My So Called Life

The Addams Family

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Over break, Sara and I took a day for ourselves and went to see The Addams Family. It is a musical that is premiering here in Chicago before going on to Broadway in New York. It stars Nathan Lane as Gomez and Bebe Neuwirth (A.k.a. Lillith, from Cheers (Frasier’s wife)) as Morticia.

Overall it was pretty good. I absolutely loved the scene where Uncle Fester is singing to the moon. For me, it was worth seeing for that scene alone. The guy who plays Uncle Fester is great, and so is the kid who plays Pugsly. Without a doubt, Grandma got all the best lines. As far as Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, they were okay. I was excited to see them, and they didn’t do bad, but they didn’t really knock my socks off either.

Overall I’d have to rate it a solid B. I enjoyed myself, and I didn’t regret seeing it, but I can think of a couple of shows off the top of my head that I thought were better (but of course I can think of plenty that weren’t as good, either). At one point I thought to myself, “What is missing from this show?” It had everything you could have wanted; good actors, good sets, jokes. Somehow it just didn’t catch me. I think the music wasn’t that catchy. Sara thought the jokes were too corny maybe, but then again, they usually are in things like that.

So anyway, if you’re looking for a show to see, I would recommend this. Especially if you were a fan of the T.V. show; there are plenty of references to the show (I actually saw a fair number of episodes via Nick at Night, back when that showed old reruns). Just don’t pick this one over Wicked.

Surprised!

/ Shane / 2 Comments

So Sara planned a surprise party for me on Saturday, and I think a good time was had by all. The star of the party, of course, was the tower of homemade cupcakes in lieu of a birthday cake. These weren’t just your average cupcakes either; the green ones were chocolate mint, the orange ones had orange cake, the strawberry ones had strawberry filling. The schnozberry ones tasted like schnozberries. They were amazing.

Now the first question you’re probably asking yourself is, was I surprised? Well, I’ll have you know that I am extremely brilliant, and you have to get up pretty early in the morning to fool me. And by that, of course, I mean that I’m so oblivious that most people pretty much stopped bothering to even pretend around me, and I STILL probably wouldn’t have caught on if it hadn’t been staring me in the face.

I knew my mom was coming this weekend. So the first clue was when I called her to see if she had received my email about bringing her snow pants (Evie wanted to play in the snow). The conversation went something like this:

Me: “Did you grab your snow pants?”
Mom: “Yes, and I already called Rachael to tell her to bring hers.”
Me: “Oh, is Rachael coming too?”
Mom: “No.”

Despite this, I still wasn’t suspicious yet. Not suspicious enough to not notice the 6 lbs. of beef thawing in the fridge or to think anything was amiss when Sara proceeded to make 45 cupcakes while I was in the kitchen (to be fair, this doesn’t mean that I didn’t notice all the cupcakes, only that I didn’t see a problem with someone making me 45 cupcakes).

However, on Friday night I was opening up some presents from my mom, and the card said, “I hope you were surprised!” “About turning 30?” I asked (I quite expected to make it to 30, thank you very much). I thought maybe there was a surprise in the present. “Was I supposed to open the present first?” So I opened the present and it was jeans. My mom tried to play it off. “Aren’t you surprised I got you the same present for Christmas and your birthday?”

This was decidedly odd, but before I could even think about it, I opened the birthday card from my dad that came in the mail. “Sorry we couldn’t make it to your party.” “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” said Sara. Now I might be oblivious, but when you put the word “surprise” and “party” so close together, combined with all the other weird stuff (I thought of some other odd stuff later too, in retrospect), you’d have to be pretty dense not to get it.

Not to take anything away from anybody though, there were several highly successful ruses. For example, Tom and Barb calling to wish me a happy birthday when they were really in the car a couple of blocks away. Rachael also calling to wish me a happy birthday and talking to me for a long time, even though she was going to see me the next day. And also my mom making me go the long way around to backtrack and see the people on the ice rink for like 10 minutes. I did not detect that I was being delayed (though I may have been a little exasperated about it!)

One final word about birthday parties, I think it is hard for Evie to imagine any situation that is not all about her. This is not entirely her fault. I remember at one point, she was sitting at the table eating a cupcake, the only one, while she held court with about 8 people crowded around her. From her point of view, there wasn’t much difference between her birthday party and my birthday party.

