Return to the blogosphere

It's pretty easy to piece together the end of my blogging life in 2006 if you know that I got pregnant right around the time of the last post and had my first child in Feb 2007.  So, I guess when you get your youngest child to 3 years old, that's when you find that you have just a few extra seconds each day (or maybe only each week, we'll see) for a blog post.

Having read a few blogs fairly extensively recently, I wonder if sharing my personal life with the rest of the web is really the thing I want to do.  But this morning in church, as I listened to the scripture lesson and Gospel, I realized that I wanted to rant about it a bit.  And I feel like the church setting isn't so much the place to do that.  That seems so wrong and counter-intuitive.  Shouldn't you be able to discuss your own ideas about the readings with others in the church?  But there's this feeling I have that I'll be reviled for going against the sacred words of the Bible if I disagree with what's being said or read.  So, if only for myself, perhaps I'll rant here.

So what's the point of my blog?  I have no idea.  I'm very conflicted about church.  On the one hand, while I believe in God, I find organized religion to be a bit like a flock of mostly unthinking and/or unreasoning sheep who repeat words that they memorized as children and don't necessarily understand what they're saying.  On the other hand, I have a compelling need to give my kids the same type of caring, nurturing, loving extended family that I had in my church when I was small.  I feel like those memories I have of church are so important to me that I don't want to rob my kids of that experience.

I wrestle with these kinds of thoughts most Sundays.  I feel a bit hypocritical in being there because my beliefs don't perfectly line up with those of everyone else there.  Kind of like when you hole punch a piece of paper but didn't have it line up perfectly in the puncher and the paper sticks out of your binder at the top a bit.  I still have the hole punches, but they're not in the same place on my paper as everyone else's are.

Ah, a fast connection for uploading pictures

OK, now I'm in a good fast-connection place, so I'm uploading the last of the photos that I was going to share from our trip "out west". I'll even try to get them in order:

A grizzly we saw at Yellowstone

An elk from Yellowstone - there was lots of wildlife out there!

Disneyland of the west, also known as Old Faithful - too many people!!

An old homestead at the foot of the Tetons - I'd love to live there!!!

Bryce Canyon - really beautiful, we must have about 400 pictures just from there.

Balanced Rock at Arches National Park - it'll fall over in a few more million years!

The requisite trip to Four Corners, which is cheeseball, but you just have to go so you can say you've been there.

The Gateway Arch in St Louis.

If you want to see more, like I said before, you'll have to make the trek out to Pittsburgh. We'd love to have visitors!

I think I'm caught up....sort of

Well, I just finished reading the two (yes, just two) blogs that I like to read - written by my old high school friends. You'd think with just two of them, I'd do a little better keeping up (I had to go back to their April archives before I found posts that I remembered reading). And really, you guys may be the only two people who actually read my blog (well, that's not true - I know Reed reads it, if I'd ever update it).

So I've learned a lot about Jenny's life and her move to join me here in PA - okay, so the York/Harrisburg area is just as far from Pittsburgh as Baltimore is, but at least now we're in the same state :). And I've learned much less than I'd have liked about KT's trip to Alaska to work with Habitat for Humanity.

So now, you guys can learn a new little tidbit about my life: I'm pregnant! It's a bit scary and really rather draining at this point (why on earth do they call it "morning" sickness - they should just call it "two or more months of feeling like crap all the time"). I'm really having trouble actually eating the amount of food I'd need just for myself, let alone the extra 200 or 300 calories per day for the extra human growing inside me. Ah well, I've been assured that it will go away soon. I really hope so, 'cause I can't take much more of this.

Let's see, what else? Oh, I'm going to try to post those photos again. Let's see if that works:

Hooray - it worked! - here's a Bison at Yellowstone
Ah - Mount Rushmore, with me added.

OK, so I have about 8 more photos that I was going to upload, but they're taking too long on my puny dial-up connection. And I have a meeting I have to be at in 1 hour, so I'm going to give up now and wait until I'm somewhere with a faster connection.

Bad, bad blogger....

