Come out of the cave, walking on your hands...
Hola, friends and lurkers!
It feels like forever since I've been around to catch up with anyone about ANYTHING. I feel like ever since I started working at the library a year ago, I'm merely on to make sure people are still alive and then I flitter off again like a fairy or something. I'm so sorry about that! For two and a half years between graduating uni and finding a steady job, I had nothing to do EVER and now I feel like I'm never home. And when I am I seem to end up on youtube.
How are you all?! Seriously. Comment and let me know! Good or bad, I want to know how my friends are doing.
My summer has been busy. I've been on LJ a couple of times to post drabble challenge responses, but that's all. So here's some information on what I've actually been *doing.* (Since writing that DW/Fringe xover for this summer obviously didn't happen.)
<0> Concerts: There have been many.
-- First, I saw a double header of Alice Cooper and Iron Maiden up in Manassas at the end of June. Talk about AMAZING. It was my second time for both, and both groups were in fine form. Alice even did Feed My Frankenstein, which he didn't perform the first time I saw him. And Iron Maiden was rehashing some classics this time around. When I saw IM two years ago, they mainly did songs from their newer albums, but this time they performed some songs they haven't performed live since the 80s. Mainly songs like The Prisoner (one of my all-time faves), Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and there was one other one but I'm drawing a blank on what it was at the moment. Needless to say, the crowd was a lot more lively this time around than when I saw them the first time because it was more of the songs that most of the lay fans are into.
-- Scissor Sisters (literally two days after AC and IM). My second time seeing them too and they were AMAZING. I enjoyed them the first time I saw them back in 2010, but this time was even better because it was a much smaller venue, so it was really intimate. I was literally two people back from the stage and dead center. I actually got to hold Jake Shears in my hands when he crowd surfed, and everyone was just really energetic and the band was being hilarious and it was absolute perfection. They had a new album come out this year too, so there were a lot of new tunes to dance around to.
-- Victor Garber. I traveled all the way to NYC to see him perform. Now, most people think of Victor Garber as either Thomas Andrews from Titanic or Jack Bristow from Alias, and I do think of him in those roles and love them both. But he is, first and foremost to me, Jesus from Godspell because I've loved that film since I was a small child. AND HE PERFORMED TWO SONGS FROM IT. He did All for the Best (my all time fave) and Beautiful City. I was spasming in the club, you guys. (He played at the club 54 Below and I was getting kind of over-emotional cos I was trying a Manhattan for the first time ever and GOD WAS IT STRONG.) He did so many wonderful favourites of mine -- Could it Be from West Side Story, Bernadette, Hushabye Mountain, Joanna from Sweeney Todd (he played the original Anthony). And then his last song of the night literally had me in tears... HE SANG AND SO IT GOES. My favourite stage actor performed one of my favourite songs by my favourite singer. I think I freaked out jack_is_love17 something fierce. When I called my dad up after the show and was telling him all about it, I was still kind of emotional and he was like, "It's not THAT big a deal," and I was like, "NO, Daddy, you don't understand. It was BILLY JOEL. And it was VICTOR GARBER." Amazing night...and the food wasn't too bad either. Also, there was a famous producer (apparently) at the table next to me, a broadway director behind me, Eugene Levy was two tables in front of me, and Jennifer Garner was apparently hiding in the wings somewhere. Glad I didn't see her cos I would probably have accosted her and been like, "YOU WERE MY HERO SINCE I WAS 14 YEARS OLD!!!" That would have just been embarrassing.
-- Daughtry. quirkyoppossum took me to see him for my third time in mid-August, as a birthday present. (My second time seeing him this year). My first Daughtry concert had been with her and she had to miss him when I went to see him in April with my mate Stephanie. That concert was, as usual, STELLAR. The first time we saw him was after his first album and he was amazing then, but he's even better with three albums worth of songs to choose from. And Chris Daughtry just has this insane amount of energy. And when he plays the acoustic guitar and sings a slow number? Forget about it. Your heart will turn to mush and you'll be drooling in tears. I mean, I had grown sick of the song "Home" from the sheer amount of radio play, but when I hear it live, I remember what it was about that song that struck me when it first started playing back in '07. The only sad part about this concert is that he didn't play "What About Now," which is my all-time favourite of his songs.
And I'm going to see Florence and the Machine in less than two weeks.
