Pre-Season Update
OK, it's been a few weeks since I posted anything of note here, so here's what's going on:
BRF 2011: Opening Day is tomorrow. This promises to be a very interesting season, on many counts. First of all, I'm only going to be there for 8 days total. Some people have asked me why I'm bothering to do Faire at all if I'm going to be missing most of it. All I can say is that I'd miss not doing those 8 days and I'd rather have a short season than none at all. I already took a season off (two if you count the season I wound up having my gall bladder removed right before 2nd weekend) and it just about killed me to be on site and not on cast. I guess once you've gone to the Dark Side, you can never go back. Oh, and we have a new Entertainment Director as of last Saturday. I don't have any details about that (so don't ask), nor do I particularly need to know how or why things happened as they did. I have no influence or control over the situation, so I'm going to stay out of it. I wish our former Entertainment Director all the best and I hope to see him and his lovely wife again soon. In the meantime, I will give our new Entertainment Director all the support and cooperation I can, just as I have in the past. The show must - and WILL - go on.
I altered my corset at the last minute this week. I'm not sure yet if this was a good idea or a bad one. At Dress Rehearsal, the corset was too big - WAY too big. That's not a surprise; I'm about 20 pounds smaller than I was when I made it. I asked Alyssa, the Costume Director, what I should do to fix it and her suggestion was to take out a small chunk on either side of the front, put new grommets in, and rebind the edges. This made sense, so I took it home and immediately started taking out all the handstitching holding the grosgrain binding in place. Clearly I do good work since it took all of the musical 1776 and most of the 7-part John Adams miniseries to get the binding off (yep, that's how I spent my 4th of July - working on my costume in front of the TV. Yippee.). Then I cut off the bone next to the grommets, put in some new grommets, and started re-stitching the binding. The bone I removed was angled, not quite 45 degrees, so removing the bone changed the shape of the corset but it wasn't until after I got it all put back together that I realized just how much the shape had changed. Before the alteration the corset was conical; now it's perfectly cylindrical. So now the corset is WAY too tight. There is absolutely no way it's going to close in the front at all. Even with a 3" gap, I can barely breathe. Luckily, I've bought a really wide ribbon to lace it with, so my front will be covered with lacing. I've decided there's no use second-guessing myself on whether or not I should have gone ahead with the alteration or not since the corset wasn't very wearable the way it was and I had few options given the design of the garment. At least I won't have to worry about shrinking out of my corset this summer; I've got plenty of weight to lose before the corset gets too big again.
I've also made buttons to hand out to patrons who get spanked by Jezebel. They're small - only 1.5" - and they say "I've Been Spanked!" on them with the year (in Roman numerals), a picture of a banana and my website address. I've got 55 in my pouch to start out with; we'll see how fast I go through them this season. This will be a good way to find out exactly how many spankings I give during the course of a day since I've never been very good at keeping track of these things.
Everything is inventoried, packed, and ready to go tomorrow morning. BRF 2011, here I come!
Dad's Surgery: My Dad had a heart catheterization this afternoon; even as I was typing this up, I got the call that he was out of surgery and doing fine. He had gone to the doctor and had gone through a battery of tests that suggested he had an 80% blockage in one artery and a 60% blockage in another. He had no symptoms and all of his blood work came back perfect, so this news came as quite a shock. Luckily, when they went in, they found that the test had been misleading. There was only one blockage and it was only 20%, so they cleared it out and didn't have to put in a stent or anything. Whew! What a relief! Let's hope this little "wake up call" persuades my father to start doing some of the things the doctors have been trying to get him to do for last few decades: eat less fat, eat less sugar, exercise more, lose some weight. After all, as the doctor firmly reminded him, he won't be able to procrastinate any more when he's dead.
Will-ness: I haven't posted an update in quite a while; shame on me! Of course, there isn't much to post, either, since I'm kind of in a holding pattern. I need to get out of it soon, though, because I am now officially behind schedule by a half a pound. I had wanted to weigh 155 by Opening Day and I'm currently about 6.5 pounds heavier than that, but as I mentioned earlier, my recent costume alteration has renewed my desire to get back on track. I currently weigh 161.5 pounds, and have for a few weeks now, so at least I'm not gaining huge amounts of weight back. If I want to stay on track, I need to be down to 152 pounds or lower by Labor Day. Time to start spinning again!
Car: We ordered my new car! It still doesn't seem quite real yet; the car won't be here until August. I'm getting a 2011 Nissan Juke SL AWD. This car does everything except drive itself. It will have a Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT) and 3 different drive modes: Normal, Economy, and Sport. It will have a power sunroof, 6 upgraded speakers, an iPod dock, an in-dash GPS, heated leather seats, push-button ignition, hands-free Bluetooth connection for my Blackberry and lots of other goodies I can't even remember right now. This will be my first new car, the first car with less than 45K miles on it (most of the cars I've owned have had far more than that). It will have power door locks and power windows, something I've never had on a car before. I'm almost afraid to get too excited just in case something happens and the deal falls through. Not that I want to rush the summer through or anything, but I really wish August would get here soon!
