Party Weekend numero Uno
I was not online much this weekend, and once I do this recap you'll understand why!
Friday:
After work, (where I worked 'til about 6pm) I was thinking that Mike and I would end up hanging out, but he was extremely tired from opening that morning and from pulling an all-day shift on Thursday (to make up for the time he missed when his car died on Wednesday). So, I ended up watching Man of the House OnDemand while cross stitching. I set a deadline for myself to be finished by Wednesday (Thursday at the latest), so much stitching was had most of the weekend. I ended up going to bed early to get extra rest for the big day on Saturday.
Saturday:
Albert's 15th Birthday! Mike & I were supposed to take him to Laserdome for his 14th birthday, so we thought, better late than never. I called ahead in the morning to make reservations for lasertag ~3:30pm. For the rest of the morning, I stitched. I watched Awakening (DeNiro & Robin Williams, very good) OnDemand and a few episodes of Franklin before the mail came. Gilmore Girls came in the mail, so I watched an episode of that. All while stitching. I got to the point of being over half way finished. Woo! Mike showed up around 2:30 so I started getting ready to go. Mom dropped Albert off and we headed in a south-easterly direction to Laserdome!
We ended up playing Halo (in the "virtual arena") first. After 4 games of it, I had only managed to kill 5 people. That is major suckage. Of course, I guess since it was the first time I played and it took me 'til halfway through the 3 game to figure out how to stop walking into walls with any consistency. It ended up being about $13 each to play for 20 minutes, so next time we go, I'm all for skipping that. It was interesting, though. 10 people playing all at once was neat.
Right after we were done with Halo, it was time for lasertag! They did a pretty good job at explaining how everything worked and what to do in their training session. Since we had to change our lasertag time when we showed up, our group was called last. And since my code name (tenthz, of course) was last alphabetically, I was the absolute last person to get called for a vest. As is tradition with me, I was picked last for a sport. :-P We were on the Red team (the other team was blue). It was way a lot of fun and for 3 of the 4 games, Albert had the highest score across the board (out of a total of 40 players!). Mike was in the top 10 of all the scorers the whole time. They kept making runs on the other teams base which is what made their scores so ridiculously high. I only did that a few times and the rest of the time I spent guarding our base which I attribute to the fact that we won every. single. round. By a LOT (like 10,000 to 3,000). It was a ton of fun and would definitely do that again.
We each got 44 tokens when we got there so we also spent some time playing in the arcade with those. Albert and I played a lot of the games that you get tickets from and he ended up hitting the jackpot (750-ish) on one of them with his last token. Whoa. He ended up with 1300-ish tickets, so he got a nifty disco ball thing that plugs in and lights up with different colors.
After we were all finished and Albert finally got his prize (lines were pretty long at this point), we managed to get out of there by 6:30. I placed an order for pizza at the pizza place that is closest to my apartment so that it was ready by the time we got there. Then we went back to my place and watched Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd which was totally awesome. Albert had wanted to see it, and during the first few minutes he says, "Oh, is this a musical??" :-P Duh. Anyway, we all liked it, although, I would have liked to see less blood-spurtage and such and more tasteful artiness. Ah, well. Definitely liked the adaptation other than that and the entire cast was very good. I was delighted that everyone could sing (Timothy Spall, I thought was the shakiest, but still held his own in the few places where he sang).
I ended up bringing Albert home around 10pm and then coming back to the apartment and cleaning up a bit while watching more Gilmore Girls. I got a bit of a second wind, so I also did more stitching, caught up with my e-mail and such, and then ended up going through my sheetmusic box to find my musical theatre books. I have to pick 18 bars for auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors near the end of May. Decisions, decisions. I finally ended up going to bed around 2am. :-P
Sunday:
Managed to get up at 9 and get to church with time to spare. After church, I went back to my parents and mom made french toast for breakfast. I brought my stitching with me and worked on it while mom cooked and we chatted. After breakfast, I headed to the grocery store (needed milk) and also ended up getting some pasta that was on sale ($0.75 a box). I didn't totally stock up, but I did get some so that I don't feel like I don't have any. A decent sale, but I had wished that they had included ziti. So, just spaghetti and rotini. Seems like my pasta supply is incomplete. :-P Anyway, also picked up some non-crappy strawberry preserves and lunch meat for lunches this week. When I got home... I did more stitching! Surprise, surprise. I stitched and watched the Baby Sitters Club movie OnDemand. Boo. I realized I was expecting the TV show which was SOOO much better. Oh well, it was entertaining. And I think I have exhausted the interesting free OnDemand stuff. I'll have to keep an eye out for anything new that pops up, I guess. I also caught the end of the big give show which looked interesting and then watched Desperate Housewives (YAY it's back) and Eli Stone. Then I went to bed.
I'm almost 3/4 done with my cross stitching. I probably won't get to work on it too much tonight with Singers and all, but I should get plenty of time on Tuesday and Wednesday if need be. The pattern is extremely repetitive. It's like this one except light green instead of dark blue and a pink instead of light blue. It looks very pretty and like a completely different piece, actually! I've got 1 1/2 side motifs left and a whole corner motif left to do. The corner motifs take the most time because while they are repetitive symmetrically, each leaf/flower does not have a particularly logical flow of stitching it. So it takes a bit longer as I figure out which way to go or whatever. I still will have to do the personalizing which will not take long, but I haven't laid it out yet, and that will take some time. I'm estimating another 5 hours of stitching total, as long as nothing goes wrong. Then I have to wash it and iron it and bring it to Michael's to have them put it into the frame I have. I'm hoping that doesn't take long since it needs to be ready to take it to NJ on the 25th.
