December

     Wow. So I guess I fell off the radar there entirely. No post for over a month. Sorry 'bout that.  Things have been crazy here. Shows closing. Preproduction for new shows. New day job. Holidays. Traveling.

So, recap:

1. New job.
    Nothing too exciting. Receptionist for a real estate office. The major thing I have learned is that I find real estate to be incredibly boring. I see how it can be exciting for someone else (particularly the person doing the selling,) but not for me.  But it's a day job. I go in, do my time, then go home and forget about it. Not what I want to do for the rest of my life, but a decent way to pick up a paycheck while having plenty of time and brain power for other things.

2. Holidays.
   Christmas was nice. We went to The Boy™'s parents' house for the weekend.  I was sick, but it didn't prevent me from relaxing and having a good time.
    We're spending New Year's Eve with friends. I'm looking forward to that, too.

3. Traveling.
    First, there was the aforementioned trip to Downeast Maine. After New Year's, we're going to NY to my sister's. It's Dad's 60th next week, and the whole fam damily is coming to celebrate. I'm also looking forward to that. Haven't seen Parents, Sister or Nephews since June. And haven't seen my brothers or their families in two years.  It'll be a good time.

4. Shows.
   A tiny bit of a break right now.  Detritus starts rehearsal at the end of the month, then I'm pretty much booked through August.  This is not a complaint.

5. Derby.
   Still going great! We've added Tuesday practices and are now practicing three times a week.  I went up north a few weeks ago and had a great scrimmage with a couple of other teams.  We're planning another bout this winter, hopefully at home.  I'm looking forward to the Great Derby Social at the end of the month and the Triple D weekend in June.

   That's my life n a nutshell right now.  I'm home recovering from strep throat (aka Pixie Plague, as the entire derby team has had it.)  I'm hoping it's gone before we leave for Sister's.


    If I'm not back before the weekend, Happy New Year to you, Dear Readers.  May your 2012 be fantastic.

Laundry Soap

A few months ago, I experimented in making my own laundry soap. I've been using it for a couple of months and decided I really like it.  I finally ran out of the batch I made, so while making a new batch, I documented the process for you.

You will need: 

* 1/2 cup Washing soda (not the same thing as baking soda)

* 1/2 cup Borax

* 1 bar of Ivory soap (or 1/3 bar of Fels Naptha)

* essential oil (optional)

* container that can hold at least 1.5 gallons (I use one with a spout for easy pouring)

* grater, pot, spoon and stove (not pictured)

Step one: Grate the soap

Step two: put soap flakes in pot with 6 cups of water and heat until soap dissolves

(Before the soap dissolves, it kind of looks like thick potato flakes.)

Step three: add 1/2 cup washing soda

and 1/2 cup Borax

and stir until it's dissolved and remove from heat.

Step 4: pour 4 cups of hot water into your container

Step 5: Add soap mixture and stir.

Step 6: Add one gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir (note: one gallon is 16 cups.) If you choose to add essential oil, now is the time to do it.

Step 7: Let soap sit for 24 hours to gel up.  Use 1/2 cup per load.

A couple of things to know:

* The soap sort of a watery gel. I keep it in the basement (where my laundry facilities are) and found that it had a tendency to harden.  A good shake of the container before trying to pour the soap loosened things up a bit.

* This soap doesn't suds up, so don't get worried when it doesn't. You can still use your usual pretreater or bleach if you feel like you need to.

Fake Steak

For the last show, we needed three steak dinners every show.  There's now way our poor little theatre company could afford three steaks for eight performances, so I made fake steaks to go along with the real food.  Here's a little step-by-step explination of my process in case you ever need to make fake steak (or for the next time I need to make it, so I remember how I did it.)

Ingredients: floral foam, white glue (of the Elmer's variety), paint

Step one: cut the foam to the desired shape and coat with glue; let dry

Step two: base coat with red paint; let dry

Step three: dry brush with brown paint; let dry

Step four: add grill lines with dark brown and highlight with cream; let dry

I didn't get a good picture of it onstage, but believe me when I tell you that on a plate with potatoes and green beans under stage lights, it looks close enough to real steak that the audience will believe it.

Snowtober

Freak October Nor'easter dumped about 4 inches of snow on us Saturday night.  We lost power for fifteen hours.  We're luckier than some other people in the area. There are still many people in New Hampshire without power.

This early in the year, there are still leaves out.  A lot of trees lost limbs. One of the trees in the side yard dropped a limb right on my poor little truck.  It tore a big hole through the cover. 

I'm hoping this isn't a preview of the winter to come.

Off the Needles

Now that Orson's Shadow has closed, I have a tiny bit of extra free time to get some more knitting done.  Here's what's recently come off the needles:

The pattern is the Ruby Tuesday Cardigan found here (warning: the site is not in English.)  I like the way it turned out, though the buttons pull a little weird when they're all buttoned. I don't know what that's all about. If I do this again, I'll make the sleeves a little longer.  They seemed long enough when I tried it on while I was knitting it, but after I blocked it and put it on finished, they end about two inches above my wrists.  They're both the same, thankfully, so it looks like I did it that way on purpose.

I got some nice, handspun yarn from the local farmer's market with the intention of making a scarf out of it.  However, when I got it home and started knitting with it, I found the weight was too inconsistant for me. So I just made a simple shawl out of it for my Mother-in-Law for her birthday. 

