Wrapping Up 2008 & All Its Gifts!

Happy Holidays!

Ray and Otto have a meeting of the minds.
Ray is the true Big Dawg of this household, and Otto is very much the trusty companion.

The Cats are still a big reluctant to get into the Holiday spirit...Salvador tolerates the attention, so long as the annoying dog isn't around!

First time at an official local dog park. The facility is very well maintained and the other dog owners have seemed to have developed their own community. Otto was super social and loved playing chase with his new friends.

It's a Holiday Miracle!!! Day by day, the cats are adjusting to the presence of Otto and his spastic ways. Every once in a while they still hiss and swap at him. They're too old to be playing like the Pup wants to play...and I think its an insult to their dignity too.

So many attempts at taking the picture with the dog wearing the antlers...finally we just gave up and let him do what he naturally wants to do with them.

We decided to fore go a Tree this year and hung lights, garland and our favorite ornaments along the upper bookcases. Its not Christmas without that soft glow of the lights, which we get to enjoy now.

This was Otto's contribution to our home decorating night!

Gotcha!!!

Thanksgiving was such a nice time to spend with family and we were all so impressed with Otto's laid-back demeanor. Perhaps all of our dinner talk about puzzles, construction and politics just bored him.

Ah ha! The camera-man gets his picture taken! Oh yes, and this was also the night we discovered how effective the lazer-pens are on keeping Otto's attention. Our cats could still care less, and sit and watch with pity as the pup foolishly chases it.

Ray gets his early start on the Thanksgiving with improvised Turkey Puppetry.

Maybe it's an Ink Addiction? Coke Zero is sooo yummy!

My two favorite boys.
Ray practices his nightly couch-potato training with Otto.

This is an early picture of Otto... he's been with us now 5 1/2 weeks and we can see that he's already grown since he arrived. Sweet boy.

The Cd-launch party was a terrific successful night! Here is Linda with a group from her Second City improv classes.

Ray was awesome at promoting Linda's Cd the whole night. And here he is with Spike, Linda's long-time friend who was also the person who convinced her to come out to Chicago from Hershey, PA.

Linda and I doing a sound-check at the club, a few hours before the show.

After the performance, we had cake in celebration.

Sweetie and I together on a typical weekend morning.

Proud to be American

The season begins

Mmmmmm yummy.

Ray had to create rain on stage for their current production and one afternoon we went in to watch the matinee show and see how the rain was turning out. Then after the audience and cast members and everyone was gone, Ray had to gear up to start climbing around the grid to make a few minor tweaks to the rain system.


If I weren't so bundled comfortably right now in my chair around the computer, I'd get myself up to go take pictures of the indoor herb and plant garden that I've been growing. And they are growing like crazy! We went to Home Depot and got the equipment needed to grow year 'round and Ray rigged it all up for me. We've got Chives, Parsley, Thyme, Lemon Thyme, Mint, Basil, and Tomatos, as well as my two new plants that a class of students gave to me as a present on their final show night.

We never did get up to camping last month. We had the five days off, but Ray followed right behind me in coming down with a real bad, achey cold that lingered too long. I miss the camping and the location. I probably think about Westfield and wonder what it looks like and wish that I was there about two times a week.

So while sitting at home feeling miserable for so long, Ray got his mind into learning to read music. I told him that after learning so much on the banjo, a guitar would seem a bit easier. And sure enough, he took to it at a much faster rate. We headed to the burbs and picked up this very pretty and deep warm sounding Washburn for him, which he practices on for hours every single day.



The new Fall term has begun at the Second City Training Center! My boss, Mike, has accepted the promotion to being now on the ETC stage which has meant that he's had to cut down the # of classes he teaches this term. We had been splitting the duties 50/50 for the last two years. Now I'm picking up two significant workshops/performances from him as well as smaller one-off classes this term and getting a little extra pay for it. I don't mind it at all. The work is so worthwhile.

Linda K and I are back to rehearsing regularly and gearing up for the CD launch. I've been getting more and more annoyed with the out-datedness of my keyboard and its poor outdated sounds, that I'm really hoping to get to pick up a new keyboard on Wednesday. My Casio is a WK1800 (which was a replacement for my WK3500, going backwards in quality), and Guitar center is having a KILLER Sale on the most recent Casio WK6000 for under 300 bucks. Wow.