The big 3-0

/ Shane / 7 Comments

Today is the big day. I’m turning 30.

To be quite honest, it doesn’t really bother me. I kept waiting to have this big, “Holy crap, I’m old!” moment, but it never really happened. Maybe it’s because I’m doing pretty well with myself. I would probably feel worse if I felt like there were things I should have done before I turned 30; like my life was lagging behind my expectations. If anything, it’s exactly the opposite: I am married with a beautiful daughter and another kid on the way, I have a job that I like, a Master’s degree, I own my home (by which I mean I owe a whole lot of money to the bank, but hey, they don’t call those payments rent!), and I have some dough in both my savings and retirement accounts. What more could a 30-year-old ask for?

I’m not saying there’s nothing that could be improved in my life. I need to lose some weight (but isn’t that supposed to be what I say when I turn 30 anyway?), my hair is hiding who-knows-where, the house could be cleaner, etc., etc. But all in all, when I look around at my life, I think I’ve got a pretty good thing going.

Is this normal? Will it hit me at some point? Am I missing a good excuse to make a big deal and get a lot of attention? Do I need to turn the histrionics up a bit? (I mean aside from posting this early in the morning so I can get compliments all day, instead of posting it at the usual time) Anybody have any good getting old stories / discussion? Feel free to post in the comments.

Blogging Challenge – 1 year down

/ Shane / 12 Comments

In years past, my blogging as been spotty at best. Most years my posts were few and far between. I even took an entire year off from August 2004 – August 2005. Here are my totals through the years:

  • 2004 – 74 posts
  • 2005 – 57 posts
  • 2006 – 83 posts
  • 2007 – 91 posts
  • 2008 – 173 posts

So after averaging just over 75 posts a year, I jumped up quite a bit in 2008. At the beginning of 2009, I started blogging a lot. I thought to myself, “Self, do you think you could blog every day?” Honestly, I thought the answer was no. After a few minor adjustments (Sara convinced me to keep it to only week days), I gave it a shot. I was a little worried that I would run out of topics to talk about, and that I would end up making posts for the sake of posts, which would draw down the quality of the blog as a whole. Surely no one can come up with 5 good posts per week (I’ve at least proven that, if nothing else)!

So I started doing it just to do it and to see how long I could keep it going. I didn’t know how long it would last. Just when I was about to make up my mind on if I would really commit to doing it every day or not, here we are! A full year complete. I can’t believe how fast it went.

So 2009 ended with 309 blog posts, more than all the posts I made from 2004 – 2007 combined. There have been times when I just really had nothing else to say, and something occurred to me right at the last minute. Other times I have 10 posts half-written on the back burner, waiting to be polished up and put out. I even pre-scheduled posts over holidays (excepting the Christmas hiatus I just took).

So what sayest thou? Should I keep going at the same schedule? Any thing you’d like changed around here? More / less regular features? More / less posts? More delicious bacon ideas and zombie escape plans and less darling quotes from my daughter? (Just kidding on that last one, I’ve already heard aaaaall about it, believe me)

Answers go in the comments, and feel free to lavish me with extensive praise. I think it’s the least you can do for me, I like the attention (why else would I write 309 publicly viewable blog posts last year?)

An ode to my crappy laptop

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Oh laptop, how I hate thee! Let me count the ways:

  1. The way the “t” fell off your front cover, making you a “Gaeway” laptop
  2. The way some of your keys don’t work every now and again, forcing me to hit them a few times to get them to work
  3. The way  you somehow ruined not one, but two mice, which no no longer work in any computer
  4. The way you were not Windows Vista compatible when I bought you, even though you came pre-installed with Vista
  5. The way you always used to get blue screens (though, to be fair, this seems to be fixed now, after a year or so)
  6. The way you occasionally randomly shut down for no reason when you are left alone
  7. The way you take 48+ hours for virus scan
  8. The way you are unable to do anything while virus scanning
  9. The way you take ten minutes to start up or shut down
  10. The way I had to re-flash your bios that one time, just to make you work like a regular computer (see #5)
  11. The way your tiny hard drive is 98% full
  12. The way you somehow destroyed your own power cord

Between #3 and #12, I’m kind of worried the poor thing has Lupus. In regards to #6, and maybe the whole list in general, I think that the little devil just wants attention. Hey laptop! That’s not the kind of attention you want, buddy!