Thorne House II: Return of the Blog!

Well, I can assure you that the lack of updates to this blog is due to the fact that we've been busy, not that we've been lazy. (At least, not any lazier than normal.)

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The ADD Version
After my family left, we had a day of work before New Year's weekend. I am in preproduction for Mu's Cowboy Vs Samurai, which starts rehearsals the end of this month. We are in Saturday morning puppy classes with Arrow, and Adam takes him to a couple of other play times during the week. We have also finalized our paint choices for the living and dining rooms, and begun the process of stripping the paint off the woodwork in the dining room. Viola, you're up to date, without all of that annoying editorializing that I am prone to do.

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The Peter Jackson Version

After my family left, we had a day of work before New Year's weekend. Adam was pretty smug that he had off all week, went to work on Friday, and then had a long weekend off of work. On New Year's Eve we went to a party at a friend's house. We didn't stay much past midnight, but it was nice to get out for a while. New Year's Day our friends Jen Cuff and Chris Smith had a brunch at their new house, just two blocks away from our house. They had plates of cookies, and fresh fruit, lots of coffee, a fantastic amount of pepper and chorizo omelette, and some delicious potatoes sauteed with butter, garlic and onion. Very, very good stuff!

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I have started preproduction work for the next show. Mu Productions is presenting Cowboy Vs Samurai, which is a play inspired by Cyrano de Bergerac. It is a story about three men in a small Wyoming town and how their lives change after the lovely Veronica Lee moves there. The script is very funny. I'm looking forward to seeing it come together. We'll have only two weeks of rehearsals, though, since the director is coming out from New York City, so we're having two read throughs before we start rehearsing and my actors have to be off book. It's a difficult way to work--it's much easier to memorize when you've got some movement to help you keep track of where you are in the scene. I just had a walk through of Mixed Blood Theatre, the space where we'll be performing. I've been there to see shows, but this will be my first time working there, which is exciting.

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Saturday mornings are now spent with six or eight other puppies, which is entertaining. Arrow is one of the youngest dog there, at 12 weeks. There's a Yorkshire Terrier pup who is 14 weeks. He's so small that Adam mistook him for a guinea pig! The other dogs are all about four months or older, but Arrow loves to run around and wrestle with them. We're pretty profficient at Sit, and we're getting better at Down. We've just started working on Stay and Leave It. Arrow is turning out to be pretty smart, which might cause all kinds of problems if we can't keep him occupied. He also has lots of energy, and he likes to make sure that you know that he's available to eat whatever it is you're eating, or play with whatever it is you've got in your hand. On Tuesdays, there is a small dog play hour, which Arrow is quickly outgrowing. At 8 weeks, he was 12 pounds. At 12 weeks, he weighed in at 20 pounds. Adam just bought him a new collar, which should fit him for a long time. (It has triangles on it, for Triangle Toss.) Our class instructor might start a second play hour on Sundays, for the dogs in the class, so Arrow would be able to go to that, even if he outgrows the first one.

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Just after Christmas, Adam and I finally bought an area rug for the dining room. We had been looking for a rug for a long time, trying to find something that we both liked, for a price that we could handle. The rug is a little over 8' by a little under 10', and we're very happy with how it looks. It's always fun to see how the room changes when you add a new piece to it. Now that we have the rug, we were able to choose the paint colors for the living and dining room walls. We're both excited to be rid of the yucky wallpaper.

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We've started stripping the paint off of the baseboards, and we've found that underneath the coat of white is a coat of mega-ugly pea-soup green. It's especially gross when it's mixed with the bright orange stripping gel. We're using a product called Citristrip, which is safe for indoor use. It smells like the biggest orange you've ever seen, but it's miles better than the usual chemical stuff. The baseboards are coming out a dark brown that was probably really beautiful when it was new. 96 years later, some parts are lighter, some darker, some pretty rough, and some still pretty nice. So, we'll see if we can get all of the paint off, and then then it will be wallpaper off, and paint on, and then we'll revisit the trim and decide how we'd like to finish it off.

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So, that's The Rest of the Story. Sorry it took so long to get this updated. Hopefully this means we'll now move on to returning voicemails, emails and letters, too. (And by we, I mean me.) Plus, stay tuned for more pictures!