom thinks she might have had a seizure or a mini stroke or something (the dog is almost 11… we don’t know what breed she is, so there is no way to properly gauge what her life expectancy is. No vet has been able to tell us what kind of dog she is either… she was a stray who we rescued when she was about 12 weeks old. She looks like a cross between a German Shepherd, a brindle greyhound and a Dingo… she’s unique). But she’s been walking around and responsive and everything, she just didn’t feel like eating today and has been walking with a bit of a limp and her ears back and tail between her legs. It might even have something to do with all the thunderstorms we’ve had today… she’s high strung and more scared of storms than me. But, my mom insists that Yukon will be fine and I believe her. Yukon is a tough cookie and just needs to take it easy for awhile. She followed me downstairs when I was heading to my room, so she’s still getting around fine.

Also, I just saw that Britney Spears will be on an episode of Glee… that kinda makes me happy. I love Glee and Britney Spears music (go ahead and judge, but her songs are friggin’ catchy), so this’ll be great.

I am very much looking forward to new shows starting up soon… summer TV on broadcast television blows. (I miss cable!)

I didn’t do any thesis work again today, but I got two movie books I ordered in the mail… so when I do get around to school work, I will be extra prepared.

Golf tomorrow… school work next week 🙂

Have a good one!

 

Posting early today… so I can have more fun later.

Let’s just get this part out of the way:

No, I didn’t work on any thesis proposal stuff today. Yes, I feel a bit bad about that.

But I have a massive headache right now (I’m gonna blame the heat and being out in the sun all day yesterday), so I’m not really in the right frame of mind to sit in front of my computer for longer than I have to. Ergo, this will be a short blog post *and* I still = epic fail when it comes to school stuff.

My little brother (and by “little” I mean younger… he’s about 2 1/2 years younger than I, but roughly 1/2 a foot taller than me… so he’s not really little) is coming to visit today!!! I won’t feel bad for not working on school stuff while he is here because I hardly get to spend quality time with him anymore (although i have seen him more this year than in the past couple years combined it seems…). We’ll play some Monopoly, and then with the parents we’ll go to the shooting range, play in a golf fundraiser, go out on a boat, maybe do some fishing and play tennis… make some smores… it’s gonna be swell.

I went to the library today with my parents to return some books and CDs and pick up some more. My Dexter DVDs weren’t in yet (sadness!), but I got 3 Dexter books, the latest Writer’s Market and a handful of broadway/musical CDs. So, hopefully the Writer’s Market will inspire me to send out some query letters or something. I realized this morning that if I made some time for scriptwriting, I have a Forgetting Sarah Marshall-esque script in mind (I have a buh-rilliant opening cooking in my head…), but with a girl protagonist. I have other scripts that I have been meaning to write, but maybe I should really hold off on feature scripts until my thesis is a thing of the past… Hmmm. Priorities!

Alas…

My parents are picking my dad’s car up from the shop right now (maintenance yo!), but they’ll be home soon. I will help my mom with some house chores before my brother gets here. Maybe make a few new playlists for my iPod (I want a whole list dedicated to Jonathan Groff… I had a ridiculously funny dream starring him last night. Basically I got to see him in a show, he came up into the crowd to serenade me, and then we became BFFs. Good times!). Maybe play some more Yahtzee with mom… anything to keep the headache at bay and not type up my proposal.

I’m horrible, I know.

Have a great day!! Stay cool 🙂

 

Prop 8 Overturned!

When I saw some of my friends post on Facebook earlier that Prop 8 was overturned today, my heart leapt a little bit and I cracked a giant grin.

Though this decision does not directly affect me (I’m not gay, nor do I live in California), but it does affect our country and is a giant leap (in my opinion) towards equal rights for everyone. Isn’t that what our country was founded on – that all men are created equal?

