Saturday, February 6, 2010

Car, Storytelling, and Boardgaming

Yesterday, I attended the Timpanogos Story Telling Festival Winter Symposium. I attended several great sessions by renowned storytellers. I did an improv session and worked on ways to enhance your story by focusing on characters, voice, incident, and place. I also got to hear several very good performances. Today's session looks even better, however I do not know if I can go.

My car appears to be dead. I don't know if it's the battery, the starter, or some electrical circuit. It is completely dark when I'm in my car. We hooked it up to try to get a boost, but it didn't really sound like it was trying to turn, although that did make the inside lights and the automatic doorlocks work, so I know it's something electrical. I'm going to try to figure out how to get my car to the shop today. Hopefully I can do that early so that I can actually make it to the second half of the symposium or home so that I can get a full one credit and not a half.

Anyway, last night, we had a roommate night playing games. Puerto Rico and Mexican Train Dominoes. We certainly had the Central American theme going (name-wise anyway).

Here's hoping I can get my car working so that I can give mom a spell from the twins.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Crazy Dates

So, Lizzy and I have been dating for about four months now. I've never dated anyone this long and we've had some pretty adventurous dates in the past while...not that we've done anything very adventurous. Our first date was to the international cinema where we watched the Spanish film, El Laberinto del Fauno or Pan's Labyrinth. It was a lot of fun and we enjoyed talking to each other and, since we're still dating, I'm not going to go into the details since the outcome is obvious. Still, it is an odd movie for a first date.

The next week, we went to Into the Woods at the Scera. We sat next to a kid who looked a lot like the little boy on Heroes. He was 11 and gave us his take on Twilight (he'd read the book a dozen times and was excited for the second movie in the series). Truthfully, I wouldn't want to be an 11-year-old boy obsessed with teenage vampire fan fiction. The show was a really good (even though Cinderella's prince couldn't stay in key), until we had an unscheduled 20 minute intermission when Little Red Riding hood caught her leg in a moving mechanism on one of the stages moving part and it kind of got crushed, broken and/or mutilated. It's a little disconcerting when the director comes out and asks if there's a doctor in the house and asks someone to call 911.

Our second venture to International Cinema was a supposedly very good Norwegian Vampire movie. It ended up being one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen. I don't think I can even describe it so I won't. I still don't know what to think of it.

Christmas, Lizzy took us to go see Voice Male's Christmas A Capella concert at Thanksgiving Point. We got there and passed our tickets to the ticket girl and she scanned them. They flashed "denied" on her little scanner. She looked at the tickets and said, "These tickets are for yesterday". Lizzy almost died of embarrassment. I forced her to come to the ticket office with me to see if there was anything we could do. I walked up to the ticket booth, passed the tickets, and said, "Um...it's finals week and....you know. Is there anything we can do?" The lady was sympathetic and we were lucky; a couple had just called to cancel their non-refundable tickets. We got to see the show anyway, which was good, because we absolutely loved it and I converted Lizzy to A Capella music.

Our third trip to International Cinema was with Megan, her mother, and her sister. We saw the French film, Bleu. It was so weird. None of us really cared for the movie. I don't know what we have with picking the weird movies to go to.

Last week, I got tickets to the Utah Valley Symphony (thanks, Steve) where we got to see Jessi Judd perform. There was one part where the bassoons came in and a lady in front of us giggled and turned to her companion and whispered (really loud), "I think those are the oboes". Lizzy and I had a hard time not laughing out loud. The orchestra was just starting the first movement of their third piece when the power went out. For about five minutes, we sat in the dark of the auditorium of the Covey Center while Bryce Rytting (the conductor....from my home ward) told jokes.

So, those are my dating adventures of the past few months. It seems every other time we go out, something crazy happens or the movie is extremely odd. Guess we're just cursed that way. Maybe that's why we play a lot of boardgames.

Tired

Well, here it is 5:30 in the morning and I cannot sleep. This is really getting old actually. I think that it has been about 2 or 3 weeks since I've had a good sleep. Usually I only go a little more than a week. Yesterday, I was so tired. I almost fell asleep during a meeting I was at and was not fully functioning at 5pm. I couldn't think enough to form coherent strings of sentences. I still finished the ward directory and made it to my business class on time (thanks to Lizzy for driving me around since my car is still parked at BYU with a dead battery [I hope]), but I was so tired when I got home that I went right to bed...and took forever to fall asleep (if I even did) and woke up (checked my clock) at 1, and 2, and 4, and finally got up at 5. It's been two weeks now that I've started waking up around 4 and not being able to get back to sleep. I'm scared of how tired I'm going to be today.

I hope I can sleep tonight. This is really getting old.