Making excuses

I guess this is the only thing I can actually do at this point is to make some lame excuse for not writing in over a month on this.  At the very beginning, I speculated that I would post at least twice a week.  That, obviously, hasn't happened.  Life got in the way, as it is wont to do from time to time.

During most of the latter part of February and into March, I was involved in our school's annual 60 minute Shakespeare production.  Last year, we produced Romeo and Juliet.  I played Lord Capulet, father of Juliet.  I had a fun time with it, but was stressed out considerably while I tried to memorize my lines.  I had fully planned on not being involved in the play this year, but another teacher at our school wanted to be in the play and there weren't any appropriate roles for her unless there was another adult male playing opposite her, so I volunteered to play the part of Theseus opposite her Hypolita in A Midsummer's Night Dream.


So stress plays a factor, and also time itself.  I am amazed at how middle school students can memorize Shakespeare so quickly.  One girl was given a page full of new dialog to memorize and had it memorized in less than a couple of hours.  I can't do that.  The best way I've found to memorize material is in context, feeding off the other person's lines, or I type.  Yes, I literally type my lines over and over again until I don't have to look at my script in order to type the lines.  I don't think this lends itself very well to good acting, but it works for me.

The photo I've posted is a self portrait I took of myself after taking a nap following our last performance.  I had a headache and lay down on our bed to rest.  I tossed and turned for what seemed like fifteen or twenty minutes, so decided that I couldn't go to sleep so I might as well get up and be productive.  I looked at the clock and realized that I must have literally passed out, because an entire hour and a half were gone from the afternoon. So as you can see, I've had a nap and I still look exhausted.


And I also know that photography is taking an awful lot of my time.  With the spring weather, I'm enjoying being outside more, although you couldn't tell that by how tall the grass and such is in the back yard.  Still, I will try to make a more balanced effort in the future to post here more frequently.  


I leave you with the first butterfly I've been able to capture this spring.  It's a Painted Lady and was enjoying the nectar from the lantana that grows in our parkway.