Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Endgame Closing and Fall Photography

Greetings from a long-absent blogger!

Want to know why I was gone?  Oh, simply lots of things!  For starters, check out the NaNoWriMo light blue box in the top right corner of the blog...

76,277 words, and I've got through November 30th to hit 100,000!  I'm pretty much on track, and the characters and plot are running leaps and bounds away from me, saying things like "WE WANT AN EXCITING LIFE; HERE, HAVE SEVENTY SUBPLOT BUNNIES"and occasionally making me want to tear my hair out because it is totally bloody implausible to be married to someone for a thousand and one nights and bear him three children without him noticing anything!  This is what I get for trying to bring morbid realism into fairy tales.

And, you guys, Endgame and Act Without Words II went so well!  We had to turn people away the first night and only had about three seats or so open the second night, which is amazing, and most of us agreed that it was and was probably going to be our favorite thing that we would ever do at UGA.  It's just...you can't compete with a great play, and that's what Beckett writes.

On a really entertaining side, would you guys like to see how creepy I looked?  My ash-can  husband and I are pretty good at stage makeup.  Check out the About Me page to see what I look like normally...it's a pretty drastic difference!  And yes, I am the one on the right with the terrifically ratty black wig.

It was a pretty wonderful experience, especially since I very probably won't be cast so wildly out of type for years and years if I get lucky, never if I don't.  It's also probably one of the few plays in which I could fall asleep during the performance and it was totally okay.  Except for about 10-12 minutes, I was either on my knees inside the ash-can, and my cue to poke my head up was a really loud banging on the lid just over my head, and for the rest of the time I lay behind the cans reading The Other Boleyn Girl or Seabiscuit (best-written nonfiction book I have ever read, bar none) and the cue to get me out of the cans was darkening lights and applause.  Baby powder was everywhere, though.

I have discovered one great thing about makeup removal lately.  Usually, we use Vaseline, face scrubs, soap, and a lot of washing to get that heavy, cream-based Ben Nye makeup off.  However, a few months ago I started getting interested in coconut oil, and found Nutiva's Organic Extra Virgin Coconut Oil.  The theory is that if it's safe to eat, it's safe to put on my skin to be soaked up through pores and all that good stuff.

So aside from using it as a cooking oil that oxidizes only at very high heats (and tastes great with Thai food...), it's serving as an all-around magic potion:  it goes in the cat's food mixture of ground chicken, fish oil, grated celery, pumpkin purée, and water, I use it as lotion all over my body and moisturizer for my face when I go to bed (the coconut smell fades after awhile, luckily for me, my love of great perfume, and the boyfriend who does not really want to kiss a coconut), it can be used to protectively oil my bamboo cutting board, and if you smear it onto whatever waterproof or crazy heavy makeup you are wearing, the makeup and the coconut oil wipe right off.

Yes, it may take a few applications (never more than three for me with the heaviest cream-based makeup), but it's so, so, so much gentler on your skin than just washing and scrubbing, and it's never made me break out.  In fact, if I put it on my face just like moisturizer before going to sleep, I wake up with dramatically better skin.  It's pretty awesome stuff, and it's a huge savings in gazillions of horrendously expensive products that I'm slowly weeding out of my bathroom--there is suddenly so much more space!  It's a pretty great thing.  It's also the only thing I've found that is organic, edible, and took off my heavily applied waterproof eyeliner from The Arabian Nights.

Finally, I thought I'd provide something pretty to look at.  =)

You know, I am perfectly aware that it is the end of November, but Georgia does not seem to agree with me.  About a week ago, I went out and finally took some of the most beautiful fall photographs I've ever taken, and that evening, a rainstorm decided that Georgia was finished being pretty and that people should just wander through ankle-high drifts of crackling yellow leaves instead.


I took all of these on the five-minute walk to the Publix around the corner.  They're pretty magical.  Don't you just love the gorgeous contrasts between the red, orange, green, and yellow?  I actually saw a few purple leaves the other day, so they're spanning all the colors in the spectrum except for blue...





Look at these two trees against the sky:  it's like the least dangerous leaping orange flames that are utterly consuming every single branch...





This one I find utterly fascinating, because when I look closely at it with the help of a pair of squinted eyes, it reminds me of a slinking red dragon coiling its way up a tree.  Look at that gorgeous, undulating red and gold against the still bright and dark green background!  And to think, that lovely beauty bloomed on the corner of an incredibly busy street.  No matter how hard we try, it's pretty hard to force nature into submission...








This one makes me hungry.  I am embarrassed to admit it, but it is so.  I look at it and think "This is so red and luscious and gorgeous that it must have something to do with food!"  Clearly, I need to retrain my appreciation for eating to approach the world in general.






Look at this one:   a yellow-gold canopy that I can imagine hanging over a bed...specifically, the gold and apple-green canopy that hangs over Marie Antoinette's bed in Versailles, surrounded by its golden railing to keep the crowds a few feet away during royal births and just normal things like...getting dressed.



 A fountain of green dotted with fall!  I love this tree; its underside was surprisingly so much more dramatic than its top, which usually doesn't happen--the leaves closest to the sun turn red and drop off first.  This one is a pretty little anomaly!





Look at the poor nude branches after the rainfall--reaching out to each other as if to say "We had a good thing going there; stay in touch, friend!"

I won't be seeing them next year, though, unless I make a special trip with the camera, because...and this is one of the most exciting things of the past few weeks...the boyfriend and I signed a lease for a historic loft by the river!

More on that later.  It's a dangerous thing!  I'm scouring Anthropologie for chandeliers, trivets, wallpaper, and herb bowls that would work so well in that gorgeous old space...


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

hehehe, glad it went well!!
Your autumn looks so beautiful, it's getting too hot here!!!
xo Kate