<0> Trips:
-- Went out west on a theme park trip with my brother and our best friend Chris. We drove through Kentucky, WV, VA (obviously), Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Just note: Illinois is a LOT of cornfields. We mainly went to go to theme parks and over that week we visited Holiday World (in Santa Claus, Indiana), Six Flags St Louis (in St Louis, Missouri), Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun (in Kansas City, Missouri), and Six Flags Great America (just north of Chicago.) On the road, I got to see the town that Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) was from and crossed over both the Missouri River and the Mississippi River. And I got to see the St Louis Arch from the road, and all I could think about was that Percy Jackson fell off of that structure and into the river in the Lightening Thief...
During this trip, I also got to meet in person a friend that I've known very well online for a decade: jadereader. I am happy to announce that we get along just as well in person as we have online all these years. And he got to listen to my weird music on my iPod for two and a half hours one day, and then I got to listen to his music for two hours the next day. And thankfully, there was hardly any confusion really on who was who (he and my brother have the same first name), mainly because I usually don't address people by name anyway. I call most people "dude" or "yo."
I also rode 38 roller coasters that week. And on the Superman Ride at Great America (the stealth coaster), Chris lost my brother's keys. And then we had this huge drama with the park about getting our keys back. First they said they'd have them to us by the end of the night, and then they said to check back the next morning, and then they said we might never get them back. That could have been problematic because well...the park is in Chicago, and we live so far south in VA that we're practically in NC. We definitely couldn't have afforded to fly home, much less get the car back from an impound at some point too. We walked back and forth TWO MILES OVER INTERSTATE to our hotel 3 times in those two days. We did eventually get our keys back though. Thank God.
-- Went up to PA and NJ for more theme parks a couple of weeks later. Went to Dorney Park in Allentown the day after my birthday. It's one of those rare parks that is open from 10 am until midnight. Talk about a LONG day. But man did they have some fun coasters! They even have the last copy of this one coaster that takes you up in an elevator type car and then drops you down and you end out lying on your back on the ground. IT'S AWESOME. I realised though that on rides like that I scream like Amy before she and the Doctor fall down the Star Whale's throat in The Beast Below. It was an interesting realisation.
In NJ, we went to Six Flags Great Adventure. The most interesting aspects about that park were the King d' Ca (or however you spell it really), which was a blast/lift cable coaster that takes you straight up 500+ feet at 110 mph, and then drops you straight back down at a 95 degree angle. CRAZINESS. But it was so much fun! Also, we paid the 28 bucks per person to go into the Safari section and happened to drive past as the lions were mating...a lot. It was so hilarious we had to text all our friends and tell them about it. 28 dollars per person for a Safari that takes about 2 hours though wasn't too bad of a deal...except that I had to pay for all three of us. Later that day, it stormed to high heaven and so we left the park about an hour early, but we still managed to ride everything we had wanted to anyway, thanks to spending 160 bucks altogether on flash passes.
In that one weekend, I got on 17 more rollercoasters. ;)
-- Went to NYC for the first time, unless you count those two times I've sat in a NYC airport for a connecting flight. But my friend and I stayed at her dad's place in Sandy Hook, NJ (where he's a historian at Fort Hancock and gave us late night tours when the park closed, which as a historian myself I found endlessly fascinating). But we went into the City to see Victor perform and then stayed the night at a hotel in downtown Manhattan. We spent some time in Times Square where my friend did way more shopping than was probably healthy for her. I mean, the Toys R Us (where we rode the huge ferris wheel), the two story Disney Store, the Hello Kitty store... and then we hit the HBO store, which was bad for both of us. Cos they had Game of Thrones stuff in there. I came out with a Baratheon sigil necklace (cos my bb Gendry is a Baratheon even if he doesn't know it), a poster of Tyrion Lannister, and a coffee mug with the Stark sigil and house motto on it. And then we went in the Broadway store, where I spent even more money. BUT this time it was on my father (cos his birthday was that week), and I only got one thing for myself really. I got Daddy the Godspell songbook, a Wicked hat and a Phantom of the Opera t-shirt. I got myself the Michael Cerveris as Sweeney Todd soundtrack. Becky got herself the Michael Cerveris as Juan Peron Evita soundtrack.
Which leads me to the next leg of our adventure. WE SAW MICHAEL CERVERIS. IN PERSON. Now, this won't mean much to some people, but if you watch Fringe and you don't know who that is by name: WE SAW SEPTEMBER. WE SAW THE OBSERVER. We didn't actually get to meet him, but we saw him and took his picture as he exited the stage door from Evita. And this was only two hours after seeing Victor. And then naturally we posted pictures to facebook to show to marymc because we knew she would spazz out as bad as we were currently doing. (We were right. She totally did, and then threated to defriend us. WE LOVE YOU, MARY!)
