Saturday, November 20, 2004

End of Salesman

Well tonight is the final night of Death of a Salesman and I'm sad to see it go. This has been an incredible, wonderful, heart-wrenching production. Hearing Linda (Spavis) scream "NOOOOOO" every night as Willy (Jake) gets into the car to crash it is just incredible, as well as seeing the relationships of Willy, Biff (Jim) and Happy (Dan) deteriorate over the course of the show. I've had so much fun becoming a part of this group of people and getting to do something that I didn't have an opportunity to do as an undergraduate.

After this I have continuing rehearsals for Merrily We Roll Along, which will actually be a larger undertaking now that I'm the understudy for one of the lead roles. After that I will be trying out for New Voices 23. I am completely enjoying getting involved with theater and fully exploring my "thespian tendancies". ;)

Friday, November 19, 2004

Been a While - Update Part 2

Ok, so when I was last writing I was talking about work stuff. Now on to the rest of my life over the summer up until now.

Let's see, first off is that I moved from my apt. on Bowdoin Street to my new place on Dean Street. The new place is great and has 2 floors, one of which is a full finished basement. It has a built in bar, 2 refridgerators and a dishwasher. I'm sooo excited that it has a dishwasher. That has to be the all time best thing EVER!!!

The next thing is that i was involved in a musical revue. It was a collection of Sondheim songs with a few other composers thrown in for good measure. It was quite a quickly done show. We had one rehearsal in July and then nothing else until August and then from Sunday through the following Saturday when the production occured, my life belonged to the revue. Its funny, "hell week", as final production week is known as, is usually a lot of work and very stressful and this was no exception, but amazingly this worked very well to counteract the heavy dose of work related stress I was dealing with at the time. Without this production to escape to every night I think I would have had a hard time dealing with work.

I made a new friend over the summer as well. Donald, a Lamda Chi Alpha brother from RPI came up to work for John Minasian for the entire summer. Donald and I hit it off very well and became very good friends over the course of the summer. He's a pretty nice guy, for a Republican ;).

Since September started I've become involved with a new vocal group at WPI, theater at WPI and musical theater at Holy Cross. As you can tell, after the revue I got bit hard by the theater bug.

The vocal group is the Vocal Performance Lab. This is kind of a workshop group. It is audition only and I've been brought in, like one of the women, as a professional singer. *grin* I'm a professional.

Through that I got invited to try out for the February production over at Holy Cross. They are doing "Merrily We Roll Along" which is a musical by Stephen Sondheim. I'm playing "Tyler" as well as ensemble and I've recently been named understudy to Charley, one of the leads.

I also tried out for the B-Term show at WPI. We are doing (right now as I type actually) Death of a Salesman. Its a wonderful show. I play "Stanley" which is the waiter in the restaurant scene. I've had such a blast and its such an experience and a priviledge to work with such incredible people. I've forgotten how much fun this can be.

It was also fun to have Donald come and visit unexpectedly last week. It was good to catch up with him as to how things had been since he went back to RPI. It'll be fun to have him back up for a longer time in the winter.

So in the department of love life there's been absolutely nothing. nada. zilch. No crushes, no interests, no nothing. Honestly this is the first time in my life I haven't been crushing hard core on someone. I also really haven't had time for a relationship right now so I guess it's ok.

Finally I'm moving along in the quest for my condo. The purchase and sales agreement is in with the lawyers and I'm just waiting for them to resolve everything.

Well that finishes the update and brings most everything up to date. I'll try to start updating more often.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Been a While - Update Part 1

Well it certainly has been a while. What a summer. This has to have been one of the most hectic summers I've had in a very very long time.

First off there is work. From about August until about mid-September I barely got home earlier than 7pm on any given night. I've been really burning the midnight oil trying to get all the upgrades done for the labs. The funny thing is, the OS conversion from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was actually the easiest part of the whole process. What really held me up was waiting for last minute updates to several key pieces of software that had to be installed on the images themselves. This made it very difficult to create the foundation image that I use to build all the lab images for all of the 14 labs on campus.

The other thing that was hellish was waiting for the STUDENT domain to be created and set up. This really wasn't anyone's fault, as its creation was vital to future progress of the Windows infrastructure at WPI, but it still made a lot of things come down to the last minute. Also there were several glitches that weren't able to be worked out due to the lack of time in production mode for the new domain prior to student arrivals.

When the students came we (the windows team) had thought that the account creation page was fully operational but unfortunately that wasn't entirely the case. It ended up that we sat in a room on the other side of Higgins Lab doing the account creations manually for a portion of the process. After about an hour Jon got the script operational again and things have been mostly smooth on that avenue ever since.

