Author: Lara

I warned you it was coming…and now it’s here…and we need YOUR help!

Ted is a Top 10 Finalist (out of thousands of entries!) in a contest that, if he wins, will send him on a well-deserved vacation he’d desperately like to take (and that I desperately want him to take!). It takes less than 15 seconds to vote for Ted Rhyner – one vote and you’re done! Please help us!! And if you have any awesome inclination to email or Facebook your friends/family and ask them to vote for Ted, we’d be crazy grateful! Every single vote brings us one step closer! THANK YOU!

Click here to vote for Ted!

Aside from that, it’s been a wild couple of days. On Tuesday, it was glorious! We’re talking brilliant blue skies, bright and sunny, 50 gorgeous degrees, no snow on the ground….spring in full swing! By noon on Wednesday a State of Emergency was declared for Winter Storm Vulcan, winds were raging at 40 mph, and a blizzard was in the midst of pounding us with 20+ inches of snow. It was pretty amazing. Our vehicles were hardly visible out our kitchen window – mere feet before our eyes! I was officially sent home from the theatre at 12:30….where we promptly spent the rest of the evening bundling up to where only the slits of our eyes were visible for a blizzardy snowball fight/throwing each other into snow drifts/making snow angels/walk around our townhome complex (yeah, we know we’re nuts), drinking hot cocoa, napping, and watching Frozen. Because that’s what you do when you get an exceptionally rare snow day in upstate NY. When a LORT theatre cancels a performance and sends its casts and staff home, you know hell hath frozen over.

In the morning, before we were all sent home, we – cast, staff, playwright, and cohorts – spent an hour or so cozied up in our NextStage sharing and recording our personal origin stories and a few songs for our upcoming world premiere production of Informed Consent (a phenomenal show that you absolutely do not want to miss!), written by the brilliant and wonderful Deb Zoe Laufer. It was a blast. It was powerful. It was community. It was beautiful. And it was a freakin’ sweet way to spend a blizzardy morning! Also, not everyone can say they’ve sung with Tina Fabrique. Half snow day for the win!

(Photo via Sean Daniels}

If you’d like to read more about our morning recording session, check out this neat article one of our cohorts wrote about the experience.

And remember, Vote for Ted!

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Friday evening was spent at two First Friday celebration events – The Rochester Brainery’s First Anniversary Birthday Party, where we hobnobbed and noshed on cupcakes, wine, hummus, and pesto dip while exercising our brain power by taking – and failing miserably at – the 45-question BATs (like the SATs – only fun). And then we walked down to Writers & Books for their Snow Child First Friday celebration featuring a cranberry vodka cocktail, berry pies, live music, a snowflake making station, and a bunch of our friends.

Rochester is home to so many completely awesome, small, local, non-profit, cultural organizations that do amazing and fun things to promote literacy and life long learning in our community. And we are so lucky to have them!

Speaking of the Rochester Brainery – Shawnda is teaching one of her fantastic couponing workshops at the Brainery next monday! Register for her budget/life changing workshop here (and check out all the other amazing classes they’re offering over the next few months!!).

Head’s up family & friends:

We’ll be needing your help soon!

Ted was selected as a Top 10 finalist out of thousands of entries for the 3rd annual Cintas & Carhartt Cold Crew Contest. Meaning, he has a 1 in 10 chance of being voted the grand prize winner – which is accompanied by a trip for two to the June 2014 CMA Music Festival in Nashville…and that would be such an amazing and well-deserved reward for him to win. Especially since he’s always working so hard, in so many capacities, to help support our family, and vacations that are anything but free are just not within our means, so this would be an incredible treat. The contest celebrates people who endure extreme winter working conditions – and over the years Ted has purchased many warm and durable Carhartt clothing items that have kept him safe, dry, and warm while working grueling 18-hour days disassembling, by hand, multi-ton industrial machines, outdoors, in biting sub-zero temps with frigid wind chills and blowing snow. I am so proud of this guy and thankful for companies like Carhartt that make strong, safe, and warm clothing to protect him.

Online voting will open in mid-March, and the winner will be announced in early April. The great thing is that since this contest is a one-vote-per-person kind of thing, you only have to vote ONCE. Last year Ted worked his tail off scrounging up enough votes for me (and my Pear Weather Friend drink recipe) to win two free tickets to the New York State Ice Wine Festival. I had an amazing time and desperately want to return the favor!

As soon as the online voting opens, I’ll let everyone know. If you could please give the one-minute it will take to vote for Ted when online voting opens (and share the voting link with anyone you know so we can get him as many votes as possible!), we would deeply appreciate your help!

Thank you for always being so wonderful and supportive of us!