Now, this is just my opinion, but who is to say that gay people aren’t allowed to get married? Regardless of how people interpret the Bible, in my opinion, the government should not have jurisdiction over who is allowed to fall in love with someone else (that is, in the case of marriage, two consenting adults…). A man loves a woman. Fine. A man loves a man. That’s cool. A woman loves a woman. Equally fine by me. Transgender people. Transsexual people. Bisexual people. Whatever. A person who loves another person and wants to be in a committed relationship as long as they both shall live should have the right to get married to each other. Prop 8 was inhumane. But again – that is just my opinion.

Stepping down from my political soap box, today was another day of thesis proposal notes, Yahtzee and Dexter.

I finished all guild notes and only have some books to go… but since they haven’t come in the mail yet, I just need to work with what I got. However, when I tried to print out my notes, my computer couldn’t access our printer (my mom forgot to inform me that I would need to install some printer software on my computer…), so I’ll have to print that out tomorrow morning. Whatever!

My mom and I played some more Yahtzee (it’s our game of the summer, evidently… one summer all we did was play 500 Rummy). I dominated the game this morning, whereas she kicked my ass right before I crawled into bed to start typing this out.

My brother texted me today – “lots of Monopoly.” He’s coming to visit next week and he and I have a history of playing Monopoly. We each buy the exact same properties every time (I get the Dark Purple, Light Blue, Orange, Green and Dark Blue spaces and the Railroads while he gets everything else) and we’ve been playing that way for years. It’s still fun for us. Sometimes my sister will ask to play too, but it’s just not the same when she gets involved – she messes up our established system. Besides Monopoly, there will be some tennis, fishing and maybe some catch as well 🙂

My mom and I watched the last half of Season Two of Dexter. I am 100% sure my mom has never watched that much TV in one sitting… but we couldn’t help it. We’re sucked into the show and are eagerly anticipating Seasons Three and Four (I put them on reserve at the library… hopefully I get Season Three soon… I will be going through Michael C. Hall withdraw in a matter of days, I know it.) I love his intensity in his quiet moments, as well as when he finally wigs out every now and again. His stare is unsettling, but in the best way possible for that character. I’m so glad I finally started watching this show!!

And that’s about all… I am super tired, but even though I should try and fall asleep, I’ve been reading a few chapters of HP7 each night (even though I own this book and have a stack of library books I should be working my way through). What can I say, I love the HP series (books and movies, though I consider them two separate entities)

Have a good one and YAY California for overturning Prop 8 🙂

 

I love my mom (and Constantine Maroulis…) :)

First of all, let me say that typing a blog post when I’m tired is the equivalent of grocery shopping when I’m hungry… the end result is never what I intended it to be. But what can you do? Press on…

I woke up this morning to find a note on the kitchen counter from my mom saying that she’d be back soon. Curiouser and curiouser.

I let Moose out of her coup and grabbed my water bottle and a peach from the fridge. As there weren’t any dishes in the sink, I knew my mom hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, so I wanted to wait for my mom to eat with her (I’m getting used to meals with one or both parents – it’s kinda comforting). I cuddled up with Moose on the couch and put on my next episode of Dexter. Once I fast forwarded through the credits, I heard the front door opening – my mom!

She went to the grocery store to get more tea bags (my mom has been coughing a lot since she got back from her trip… I blame my sister) and some pecan rolls for us. She sat down at the table to work on a crossword puzzle while I continued on with my episode of Dexter. Mom ended up paying more attention to Dexter than her puzzle… I think she’s hooked. My mom LOVES murder mysteries and forensics, so obviously this show is right up her alley 🙂

After the show, we played a couple rounds of Yahtzee then both got ready for our string of errands that needed to go down. We dropped off some postcards at a mailbox then ran to Target for some groceries. Yep, one of our many Targets has better groceries than our regular grocery store. Crazy times. We then stopped at a gas station so Mom could top off her car’s tank before she heads out to Kansas tomorrow.

Home again, home again – we played some more Yahtzee before getting on with today’s chores. While mom got stuff ready for her trip, I wrapped my mom’s birthday present to my dad. (I friggin’ love wrapping presents. When I worked at Elder Beerman, wrapping wedding presents was seriously one of the best parts of my job.)

