A Return to (Ab)Normal Life

It's been over a month since I lasted posted to this blog. We performed our high school musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie, last weekend. My perception, and by all accounts, the show was well done and very well received by the audience. It's also my excuse for not blogging. We spent six weeks in rehearsal. Partway through we switched from doing two-hour rehearsals (which often ran late) to doing three-hour rehearsals (which occasionally ran late), as we saw that we needed the extra time. During the penultimate week of rehearsals, I spent four days where I was at the school for 13-14 hours (from before 8:00 a.m. until well after 9:00 p.m.). Even the weekend of performances, usually a bit of a downtime for me, I was at school for more hours than normal. Usually for performances, I stand in the back and watch, figuring that my job is done. This year, I ran both the sound and light board -- which I gotta admit was a lot of fun. I've done lights before, but never sound. Mixing live sound is a challenge. I don't bring any of this up in an attempt to elicit sympathy; I know what I'm getting into when I start a show, I get paid for it (though perhaps not adequately), and I do enjoy working with the high school actors, and feel a sense of accomplishment at the end, particularly when the show turns out as well as this one did. It's simply my excuse for not contributing to this blog even semi-regularly the past six weeks or so. This week I've managed to catch up on some TV (I think I had something like 12 hours of stuff taped), did some reading (starting to whittle down that huge stack of new comics, and even got back into the novel I put aside at the start of rehearsals), and even went to three movies over the weekend. Is this normal life? Anyway, the other day I put together a rehearsal schedule for our one-act play; I plan to hold auditions for that the week after Thanksgiving, and start practices the following week. It never ends. But I do miss the theatre stuff when it's not happening.