That's all for now. Stay tuned...
BRF 2011: Opening Day is tomorrow. This promises to be a very interesting season, on many counts. First of all, I'm only going to be there for 8 days total. Some people have asked me why I'm bothering to do Faire at all if I'm going to be missing most of it. All I can say is that I'd miss not doing those 8 days and I'd rather have a short season than none at all. I already took a season off (two if you count the season I wound up having my gall bladder removed right before 2nd weekend) and it just about killed me to be on site and not on cast. I guess once you've gone to the Dark Side, you can never go back. Oh, and we have a new Entertainment Director as of last Saturday. I don't have any details about that (so don't ask), nor do I particularly need to know how or why things happened as they did. I have no influence or control over the situation, so I'm going to stay out of it. I wish our former Entertainment Director all the best and I hope to see him and his lovely wife again soon. In the meantime, I will give our new Entertainment Director all the support and cooperation I can, just as I have in the past. The show must - and WILL - go on.
I altered my corset at the last minute this week. I'm not sure yet if this was a good idea or a bad one. At Dress Rehearsal, the corset was too big - WAY too big. That's not a surprise; I'm about 20 pounds smaller than I was when I made it. I asked Alyssa, the Costume Director, what I should do to fix it and her suggestion was to take out a small chunk on either side of the front, put new grommets in, and rebind the edges. This made sense, so I took it home and immediately started taking out all the handstitching holding the grosgrain binding in place. Clearly I do good work since it took all of the musical 1776 and most of the 7-part John Adams miniseries to get the binding off (yep, that's how I spent my 4th of July - working on my costume in front of the TV. Yippee.). Then I cut off the bone next to the grommets, put in some new grommets, and started re-stitching the binding. The bone I removed was angled, not quite 45 degrees, so removing the bone changed the shape of the corset but it wasn't until after I got it all put back together that I realized just how much the shape had changed. Before the alteration the corset was conical; now it's perfectly cylindrical. So now the corset is WAY too tight. There is absolutely no way it's going to close in the front at all. Even with a 3" gap, I can barely breathe. Luckily, I've bought a really wide ribbon to lace it with, so my front will be covered with lacing. I've decided there's no use second-guessing myself on whether or not I should have gone ahead with the alteration or not since the corset wasn't very wearable the way it was and I had few options given the design of the garment. At least I won't have to worry about shrinking out of my corset this summer; I've got plenty of weight to lose before the corset gets too big again.
I've also made buttons to hand out to patrons who get spanked by Jezebel. They're small - only 1.5" - and they say "I've Been Spanked!" on them with the year (in Roman numerals), a picture of a banana and my website address. I've got 55 in my pouch to start out with; we'll see how fast I go through them this season. This will be a good way to find out exactly how many spankings I give during the course of a day since I've never been very good at keeping track of these things.
Everything is inventoried, packed, and ready to go tomorrow morning. BRF 2011, here I come!
Dad's Surgery: My Dad had a heart catheterization this afternoon; even as I was typing this up, I got the call that he was out of surgery and doing fine. He had gone to the doctor and had gone through a battery of tests that suggested he had an 80% blockage in one artery and a 60% blockage in another. He had no symptoms and all of his blood work came back perfect, so this news came as quite a shock. Luckily, when they went in, they found that the test had been misleading. There was only one blockage and it was only 20%, so they cleared it out and didn't have to put in a stent or anything. Whew! What a relief! Let's hope this little "wake up call" persuades my father to start doing some of the things the doctors have been trying to get him to do for last few decades: eat less fat, eat less sugar, exercise more, lose some weight. After all, as the doctor firmly reminded him, he won't be able to procrastinate any more when he's dead.
Will-ness: I haven't posted an update in quite a while; shame on me! Of course, there isn't much to post, either, since I'm kind of in a holding pattern. I need to get out of it soon, though, because I am now officially behind schedule by a half a pound. I had wanted to weigh 155 by Opening Day and I'm currently about 6.5 pounds heavier than that, but as I mentioned earlier, my recent costume alteration has renewed my desire to get back on track. I currently weigh 161.5 pounds, and have for a few weeks now, so at least I'm not gaining huge amounts of weight back. If I want to stay on track, I need to be down to 152 pounds or lower by Labor Day. Time to start spinning again!
Car: We ordered my new car! It still doesn't seem quite real yet; the car won't be here until August. I'm getting a 2011 Nissan Juke SL AWD. This car does everything except drive itself. It will have a Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT) and 3 different drive modes: Normal, Economy, and Sport. It will have a power sunroof, 6 upgraded speakers, an iPod dock, an in-dash GPS, heated leather seats, push-button ignition, hands-free Bluetooth connection for my Blackberry and lots of other goodies I can't even remember right now. This will be my first new car, the first car with less than 45K miles on it (most of the cars I've owned have had far more than that). It will have power door locks and power windows, something I've never had on a car before. I'm almost afraid to get too excited just in case something happens and the deal falls through. Not that I want to rush the summer through or anything, but I really wish August would get here soon!
That's all for now. Stay tuned...