4/6/09

Come ooooonnnn Spring!


Otto and his girlfriend. Seriously, these two are crazy for each other. Lola belongs to our neighbor Heidi who lives on the first floor and we've gotten to become good friends with her. And now, whenever one of them are outside getting a walk, the other one some how knows it and starts insisting on going outside too.



So this past weekend was nice enough for Ray and I to hang out on the balcony and surely enough Lola pulled Heidi up the stairs to come see Otto. Then Otto brought Lola into our apartment to show her his pad...like this the couch where he likes to lie around.


























What's really nice about these two is that Lola doesn't mind playing the submissive and Otto likes just standing over her even if she's ignoring him because she's chewing on something.



Another great shot of these two and their smiles.
Boyfriend & Girlfriend in the dog world...how cute!



Here's Otto showing Heidi how he greets Ray and me whenever we come home - with a big doggie hug!




Just hangin' with the adults out on the balcony.





















In mid-March we had Ray's friend Fred from Maine come visit with us.

It's always a fun reminder having a friend from out-of-town visit Chicago because it gives you a chance to be a tourist again yourself and see in the city with fresh eyes.

With Fred we went to a fun Jazz Club one night, caught an improv show and Ray and Him checked out the Natural History museum as well.








Otto hanging out with Linda on the stair steps while Ray does the first Grilled dinner of 2009!




Otto liked Fred quite a bit and gets to be with the boys.
And for future guests, just know that while staying with us you are required to sample several of Ray's home beer selections (he's up to Brew #9 now). Fred enjoyed the lighter beer versus the darker ale and every time Ray gets to share his beer it gives him new ideas for future recipes.













Otto playing with his mommy :-)















Our Home Brew collection is growing and busting out of the closet.





Ray's Beer Label is "O.E.B." which stands for Olde Englishe Bulldogge, and on each of his labels Ray puts a picture or profile of Otto. Here is Otto over-seeing the making of his Ginger-Honey Wheat ale. But Ray has to remind him that he can't sample his beers until he turns 3!




2/27/09

One last go-around in my 30's!


This is it world! I wanted to capture a picture of myself today, my 39th birthday, and the first of my last year being in my 30's.

So this is what 39 looks like on me. I really want to enter my 40's in the best shape ever - in best physical health, mental health, nutritional and all.

Today I went on a gig and played piano for a Dave & Co show. I rode with my friend & the stage manager Jen Taylor to Schaumburg for the show and on the way I was talking to her about my wedding plans when it suddenly hit me (privately) that she might be expecting an invitation to the wedding and I hadn't even thought of her at all. So that was my first hit of the kind of wedding-planning-stress that no one looks forward to. Just a small thing, but still something that you don't ever want to inadvertently hurt someone's feelings.

So yes, the wedding plans have started and the biggest thrill of all for me is how much Ray is supporting me and being enthusiastic over the little discoveries I'm making. I'm finding myself strongly driven to design a lot of it my own and I expect that I'll be able to slowly garner all of the pieces over the course of the next year and at half-the-cost it would be with a wedding planner.

In fact, I've already picked out my favorite designer wedding dress and amazingly was able to "win" that very dress on ebay for a fraction of its designer-cost. Well, I won't be entirely certain until it shows up that I got what I'm expecting to get. Still, it's really thrilling to even think about wearing such a beautiful, elegant dress on that uniquely special day.

I would love to succeed with a few accomplishments this year - like a flatter stomach, a stronger body, and the ability to run more than 3 miles at a faster, lighter pace. I wonder what change it might make in me if I went my entire year at 39 without eating any processed sugars and desserts. Could I do it, I wonder. Well, the answer is yes I could but it would take some moments of very strong will-power to resist all external temptations and the inner demons as well. I definitely have a long history of aching for a full stomach and eating sweet desserts/candy to offset difficult feelings. But I also have a history of taking myself into brand new territories and embracing a healthy lifestyle fulltime.

