this post does not deserve a title... it's not really about anything.

our house is cold.
my dad says the furnace is broken
i think he's trying to cool down the cat.
the cat is in heat.
she's driving me crazy.
she won't leave me alone
she sounds like she's dying.
it makes me stressed.
last night she slept with me and kept trying to lie on my face.
she was all squirmy and making her weird trumpeting noises.
she licked my nose.
this very instant she is rubbing her head between my hands as i type.
i'm counting down the days until she gets fixed
5 more sleeps

i didn't do a whole lot today. i worked. it was busy in spurts. lots of serious shoppers though, not a lot of window shoppers. then i went home and wanted to eat eggs. but we didn't have any so i went to visit christie at f&q and then i went to see a show at wcd. the guy was a really good dancer. there was lots of rice... then i came home and had eggs. i bought them at 7-11 but once i got home i realized we did have eggs all along. then i talked to christie on the phone. and now i'm going to read for a while. how's that for a wild saturday night?

the stagette

alright. well so far the camera is winning by a landslide, although it seems like my 2 voters know something i don't...

so last night after dancing all day, i went to my friend darby's stagette. it was pretty fun. we met at massawa for dinner (ethiopian food) at 5:45 (i was a little stressed about getting there on time. but as it turned out i was the 4th person of 8 to get there. i was pretty proud of myself). We had dinner and then we were picked up by a limo. darby was really excited about the limo. she was really surprised. nicole had a pretty veil for her to wear and a little sash that said 'one night only'. she looked pretty cute. she said she felt beautiful.

the limo took us to the bdi for ice cream (darby had never been there) and she had to find a guy to buy ice cream for her. there was hardly anyone there because it was pretty cold. there was an older guy there - bald with a big white moustache and i told her that he was the guy. turns out he was very sweet and bought her a hot fudge sundae. he was there with a younger couple (his daughter) who was tami's friend katie and mike (except i didn't recognize them at first... i didn't know she was pregnant. she warned darby that she got married and then look what happened...) and then we drove around and played silly games in the limo and arrived at our final destination...

the oc. formerly the beach. formerly scandals. one of the trashiest teenage barstar clubs. darby had never been to one of those, either. i was told i wasn't allowed to wear my jeans and my friend alia pulled out what she called a 'carpet skirt' which was miniature and fuzzy... so i had to wear that and we all went dancing in our little skirts with all the little made-up teenagers. more of our friends from dance joined us and we had a lot of fun. darby had a number of tasks she needed to perform at the bar and succeeded at almost all of them by the time i left. she seemed to be having a good time.

kyle was out of town and was terribly worried that i was going to see strippers for the stagette.

and now i'm at work. it's rainy and slow, which is kind of nice after my busy week. i can just sit around and read all day...

the polls are open

today is my little brother's birthday. he's 20 years old. this marks the end of teenagerdom in my household. momentus. happy birthday daniel.


on another note, i think we shall have a quick vote:

here's the situation. my grandparents generously gave me some money for my graduation. what sound i buy with it? here are my two thoughts. i'll lay them out for you and you can vote. it'll be very democratic and fair. except that i only know of 2 people who read my blog so if they vote for different things i don't know what i'll do...

option 1: i've always wished i had some kind of birthday or something in the summer because i would love to have a pretty silky summer house coat. sounds lame, i know but i love putting on my house coat in the morning and having a cup of coffee and writing in my journal or reading a book. the house coat i have now is thick and fleecy and hot and i miss the tradition in summer. especially because i typically have more time to sit around in the summer. but it's never really a priority to buy something like that for yourself, seems like you should get it as a gift. but i have no gifting occasions in summer time and october is too late. so i was thinking about getting a pretty one with my money and maybe i'd have some left over to buy this perfume i found in the states at victoria's secret when christie and i were there. we both fell in love with different perfumes and debated the whole trip about getting them but when it came down to it, it was too expensive. but i still have my little smelly card and i smell it all the time and think about asking for it for my birthday or something. so potentially i could get both. i don't have any perfume. it seems fun and lady-like.

option 2: i don't really know if i could afford it, i'd have to do some shopping around but i'd like to have a camera. just a little one that i could use and post exciting things for my 2 blog readers to see... it seems like it could be a good thing to have... for example. i have been wanting to use my blog to record different projects i'm working on - knitting things and other crafts. i knitted a sweater after christmas that i was pretty proud of and i still haven't posted a picture because i always forget to make kyle take a picture of it for me. plus i've been putting off writing a post about how we have a new cat because it seemed like i should have a picture of her on it to make it complete but, same deal. so i'd kind of like to have a camera so i can take my own pictures when i want them... (she's a nice cat, by the way.)

so there you have it. voting begins now.

kyle finally put more photos up on his flickr so i can finally add them to my posts...

today was another exhaustifying day. although fortunately i didn't have anything to do this evening so i had a nice long bath and read a cheezy francine rivers book and then sat in my housecoat and ate ice cream. and now i think i might head up to bed. i didn't sleep well last night despite my determination to go to bed early. my whole body hurts and i'm stuffed up. so i'll leave you with some pictures from my recent past. here they are:


These two are ones kyle took at our dress rehearsal. i think they're nice.