I used a shawl I had knit a few years ago in a show recently. My bestest, Wina, loved it so much I decided to make her a shawl for Christmas. I'm rather pleased with the way it turned out.

This is the first of a pair of socks for The Boy™ for Christmas.  It isn't any particular pattern, just a basic toe-up construction with a floating rib pattern along the leg.  The yarn is from Knit Picks; the colorway is called Pirate King. So I'm calling this pattern Floating Pirate.

There was some discussion on twitter regarding what differentiates floating pirates from witches. To which I responded: pirates weigh more than ducks.

And if that made you chuckle, you are my friend. 

Helmet Head

This post is soon to be featured over at the Poison Pixies Website. It's probably a little didactic and more information than the average readers of my blog care for, but I'm sharing it with you anyway. 

Your helmet is a vital part of your derby ensemble.  Sure, it’s handy for keeping your sweaty hair out of your face, and it’s a great canvas for decorating with your own personal flair, but it is also an important article for keeping you safe and healthy.  Initially and most obviously, it protects you from the nasty: skull fractures.  No one wants to fall and crack their head open on the rink.  However, you can do serious injury without your head ever making contact with the ground.
Imagine your head is like a bowl of jello.  The bowl is your skull; the jello is your brain.  When you give the bowl a little shake, the jello inside moves. The harder you shake, the more the jello moves, rather independent of the bowl itself.  The same thing happens in your head.  When you move and then stop suddenly, your brain moves within your skull.  The faster you move and the more sudden you stop, the more your brain moves.  As you may imagine, your brain isn’t meant to move that much inside your skull.   This movement can cause what is called acceleration-deceleration injury - pretty much how it sounds: your brain accelerations and then decelerates suddenly.  
These traumatic brain injuries can bring with them a variety of outcomes.  The worst case scenarios: cracking your head open and bleeding out, rupture a blood vessel within the brain, getting a hematoma, causing pressure in the brain, etc.  All of these things will ultimately kill you.
There are also less serious outcomes from these injuries. Less serious in that you don’t die; they’re still pretty bad.  These outcomes can range from deafness, blindess and aphasia (an impairment of language ability,) to cognitive, social, behavioral or emotional disabilities.
The more mild forms of brains injuries are known as concussions.  Most concussions are fairly mild.  You get into trouble if you don’t let yourself heal properly afterward, or if you get multiple concussions.  Post concussion syndrome can include headaches, anxiety, memory loss, sleep problems and irritability.  Symptoms of post concussion syndrome can take weeks, months or even years to resolve. Every time you have a brain injury, you’re more susceptible to having another brain injury.  The more times you have a concussion, the easier it is for the brain to concuss.  You can’t say x number of concussions are okay, but x plus 1 are bad. It depends on the frequency and severity of previous concussions.  The effects of multiple concussions can include difficulty concentrating, headaches, aphasia, memory loss and personality changes.

So now that you know all the nasty things that can happen to you if you don’t wear a helmet, what do you do? Why, wear a helmet, of course!  You want to choose one that fits correctly.  The wonderful people at your local skate shop can help you with this.  Something to keep in mind: not all helmets are created equal. You need to get a skate helmet, not a bike helmet.  The foam inside a bike helmet is intended to gradually decelerate the head.  It assumes you are going at high speeds and have had a major crash (with a car, for example.)  While you may feel like you’ve been hit by a car when that other blocker slams into you, it is by no means a similar collision. Also, bike helmets are only meant to work once: after you’ve had an accident where you hit your head (and your helmet saved you from injury,) you need to get rid of the helmet and get a new one.  Skate helmets, with the hard plastic shell, are designed to displace the force of impact, rather than decelerate.  The skate helmet assumes slower speeds and less car crashes. Also a skate helmet can be worn again after a collision because, unlike a bike helmet, the foam doesn't collapse.
Long story short(er), wearing a helmet isn’t important just because WFTDA and your team captain tells you to.  It can literally save your life so you can skate again another day. So go on out, find one you like, spruce it up with some stickers, paint and flair and wear your helmet with derby pride.

Unfounded Fears

Things started slowing down once Orson's Shadow opened.  The insane succession of shows I had at the end of the summer was over, and I was working on one show with nothing else on the horizon. 

I'll be honest. I began to panic.

Logically, I knew it was a lot to expect that I would just fall into my old ways once we returned to NH. Life here had moved on in the five years we'd been away. I couldn't expect every director I ever worked with to be pining away for their favorite stage manager to return. A small part of me hoped they had, but the realist in me knew it wouldn't be so.

I was a little disappointed, irrationally, when I found that the show I most wanted to do out of this season already had a stage manager. 

So I started to prepare myself that I would be theatre-less for the rest of the season and I would have to start looking for something else.

But that changed quite suddenly. 

A friend of a friend, a woman I knew socially but have never worked with before, found herself without a stage manager three weeks into rehearsal for her show.  She sent me an email asking if I could step in.

Of course!

We were discussing her final show of the season, and my desire to be a part of it.  She already has a stage manager, but would love it if I could come in and be her run crew.

Of course!

Last night at rehearsal, she turned to me and asked "what are you doing in March?" Um. Nothing?  She has another show opening at the end of March that she'd like me to stage manage.

Of course!

All that concern about not having any gigs for the rest of the year is gone. It really is almost like I never left.  And I'm really happy that we're back. 

** The shows, by the way, are Elephant Hunt, Detritus, and Wit.  Go to the Players' Ring website  for more information.