Busy, Busy, Busy!

[dawn_felagund]

Sheesh. It's been a long time since I posted. (The writing post I just posted, I have been working on for most of the past week, off and on. I mean an actual, honest-t'-goodness, all-about-life post.) I've been busy. Busy editing and writing, busy rehearsing for my show on Wednesday, busy spending quality time with my hubby. This was Memorial Weekend here in the good ol' US of A, so we had a three-day weekend. Bobby and I took a trip out to Western Maryland on Saturday to go to Cunningham Falls State Park, but I save that for a separate post since I have lots of pictures to go along with it!

Erm...let's see. Life in points:

• Work. Some noticed that I all but disappeared on Wednesday. No, unfortunately, I had not fallen through a portal into First Age Middle-earth. I was sent to the Baltimore Unit to acquaint Kevin, the new commander, with the goings-on of our database system. Yes, the database system that was created in 2004, that no one at their unit had really bothered to learn up until this point. So now he knows how to use the queries I created back in the proverbial day to generate review and contact lists automatically. Now he no longer has to do stats by hand; Access and Excel will work together to do them for him. But wow...am I ever glad that I do not work there. For one, it is noisy. For two, he shares an office with his secretary. I'm spoiled and demand my own office.
  
  (Johnny the Boss sent me in part to find out the oft-asked question "What Does Ursula Do?" Well...she seems to run warrants...and that's about it. Kevin does the rest. Most of which I do in my office while Johnny does commander-type things. Well, I get paid decently now, so I won't complain about that...but wow. Trust me, what they say about bureaucracy and governmental incompetence is so true.)


• Hockey. Hockey started back up for Bobby on Thursday. Well...technically it started two weeks ago, but he was in Washington. They are no longer called the Dragonfish; their new name is Your Team Name Here. Their chant is no longer "1-2-3 FISH!" but "1-2-3 HERE!" They are getting logos on their jerseys of a beer mug with 'Your Team Name Here" on the front. My friend and fellow Hockey Wife Cindy thinks that it's the stupidest thing that she's ever heard...but I like it. It's fun. It's funny. And it's so like their team. It's funny to see the schedule board: "Grizzlies versus Your Team Name Here." But it looks like Team will be pretty decent this season, and the league has changed a few rules that should hopefully keep me from complaining as much as I did over the winter.


• Skating. The skating show is on Wednesday. It's hard to believe that it's here; I've been working on this show since January. I think this one is going to be a good one, though; probably the best I've ever been in. We've been having crazy rehearsals and such. Sunday, we had our pictures done amidst a two-hour practice. Last Sunday, we practiced for two-and-a-half hours. My hip is back to hurting, but I've grown so accustomed to it by now that the pain is normal, so I don't care. Yesterday, I practiced my solo one last time, and it was probably the best run I've done yet. If I'm warmed up, relaxed, and remember to have fun, then it'll be great. If not...average.


• Writing. Writing has been on the fritz for the last week. I put off everything else for weeks to accomodate my non-stop writing, so I suppose it was a much-needed catch-up. Still, I'm looking forward to getting back into it this week. I hope to finish Alina's birthday story and get some ideas for other friends' upcoming birthdays. (Actually, one is finished already, but I'm not telling whose!)


• Anniversary. In the midst of preparing for the show and getting ready for Puerto Rico--now less than three weeks away--I've lost sight of my anniversary. On Wednesday, Bobby and I will have been together for ten years. Yes, that means we started dating our first year in high school. I was fourteen; he had just turned fifteen. But...ten years! Crazy!


• Painting. Aaaand...I decided to get back into miniatures painting. My friend Tammy and I went out to lunch last Saturday and visited our old friends at the Games Workshop and the smell of that place made me itchy to paint. I'd started a High Elf dragon model more than a year ago; after months of modeling and fixing the mistakes on the model with putty, I started base-painting it...and stopped. Saturday, I spent about an hour base-painting and that step is now about 85% finished. After that, I will begin actually painting, as in painting in color, to show the effects of light and shadow, et cetera. The dragon (I figure) will take at least one hundred hours to finish from where I am now. Yes, I am slow, but I paint with a great deal of detail and this will be my largest model painted to date.
  
  My project is to paint a High Elf army based off of the devices and characters of The Silmarillion. So I have taken the High Elf lords and generals and given them identities based on the book. My dragon rider is none other than Fëanor; I figure that he is the one crazy enough to ride a large, fire-breathing beast. My Maedhros model was one of my first major projects; he took about eighty hours to complete, start to finish, including modeling and basing.
  
  I will be posting progressive photos of Fëanor and Dragon as my work on them progresses. Pictures of my favorite models completed so far (including Maedhros) and the un-primed Fëanor and Dragon can be found here.


• Upcoming Stuff! It's my favorite time of the year: the threshold of summer, when I am looking forward to everything and the summer seems endless. We kicked it off this weekend at Cunningham Falls. On Saturday, we are going to Paramount's King's Dominion, a theme park about two hours away in central Virginia. On 12 June, Bobby and I are going to see Spamalot at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. We leave for Puerto Rico on 17 June! There's so much to look forward to in such short time.

That's all for now. I will be following with pic spam posts of the house finch family that moved onto our balcony last month as well as the Saturday trip to Cunningham Falls.

While I am thinking of it: Is anyone willing to post the weekly Silmarillion reading for me at the Henneth-Annun Yahoo list while I am gone to Puerto Rico? The posts are done on Sunday (generally, I try to have them done by 1-2 p.m. EST), a chapter per week. I will be gone for two Sundays, the 18 and 25 of June. I will email you the chapter summaries that I have written; all that you will have to do is paste them into an email and click SEND. It will take no more than two minutes.

Please let me know in a comment or an email if you can help me out with this. Thanks in advance!