“With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you…

…won’t you say you love me too?”

Upon closer review, it appears that Barney was quite a needy dinosaur. Perhaps it’s for the best that we distanced ourselves before the situation escalated.

So, it turns out that I caught a virus last weekend, and I had a temperature last night. I’m fairly sure it’s some strain of swine flu, considering how prominent it is in the area these days. It’s not hugely different to any other flu, though, so I’ve got no worries.

Still, I went to sleep early last night feeling terrible, so dad decided to let me sleep in this morning and told me it was okay if I wanted to skip school. On any other day, this would have been fantastic, but today my attendance at school was imperative.

After waking up an hour later than I should’ve, haphazardly throwing my uniform on, running to school and stumbling into my second period class, I was greeted with exclamations of “Where were you this morning?”, “You don’t look so good” and, my personal favourite, “Why are your eyes SO droopy?”.

I spent the course of the day working on assignments, worrying about, then completing, a maths test, scratching my bewildered head at all the notes on the board for physics, attending school council meetings and desperately trying to catch up with all the coursework I’d missed last week; all the while resisting the overwhelming urge to tell my teachers to bugger off and let me sleep.

By the end of the school day all I could think of was going home to sleep. Dad usually picks me up from school on Tuesdays, but he happened to be attending a funeral today so I walked home.

Now I’m running off to pour myself a glass of orange juice and settle down in front of the TV to watch a Spongebob Squarepants marathon on Nickelodeon.

I can haz childhood bak pl0x?

We All Fall Down.

“Mosquito repellents don’t repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito’s sensors so they don’t know you’re there.”

Yet another tidbit of insight, courtesy of the eternal wisdom of the internet.
Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t understood the fact correctly, but I find it fascinating that we can dull the senses of another creature to make ourselves effectively invisible to it. It reminded me of the Perception Filters from the “Sound of Drums” episode of Doctor Who (nerdy reference, let it pass).

Anyway, surprise surprise, I’ve neglected this blog for yet another month. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get back into the swing of things and start posting good sized blogs on a regular basis, as opposed to these sporadic attempts at summarizing large chunks of my life into online essays. On the plus side, I do have a genuine excuse for being so lazy with the updates. I’ve been really busy.

1. On the 22nd of June I started my week of work experience at my old primary school. It was brilliant. My timetable had me rotating around a lot of different teachers and year levels, so apart from the two or three teachers who used me to do administrative jobs like photocopying and filing that they didn’t want to do themselves, it was really fantastic. A few of the teachers remembered me, and strangely enough, one Grade 6 student claimed to remember me as well. The highlight of the week was spending one morning with the Prep class, where I taught an adorable little boy to recognise the letter ‘a’.

2. The work experience week lead directly into my school holidays. The first week was wonderfully relaxing. I went to a few birthday parties, tried to plan a sleepover but completely failed, and on one occassion had a few friends over from ten in the morning till seven in the afternoon.

3. During that week, my parents refurnished me and my brother’s bedrooms. We live in a relatively small house, and our rooms were quite congested. Mum decided to throw out the odd bits of furniture cramped against my walls and replaced it with one giant desk with enough shelves and storage space to hold every single one of my earthly posessions. I’m loving it. Dad then bought me an office chair to go with it, and spent more on it than anyone in their right mind would have.

4. All of this refurnishing was the first step of our family’s moving process. We’ve been renting this house for four years, but recently our ladnlord informed us that he would like to come back and live here again. We have till September to find another house and move out. We’ve been searching for houses for a very, very long time now and my parents are starting to worry since we’re having trouble finding decent houses in the area within our price range.

5. The second week of my school holidays was devoted entirely to ‘Urinetown: the Musical’; the school production we’ve been rehearsing since March. The cast members were required at school from 10AM – 4PM for four days, and on the fifth day we were expected to stay at school for twelve hours in order to rehearse each song with the full band. The week was surprisingly fun, and we managed to work out all the little glitches in the show.

