Technical Difficulties

Due to various technical difficulties, the NYC Travelogue will not be posted until I return home.  It will run it its entirety beginning Tuesday night.  Complete text and photos will be included.

Thanks for your patience.  Tune in again Tuesday.

Planes, Trains, And Automobiles

First let me apologize for having not answered all of the questions that you guys posed to me. I promise that I will respond to each one and the prizes will be awarded. Right now, life around here has gotten a little crazy.

We are all back in school; soccer season has started; and, the ever-present rehearsal schedule continues. We are having one last Christmas fling over this long MLK weekend. This time tomorrow we will be in New York City. Hopefully TKTS will be good to us and we we'll have a great weekend of Broadway shows. Perhaps a little snow will fall on us as well.

The trip became a bit complicated when Mike's sister passed away earlier this week. He and I will be gone an extra day to attend the memorial service in northern Virginia before flying home Tuesday night. Because of school commitments, the girls will each return to their respective locations Monday evening. It has proven to be more difficult than we thought to get from New York to Washington D.C. As of this moment, we will be travelling by train for this leg of the journey. I have not ridden a train in this country since I was an undergraduate twenty five years ago. Riding the rails will be a bit of a treat.

I hope to be able to post while we are away. If not, I will definitely return on Wednesday.

Thanks to each of you for your continued interest and support.

Fifteen Going On Sixteen Going On Seventeen

This is the face of a kid who thinks big and works hard to make her dreams come true. Erin has been acting since she was six. She has had some great opportunities on stage and she has had some peculiar ones. (Imagine above kid as Ito in Auntie Mame.) During the past six months she has played the gander (yes, the gander) in Honk!, an Angelette in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and was in the chorus of Big, the musical. None of these was a huge part but they were all learning experiences. Currently she is in a high school production of High School Musical. Even with all these credits, Erin is still waiting for that "first big role."

Monday night she auditioned for the Sound of Music; she and about twenty other girls auditioned for the role of Liesl. On Tuesday there was another full night of auditions. Though it was obvious that some of those who thought they were sixteen going on seventeen were more like twenty six going on twenty seven, there were many potential candidates for the role.

Erin is at an awkward age for an actress-too old to play a child and too young to play an adult. Surprisingly, not many parts exist for teen aged girls. Though she is only fifteen, she thought perhaps she could pass for the sixteen year old Liesl von Trapp.

Erin was not feeling terribly confident after her audition though she honestly believed that she had done her best. The question was whether or not her best was good enough. Then began the waiting game.

Tonight her dream came true. Meet DCT's Liesl von Trapp.

Another Question

I apologize for taking so long to answer your questions. I guess it is a good thing that I did not get very many. Truthfully, I would rather have been catering to those of you with inquiring minds than cleaning my house, but the cleaning thing was an absolute necessity. I won't go into the details; trust me on this one! I had house guests this weekend and they deserved clean sheets and a bathtub that was not full of dog hair from where I had to give Adidas a bath the other day because he had been romping in the pasture and found the remains of some critter and promptly rolled in it. And, well, Eau de decompose is not the best scent for him or any other dog for that matter. See what I mean? The details are ugly. Suffice it to say that we had a lovely weekend visit with out of town friends and except for a few closets and a basket or two of laundry (the sheets from the guest bed don't count) Martha might almost be proud of me.



On to the question. This one came to me from Ikkinlala.

What is your favorite kind of skiing?
I must say, this is not a question that Texans get very often though I can honestly say that I have been snow skiing but not in this country. On two different occasions, I had the good fortune to visit Banff and Lake Louise in Canada for week long ski trips. All we tried was downhill and I loved it. There is something about the sound of the whooshing wind as you glide down the mountainside. The only part of the experience that I was not too keen on was the ski lifts. I am afraid of heights, especially when I feel exposed. For example, airplanes don't bother me and skyscrapers, as long as I am inside don't bother me. Ski lifts and the top of the Eiffel Tower, they bother me. So, my skiing is limited not so much by my ability to steer clear of trees and other inanimate objects, but by how high I am willing to go and for how long I can ride on the lift before the urge to jump kicks in. I am fairly certain that Ski Patrol would not be too happy to come scoop up the idiot who could not wait to get to the top of the run before disembarking from the lift. Now helicopter skiing . . .I would like to try that!

Does water skiing count? I love that too. No lifts. The only downfall to water skiing is swim suits. The good thing about snow skiing is that everyone looks like a marshmallow. Not so with water skiing.

I have not done any kind a skiing in about ten years. Erin keeps hinting at a ski trip to the mountains of New Mexico. Perhaps that should be added to the 2008 "To Do" list.

Thanks for the question! It brought back for me some wonderful memories of my experiences in Canada. Those days seem so long ago. I think that I could still get myself down the mountain on skis though I might have to resist the temptation to sit in the warm lodge with hot chocolate and my knitting and where no ski lifts are necessary!

Scam Artist Or Genius?