So I'm thrilled about working with Linda and watching her continue to blossom and bloom. Last week Ray and myself went to Macy's with her to try on appropriate wear for the Jazz setting. It was so much fun and she looked awesome in everything we picked - though admittedly Ray had the best vision for the look we were after.

All things are good in these parts. The plants are growing, the students are learning, the music is getting real good. Oh! A few other music things...

Every Friday of this month I've been doing Jason Chin's Halloween musical "Friday the Halloweenth". I wrote the music for the show and the cast is very fun, if not so so so young! Gosh I used to be part of the young crowd being intimidated by the iO theater, and now I'm the oldie passing on musical guidance to my green cast.

Then this December I'm working with Rich Prouty on re-mounting "Listen Kid..." the parody musical comedy written by (emmy award writer) Peter Gwinn from the Colbert Report (with music by Me :-) ). The show will run on Saturdays at 7:30pm at the Donny Skybox theater. We have to edit it down for the venue, but that's making us tweak down to its best moments and put on a better show.

Alrighty... So that's about it for my latest update. We are just having a dandy Fall this year and I'm very happy and grateful for it. Mellow and snuggly. And for some reason, Ray's been particularly romantic these days which just makes it all that more peaceful and nice for me as the weather turns chillier and greyer.

Yes, I should Definitely put up picks of my plants next time! Will do that.

Bye for now...

A monkey at work!

This is either really early in the morning, or real late at night. We just have fun.

Notes to Self

"Tech Widow" is now the term that Ray overheard to describe the experience of the significant others during Court's lengthy, lengthy tech / preview week. The show FINALLY opens this SATURDAY and I'm looking forward to seeing it - I've heard so much about it.

Then in two weeks we have the opportunity to take one last camping/fishing trip. I'm really really hoping for it.

Meanwhile...

I feel curiously alone in how I'm experiencing the current political and cultural environment. But I also tend to assume that it comes with age. I can't tolerate the shallow repetitiveness of everyone's political promises and the singularly ignorant opinions the populas makes based on two-dimensional sound bites, hear-say and sliced up media contortions. The first casualty of any War is Truth...can we now just say truth is no longer objectifiable once our culture turned all of its resources in the media into recreating reality? An alternate-reality.

What percentage of the 300 million strong in this Country are directly accountable for this week's bank failures? And what % of people actually walked out of their door this week with significantly less assets in their accounts?

Yet the *rest* of us, with our tiny little savings, our miniscule 401K's, or (for an even greater percentage) just whatever is left in their checking account after taxes and paying bills, will have to suffer much greater.

Gee, I feel so bad for Hillary and her 25 million that she loaned to her own campaign.

Gee, poor millionaires.

And yet this will all hurt "US" for a longer time, a deeper time, and the "trickling down" will splatter and drain and drool all over our daily financial lives.

But do I sense anyone else angry? It's far-enough away and distant enough from our lives that we just go about our lives craving our next pop-culture fix.

I think "we" should be taking this whole thing a lot more personally. To have such a small small elite group of decision makers and, essentially flawed and often power-hungry humans, be so much part of the main line of our economic system that all could and can..and will suffer - Maybe if we took it a little more personally, there'd be a greater backlash and rise of the populas voice.

As I think about it, I don't wish to join in any online forums or discussion groups to find my kindred angry spirits. I don't wish to debate the little nuances, get into an intellectual bitch session, or joust and jockey for position as the most educated and most informed online. If manager Ronald in Michigan agrees with me but accounts exec Diane in Florida very much doesn't - what will spending our time reading each others words and opinions do to make a single dent in the current situation? Online forums are nothing but an illusion of meaning and purpose in my opinion, and actually delay and procrastinate real involvement and interaction. Funny how when I used to be involved on online forums I'd have all sorts of feelings about these people, often trying to be courteous and considerate, open-minded and respectful. But I still wanted to kill any annoying driver sitting in my way on the road. It never really did translate into the real world.

So, action then.

When I was a young kid, during the 1980's hostage situation, I remember spending a night sitting up in a chair and trying to figure out what single thing I could do to make it all come to an end. I thought about what letter I could write to make the people stop. I even started writing that letter. And it got very, very long I recall. It got so long that I decided it was too much and thought instead of what action I could take. The plan I developed in my head was to go on a protest of starvation. I pictured myself sitting across the street from the White House, sitting on that lawn that runs down Pennsylvania avenue, with a banner that said something about my starvation protest until the hostage crisis was over.