And then the next day, we spent the bulk of time in Central Park, where I got to see the Bethesda Fountain (where John the Baptist baptized the disciples and Jesus in Godspell), the Trifoil Arch (which is where the filmed The Lamp of the Body segment), the Sheep Meadows (where they filmed the All Good Gifts segment), Strawberry Fields (mecca as far as my friend was concerned) and the Alice in Wonderland statue where we both stood around and played on the statue while humming A Very Merry Unbirthday (we're nerds. What can we say?) We also saw the Loeb Boathouse, which gave us creepy Fringe feelings because um...Mitchell Loeb? Kind of a creeper...
And just before we left to go back to our train to NJ, we ate Joanne's, which is the restaurant owned by Lady Gaga's family. AND HER FATHER STOOD THERE AND HAD A CONVERSATION WITH US FOR ABOUT FIVE MINUTES. Seriously. A real conversation, where he asked about our trip and what VA was like and complimented Sandy Hook and talked about what a great beach it was. He was a very nice man (obviously.)
I kind of want to live in New York.
<0> I've also been working (of course). But that's boring and not much to speak about. They cut my hours a bit due to budget cuts, but I'm still getting 58.5 hours every two weeks, which is just down from my 63.5 that I was getting before. And hey, I get an extra day to sleep in. HUZZAH!
<0> Wrote a few drabble pieces: one for Covert Affairs (my first ever writing for that fandom, yay!), one for Edward Sexby and one for Joan of Arcadia.
<0> I now own 11's sonic screwdriver, 4's sonic screwdriver (I already had 10's from YEARS ago), a TARDIS lamp, a life-size TARDIS cutout, multiple DW shirts (it's an ever growing collection) and three more classic!Who serials (all Third Doctor).
<0> I turned 25 in August. I'm officially a quarter of a century old.
<0> I've started writing another DW/Fringe xover, completely separate from the ones I was doing before. This one has Eleven as the main Doctor, with an 18 year old Olivia as his companion who has been traveling with him since she was 9. The plot just keeps getting more and more complex as I write it in my head because the TARDIS lands in 2004 and Olivia befriends Rose (cos she doesn't know the Doctor's history with her), so the Doctor keeps trying to avoid being around them both but then Olivia ends up getting involved in alien stuff because a certain con artist she comes across at the pub Rose frequents is unknowingly getting in over his head on some bets. I think this could be fun. What do ya'll think?
I hope everyone is doing well! Hopefully, I won't be MIA as much once the summer is officially over and I become unpopular again.
It feels like forever since I've been around to catch up with anyone about ANYTHING. I feel like ever since I started working at the library a year ago, I'm merely on to make sure people are still alive and then I flitter off again like a fairy or something. I'm so sorry about that! For two and a half years between graduating uni and finding a steady job, I had nothing to do EVER and now I feel like I'm never home. And when I am I seem to end up on youtube.
How are you all?! Seriously. Comment and let me know! Good or bad, I want to know how my friends are doing.
My summer has been busy. I've been on LJ a couple of times to post drabble challenge responses, but that's all. So here's some information on what I've actually been *doing.* (Since writing that DW/Fringe xover for this summer obviously didn't happen.)
<0> Concerts: There have been many.
-- First, I saw a double header of Alice Cooper and Iron Maiden up in Manassas at the end of June. Talk about AMAZING. It was my second time for both, and both groups were in fine form. Alice even did Feed My Frankenstein, which he didn't perform the first time I saw him. And Iron Maiden was rehashing some classics this time around. When I saw IM two years ago, they mainly did songs from their newer albums, but this time they performed some songs they haven't performed live since the 80s. Mainly songs like The Prisoner (one of my all-time faves), Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and there was one other one but I'm drawing a blank on what it was at the moment. Needless to say, the crowd was a lot more lively this time around than when I saw them the first time because it was more of the songs that most of the lay fans are into.
-- Scissor Sisters (literally two days after AC and IM). My second time seeing them too and they were AMAZING. I enjoyed them the first time I saw them back in 2010, but this time was even better because it was a much smaller venue, so it was really intimate. I was literally two people back from the stage and dead center. I actually got to hold Jake Shears in my hands when he crowd surfed, and everyone was just really energetic and the band was being hilarious and it was absolute perfection. They had a new album come out this year too, so there were a lot of new tunes to dance around to.