It's no special insight to comment on how much work it takes to make healthier choices. Last week I got back up to running 3 miles a day for 4 days...then it snowed, Otto got very sick, and my mood just got down again and I neglected to run at all this week. Every day, every week is a day to try again and that's what I say to myself when I fret over my inconsistancies. Life was simpler when I was alone and single and I had tons more freetime and energy to be so focused on my health. Then comes all the transition of this year and while I've tried make all the adjustments, I've also let my previous health priorities slip quite a bit. So it's hard.

I think loving and being in love is a very vulnerable place to be. I know its suppose to be the easiest and best to be with someone who loves you for just being yourself. And that's true too. But additionally, there's a great sense of accountability when you committ yourself fulltime to another person. What affects you also affects the other person. And its just plain vulnerable.

But maybe I'll find it less vulnerable in my 40's. Maybe its just a sense of my uncertainties about life and remenants of younger insecurities that'll finally shed-off this year and lessen those vulnerabilities & insecurities I still struggle with.

One year left.

39.

I put the last of my birthday cupcakes in the freezer tonight.

There's the wedding tradition of saving the top of the wedding cake for the one-year anniversary.

So I want to keep those cupcakes for one year and not have another sweet sugary thing until next February 27, 2010.

They'll be so tasty!

Wish me luck.






r




2/6/09

Christmas Snow in February...still!



It's the first Friday in February and also the first time since before Christmas that the temperature gets above freezing! Heck, it's suppose to get near the 50's tomorrow. If so, then all this snow/ice/slush/dirty-muck might finally start to melt away and clear.

But I wanted to make an account of this past Winter '08-'09 with these pictures remembering what it has been like to have a brand new puppy in the house and have to take him out at 6am every morning thru to 11pm at night while we've been under this constantly-near Zero degree cold. So much cold that the ice, snow, ice and then snow again from December is still around.

Crazy!

We haven't been able to
walk through our gangway
to get to the front of the
house since early Decemeber.

The pipes freeze and drip
down long ice-sickles that
form a solid sheet about
3-4 inches thick.

Even Otto doesn't want to
try slipping through this.









But on the good side, Otto and his girlfriend Lola (our neighbors dog) have an awesome time chasing each other around in this back drive-way. And its still so icy that we don't have to worry about drivers speeding down it. Not yet, at least.















Just one last picture of all the piles of snow still mounded up in the yards. Those who never bothered to salt their sidewalks are now leaving all of us to have to slip-slide down the street.


Then again, if it hits the warm temps that it's suppose to in the next 48 hours, things will finally start to clear.









Christmas morning '08 with Otto helping tear up the wrapping paper.


You have to admit, it's really adorable. Here is Otto tearing at the Big-Kahuna gift that I got for Ray --- his beer making kit!


And Ray surprised me tremendously by giving me everything that I had on my list... from V.S. pajamas to a luxury robe and a sports-line heart monitor watch for exercise.


I think in this picture I'm opening up a very bright travel light for attaching to Otto's leash for those very dark early morning constitutionals. Hilarious gift there Ray.



Here are my boys now crashed on the couch after an exciting morning of gifts, morning breakfast and an afternoon of Its A Wonderful Life!


We spent New Years Eve at the home of Jim & Roseanne, (Ray's friends from elementary school) and their two children. One adopted (William in pic) and the other one is Benjamin, who loved having Otto around in their house that he followed the dog everywhere he went.



































New Years Eve antics. This is Jim. Jim and Ray have known each other since 2nd grade and only recently got back in contact with eachother in the past year. Typical of best friends, though it had been perhaps 6 years or more, they picked up exactly where they left off. Jim & Roseanne are super special friends for us.
















Kids & Dogs!



Ray's first evening cooking up his beer brew. He's got a system down now of having working on two-or-so brews at the same time, each at a different part of the 10-14 day process.













And here's where Otto hangs out when we're working in the kitchen. And sometimes, when he's being too spastic we leash him to this spot for him to calm down. I think he actually likes the down -time sometimes.











After the new year, the fate of Otto's family jewels were in jeopardy. The first day, it really sucked for him. But after that, I think he forgot he had anything in the first place.

Ray is wearing this T-shirt on purpose. It was inauguration day for Obama and here he is enjoying his home-made beer brew and watching t.v. with our cone head dog.

12/16/08

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.

11/5/08

10/20/08

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.

9/18/08

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.