Let's see, as I've been complaining about everything in the universe lately, I suppose it's time for a re-cap of life.
The K-5 play went... OK. The kids had fun, the parents thought it was clever, but it wasn't as smooth a show as I would've liked. I suppose it was your average elementary school play, but, still.
It was a circus, and all the kids were in different acts. There were one or two acts that went on that made no sense because they mostly involved the kids chasing each other and screaming. For the barrel of monkeys, it wasn't that bad, but the Shark Tank could've been so much more. Oh well.
There were something like ten kids who wanted to be ringmasters. Two of them were kindergarteners. The first boy knew his line perfectly, and he was adorable. He's a very small serious little boy, who has a tiny bit of trouble with the letter r, so everything he says and does is instantly cute. He had his line, said it on command, said it loud, did a great job. The other boy could say it offstage, but as soon as he got out onstage to say it he'd stare at the audience and be totally incapable of anything. I'd have him say it just before he went on-stage, tell him to go out and do just that, and it never worked. One of the middle schoolers had to go stand behind him and whisper it to him both nights. And all he was saying was, "Is there anything more fun than a barrel of monkeys? I don't think so!"
We had Mikey the Life Boy who only wanted to be shot out of a cannon. So, one dummy and cardboard cannon later, we had our Daredevil act. The second night, they threw the dummy, but let go of the cannon, so it fell over and it was maybe twenty seconds before they realised. Of course that was also the night it was being taped.
The Kindergarten strong men were a big hit. Styrofoam weights and lifting toy cars over their heads. The boy who couldn't do his ringmaster line was the star of the event though- he ripped a phone book in half. We cut a phone book in half and glued covers back on it, so it just looked like it was intact. He'd always practiced it with just paper, so none of the kids had seen it either. He was having a little bit of trouble with it, and you could see the parents all willing to be impressed even though he screwed up, but he did it. It looked so awesome, and all the kids thought he'd really ripped through a real phone book.
I'm going to do it next year. I keep going back and forth, but I think I really will do it. They need the same person to do it for a couple years in a row- they've been through half a dozen in the last few years, I guess. I want to do something with pirates, maybe for the younger kids so I don't have a cast full of Johnny Depp fan girls. (Never seen any of the Pirates movies, suppose someday I must.) Besides, the younger kids aren't instantly going to think drinking and wenches. I could write a whole series of short pirate sketches, then the older kids would have LINES, but it wouldn't be too much for them to learn.
My Meteorologist and the Weather Gods play was due today. I finished the last forty pages of it last night. It was only an eighty page play, so that's saying a lot. The other guy in the class wrote a farce, and I feel kinda bad that my play got way more laughs than his did. Granted, farce doesn't work well on paper (you read the second act of Noises Off sometime and see if you laugh), but it still needs a lot of work before it's a real farce and not just a play in which strange things happen, some of them physical comedy. The plot structure is not farce, but the bits are.
I'm happy because they thought that Worak the Destroyer, the enormous groundhog who lives under Gobbler's Knob in Pennsylvania and is also called Phil was hilarious. They also thought it was suitably sweet that the show ended with the accident prone hero of the show forecasting the weather at the end. The last bit you really have to read the play to understand. It has its faults, like the ending, which is really a total cop out, but it's got some fun good stuff in it too.
And, with that I'm not going to have any more school for the next two years. It's going to be very weird to stop going to school, since I've been doing it since I was three. It's going to mean a real job- I'm looking to interview for a job at one of the animal kennels in town.
I don't know whether it's a feed them, walk them, change their cages job or a check them in check them out job. Either would probably be OK. I like animals, for the most part. It's like the opposite of my opinion of people: animals in general are great, but specific ones are a pain in the ass. Not a big fan of cleaning cages, I guess, but there is very little call for anything I'm actually qualified to do.
I would like to take this opportunity to give mad props (there's a first for me with that phrase) to Brendan Benson, my latest discovery. I downloaded all the stuff Napster had and am listening to it before the licenses expire. (I signed up for the free trial because I figured I could download songs for the show and play them on the laptop. Turns out the music doesn't work unless it's connected to the Internet, which the school didn't have, of course.) At least I'm getting something out of it.
Monday we return to Iowa because... I don't know. I don't know what we're doing, how long we're going to be there, anything. This pisses me off because I would rather do anything other than hang around with one set or the other of our parents. We've seen them way too many times this year. That is way more than enough considering we live this far away. We had relatives that lived closer to us than that that I never saw more than once or twice. I keep saying, once in the summer and then Christmas or Thanksgiving, that should be it. Seriously. We have the Internet, we have phones, it's not like we're unreachable. I've got friends I haven't seen in three or four years that I like much better than any of my relations.
The thing is, I know for the most part that we're going to his house to help them clean the house. We do not live in the state. The rest of his siblings, as well as his oldest nephew who is now 15, all live in town and are not called upon to clean the house. This is basically because The Boy is easy prey, he won't say no because he knows the rest of his siblings just plain won't.
Let me take this moment to say that I'm pretty damn certain that he probably demands way less than his siblings because once he moved out he really did. They helped him pay for school, but the way I look at that, the government expects parents to do this (the Financial Aid forms are set up to assume that parents will give as much as possible based on their income), so no parent has the right to play "this is a nice thing I'm doing for you". Whereas paying court fees, credit card bills, car repair, phone bills, electric bills, rent, and groceries for the other three (especially when the oldest has four kids) is stupid. Especially when we never hear of them re-painting the living room and hallway, cleaning the basement, washing the windows, cleaning the garage, taking up the carpet, or hauling off garbage- all jobs we've done for them in the past few years.
But, I also understand that The Boy's parents do really need the help, and The Boy does feel like he owes them, and we do have time off. I just don't think we need to drive eight hours to wash their windows when there are perfectly capable choices within ten minutes.
OK, so much for not complaining about anything in this entry. It just bugs me that we're leaving for maybe two weeks in two days and we still don't have a plan. Tonight, though, The Boy finishes his last class project, so maybe we'll talk about it tonight.
And now, since I have time for the first little while, I'm going to play with my Sims for a couple of hours.