I know that vision was influenced by my family's vacation trip to Washington D.C. back when I was 9 years old. I don't know if its the case now, but back in the summer 1979 when we drove past the White house I was so taken....so taken by how many people were planted across the street with their various banners, flags, images and protests. Nothing organized - they were each there for their own separate cause - and they mostly looked ragged, obsessed, and mentally unstable. And I wanted the car to stop and I wanted to get closer to these people and try to understand why they are there, what they want, what their story is.

The feelings and assumption that I took away from that experience, however, was the certainty that none of what those various individuals were doing was actually having any impact on the President.


This new post of mine is really just for me. An open diary that I leave open because I think sometimes we enjoy little insights into eachother. I'm part exhibitionist. You're part voyeur. It's okay.

This is just a snap-shot of me today. I'm done with so much of what our culture deams a priority. I am deeply hoping for any sign of hope. But even if Obama were to come to Chicago and happen to walk into a coffee shop I'm sitting at for a journalistic and campaign snapshot of him "conversing with the people" I'd want to say to him "why would I be ignorant enough to think you have any real promise to give me something in return for my vote?"

By the way, whose going to have enough guts to eliminate the electoral college? No one? Too political? Too costly? People have money invested in that archane system?

That's what I thought.

One person can make only very very very small little ripples. All of our very small ripples, collectively, still doesn't make a current.

I need to go sit on a boat in the middle of some lake somewhere.

Engaged now!

It was romantic.
It was so unexpected.
It was perfect.
And it really started off our vacation in such a special way.

We then decided to hold a party before the summer was over - to invite our good friends and co-workers over to mingle, celebrate and enjoy some of Ray's great BBQ cooking.

Funny thing was, we ended up inviting WAY more people than our place can actually hold. We started to think of friends, old and new, who we would really like to re-connect with in this celebratory way and pretty soon we had an Evite list of over 50 some people.

When Evite suggested that we send a "reminder email" just a week before our party, I opted to skip it...and was just praying we could handle having as many people over as had rsvp'd.

Turned out really super.

Here are some pictures... and ALL of these pictures were taken by the next door Ukranian girl and who is six-year-old and has designated me as her "new best friend" - Sofiya - Hence many of the angles are coming from a little twerp about 3' 5" tall and from her own eyes of the party. LOL



Ray kept his station by the grill for most of the night.












Me blowing up balloons and putting last minute touches to our "party" balcony.












My singer and great friend Linda, and Ray's mother Pam. Pam brought with her a terrific fruit display, a lovely spicy pepper tray, and some pickled cucumbers that were a big hit.










Chit-chatting with my old roommate and some other Improv Friends.












Ray's good friend Nate, with his new little one Chloe. Sofiya became very enthralled with having the little baby around.











Myself with Linda and Chris, two previous students of mine. Linda is the singer galore and we'll be launching her website and booking her gigs this fall!














Some of Ray's co-workers. Sofiya learned how to Zoom in the focus during this party, and it starts to show. Very funny.












Me with Andre Washington - my last and best roommate from the Lake Shore Drive apartment. He was also the first one to ever hear about this "Ray" guy that I started to date.









And this is Ray with his oldest and absolute Best Friend, Jim. Jim also has a wonderful and charismatic wife Roseanne, along with two sons, but the following day was the first day of school - so they weren't able to make it. Jim and Roseanne have been a terrific couple to get to know and we've started the tradition of seeing the Opening Nights of the plays at Court with them together.





Annie and Kate - two lovely ladies who were once students of mine at SC, but now just really cool chics to hang with.













One of my new girlfriends and also alumni student. She's a powerhouse improviser on stage and just an all around positive and sweet girl to know, Heather Markey.










Me with Rochelle Winters - the producer from Wavelength and also very wonderful lady to get to know.











This is Jim Winters, Rochelle's husband and co-producer of Wavelength. I like this picture also because it demonstrates Sofiya's perspective being around all these adults.










And this is Me with Sofiya.

Her entire family next door speaks not a word of English, but it seems that over the last several months Sofiya's grasp of the language has blossomed and she wants to speak it all the time. She speaks it so well that she loses her Ukranian accent when she does use English. She's a cute one, of course. Very independent and self-sufficient this one!




And here she has Ray being silly too.















The party lasted for several hours and near the end, of course, we all ended up in the Kitchen carrying on dozens of different conversations. That's always a fun energy to have in your house.

So this was our very first time holding such an open-house type party for our friends. Kudos goes to Ray for getting so much of the place ready and clean while I had spent the last 7 days on the road with Wavelength doing shows.