6. I spent my final day of vacation at a friend’s sweet sixteenth. It was a heores and villains themed party, and I went dressed as Sarah Jane (another Doctor who reference, forgive me). We played a few party games, but for the most part we just hung out and had a good time. It was lots of fun.

7. Rather than joining all my classmates for school on Monday, us Urinetown cast members had the first two days of school off for rehearsals. We spent Monday throwing together our costumes, fine-tuning make-up, etc. We came back to school at six in the afternoon for a full run through of the show, for the first time with all our costumes and the tech crew working the lights. It took some time to smooth out the technical difficulties, and we didn’t leave until eleven at night.

8. Tuesday, again, was devoted entirely to Urinetown. We had our matinee performance for the Year Sevens during the day, which was honestly quite discouraging. They didn’t laugh at many jokes, and were a generally unresponsive audience. To be fair, though, twelve year olds are hardly the target demographic with regard to this musical and they did seem to enjoy the parts they understood. After talking over everything we needed to improve based on the matinee performance, we went home for a quick break and came back to school again and performed our opening show. It went really, really well. The feedback was great, and the energy onstage was fantastic.

9. I decided to go to school on Wednesday, since there were a lot of friends I wanted to catch up with. Well, that, and my timetable for Wednesday lets me off at 12.45 so I wouldn’t have to spend TOO much time at school. Of course, Wednesday happened to be the 15th of July, also known as the day Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince came to theatres near you. A few friends and I ran down to the cinemas after school, and made it just in time to see the 1.15 showing of the movie. The movie in itself was good and a huge step up from the last one, but being the Harry Potter geek that I am, it was a bit dissapointing and didn’t really feel like Harry Potter. After the movie, I headed back to school for our second night performing Urinetown. Again, all went really well.

10. I skipped school on Thursday, and only left the house in the afternoon for our third performance. The audience was fracking brilliant. They were LOUD, which is just what we were after. I endured a full day of school on Friday, ignoring comments about the enormous bags under my eyes and went back to school again in the afternoon, now fully used to go-to-school-at-8AM-and-leave-at-11PM routine. On Friday night, the audience was packed, as expected. We made more mistakes than we’d ever made before, with people forgetting lines and the band making mistakes that cut off entire bits of dialogue and threw the actors off completely, but we covered up the mistakes so well that the audience didn’t notice a thing.

11. Saturday night, the cast all agreed to meet up at school early since it was our closing night and we wanted to spend more time together. After our director walked around filming our stupid (read: hilarious) comments and conversations,we went out and performed. The audience was packed again, and the show ran without a hitch. We were all visibly tired and starting to lose our voices, but it was great and the audience loved it. After the show was finished, us castmembers completely surprised everyone else by holding an improptu presentation where we thanked our director, musical director, choreographer, costumers, tech crew and all else involved by giving them presents and a spotlight. We then performed one of our favourite songs one last time, more for our own benefit than for the audience.

12. After packing everything away, returning costumes, removing makeup and tearing apart the set by stealing whatever props we wanted, we all headed down to the after-party at one of the cast’s houses. It was a little strange. The cast of this show are, for the most part, kids from around the school who would probably never, ever, get together under normal circumstances. We’re all from different year levels, and usually run in completely different circles. The show forced us together though, but I’m glad it did since they’re all great people.

13. Anyway, it’s now 2PM on Sunday, and I’mtyping all this up as I eat a chocolate muffin for breakfast. I’ve had a good night’s sleep for the first time in a fortnight, refuse to step out of the house for any reason and intend to spend what’s left of this wonderful day catching up on a month’s work of homework I’ve used Urinetown as an excuse to ignore.

I’m finding it really weird that Urinetown is over, though. I devoted five months of my life to the show and I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. I have all this spare time on my hands. It doesn’t help that the cast members will probably never get together again, since a lot of them will be off to university and TAFE soon enough.

As our director said, though, the show will live on; both in our hearts and in DVD format.

That’s all from me. Goodnight, bubs.