Add to everythign else the fact that we got hit with two different viruses when students got on campus. It took a better part of the first three weeks to erradicate the majority of the virus. It still pops up now and again but we're pretty much covered at this point. I won't even get into the fact that it was propogating from a vulnerablity that was patched MONTHS ago. Hmm.... this seems VERY similar to my rant from last year.

Well at this point things are finally calming down and I look forward to some time after B term when I can take some time off and relax. :-D That's all for now. More about the summer later....

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Happy 4th of July

Happy belated 4th of July to eveyone. Hope you all had a great time.

My 4th annual BYOBBQ went off very well this year. The numbers were a bit smaller but a good time was still had by all I think. I think I confused everyone by setting the start time at 4pm instead of the normal 6pm, but oh well. The important thing is that people came.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Almost Summer

Well, only two more days until the official start of summer. of course it feels like its almost half over since WPI got out on May 1.

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Hiking

Well Max and I went hiking in the Blue Mountains today. It was incredible. I had an absolute blast. It was so nice to be back doing something with nature. I haven't really done anything much outdoorsy since last year when I went camping.

We hiked the red dot trail and the blue skyline trail (the north-south loop for anyone who knows it.) It was a lot of fun and there were a lot of great views. The only bad part is that I turned my foot on one of the rocks and now its sprained. I'm wrapped up with an ace bandage and on cruches. Isn't that the greatest way to end my vacation. :-P

Ahh well, better to have ended in a blaze of glory than to have spent another day inside cleaning my apartment.

Monday, June 07, 2004

Farewell vacation, I hardly knew thee....

Well vacation is almost over but I can't really be too upset since I'm taking Mondays and Tuesdays off all month to burn up my vacation time. Rough life I live huh? *grin*

Tomorrow I go hiking in the Blue Hills with Max which I haven't done in AGES! It should be a lot of fun. I can't even remember the last time I went hiking. It'll be sunny and warm out tomorrow. Its finally gonna get to 85 degrees out. Wednesdays gonna be a scorcher at 95.

Also gonna play some Monopoly with Donald and Tim tonight, which I haven't played in a while either. Should be fun. All in all I've had a nice relaxing time off from work and the move in process is nearly complete. Should be all set until next summer when I move for hopefully the last time for a much longer while since I'm moving into the condo. I'm looking forward to owning my own place (well, mostly the bank owning it) and being able to do whatever I want to the place.

That's all for now. I'll update with information about how hiking went tomorrow.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

Me + Car = Happy

Well I got my car back today and it looks beautiful. I had a minor accident at the beginning of May. I was backing out of my driveway at my old apartment and between the car parked at the edge of the driveway entrance and one of the blindspots in my car (the rear passenger side structural beam) I didn't see the other car coming down the street and backed into it. Several insurance dealings and a deductable later my beautiful car never looked better.

Being without a car SUCKS let me tell you. I've been without it since Tuesday. I really have found out how dependent I am on that thing for transportation to anywhere. It's really like an extention of me. Not sure if that's just interesting or just sad. *shrug* Whatever, I don't have to worry any more cuz its back.

In other news, the developer of my condo contacted me to let me know that all permits are now in order and the pre-construction work has begun. Here's hoping it'll be done in time for next June.

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

A cold in summer?

So craziness of all craziness I have a cold in the summer. This sucks. I had thought that it was just agravated sinuses due to the dust from moving but it lasted too long, came on too strong, and I've had the cough of a cold all day, in addition to the lack of strength and the lightheadedness that comes with it too.

Apparently this cold is going around to a lot of people right now. Must be something to do with the on-again off-again nice weather or the change in seasons or something.

*sigh* Hopefully I'm almost done with this cold and can enjoy the rest of my vacation. Here's hoping.

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Moving is DONE!!

Ok, so I'm officially horrible at keeping this thing up to date. *sigh* Oh well...

I have finally finished moving my life to its new location. I have fully moved into my new apartment. This place is incredible.

There are two seperate floors; the first floor has the bedrooms and the basement has the living area, the kitchen and the bar. We have two dish washers, two stoves (one electric range only at the bar and another in the kitchen with gas oven and range), two refidgerators (they are old so they both combined equal about cubic volume of one modern one) two bathrooms, and there's a garbage disposal in the sink in the kitchen as well as the one in the bar.

I definately plan to have some nice dinner parties here over the course of the year.

That's all for now. I'll try to update some more while I'm on vacation.