OK, so I've been busy. Excuses, excuses. I was working in Milwaukee (yes, I had internet access, so really not a good excuse) and then I came home and went IMMEDIATELY on a vacation. Todd and I took my parents' RV and drove across the country to Yellowstone and then down into all the canyons of Utah. It was really a great trip. But we spent A LOT of money on gas..... 6000 miles at somewhere between 6 and 8 miles per gallon..... you do the math.

OK, so I'm having some trouble with posting the photos from the vacation. Hmmm. Anyway, we took about 2000 pictures (we each had a digital camera along, so there are lots of duplicates). I was going to post about 6 of them, but the website is not cooperating. Ah well. I guess that means if you want to see them you'll have to come visit me in Pittsburgh (evil grin)....

So here's what's going on with me right now: I'm working at Carnegie Mellon University for 6 weeks teaching stage management in a pre-college program for high school seniors-to-be. It's kinda fun. Tonight I'm teaching a workshop on Theatrical Unions, which I was going to gear toward the technical students, but apparently the kids who signed up are overwhelmingly actors, so I guess I'll be concentrating more on Actor's Equity Association. Guess I learned about the others for nothing.

Other than that, I'm just lounging around for the summer, which hopefully means I can make some actual progress with circus stories. Next in line is Wilkes Barre, PA, I think. Maybe I can also make progress with my garden (in which I lost all but 1 pepper plant), books I want to read, and some other projects I'm working on.

BTW - KT - Todd and I are going to be in NYC for about 5 days or so in August, about the 15th-20th. I'd love to get together if you're back from the Habitat from Humanity thing by then! (Maybe if I read your blog I'll find out if you'll be back, so I think that's the next thing on today's to-do list.....)

LASIK

So, as usual, I've been delinquent in posting recently. I see that Jenny has given up on sending me comments that say "More! More!!" :)

And Reed still hasn't answered the challenge to comment on his visit with me in Albany.

But the best excuse I have to explain why I haven't posted anything recently is that I GOT MY EYES LASERED!!! And it's the BEST thing I've done for myself in a while. I can actually see! And when I went back yesterday for my one-day follow-up appointment, I could almost see the whole 20/20 line, which the doctor said was an excellent result for one day after surgery. I have another appointment next Friday, and I expect my vision to just keep getting better for the next week or so. When I woke up today it was better than yesterday, so it'll just keep getting better! For anyone out there contemplating it, you should definitely go for it!

That's all for now. I have lots of road signs to go read and TV to watch without glasses :)

Cincinnati, Ohio, March 2001

Ok, so clearly I've skipped ahead in my telling of circus stories. This is because my parents are currently on a vacation in Cincinnati. You may wonder about the phrase "vacation in Cincinnati". Really they're on an Elderhostel trip, in which older (though I think my parents would object to this adjective) people go learn something, since they need something to do with their surplus of time as retired people. Anyway, my mother loves to call me at 8am to tell me ridiculous trivia. Fortunately she has not actually been waking me up this week, since I'm in a tech week at work and putting in a stupidly large amount of hours.

So on Tuesday, I called my parents' house to tell my mother to read the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss (about punctuation - HILARIOUS!!!), having forgotten that they were in Cincinnati. My dad called in and got the messages, so my mother felt compelled to call and remind me that they were not at home. But, of course she had other fun things to say. I guess one of the seminars about Cincinnati talked about how the river has flooded several times in the past, the most recent being March of 1997 while Ringling Brothers (my unit) was in town. That was a popular story that was told often leading up to our visit to Cincinatti in 2001 and recounted by many during our stay there. Apparently the arena, which is right next to the river, flooded up to the 7th row of seats or so. Here are some good photos: Enquirer Flood Photos. The big round building is the ballpark and the smaller, squarish building behind it is the arena. Couldn't find any good close-up photos of the arena, but I think that the flood happened on the Sunday before the show got to town, so they just didn't even get there. Could've been a lot worse if there had been 10 elephants or so stuck in knee-deep water....