And the following two are from Mother's Day:

This is me trying to frantically finish my homework - a sweater for kyle. he was keeping me company and being my model and photographer...

And this is Solomon on the tree swing my grandpa put up at the cottage for the kids. they love it. this picture makes me excited for relaxing summer days...

exhaustified

so after one lonely yet lovely day off, i'm back at dance. and let me tell you how it went today:
9:30-11:00 class with Bill Evans from New Mexico. It was hard but fun and very sweaty.
11:00-1:00 somewhat useless performance workshop with Stephanie Ballard. we're learning a new solo for no reason in particular except to fill time.
1:00 - 1:30 eat lunch as quickly as possible without getting sick
1:30 - 2:30 body mechanics with Bill Evans. We learned about and paractised the 6 patterns of total body organization
2:30 - 5:00 rep with Bill Evans. We're learning a new piece for the show in December. It's fun but hard so far. It's very classical with lots of balancing and whatnot. Long dresses with sleeves. There's also a fairly lengthy solo part so the rehearsal almost felt a little bit like an audition too. So that was a little stressful and tiring since we were giving it our all the whole time. and the studio was hotter and humider than ever before. i don't think i've ever been so sweaty in my life as i was all day today.
5:00 - 5:30 Somehow in this time i need to go home, shower, find an black and white outfit, look fancy and lovely and get to a graduation cocktail party. Everyone else was done at 2 so they had lots of time to get ready. i ended up getting there closer to 7 and wearing a black and red outfit because in my haste to dress i stuck my foot through my black tights. red was the only other option (although to be honest, the red looked better anyways so i guess it was okay. an elderly lady told me i looked smashing as i frantically showed up at the building).
5:30 - 9:30 graduation cocktail party. Avoid getting drunk due to severe dehydration, shakiness from rushing and empty stomach.
9:30 - present whine about being tired to everyone who will listed (or read) and drink echinacea tea because my throat hurts and my nose is stuffy. I can't get sick - my schedule is the same for the next two weeks (minus the cocktail party, add another formal grad dinner and a stagette) and it's not an option to miss anything. So i might not survive if i'm not in prime form. Once I'm done whining I'm going straight to bed to finally put an end to my non-stop day. sigh. I guess I'm done whining now.

I suppose I've kept you in suspense long enough

It's been a week since my last class so it might be hard for me to remember everything, but if I have a hard time, I did take notes... So my class has always been a source of hilarity to me. It's such an ecclectic group of people and it might be hard to explain in a typed fashion but I'll try.

This week (or I guess last week) we presented Men's Wear garments that we designed, drafted and sewed. It was a very interesting look into the lives of these women and what they seemed to like in a man. I'll try to keep it down to a couple best of the best so this post doesn't go on forever.

First off we have Bonita who has the most bizarre and hilarious voice I have ever heard. Her garment wasn't particularily hilarious. She made shorts for her husband but he wouldn't try them on because he was working night shifts and wanted to sleep. What made this one funny to me was that she added no shaping at all to the shorts because she said her husband was really fat and then she announced that she split her pants. This is not nearly as funny as it should be because you can't hear her voice.

Then we have Shona, a larger girl who sleeps through every class and snores. She got her boyfriend to come in and model the little cloak she made for him. The funny part of this was that they looked exactly the same. (man. this post is not doing justice to the hilarity. I need to show you the little face they both make which I can only describe as the chubby person frown but it's hard to describe things in a way that doesn't make me feel mean or worried that people will somehow find this on the internet...) Anyways he had a long black pony tail and looked pretty sweet in his cloak.

And then there's Aline who is the overacheiver of the group. Her homework is always perfectly neat and tidy and she has this funny little nasal voice. She's super anal about everything, she kind of reminds Christie and I of Angela from the american office but smilier. She started making jokes during the class while the teacher was talking about putting a piece of fabric behind the zipper in men's pants - a fly guard. She thought it was really funny imagining what types of things might get stuck in the zipper... Which was funny to us considering her character. For the presentation she made a men's flowy, billowy, peasant blouse. One of those ones that laces up at the top. She hand braided the cord for the lace up part and put in the gromets at 2 in the morning and smashed her thumb in the process. Her pattern was perfectly laid out and she had printed out pictures of stars wearing similar tops. I think one of the pictures was of Nick Lache. And... she told us that "her guy loves it and didn't want to take it off".