Friday:
After work, (where I worked 'til about 6pm) I was thinking that Mike and I would end up hanging out, but he was extremely tired from opening that morning and from pulling an all-day shift on Thursday (to make up for the time he missed when his car died on Wednesday). So, I ended up watching Man of the House OnDemand while cross stitching. I set a deadline for myself to be finished by Wednesday (Thursday at the latest), so much stitching was had most of the weekend. I ended up going to bed early to get extra rest for the big day on Saturday.
Saturday:
Albert's 15th Birthday! Mike & I were supposed to take him to Laserdome for his 14th birthday, so we thought, better late than never. I called ahead in the morning to make reservations for lasertag ~3:30pm. For the rest of the morning, I stitched. I watched Awakening (DeNiro & Robin Williams, very good) OnDemand and a few episodes of Franklin before the mail came. Gilmore Girls came in the mail, so I watched an episode of that. All while stitching. I got to the point of being over half way finished. Woo! Mike showed up around 2:30 so I started getting ready to go. Mom dropped Albert off and we headed in a south-easterly direction to Laserdome!
We ended up playing Halo (in the "virtual arena") first. After 4 games of it, I had only managed to kill 5 people. That is major suckage. Of course, I guess since it was the first time I played and it took me 'til halfway through the 3 game to figure out how to stop walking into walls with any consistency. It ended up being about $13 each to play for 20 minutes, so next time we go, I'm all for skipping that. It was interesting, though. 10 people playing all at once was neat.
Right after we were done with Halo, it was time for lasertag! They did a pretty good job at explaining how everything worked and what to do in their training session. Since we had to change our lasertag time when we showed up, our group was called last. And since my code name (tenthz, of course) was last alphabetically, I was the absolute last person to get called for a vest. As is tradition with me, I was picked last for a sport. :-P We were on the Red team (the other team was blue). It was way a lot of fun and for 3 of the 4 games, Albert had the highest score across the board (out of a total of 40 players!). Mike was in the top 10 of all the scorers the whole time. They kept making runs on the other teams base which is what made their scores so ridiculously high. I only did that a few times and the rest of the time I spent guarding our base which I attribute to the fact that we won every. single. round. By a LOT (like 10,000 to 3,000). It was a ton of fun and would definitely do that again.
We each got 44 tokens when we got there so we also spent some time playing in the arcade with those. Albert and I played a lot of the games that you get tickets from and he ended up hitting the jackpot (750-ish) on one of them with his last token. Whoa. He ended up with 1300-ish tickets, so he got a nifty disco ball thing that plugs in and lights up with different colors.
After we were all finished and Albert finally got his prize (lines were pretty long at this point), we managed to get out of there by 6:30. I placed an order for pizza at the pizza place that is closest to my apartment so that it was ready by the time we got there. Then we went back to my place and watched Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd which was totally awesome. Albert had wanted to see it, and during the first few minutes he says, "Oh, is this a musical??" :-P Duh. Anyway, we all liked it, although, I would have liked to see less blood-spurtage and such and more tasteful artiness. Ah, well. Definitely liked the adaptation other than that and the entire cast was very good. I was delighted that everyone could sing (Timothy Spall, I thought was the shakiest, but still held his own in the few places where he sang).
I ended up bringing Albert home around 10pm and then coming back to the apartment and cleaning up a bit while watching more Gilmore Girls. I got a bit of a second wind, so I also did more stitching, caught up with my e-mail and such, and then ended up going through my sheetmusic box to find my musical theatre books. I have to pick 18 bars for auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors near the end of May. Decisions, decisions. I finally ended up going to bed around 2am. :-P
Sunday:
Managed to get up at 9 and get to church with time to spare. After church, I went back to my parents and mom made french toast for breakfast. I brought my stitching with me and worked on it while mom cooked and we chatted. After breakfast, I headed to the grocery store (needed milk) and also ended up getting some pasta that was on sale ($0.75 a box). I didn't totally stock up, but I did get some so that I don't feel like I don't have any. A decent sale, but I had wished that they had included ziti. So, just spaghetti and rotini. Seems like my pasta supply is incomplete. :-P Anyway, also picked up some non-crappy strawberry preserves and lunch meat for lunches this week. When I got home... I did more stitching! Surprise, surprise. I stitched and watched the Baby Sitters Club movie OnDemand. Boo. I realized I was expecting the TV show which was SOOO much better. Oh well, it was entertaining. And I think I have exhausted the interesting free OnDemand stuff. I'll have to keep an eye out for anything new that pops up, I guess. I also caught the end of the big give show which looked interesting and then watched Desperate Housewives (YAY it's back) and Eli Stone. Then I went to bed.
I'm almost 3/4 done with my cross stitching. I probably won't get to work on it too much tonight with Singers and all, but I should get plenty of time on Tuesday and Wednesday if need be. The pattern is extremely repetitive. It's like this one except light green instead of dark blue and a pink instead of light blue. It looks very pretty and like a completely different piece, actually! I've got 1 1/2 side motifs left and a whole corner motif left to do. The corner motifs take the most time because while they are repetitive symmetrically, each leaf/flower does not have a particularly logical flow of stitching it. So it takes a bit longer as I figure out which way to go or whatever. I still will have to do the personalizing which will not take long, but I haven't laid it out yet, and that will take some time. I'm estimating another 5 hours of stitching total, as long as nothing goes wrong. Then I have to wash it and iron it and bring it to Michael's to have them put it into the frame I have. I'm hoping that doesn't take long since it needs to be ready to take it to NJ on the 25th.