Though three of the four people who inhabit my house live by an academic calendar, we all find ourselves in different places with regard to that calendar right now. Brooke is back at school and nearly a week into the winter quarter. I am still enjoying my semester break for a few more days. Erin is back at school as well though because of the way the Texas legislature has played with the school schedules, she went back after Christmas break to finish two weeks of the "Fall" semester. This means that next week she has mid-year exams. It has been hard for both students and teachers to adjust to this new schedule. In years past, everyone enjoyed being at a point of closure, having already taken exams when the Christmas holidays began, and then going back to school in January ready to start a fresh semester.

So, Erin is busy finishing projects before the six weeks and the semester end as well as preparing for exams. Her calculus teacher is being a pal and allowing the class to use their notes for the exam. Here is the catch; the notes that can be used must be copied out on an index card, a commercially available index card - one index card per student and no sharing. If you are an office supply junkie like we all are, you know that index cards come in several sizes - the standard 3x5, 4x6, and the less standard but still fairly common 5x7. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the bigger your card the more notes you can cram onto it.

We have plenty of both 3x5 and 4x6 cards at home. Needless to say, neither were big enough for all of the necessary formulae and equations so we headed to the toy store, I mean the office supply store, to buy 5x7 index cards. The shelves were full of 3x5 cards with lines, without lines, in pastel colors, in neon colors, with a different color on each side, but 3x5 is still 3x5. There were not quite as many choices in the 4x6 size, though obviously they were bigger and that really is all that mattered. As Erin carefully examined all the possibilities in index cards, she finally made her selection. She found the biggest honest to goodness index card we had ever seen - 5x8! You can fit a lot of numbers on a 5x8 card, especially if you use two colors of ink and write in two different directions, as she plans to do.

Quite proud of her find at Office Max, and in keeping with her reputation as an over-achiever, she took her cards to class the next day and showed them to her teacher. The only restriction that he had placed on the cards was that they must be commercially produced and these were. Score one for Erin. After the initial unveiling of the steroid enhanced index cards, Erin's point count kept rising. Being the quick thinker that she is, she offered to sell these 5X8 cards to her classmates for 25 cents. Since she is allowed to use only one card herself, she had 49 extra cards. Her little entrepreneurial adventure netted her several dollars. This was a great deal for her considering I payed for the cards to begin with. She does well in calculus, but no one has told her that she needs to consider her capital investors once the business becomes successful.

It is not surprising that she used this opportunity to make a few bucks. She is the same kid who, when she broke her leg at age six, sold advertising space on her cast. Erin was buddies with the girl who worked in the cafe at our local Borders Books. For a few free cups of coffee, Erin let the Borders employee fill a good portion of her cast (she was six so there was limited space as the leg of a six year old is rather short) with a Borders promotional. The same offer was extended to a favorite barbecue restaurant in town. In this case, I believe Erin got a free piece of pie in exchange for cast space. Her friends were allowed to sign free of charge once all of the business deals had been finalized.

Hopefully Erin's fine shopping skills and emerging business sense will be followed by success on her calculus midterm!

10808 Blues And Oranges

Yesterday I mentioned my love of the colors blue and orange. When these two come together in the sky, they are especially beautiful. This evening I was moving through the house trying to get some chores done before going to a meeting. Something made me stop and gaze out the window. Yes, this is what I was trying to describe in words yesterday.

The changing shades of both the blues and the oranges over just a few minutes remind me how quickly time passes. As each second ticked away, a new canvas was created and another was lost. The only gallery in which these images will be preserved is called memory. Each moment that passes and that we don't take time to acknowledge is a lost work of art.

Take time to honor the artist.

A Few Questions

I promised that today I would begin posting answers to the questions I received. I must say that I did not get the response that I had hoped for. I'm not sure if this means that I am boring or you are. A big thanks to those of you who did play along with me. You will all be rewarded for being such good sports. I will address all of the questions over the next week or so and will announce the winners and the prizes.

First up are two questions from "Anonymous". I'm not sure if they are both from the same person or if they both had parents with ADD who could not get past the "A's" in the baby name book.

The questions are:
"Why is the sky blue?" and "Why is the grass green?"

Ignore what they say about the grass being green because it contains chlorophyll, a sunlight-fixing pigment and the sky being blue because there are billions of tiny particles in the air that refract the sunlight. Here is the real explanation of the green grass and the blue sky. Simply stated, the sky is blue because blue, whether it be the cheerful blue of a Spring day or the harsh, cold blue of a winter storm, is my favorite color. Green is not my favorite color. I would always rather see blue than green. Therefore, the sky is blue to encourage me to always keep my head up. Also, blue is the color associated with the Democratic party, another favorite of mine. Looking up to see a lot of blue on the state map on election night in November will make me much happier than seeing red. Seeing too much red will make me turn green and I don't like green.

In case you are interested, orange is my second favorite color. It also is found by looking up to see magnificent sunrises and sunsets.