This party also marked the end of the real summer for us given that directly following this party Ray has had to put in some very long hours installing the huge set for Court Theater's
opening production of "Caroline, or Change".

Meanwhile, I continue with my work teaching at Second City. I am going to be creating the music for Jason Chin's Halloween Musical this year - which is something I haven't had a chance to do in a long while, create original music for a musical. And, of course, the launching of Linda K and her amazing jazz voice. Linda and I have been rehearsing once a week for 3 to 4 hours for several months now and have a set-list of 40 of our favorite jazz songs. Infact, TODAY is her photo-shoot with a terrific professional photographer friend of mine Rance, so that we can get updated pro photos of her to include in her CD's and website listing. She already has a gig to perform some original political satire songs at Lake Shore Theater in October, which I know is freaking her out right now...so I'm not reminding her yet. One step at a time. She has a voice you can quickly become addicted to and I can't wait to get her up on stage, up on that mic, and give the world of people around her the honor to listen to it and fall in love!

So the Fall has lots of promise. And with all the work Ray is doing right now, I'm sneaking a chance at the calendar for one last few days of Fishing that we might be able to squeeze in. We'll see.

love to you!
Stephanie

New Season of Love

I never did finish posting ALL of the pictures from our long camping vacation. Partially due to simply having just sooo many to choose from. Also partially due to not being in the mindset of putting the great times we had this summer to rest.

But now that Ray is in the midst of the first show of the new Court Theater season, the summer feels like its coming quickly to a close. I've admittedly not felt prepared for this. I want the carefree freedom and stress free lifestyle of Fishing, Camping, and being the Northwoods to extend and extend and extend. But in the last week or so I've been seeing in Ray's eyes the reality of the time... my sweet handsome fella comes home now exhausted, sore, achey and a little brain fried. Its the beginning of the new Season for Court and the beginning of another year of Technical Direction and phenomenal stage work for Ray. Yes there are lots of worthwhile rewards to his work. I just feel a little pained sympathy for the fact that it takes a lot more right now to bring that sweet wonderful smile to Ray's deep thoughtful face.

So I'm going to post now some of the pictures from this summer. I hope you enjoy seeing them.


A beautiful evening fishing trip. We had much better luck fishing at sun-down, and it always made for better pictures too. I just love this picture so much.
This was my 22 1/4" Walleye catch. My very last catch of the trip. It took me many extra seconds as I was trying to de-hook him to even realize that it was a fish I'd never seen before! He acted a lot like a Northern Pike in the water and gave up a huge fight. Having caught this guy on a spinner-bait really takes the cake! I shouldn't expect a catch like this for many hundred more casts.

Looking studly?

Someone is a goofball!

Ray's longest, most amazing catch! That is one whopping size of a Northern Pike! We spent one whole day on a research lake north of Eagle River, Lake Escanaba. This lake provided the most amazing views of nature. We spent hours and hours casting along the banks and the winds were so rough that even with our anchors down we were being dragged north up the banks by the wind.
This is Ray's MUSKIE CATCH of our trip. Not as huge as they get, this was probably a young adolescent and we did throw him back in. Funny story to tell though...we had spent hours on this mostly desserted Lake (free of other fisherman) and had all sorts of mishaps with our reels, our lines and every kind of mechanical problem that drives a fisherman crazy. And putting up with all of it, we were still coming up short on actually catching fish.

No joke, we caught two "baits" (a Red Devil and a Spinner bait some other fisherman got tangled up in the weeds and left behind) and I caught an entire reel of synthetic mono-wire from a fishing pole that apparently some fisherman got fed up with and threw into the lake.

Ray also managed, somehow, to break the Titanium caster off his casting reel. When we later went into town and he bought basically an upgraded model of the same brand of caster, they said they'd never seen a caster break off like that.

We remained tenacious about working this lake and enjoyed the humor of all of our mishaps, including my decision to just start taking pictures of all the "non-fish" elements from the Lake that we were catching...like this huge log limb.

But eventually catching this Muskie for Ray really did cap off the day and made for the entire trip so worthwhile. We found him in this cove section of the lake where we were partially attracted to for giving us a break from the constant beating of the wind. And as we drifted into the shallower water, Ray looks down through the crystal waters to the bottom sand and asks me, "Doesn't that look like a dead Muskie laying down there?"
I go over to his side of the boat and look down
Yep. Sure does.

And the fish ain't moving.