We let the dogs out then I helped her chop up stuff for chicken salad while we rocked out to some Neil Diamond. Woot. After lunch, there was some more Yahtzee and then more chores. While Mom worked outside, I went to my room to straighten up some stuff and do a bit of unpacking. While most of my stuff is staying in their boxes, I did stack some clothes on the bookshelf so I don’t have to wear the same 7 t-shirts over and over again.

While unpacking, I got a bit sidetracked looking at on of my stashes of Playbills. My mom gave me her Little Night Music Playbill and some fliers for other shows, so I was incorporating my new material into the stack of Playbills for shows I’ve seen over the past few years. While looking at the flier for Jersey Boys, I realized the guy playing the lead is the same guy that my sister and I saw in the Chicago cast of the show *and* another one of the guys (Sebastian Arcelus) played Fieryo in the production of Wicked we saw up in Cleveland! (I met him and got my picture taken with him – see below!)

SKF, Sebastian Arcelus and me after seeing Wicked up in Cleveland 🙂

And then, I saw in the back of the Little Night Music Playbill that Rock of Ages is going on its National Tour soon and that Constantine Maroulis is reprising his role as Drew. Of course I Googled that news to see if it was true – and it is (even though it seems there is some Baby Daddy drama going on with him… though it still seems he is going to do the tour. What I *really* want is for him to be in the movie version too… but that casting hasn’t been released yet. Sigh).

So, guess who is going to be buying tickets to see Rock of Ages in MN in October – oh wait, that’s me!! I was so excited about learning all of this today that I probably could have peed my pants and/or had a panic attack.

You don’t get it, folks. I have wanted to see Constantine in Rock of Ages ever since I heard he was going to be in it years ago. When he was on American Idol back in 2005, I would watch and giggle uncontrollably every time that man was on the television screen. I don’t know why, but he made me chuckle whether I wanted to or not. I’m listening to the Rock of Ages soundtrack right now (one of my favorite medleys – “Heaven/More Than Words/To Be With You“)… I can’t wait to see this show. It’s going to be frickin’ awesome 🙂

I called my sister to tell her the good news and to see if she can come up to MN to see it with me. She needs to check her calendar… I hope to buy the tickets tomorrow, so she best know by then!

After this fan-freakin’-tastic news, I helped mom water plants outside then fed the dogs and put dinner in the oven. During dinner we watched I Hate Valentine’s Day. This actually had potential to be a decent rom-com, but I had a huge problem with Nia Vardalos. I like her in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Connie & Carla, but even though she wrote and directed this film, I don’t think she was the best choice to star in it. But, why I was okay to watch this movie is that it co-starred John Corbett. And as every woman knows, John Corbett is friggin’ adorable. I have loved him in Northern Exposure, Sex and the City, and even Raising Helen. He’s a beautiful man who doesn’t seem to make the best movies. But he’s just so likable, I’ll watch whatever he’s in 🙂

The movie was okay, and then I watched Modern Family which made me laugh out loud, of course. Mom and I played a few more rounds of Yahtzee. During one of our games, I heard a phone make the “you have a text!” sound. I assumed it was my phone, but it wasn’t – it was my mom’s. (For a fraction of a second, I was actually jealous. I remember a time when my phone would make that noise multiple times a day… and then about 6 weeks ago it just kinda stopped. Perhaps the movies were right? Or maybe the amendment holds true? Or maybe men and women can be friends regardless… Yes?)

My dad texted my mom to tell her to have a safe trip tomorrow and that he loves her. Awwww. But what is really “Awwww” is that I watched my mom write out my dad’s birthday card – “All my love, forever and ever”. Say it with me – AWWWWWWWWWW. My parents are too cute. They aren’t all swoony or overtly emotional out in public, but the two of them are the most adorable people ever. They’ll be married 29 years next month and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside that they are so friggin’ cute together. I love my parents 🙂

So now it’s time to read some more of Sarah Silverman’s book and then get some rest. Got a big day of reading articles and buying theater tickets tomorrow!

Have a good one 🙂