{This has NOTHING to do with my blog today, but I like this picture for so many reasons…so there you have it}

I’ve been a little quiet and neglectful on the blog front lately, but not for a lack of activities to share or things to say, but more for a lack of the right words to say them. I’ve had some interesting and diverse thoughts swimming in my head for the past few days (weeks?) but I’m still wrapping my own mind around them before I put them out there to the universe to see how you feel about them. That, and I’ve felt like I’m in an odd place of extraordinary busy-ness and ceaseless exciting projects, programs, and events at work that thrill but exhaust me during the day, and then leave me with zero motivation to do much more at night when I arrive home from the theatre than cook dinner, slink into my pajamas, and crawl into the warm embrace of our couch and my cozy knit blanket while watching House Hunters and Property Brothers on HGTV. I’m either moving at a beyond frantic pace or brain-dead – and, at least last week and this week, there seems to be no in between. It’s lightening fast or wicked slow. I’m also trying pretty desperately to finish up The Snow Child for book club on Thursday night. I’m almost there, but my work, my thoughts, my book, my activities, and my deep desire to be utterly lazy when I’m not at work haven’t left a whole lot of spare time for blogging lately. So, what all have I been up to for the past week? It’s all thoroughly thrilling, I assure you.

I deep cleaned the entire house (I do love the smell, look, and feel of a spotless home), did all my coupon planning and grocery shopping for the week, packaged and mailed a few sets of those tasty homemade truffles that Becca and I slaved over to a few family and friends that I thought might be in the mood for an exotic chocolate pick-me-up, made a ‘welcome home’ dinner of Italian sausage pasta casserole and lemon bars for Ted (he was away for a week on designer business), picked him up from the airport, cleaned Cider’s tank, made more lemon bars for our office potluck, used a gift certificate we had to treat ourselves to dinner at a sweet little authentic Mexican restaurant in Penfield and a performance of Clybourne Park at Geva on Friday night, used more gift cards we’ve gratefully accumulated for a fun mini Macy’s shopping spree on Saturday, took a bubble bath and read my book, cozied up to some fried chicken, cole slaw, biscuits, and the 3-hour Bonnie & Clyde mini-series DVD on Sunday (which was excellent, by the way), purchased and assembled a new shelving unit for our basement and reorganized the whole space (it looks amazing!), scored a treat of two free diet cherry coke slurpies at Seven-Eleven for Ted and I – which made me feel like I was 16, invincible, and away at summer theatre camp in San Marcos with my friends and boyfriend again (because I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I had a slurpie)(also, you should download the Seven-Eleven app on your phone because they give away something free almost every week), took the Buick in for a car wash, oil change, new spark plugs, and an engine tune up – all of which has helped exponentially but left us totally broke, and yesterday morning we woke up early for a pre-work breakfast date of free buttermilk pancakes at IHOP to support their Children’s Miracle Network fundraiser. I’m sure I’ve also done a billion more mundane things in the past week, but you get the gist. Either totally productive or totally lazy – and it changes hourly.

At work I’ve been in a quicksand beach of company meetings, department meetings, other meetings, Student Matinee performances and talkbacks for Clybourne Park, attending and snapping photos of our Discovery Workshops at schools across the city, planning and hosting Career Day, running Stage Door Design Project sessions, sitting in on rehearsals for Informed Consent and Stranded on Earth, organizing and attending several events at local library branches with the Clybourne cast, facilitating several Clybourne post-show public talkbacks, participating in our monthly office potluck, working closely with marketing to prepare materials for our upcoming Summer Academy auditions, handling applications for Summer Academy apprenticeship positions and Audio Describer auditions, diving into The Odd Couple Discovery Guide, and there’s still two upcoming multi-hour training sessions for Exceptional Service and Audio Description for me to tackle on Friday and Saturday – along with all my other work duties that still need to faithfully attending to. It’s exciting and I adore it, but it’s also been a page straight out of the looney-land book lately.

In conclusion, life is weird.

I do actually intend to blog more frequently this week and next week, but March always seems to bring the madness in the oddest of ways.

So, for sticking with me through this long and rambling post, I’m rewarding you with this brilliant one-minute video. It’s awesome. You’re welcome.

So, my awesome and totally inspiring friend Kristen…

… is doing 90-minutes of Bikram Yoga (in 105 degree heat with 40% humidity, which I am sweating just thinking about) EVERY DAY in March…

…to raise awareness and money for SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy), a genetic neuromuscular disease that an extraordinary local kindergartener named Oscar has.

I met Oscar last year and he is the BEST….the coolest kid ever. He’s amazing! And he’s the boy who inspired Kristen to take on this Bikram Yoga journey to raise money for SMA research.