-- Victor Garber. I traveled all the way to NYC to see him perform. Now, most people think of Victor Garber as either Thomas Andrews from Titanic or Jack Bristow from Alias, and I do think of him in those roles and love them both. But he is, first and foremost to me, Jesus from Godspell because I've loved that film since I was a small child. AND HE PERFORMED TWO SONGS FROM IT. He did All for the Best (my all time fave) and Beautiful City. I was spasming in the club, you guys. (He played at the club 54 Below and I was getting kind of over-emotional cos I was trying a Manhattan for the first time ever and GOD WAS IT STRONG.) He did so many wonderful favourites of mine -- Could it Be from West Side Story, Bernadette, Hushabye Mountain, Joanna from Sweeney Todd (he played the original Anthony). And then his last song of the night literally had me in tears... HE SANG AND SO IT GOES. My favourite stage actor performed one of my favourite songs by my favourite singer. I think I freaked out jack_is_love17 something fierce. When I called my dad up after the show and was telling him all about it, I was still kind of emotional and he was like, "It's not THAT big a deal," and I was like, "NO, Daddy, you don't understand. It was BILLY JOEL. And it was VICTOR GARBER." Amazing night...and the food wasn't too bad either. Also, there was a famous producer (apparently) at the table next to me, a broadway director behind me, Eugene Levy was two tables in front of me, and Jennifer Garner was apparently hiding in the wings somewhere. Glad I didn't see her cos I would probably have accosted her and been like, "YOU WERE MY HERO SINCE I WAS 14 YEARS OLD!!!" That would have just been embarrassing.
-- Daughtry. quirkyoppossum took me to see him for my third time in mid-August, as a birthday present. (My second time seeing him this year). My first Daughtry concert had been with her and she had to miss him when I went to see him in April with my mate Stephanie. That concert was, as usual, STELLAR. The first time we saw him was after his first album and he was amazing then, but he's even better with three albums worth of songs to choose from. And Chris Daughtry just has this insane amount of energy. And when he plays the acoustic guitar and sings a slow number? Forget about it. Your heart will turn to mush and you'll be drooling in tears. I mean, I had grown sick of the song "Home" from the sheer amount of radio play, but when I hear it live, I remember what it was about that song that struck me when it first started playing back in '07. The only sad part about this concert is that he didn't play "What About Now," which is my all-time favourite of his songs.
And I'm going to see Florence and the Machine in less than two weeks.
<0> Trips:
-- Went out west on a theme park trip with my brother and our best friend Chris. We drove through Kentucky, WV, VA (obviously), Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Just note: Illinois is a LOT of cornfields. We mainly went to go to theme parks and over that week we visited Holiday World (in Santa Claus, Indiana), Six Flags St Louis (in St Louis, Missouri), Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun (in Kansas City, Missouri), and Six Flags Great America (just north of Chicago.) On the road, I got to see the town that Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) was from and crossed over both the Missouri River and the Mississippi River. And I got to see the St Louis Arch from the road, and all I could think about was that Percy Jackson fell off of that structure and into the river in the Lightening Thief...
During this trip, I also got to meet in person a friend that I've known very well online for a decade: jadereader. I am happy to announce that we get along just as well in person as we have online all these years. And he got to listen to my weird music on my iPod for two and a half hours one day, and then I got to listen to his music for two hours the next day. And thankfully, there was hardly any confusion really on who was who (he and my brother have the same first name), mainly because I usually don't address people by name anyway. I call most people "dude" or "yo."
I also rode 38 roller coasters that week. And on the Superman Ride at Great America (the stealth coaster), Chris lost my brother's keys. And then we had this huge drama with the park about getting our keys back. First they said they'd have them to us by the end of the night, and then they said to check back the next morning, and then they said we might never get them back. That could have been problematic because well...the park is in Chicago, and we live so far south in VA that we're practically in NC. We definitely couldn't have afforded to fly home, much less get the car back from an impound at some point too. We walked back and forth TWO MILES OVER INTERSTATE to our hotel 3 times in those two days. We did eventually get our keys back though. Thank God.
-- Went up to PA and NJ for more theme parks a couple of weeks later. Went to Dorney Park in Allentown the day after my birthday. It's one of those rare parks that is open from 10 am until midnight. Talk about a LONG day. But man did they have some fun coasters! They even have the last copy of this one coaster that takes you up in an elevator type car and then drops you down and you end out lying on your back on the ground. IT'S AWESOME. I realised though that on rides like that I scream like Amy before she and the Doctor fall down the Star Whale's throat in The Beast Below. It was an interesting realisation.
In NJ, we went to Six Flags Great Adventure. The most interesting aspects about that park were the King d' Ca (or however you spell it really), which was a blast/lift cable coaster that takes you straight up 500+ feet at 110 mph, and then drops you straight back down at a 95 degree angle. CRAZINESS. But it was so much fun! Also, we paid the 28 bucks per person to go into the Safari section and happened to drive past as the lions were mating...a lot. It was so hilarious we had to text all our friends and tell them about it. 28 dollars per person for a Safari that takes about 2 hours though wasn't too bad of a deal...except that I had to pay for all three of us. Later that day, it stormed to high heaven and so we left the park about an hour early, but we still managed to ride everything we had wanted to anyway, thanks to spending 160 bucks altogether on flash passes.