Anyway, I then told my mother about my not-so-fond memories of Cincinnati. By this point I was living on the train, so I did not arrive early to set up the animal lot. That job had been given to a team of people who had trailers - Jon Weiss, the human cannonball, and Brian, the head of the elephant department. Once I gave up the job of setting the lot, I usually didn't so much agree with how the lot got set up, but really I didn't spend too much time worrying about it, since I couldn't do much about it.

During the load-in we had a problem with the pie car (the food service trailer). I can't remember exactly what it was - I think they couldn't find a hookup for water, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I do remember that I spent a significant amount of time during the load-in dealing with pie car issues. Our office trailer was parked on the sidewalk along the side of the building under the highway overpass. This was its spot from years past as well and apparently many people knew from experience that there were many birds roosting in the structural sections of the overpass. So we covered the office trailer with a tarp that week :)

Later in the load-in day, the GM and I were sitting peacefully (well, as peacefully as possible) in the office when the whole wagon got jolted. We darted outside and found one of the transportation guys on a Harlan pushing a wagon into its storage place behind our trailer. Turns out he had run into the office trailer with his Harlan. This is the same guy who had.....well I'll leave that one as a surprise for when I tell the Seattle stories, but this guy was very careless and was always doing things like running into 16-wagon with a Harlan (16 wagon is the name of the office trailer - it used to be one of the regular-sized circus wagons and it used to load onto the train to travel between cities. Most of us on the show knew what was stored in each wagon and called them by number: "Go to 55-wagon and get me the bicycle for the clown gag" etc. I still know what was in many of them and I still know a lot of the load order for the train. I'll tell about that stuff later.) Anyway, back to the story of Anthony Lande and running into 16-wagon with a Harlan. We almost fired him that day but for some reason decided against it. I sometimes wish we had, since he caused us further headaches in later cities. Ah well, it doesn't matter now!!!

As far as I remember the rest of the week went smoothly, or at least routinely, which means there were many bumps but they were standard bumps. I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly that the loading ramp to the main arena floor was fairly steep (going up from the street) and with a big curve in it. That always makes for a fun time - load-in is harder, load-out is harder, getting animals past each other safely is harder, etc. But I don't remember any particular incidents.

I just remembered why I don't remember any incidents. I left Cincinnati at some point during the week. I only remember that because the airport is in Kentucky. I have no idea where I went (maybe the new American Airlines Center in Dallas, maybe the flooded arena in Houston - can't remember) I just know I was gone for at least 2 days of the engagement.

So, at the end of the week it became time to load out. It was pretty cold and sometime during the 4 hours of loading out at the building it started to snow. That wreaked utter havoc on the loading of the train - the ramps were slick so the wagons had a hard time getting up, the cars themselves were slick, so moving the wagons down the long line of flat cars was difficult. Generally it was a miserable load-out. I'm pretty sure I had forgotten my scarf (or maybe this was the first really cold load-out we'd had - we spent January in Florida and I don't remember right now where we spent February) so I was pretty cold and we were out there for more than the 2 hours that it normally took after the arena load-out was done. We were fighting the snow the whole time. And the flat cars park right next to the river, so there was a wicked wind the whole time. We finally got the train loaded and I got to go home to my train room.

It's a fairly long trip from Cincinnati to Baltimore. We were scheduled to arrive on Tuesday at about 1:30 in the afternoon after leaving Cincinnati on Monday early morning (2:30am-ish). So it's like a 36-hour train trip. Well, I got really sick on that train run. Usually I liked the long runs because it meant more time off without cell signal or email and more time to cook good meals and watch our taped TV from the previous week. On this train run all I wanted to do was stay in bed. I even threw up once and I'm one of those people who will do ANYTHING to avoid throwing up. It was terrible. And we arrived in Baltimore late, so we ended up with an overnight load-in for a Wednesday night opening. It was awful. I'll leave most of the gory details to the Baltimore posting, but just believe me, it was probably the most miserable load-in of my entire time on the circus.

Split weeks suck!

So, in this post (which is long overdue, I know) the problem is that I can barely remember anything from the next circus week. So I'll do a little circus and a little other stuff.

