Blog

The past two-and-a-half days we’ve been all over the place – we’ve been busy.

On Friday night we hit a restaurant called Mac’s that’s within a few blocks of the UC campus in downtown Cincy – a college hangout. I’m of the opinion that any restaurant near a college campus that is in business must have pretty good eats otherwise it wouldn’t be in business at all. Mac’s was no disappointment. We split a pitcher of Strongbow Ale (cider is our beer of choice), an appetizer of hot soft pretzels with beer cheese, and a Gyro pizza with white wine sauce, spinach, black olives, onions, tomato, feta cheese, gyro meet and topped with tzatziki sauce. It was delicious! From there we walked over to CCM’s Corbett Theatre to see their big fall musical production of Evita.

The people who come out of CCM’s program often find that their first job upon graduation is on Broadway. WOW. There’s a good reason for that – the show was phenomenal. Really, seriously good stuff. CCM is comprised of opera, theatre, musical theatre, dance, music, design and technical production. They’re pretty much an all-in-one of awesomeness when it comes to the talent pool. This means their productions – especially their musicals – don’t just excel in one area. The singers can dance, the dancers can act, and the actors can play musical instruments. I really thought the dancing and choreography in this production was fantastic. The orchestra was awesome, the lighting was wonderful and the costumes were beautiful. All the costumes (and there were a TON of them) are each made here at UC, not purchased. I’ve seen less impressive sets, lighting, costumes and talent on nationally touring productions. Ready for the let-down? The show runs only 4 days. They started building the steel trusts for it during the summer, it loaded in and then was in tech for like two weeks. A crazy amount of money went into the costumes, lighting and more (it was sponsored by Macy’s if that’s any indication), and let’s not forget the weeks of intense rehearsals and crew of about 50. I think each person in the 20-30 person cast had their own dresser backstage. And all that for only 4 days of performances. Yet, they still make money on their productions for only having so few showings. I think such a short run is a disservice to all the talents that went into the production. If it were running longer and our lives weren’t so hectic right now, I’d have definitely gone to see it again. It was one of those shows where you could tell the performers were having fun onstage, and it reminded me of why I’m in the profession I’m in.

Saturday was a blur. It was Ted’s first full day off work since he started on November 1. At this point we’ve been in the house for nearly a month and we’re still not totally done unpacking and settling in and it was driving us nuts. So we took the day to pound out as much as possible. We mowed the lawn, raked a few leaves, moved Ted’s trailer to the back of the house, unloaded all Ted’s lighting and sound equipment from the trailer into the basement, gathered branches from the woods behind us to use as firewood, replaced the not-so-awesome hardware in the bathroom with much nicer replacements, installed hanging storage hardware in the kitchen, hung up all our pictures, wall hangings and two new wall-mount wine racks (to hold our leftover Door County wedding wine), set up and dressed the guest bed and unpacked the boxes stored in the guest bedroom, got most of the boxes in our office unpacked, and fully unpacked the living room. We took a break to order a pizza and finally got to sleep around 12:30. We only have about 5 or so boxes left to unpack in the house and only a small handful of other “fix-it” related tasks to do. It was a really productive day and it’s nice to finally have our house looking like a home.

Today we slept in a little and went to mass and the Knights of Columbus parish breakfast. After church we tried to use our Bed Bath and Beyond gift cards to purchase the knife block off our registry and pick up a few small other things but that turned into a big fail because the store we went to didn’t have anything in stock that we needed. Bummer. One more thing to try to fit in early next week. We watched that Packers v. Vikings game and now we’re back at UC from 5 pm – 2 am. Ted is striking Evita and I’m sitting in his office working on wedding Thank You notes which we can’t send out until we get our pro pics back from our photographer.

And that was our weekend in a (big and wordy) nutshell. Now, for your entertainment pleasure, I proudly present a really nerdy tool joke (you’ve been warned):