Oh yeah

I forgot to write about the Valentine's Day party we went to. It was a good experience in many ways.

First of all, it was a party! The friend who threw it usually has a xmas party but he was out of town this year so he had a Valentine's one instead. :-) It was fun to see people we hadn't seen in a while.

But what I really want to write about because it was more interesting to me, was how I handled it. It was a potluck, which is usually hard because there are so many tasty things. I filled my plate half with salad and had a taste of just about everything else. I ate it, put the plate down and just sat there (as opposed to going for seconds) and when someone asked if they could take my plate, I only had a split second of hesitation before saying yes (as opposed to hanging on to the plate to go for seconds).

I had several moments where I found myself feeling a little uncomfortable, embarrassed, shy or awkward (which is normal for me at just about any party). I didn't go up to the table and grab stuff to munch on or drink just so I would have something to do. I didn't go for my phone or ipod either. I just sat with it, observed myself and the people at the party, and after a while I would either get interested in a conversation going on or someone would start talking to me.

There was a cake at the end. I had my piece, and took a brownie. The cake was great, but after a bite of the brownie, I decided it wasn't OMG amazing, so I handed it over to G (normally I would have eaten the whole thing anyway).

There was a gift exchange game, the one where it's a big pile of generic gifts and people draw numbers and then steal from each other or pick from the pile till all the presents are gone. It being Valentine's day, there was a lot of chocolate to go around. I ended up opening a beautiful pair of handmade earrings, which I very much hoped I could keep because I didn't need a big box of chocolate talking to me for days after the party, and I didn't want another teddy bear or toy cluttering up the house. There was one lady who came to see if she wanted to steal them but said they weren't her style. So they are mine! I was grateful to get the perfect thing for me, and happy that the gift I brought was popular enough to get passed around. Just a little trinket, but I included $10 cash in with it, so that may have been the reason! :D

I decided to not even try to add up all the calories from the party but just write it off as 1000 collectively, which was fairly close in number to the party I went to in January. On the way home, I realized that I was actually a little bit hungry! (as opposed to being so stuffed I couldn't possibly eat anything for dinner). The next day I had even lost a little weight!

So, a great success and a good example for me to remember. I had fun, I didn't deny myself any of the things I wanted or stress about it but I was very mindful and aware of my choices. I enjoyed what I ate because I was conscious of what it was and savored it. Any of the uncomfortable moments were just that - moments. Nothing to freak out about. And rather than feeling depressed, stuffed, frustrated or drained after when I came home, I felt happy, content, proud, fulfilled and satisfied. Hooray!

Bass Fun

Got myself a new toy yesterday after work. Managed to slide in to the music store a few minutes before it closed. It's actually my xmas present from my parents. Long story short, I couldn't find a video camera at Christmas time that would work with my old laptop, and in the time since then I now have a webcam in my new laptop and also been borrowing a video cam from my bro that he seems ok with letting me hang on to long term (he upgraded a while ago). I've had several other ideas of what I might want but most of them seemed to involve more research and planning and at this point it seemed like it might be NEXT xmas before I got anything. I've been catching up on my Harmony class homework this weekend and I was hearing some bass bits in my head and thinking it'd be nice to have one to play them on.

So yeah. I had a couple moments of panic yesterday - what if I can't play it? What if it's a crap one and I should have done more research and gotten a better one? It's a Fender rip-off from what I can tell. Pretty basic. It should suit my purposes - adding my little bass lines to home recordings and such.

Anyway, I was working on my latest assignment, and I discovered that I could plug my acoustic in and use these virtual effects pedals that are in the new version of GarageBand and get a pretty rockin sound - I chose a dreamy texture for the guitar and liquid bass, lots of reverb. Found my chords, found a drum track that worked. And then I plugged in the bass. Started figuring out where the notes were, keeping it super basic. Set up GarageBand so I could do several takes in a row, and mid-way through one of those takes I got a huge smile on my face and thought "I'm having a blast!"

It was a moment of total fun and pure joy at what I was creating. I was doing it for me and because I liked the way it sounded. Something I don't think I've really felt in a while while doing music. Too many critical voices telling me that what I'm doing is boring, too simple, unoriginal, etc, etc. Too much trying to make things "follow the rules", not enough of the spontaneous just following my ears because they are the only things I have. And yet I WAS following some rules, the structure that was set up for the assignment. But it was kind of like an improv game - set up the boundaries and then let loose inside them.

The bit I came up with is still pretty much just a draft/sketch. A verse and a chorus. Enough for the assignment, not really ready for sharing out of that. I'm not sure if I'll ever develop it into a full song. The teacher might rip it apart when he grades it. But whatever happens, I'm so grateful for that moment of inspired joy. Glad to know it still exists and I could probably find it again. Tells me I made the right choice to buy the bass.

New Stuff

Well I suppose I did my part for the economy today. J is in town and we went shopping in Ottumwa. Pretty much mostly just for things we needed or that were practical, and pretty much everything we got was on sale, at least of the lesser practical things.

A couple new long sleeve shirts now that it's colder, a couple new pairs of pants, and a new purse for me. Both the pants and purse were something I needed as my current ones are on the way out. Also got some more contact solution as it's cheaper at Target and found some earplugs for G to use on his flight.

Came back to J's house, saw her new headshots (REALLY GORGEOUS), got pizza and watched half of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, till we realized her parents were bored and we took it over here to finish. I liked it, but I kind of didn't remember the first one, and now I'm not even sure how many of the books I read, so I kind of felt like I was missing some pieces. ah well.

Been lusting after an iPhone. Not sure I can justify spending so much on a new phone like that when I could just upgrade my current contract and get a phone for free, plus their cheapest plan is $12 more per month and significantly less minutes. Not sure I even use all my minutes anyway, and that would be $12/month to have the internet in my pocket. Plus to have a camera and video camera and music player all in my pocket without having 4 or 5 different devices is, well, an attractive idea. Crap.

Extra Extra!

I got to be an extra in a Boothby movie today. I don't know how many other people would consider it fun to give up 2.5-ish hours of their Sunday to wear funky tweedy jackets and get coal dust smudged on their face, and then walk around in circles in the basement and up and down the stairs of the Old Armory, in cold cold temperatures (It was colder inside than outside!), but I had a good time!

It was neat to see the basement and the upstairs corners of the Armory, and have them calling "Action" and "Cut" and marking down time codes and stuff. Just a small flavor of what it might be like to do it for a full thing. Whoa. A lot of work. But it will be really cool to see how it looks when it's all put together.

Professor K writes a mini explanation of the thing at the end of his blog post here. (He was also taking production photos, so I'm curious to see how those turn out. I have a feeling I'll be in more of the photos than the movie, heh.) I honestly don't know that much about it, since we were really coming in for make-up type shots that they'd missed previously, most people already knew what was going on, and we really weren't required to show any sort of emotion that would require us knowing what was going on. It was stuff like, "You've just been working in the boiler rooms and you hear the break whistle and you just want to go get food, or go home" or something like that. And either "walk faster" or "walk slower". heh.

Anyhoo, I've always wanted to be in one of the movies that these local guys have done, so there was a little wish come true. Yeah, I had a good time. :-)