Circus:
After Hershey, PA, we did what's called a split week in Springfield, Mass and Albany, NY. As you may have guessed, that means we played two cities in one week - two load-ins, two load-outs. Painful, really. Truth is, I don't even remember what the arena in Springfield looked like. I can't picture where my trailer was, I can't picture where the animals were, and I have no idea what the inside of the place was like. No memory of it at all. And I don't know the name of the arena either (but it's not the Dunkin' Donuts arena, 'cause that's in Providence hee hee). I do remember that the drive from Springfield to Albany is short, so it's the first time I drove a trailer. I drove the GMC truck pulling the relatively small laundry trailer. The General Manager, Dave Brown, drove my truck and trailer. It actually turned out that driving the laundry trailer was harder, because it's a ball-hitch type trailer (just that little ball sticking out from the back of the truck and the tongue of the trailer sits on the ball). My trailer was a fifth wheel, which mounts in the bed of the truck, so I think, in the end, you have more control with a fifth wheel trailer. Anyway, that doesn't really matter. We got to Albany, and I remember a bit more about Albany than I do about Springfield.

In Albany, the loading area is a downhill ramp. Getting trucks and wagons in and out was not simple. And there's really not much in the way of a loading dock where we could leave anything parked, so we had to unload each truck and then move it out of the way. Yuck. That takes up lots of time and on a split week, there's not much of that to spare.

I don't remember having to do a whole lot with the load-in, but I think that's because I was dealing with the animal areas. The tigers were put in an empty dirt lot about 1 1/2 blocks from the arena. During the show, they'd be put in their transport cages (those small black cages that drive onto the arena floor to get the tigers into the center ring during the show) and be towed by Harlan (that's those little tugs like they use at airports for luggage carts) to the arena. It was not the most ideal location and I got numerous complaints about it from the tiger owner, Josip Marcan. So I spent much of the first day trying to get enough power and water to that area for the tigers and Josip's trailer.

I also spent some time dealing with power and water for the small number of trailers that were able to park at the arena. It was me, the 2 lead horse guys, Jon Weiss (the human cannonball), Sara Houcke (tiger presenter), Angel Quiros (the high wire act had negotiated having one of their house trailers be at the building in each city), and 2 elephant guys. It turned out there wasn't enough power available for all of the trailers, so I ran my trailer off my generator for the 3 days we were there. It meant that I couldn't really go anywhere, because the generator was mounted in the bed of my truck. Also it was loud, but I can pretty much sleep through anything, so it didn't bother me too much.

Reed Fisher, a good friend of mine from Virginia Opera, stopped in Albany on his way to Cooperstown to work at Glimmerglass Opera for the summer. So he got to see my fun tall-man's trailer and meet my new kitty. As I recall, Gandhi was surprisingly brave when Reed visited. Reed probably has plenty of opinions to offer about the visit, so I'll let him put those in my comment book.

OK, so really, that was a lot more than I thought I had to say about that week. Here are the few things I was going to say that aren't about the circus:

1. I've been cooking a lot recently and have realized that I love it. Also, some friends of ours gave us a subscription to Cooking Light for Christmas and I LOVE IT! If you like to cook and have trouble finding recipes that you like, I highly recommend it. Everything tastes great, is low in fat and calories, yet fills you up quite well. It's amazing how much better Todd and I have been eating since we started getting that magazine.
2. I found an online game that I just can't get enough of. It's called This is notpron and it's HARD. But I love it, 'cause that's the sort of silly stuff that I love. I'm only on level 12 and I'm currently somewhat stuck. I know what I have to do and how to do it, but I just can't actually do it (it's called cross-viewing and requires crossing your eyes to make two pictures meld into one, sort of like those old stereoviewers. My eyes just don't want to cross like that). Anyway, I love it too and if you like puzzles and want to learn a bit about HTML and your computer and web searching and lots of other stuff, you should try it.
3. Finally in my list, genealogy is so much fun. I've just gone back to my search after a while away and immediately found a new piece of info that I didn't have before that gets one of my lines back into the 1700's. Of course, it makes it that much harder, since there aren't as many records that far back, but it's such a challenge. I love getting people started on genealogy, so if you have any interest and you want a jump start, I'd be happy to help.