Why would he be dead here? I asks

So Ray drops his lure into the water and lets it float down to the bottom and though it takes a few brushing up against the fish, sure enough we woke it up and watched it fish casually, and then scatter quickly away from our boat and into the safer shadows of the fallen logs up inside the cove.

Can't say exactly if that's the very Muskie that Ray ends up catching, but it made for a very new experience to see how nature exists when man is so undetected.

Now just imagine yourself, sitting on a boat, listening to the soft callings of birds around you, the lapping of the water gently against your boat, the occasional summer breeze cooling your face, and watching the sun going down for the night.
This is the closest thing to heaven on earth, is what you end up thinking to yourself.

Ray has had to learn about my "photo-bug gene" and he's had no choice but to accept it. Which has meant, at times, getting a little frustrated by the distracting sound of my camera clicks when he's trying to battle with his casting-rod against some rough winds. He was always good spirited about it, and at times like these, found an opportunity to get just a little revenge.


"Vanity"

You know...you're out in the woods, there's very little opportunity to check yourself in the mirror and you only get to wear the clothes you brought whether they suit your "mood" at the time or not. This is something only the female species can truly appreciate. In the planning of our trip, I do everything I can to try to increase my odds for staying tidy and perhaps even pretty. Part of me says to just give it up. And perhaps I eventually will. But I'm still putting up the good fight and yet even with that, I end up with "not so flattering" photos.

Oh well. :-P

We were trying for a close-up shot of the monster teeth inside the Northern Pike. This is the reason that, in all my pics, I am wearing a chain-metal type glove on the hand that is holding the fish. A nick or bite from one of these fishes could rapidly turn bad and infected in the time it would take to get back to camp and to a hospital if stitches were needed. Of course we have First Aid in the boat and I'm still learning how to avoid hooking-myself as I de-hook my fish.

I can happily report that no serious accidents have occurred on this trip. However, I cannot report that no harm was ever caused to the animals. Infact, two of them were quite tasty!


For our own scrap-booking purposes, it's important to remember all the places we got to see and visit this summer. Here is the camp site that we rented for 5 days at a brand new camp site location just north of Eagle River. This is about 2.5 hours north of our regular site in Westfield Wisconsin, and about 45 minutes from the town Rhinelander where Ray's good friend and his family live. We spent July 4th with Steve, Eileen, their daughters and the whole extended family.

These people were actually the first close friends of Ray that I had met as his official "fiance'" and they couldn't have been more warm and welcoming. I have since referred to them as his "adopted family" where Ray seems to have been adopted as just another of the many Sons.

The kids took to me instantly and we were brought along to their family party, dinner out and fireworks display. Steve himself has an amazing Boat which we had the great fortune to go out to Boom lake on with him and have a grand tour. On the two occasions that we got to go fishing with Steve, who is an expert on the intricate nuances of these lakes, Steve himself caught TWO MUSKIE!

Please note, the Muskie is so rare of a fish to catch that's commonly referred to as,
"The Fish of Ten Thousand Casts."


So I'm probably up to cast #300 or something. But to watch Steve bring in two during that week was really so impressive. It gave us all a Big High out on his boat.

So here are some of the photos from the time spent with their family.

This is Dan, Ray's best friend.
He lives in California now.
He caught this Pike on our first
evening out on the lake together.
The next day I had to return to
Chicago and Ray & Dan spent the
week together for more fishing.

This is Steve - Dan's brother and
also Ray's good friend.
He and his family live in Rhinelander.
Here he is releasing the first Muskie
he caught on our first time out to
Boom lake.

Steve and his wife Eileen were so generous
in letting Ray and I stay two nights in their
guest bedroom...and to shower up from a
week's of camping in the woods. Really
terrific peoples.








Steve & Eileen

George - the family patriarch.
He lives in a beautiful wood cabin
house nestled in the woods and
along a small river bank that connects
with the Chain Of Lakes.













Ray with the Steve's oldest daughter, Gwen.

Me playing with the middle child, Charlotte.













And the newest little one in their family, Lukus.

Don't let this picture deceive you...we are only "rentals"
















Ahh, the crazy things I can get kids to do!

The Dragon fly who got caught in my line, somehow.

Did you know, the insect world this is one of the most fiercest species?
Thank goodness its no hazard to us humans.

Okay. Well my sweet Ray just got home from work a tad earlier than expected meaning I get visit with him for a bit before heading to work. This is great! I will continue my post later and include the engagement party we just had.

Love!