One of the girls also made what she dubbed 'the mullet shirt' which a lot of the ladies thought was a hilarious name. (older people still love mullet jokes). But the shirt was actually really funny. It was a dress shirt that had a mandarin collar and a panel in the front made out of stripey dress shirt material and the rest of it was this crazy hawaiian print. It looked insane. The girl said she made it for her fiance who does a lot of performing (we didn't ask what kind) and he wears a suit jacket while he's performing so when the jacket is on, the shirt looks like a regular dress shirt but when the jacket is off, it's a party shirt for the after party... ingenious...

And perhaps the most hilarious garment of the evening came from our very own Christie Martens who sometimes has a hard time with proportions in drafting. She made a zip up sweatshirt for a very oddly sized man. It was super long and kind of wide in the body... probably about mid to lower thigh and then the arms were ultra skinny (imagine that they're tight on Christie's little arms) and long. Plus to top it off, Christie didn't have time to go shopping for fabric so she had to make it out of scraps that she had at home. So... the main part of the sweater was made out of this horrible feeling bright purple scratchy polyester material and the design of the sweater included 4 panels in the front out of contrasting fabric. So for two of these panels she used a nice mint green valour, and 1 of them was mint green and white striped cotton and the last one was the purple again except she didn't have enough fabric so she had to cut it out of the back of her sweater and replace it with more mint and white stripes. Then the cuffs on the wrist were also stripey and wider than the rest of the sleeve. It really was something to behold. It was incredibly garish and hilariously shaped. She was rather embarassed to show it but the best part was that this one lady (Shona's mom) was like "ooh. I love the colours" and Shona (see earlier paragraph if you forget who she is) woke up and started taking pictures of it with her camera phone. Once Christie was done with her presentation she went up and asked her if she could take more and took close ups and from every angle on the mannequin.

I am disappointed at how poorly the most hilarious class translates in internet blog form. If you didn't find it funny, I can fill in details in person to accentuate the experience. I am also disappointed that I can't seem to think of another word for hilarious and it is thus overused in this post.

On another note, and to make this post as long as possible, last night was my last show. I am now a graduate of the Senior Professionaly program of the School of Contemporary Dancers. Even though I'll still be there next year, I have a certificate and a rose to prove it. Our last show was... memorable. There were some collisions and tripping and I did a somersaulty thing and popped the big hair clip that was holding my french roll in place and then had to dance very stiffly to try to avoid the inevitable avalanche. Close to the end of the piece the clip fell out altogether and I said to my partner 'oh no, my hair' and then she lifted me and when she put me down I very smoothly picked up the barette so no one would step on it and danced the rest of the piece with it in my hand. And then at the very end I keep having to grab hands with my partner and it was the one holding the clip and I lost it. My hair was everywhere and I couldn't stop laughing. I ended in a nice high release and I was visibly shaking with laughter. And that's how we closed our last show in the program.

prologue

last class completed
hilarious post to follow

the end is near

Tonight is my last class at the U of M for the year (my apparel design program). And after staying up until 1:00 last night sewing a men's wear garment, I'm excited to see the end. I'm excited this past couple weeks are over altogether, actually. It's been such a scramble to get everything done and to get from one place to the next. I haven't had a free evening in quite some time...

The most redeeming part of last week was that, since Christie and I had failed to complete our homework for our class, we decided as we pulled in to the parking lot at U of M that we had better things to do. So we left and had mini-cupcakes and milk in tea cups (we just happened to have them along) by the river. It was lovely. Other than that my week was a whirlwind of working and rehearsals and performances and sad family news and mother's day events and getting stabbed by fern thorns (by the way, taping a penny over a fern wound to extract the thorn does not work...)

And this week it's finally show week. It's always such a scramble leading up to performances and you're always wondering if you're ready and what not and when it comes it's almost a relief to perform. It brings a whole new enjoyment and passion to dancing that always surprises me a little bit. There's nothing quite like creating a new world on stage and living in it for a few short minutes. Even after all the stressful weeks and months of rehearsals (it's almost depressing to think of how many hours we spend preparing for a show), it feels fresh and exciting and fun. So on that cheesy note, you should all come to our show. Unless you find yourself a quarter to half way accross the world... then you don't have to.