In that one weekend, I got on 17 more rollercoasters. ;)
-- Went to NYC for the first time, unless you count those two times I've sat in a NYC airport for a connecting flight. But my friend and I stayed at her dad's place in Sandy Hook, NJ (where he's a historian at Fort Hancock and gave us late night tours when the park closed, which as a historian myself I found endlessly fascinating). But we went into the City to see Victor perform and then stayed the night at a hotel in downtown Manhattan. We spent some time in Times Square where my friend did way more shopping than was probably healthy for her. I mean, the Toys R Us (where we rode the huge ferris wheel), the two story Disney Store, the Hello Kitty store... and then we hit the HBO store, which was bad for both of us. Cos they had Game of Thrones stuff in there. I came out with a Baratheon sigil necklace (cos my bb Gendry is a Baratheon even if he doesn't know it), a poster of Tyrion Lannister, and a coffee mug with the Stark sigil and house motto on it. And then we went in the Broadway store, where I spent even more money. BUT this time it was on my father (cos his birthday was that week), and I only got one thing for myself really. I got Daddy the Godspell songbook, a Wicked hat and a Phantom of the Opera t-shirt. I got myself the Michael Cerveris as Sweeney Todd soundtrack. Becky got herself the Michael Cerveris as Juan Peron Evita soundtrack.
Which leads me to the next leg of our adventure. WE SAW MICHAEL CERVERIS. IN PERSON. Now, this won't mean much to some people, but if you watch Fringe and you don't know who that is by name: WE SAW SEPTEMBER. WE SAW THE OBSERVER. We didn't actually get to meet him, but we saw him and took his picture as he exited the stage door from Evita. And this was only two hours after seeing Victor. And then naturally we posted pictures to facebook to show to marymc because we knew she would spazz out as bad as we were currently doing. (We were right. She totally did, and then threated to defriend us. WE LOVE YOU, MARY!)
And then the next day, we spent the bulk of time in Central Park, where I got to see the Bethesda Fountain (where John the Baptist baptized the disciples and Jesus in Godspell), the Trifoil Arch (which is where the filmed The Lamp of the Body segment), the Sheep Meadows (where they filmed the All Good Gifts segment), Strawberry Fields (mecca as far as my friend was concerned) and the Alice in Wonderland statue where we both stood around and played on the statue while humming A Very Merry Unbirthday (we're nerds. What can we say?) We also saw the Loeb Boathouse, which gave us creepy Fringe feelings because um...Mitchell Loeb? Kind of a creeper...
And just before we left to go back to our train to NJ, we ate Joanne's, which is the restaurant owned by Lady Gaga's family. AND HER FATHER STOOD THERE AND HAD A CONVERSATION WITH US FOR ABOUT FIVE MINUTES. Seriously. A real conversation, where he asked about our trip and what VA was like and complimented Sandy Hook and talked about what a great beach it was. He was a very nice man (obviously.)
I kind of want to live in New York.
<0> I've also been working (of course). But that's boring and not much to speak about. They cut my hours a bit due to budget cuts, but I'm still getting 58.5 hours every two weeks, which is just down from my 63.5 that I was getting before. And hey, I get an extra day to sleep in. HUZZAH!
<0> Wrote a few drabble pieces: one for Covert Affairs (my first ever writing for that fandom, yay!), one for Edward Sexby and one for Joan of Arcadia.
<0> I now own 11's sonic screwdriver, 4's sonic screwdriver (I already had 10's from YEARS ago), a TARDIS lamp, a life-size TARDIS cutout, multiple DW shirts (it's an ever growing collection) and three more classic!Who serials (all Third Doctor).
<0> I turned 25 in August. I'm officially a quarter of a century old.
<0> I've started writing another DW/Fringe xover, completely separate from the ones I was doing before. This one has Eleven as the main Doctor, with an 18 year old Olivia as his companion who has been traveling with him since she was 9. The plot just keeps getting more and more complex as I write it in my head because the TARDIS lands in 2004 and Olivia befriends Rose (cos she doesn't know the Doctor's history with her), so the Doctor keeps trying to avoid being around them both but then Olivia ends up getting involved in alien stuff because a certain con artist she comes across at the pub Rose frequents is unknowingly getting in over his head on some bets. I think this could be fun. What do ya'll think?
I hope everyone is doing well! Hopefully, I won't be MIA as much once the summer is officially over and I become unpopular again.