If you have an extra $1 you can share today, please consider reading up on Kristen’s Indiegogo Campaign called 30 Days for SMA and donating that $1 to help her reach her goal of giving back to and supporting a beautiful, inspiring community! You can also read more about Oscar and his story here. And if you want to keep up with Kristen’s Bikram/SMA March Madness, learn some interesting stuff, and see how she’s doing, you can check out her blog here. She’ll be updating regularly throughout March!

I don’t know about you, but my lofty goal of just making it through March, working weekdays and every weekend, with my sanity in tact, just got put to shame. What an inspiration!

Reason # 17 I am perfectly happy to rent our townhouse rather than own it: Our hot water heater broke yesterday morning and, mere hours later, (while I’m at work, doing my work and NOT dealing with removing a broken water heater and shopping for a new one) a brand new one arrives and is installed in the basement – free of my time, effort, and money. I come home to toasty hot water, a shiny new appliance, and a water-free basement floor – like it never happened. One day I’d love to own, possibly renovate, and decorate our own home, but for now, renting our townhouse is pretty much the best deal around.

That being said, I’ve also been watching WAY too much HGTV these past few weeks (and I have several friends in the process of buying/selling) and I just can’t help myself: I desperately want this house. I’ve been stalking it for weeks now and I may actually go stalk it in person when it has its next open house. With the exception of kitchen appliances (which are not included so I’d get to custom choose them…yay!), it’s practically move-in ready with no major renovations required. It was bought last May for $26,000 and flipped – so it’s been completely updated with all new kitchen, baths, windows, flooring, paint, electric, insulation, drywall and more. It’s a sweet home (great size for our little family of two) in a nice location, AND it has my top four “must-haves”: a beautiful kitchen, a great bathtub, a nice deck, and a semi-spacious and private yard for a garden and lawn games and a trampoline! Ted would point out the obvious downsides: hardwood floors, which are lovely, but unbelievably cold (which means expensive heating bills…so we’d likely invest in carpet in some rooms), the lack of a useable garage for a vehicle (it has a garage, but no way for a vehicle to get into it, so we think it’s been converted into some other useable space?), a basement that may or may not be a mess and may or may not be conducive for storage space and a workshop for Ted, and – of course – all the extra expenses associated with home ownership. But that really doesn’t change the fact that I kind of love this house.

Now this house, though clearly well-cared for by its current owners, is not totally move-in ready because it’s in need of some updates to the outdated/not-our-style cabinets, countertops, and flooring in the kitchen, the wood paneling in the master bedroom (*shudder*), tiny upstairs bathroom which could use a minor overhaul to help it feel more spacious, lack of carpet upstairs, and low ceilings (also keeping in mind we have no idea what condition the roof, electrical, pluming, walls, foundation, etc. are in), is more appealing to Ted because of the attached garage for a vehicle, shed out back for tools and equipment, and a huge, wonderful workshop space for his TORVentures business – which would be so, so awesome for him. With some updates to the kitchen, bathroom, master bedroom, and a few other minor renovations, I could be on board too. Plus, check out that sweet rustic wooden accent wall in the living room – gorgeous!

I’m truly happy to rent for now. Really, I am. We love our townhouse. Also, we’re artistic nomads and in no financial condition to buy a house, but that apparently does not stop me from obsessing over houses on the market. Human beings are funny creatures. Clearly, myself included.

Also, thanks to the awesome generosity of my wonderful parents’ sky miles, my flight home to Texas for my 10 year high school reunion has been booked, and my ticket has been procured!

Several things: A. I cannot believe I am actually old enough to be attending my 10 year high school reunion, B. I’m really excited to spend some quality time catching up with all my high school buddies again, C. I am beyond ready for Tex-Mex, Texas BBQ, Texas sunsets, margaritas, Blue Bell ice cream, my cowboy boots, hot weather, Boerne Berges Fest, river tubing with SPF 900, trolling around Boerne to see how much has changed in the past year-and-a-half since I’ve been home (I’m almost frightened by this), quality time to spend with my awesome parents and brother and his family, and SANCHO. Obviously, I am crazy excited to love on that cat of mine. TEXAS I’M COMING FOR YOU!

Furthermore, here’s this to make you smile

Because sometimes, after a day that tests your patience and temper to its limit, you really do just need to drop everything and feast on comforting and delicious shrimp pad thai with one of your best friends (using a buy one get one free coupon, of course) and then go shopping at Macy’s and buy two pairs of super cute yet practical and badly needed clearance/store closing shoes funded by a generously donated gift card. And then you take a deep breath and realize your headache is gone, and you feel a million pounds lighter, and calm and grateful and loved that you have such wonderful people to share life with.

Cider agrees. But Cider did not have pad thai. Cider had bloodworms.