Things are kind of stressful considering I’m not on a project at the moment. Where to begin?
Yesterday was off-book for Lysistrata but I only had one scene in the rehearsal, so it wasn’t such a huge deal. Between tomorrow and Sunday we are doing the entire show… and I’ve barely even begun to study my lines. (One of the reasons being I was working on a monologue for an audition for Richard III. No word on how that went yet.)
The show is going pretty well… I’d say the biggest problem is that we’re all too familiar with each other and it drives down our professionalism. But it’s a fun script and I like my part, and I’m not stressing out nearly as much as I did on the last couple of shows (lines notwithstanding).
I bought a new computer desk that took the better part of a day to assemble. It doesn’t have a return like the mammoth desk I used to own did, but it’s made of the same kind of heavy pressboard material and I swear it was somehow even more difficult to put together. It’s done now, though, and it looks pretty swell. What’s more, it finally gives me a spot to unpack my computer, so hooray for that.
I finally did the necessary pricing and research to order TV service… I settle on cable, and schedule an appointment for the guy to come and install a jack in my living room (there were only jacks in the den and bedroom before, for some reason). I wait all day and when the guy arrives, he tells me that they don’t do jack installations on condos. So I wind up going out and buying a colossal drill bit, drilling holes through the wall of my place and running the cable outside myself. I then spent the next two days trying to figure out how to conceal the cable under the siding so that my neighbours wouldn’t complain about the eyesore… I wound up with a rather ingenious solution (if I say so myself) involving zip-ties and me cutting up bits of the Styrofoam packing from the computer desk. But it’s all very exhausting.
Having a DVR is fantastic, though. For $10 more per month I have the convenience of being a few button presses away from getting to watch Scrubs, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report at my leisure, without giving any consideration for being there when they’re actually playing. I can’t imagine why I didn’t think it was worthwhile before… I must prefer doing things the hard way.
Overall my progress on the condo is still going at a snail’s pace. I think a great example would be when I wanted to replace the two thermostats – not to upgrade them functionally or anything, but just so they wouldn’t be dingy and from the ’80s. It took about a week driving around to Home Depot and Lowes, checking out the various models and figuring out what would work with my heating system. Then I had to remove the old ones and install the new ones. Then I had to discover the new ones would hum and whine sporadically, waking me in the middle of the night, so then I had to go on a giant search for other places that might carry other brands of thermostats until I found one that didn’t hum, and spent about an additional week confirming that before returning the ones I’d bought. Altogether about a month of doing research, driving around and installing crap, just for a simple upgrade.
I keep telling myself it’ll all be worth it. I hope I’m right.
Dan.