Yeah...it's been a while since I blogged last...Sorry about that.

Anyway, I think I'll take an idea from Deborah at Toss the Apple and give little blurbs of info about a wide range of subjects instead of trying to write about just one.

First of all: Honk! The play went well! We had nearly full audiences for every performance, and no major screw-ups. Success! I think last year's play (Godspell) was better, though. Thanks to Deborah and Sarita for coming!

Next: Vacation. I got back last night a little after nine from a vacation to Marion, VA to visit my dad's family. His mother (my grandmother) has a little cabin next to Hungry Mother State Park in Marion that we stayed at. We brought the bicycles with us, so we stopped at Foster Falls (a park where you can rent kayaks and inner tubes to go down the New River) and biked the New River trail. The trail was great. It's used to be a railroad, so the path is wide and flat and goes on forever. The only problem is, once you bike so far one way, you have to turn around and come back. So you have to try to decide when you are halfway to too tired to keep biking, and turn around then. We biked about 11 to 12 miles there, then went and relaxed by the river for a long time, because the weather was so beautiful.

The next day we borrowed a canoe from my Aunt Melanie and Uncle Doug and took it out onto the lake at Hungry Mother State park. We also rented the "Paddle Boat from HELL!!", as named by my brother and me (or is it "me and my brother"...or "my brother and I"...oh, who cares!!). This was a seriously defective paddle boat. The rudder was practically out of the water, so you had to hold the little lever towards a direction for like 10 minutes before you'd even start turning in that direction. Ugh.

Anyway, the last day of vacation, we went to another bike trail called the Virginia Creeper Trail. It's another trail that used to be a railroad, and it's named after the nickname for the train that ran on it. Anyway, in Damascus, VA there are a bunch of bike places that charge about $11 to shuttle you up White Top Mountain to the beginning of the trail. Then you ride down the mountain back to Damascus. It's a pretty incredible ride. It's slightly downhill the whole way down, so it doesn't take much effort, but we saw people riding up the trail. That's pretty hard core. The view from the trail was beautiful, lots of creeks and valleys and rock formations. There were also a bunch of old trestle bridges left over from the railroad. The trail is 35 miles long, total, but we only went on 17 miles of it (just back to Damascus). There was a cute little restaurant about halfway down that we stopped and ate lunch at. All in all, it was a great ride, and highly recommended if you like biking. Even if you're not a serious biker, it's not a hard trail so anyone can do it.

Okay, next topic: knitting. You remember that bamboo shirt that has been languishing incomplete for ages and ages? Well, I got it back out as something kinda mindless to knit backstage during Honk!, and it is now completed!!! I had to do some serious modifications though, because the people who wrote the pattern are apparently mentally disabled. The pattern clearly says "knit 11 inches" before making the V-neck. So I knit 11 inches and thought "Hmm, this seems a little short, I'll knit 2 more inches!" So I did. So it was now 13 inches before the V-neck. So I finished the V-neck shaping, exactly the way it told me to and checked the size by holding it up to myself in the mirror. The V-neck exposed waaaay more of my chest than is decent, and the rest of it barely went past my belly button. WTF??? That is not what it looked like in the picture!!! And it was 2 inches longer than it was supposed to be!! So i went back and added an almost 2-inch seed stitch border to the hem and a 1-inch seed stich border to the V-neck. So I finished all that, sewed it all up, wove in all those loose ends (ugh), and I'm done! yay! I'll have a FO post for it later. (For those of you who do not regularly peruse knitting blogs/forums, FO=Finished Object).

All right, If I think of anything else to say, I'll be back later, but that's all for now!

Honk!

Hello!

I haven't posted for a long because of my insanely busy schedule. I have HONK rehearsal every day. The play's going well. We're performing August 14, 15, 16 at 8:00 p.m. and August 16 at 2:00 p.m. at the Garner Historic Auditorium. See http://www.towneplayers.org/ for more information!

So, other than that, I haven't got much more news... I just thought I'd post so that everyone knew that I didn't just fall of the face of the Earth.

I don't feel like thinking of a creative title...

Yeah, I haven't posted in while, sorry.

Things have been happening, though, and I shall fill you in now.

Honk Jr. rehearsals with the Garner Towne Players have been going well. The show's going to be great! It's such a fun show to do, and I'm loving working with my old friend Patrick again. The show is basically a musical story of the ugly duckling. Patrick plays the main character, and he's pretty amazing. But, then again, he's always been amazing. I'm so jealous. :)

We almost got a new pet yesterday! A baby possum got stuck in a bucket in our garage! (Okay, we were never actually intending to keep it as a pet, but we joked about the idea.) We had no idea where its mother was, and it was just a little guy, so we took in out of the bucket and put it in a dog kennel with some cat food and a bowl of water. It loved the water; it eventually started just sitting in it. It was hilarious! Possums are so ugly and scary looking, but he was so tiny he was almost cute! Except for when he was trying to bite us...
But anyway, we let him go last night, and hopefully he found his mother. We weren't real sure what else we could do for it, but we did the best we could.

We got a new dishwasher! Our old one broke about a week ago. But this story isn't very interesting, so I'll just move on.

Owen, my younger brother, is going to be a freshman next year, so he's taking a class over the summer called Freshman Seminar. Basically, it's a bulls**t class where they're supposed to teach you how to do the "graduation project" that we all have to do before senior year ends. Anyway, he has to do a "mini" grad project, and for some reason he chose knitting as a topic (don't ask me, I can't explain why he chose it, either). So I've taught him how to knit, and for his "product" thing he's knitting some squares to donate to the "Warm up America" foundation. It's pretty cool, because I've been trying to convince him to learn how to knit for years.

So yeah, I think that's about all I've got to say. It's funny, I expected this to be a really short "I haven't left, I promise!" post. but it ended up pretty long. Not bad!