birthday celebrations

we carved a little bit of time out last weekend to celebrate my dad's birthday!  my mom made a delicious dinner with german chocolate cake for dessert.  it was nice to get together to celebrate!

love, laurie

veterans day flags

for the past several years, the student veterans alliance at the university where i teach has displayed thousands of american flags on campus in honor of veterans day.  this year they did their "flags for the fallen campaign" again, displaying thousands of american flags on the campus lawn.  each flag represents a fallen service member.  the flags are on display all week and it's really something to see the thousands of flags arranged in perfectly straight lines, blowing gently in the breeze.

love, laurie

behind the scenes

there are a lot of preparations in place for our upcoming large-scale production of the nutcracker in december.  in addition to testing the snow and fog, we hopped outside two weeks ago to shoot some teaser promo photos to advertise that this production will be moving to our venue this year.  there were several different poses which involved me (and even ryan too) pretending to move the nutcracker to its new home at our theatre. 

ryan snuck a behind-the-scenes photo of one of the poses.  i can't wait to see the final version of all of these images when the photographer is done editing them.  i'll be sure to share them.

love, laurie

oops

hey folks, this is what happens to a lamp (a theater lighting bulb) inside an instrument (a theatre lighting fixture) when you get too much liquid snow chemical inside!

love, laurie

jealous!

i was jealous when ryan texted me this picture of him and leko cuddling the other day.  i couldn't wait to rush home to join the two of them!

love, laurie

a crazy weekend of super crazy shows

wow, it was a nutty weekend! ryan and i bounced back-and-forth between 3 different shows at 3 different venues.  ryan kicked off the weekend by working a 3-day gig for a touring disney jr. holiday show (no pictures of that because it was too crazy).  i worked a movie / live action showing of the rocky horror picture show, then we both worked an eagles tribute concert.

all 3 gigs were a bit of a nightmare in their own ways, but the eagles tribute really took the cake in terms of being a disaster in every way possible. 

i'm glad all 3 of these shows are behind us and that we can move on to the next set of shows now. 

one of the subjects i teach is university-level theatre.  i always tell my students "there's no such thing as a bad show, because even if a show is absolutely horrible at least you'll learn what not to do next time."  i think this weekend really tested by belief in "there's never a bad show" because i'm still shaking my head at how crazy these 3 events were.

on to the next!

love, laurie

happy birthday, papa!

happy birthday today to my awesome papa!

love, laurie

xoxo

halloween 2019

last night was halloween!  we knew that ryan had to work at the theater, so my dad came up to keep me company and we celebrated by doing trick-or-treating at my house.  i pieced together a costume last minute by using my ballet costume from my dance recital in 2017 paired with my mask from my birthday party in 2018.  the colors in the mask matched my dance recital costume perfectly, so i decided to call myself masquerade from the phantom of the opera, and my dad dressed up in his austin powers costume.

earlier in the week, before we heard the weather forecast, we went to the store and bought a bunch of halloween candy because we typically get a ton of trick-or-treaters at our house every year.  it wasn't until later in the week (after we already took all of the candy out of the bags) that we heard the forecast calling for lots of rain and high winds.  some neighboring towns even cancelled their trick-or-treat.

luckily, our town kept trick-or-treat on and as a nice surprise ryan came home earlier than expected so he got to celebrate with us a little bit too!  we had dinner while we waited for the trick-or-treaters and then handed out candy.  all together we had 101 trick-or-treaters (which is our lowest number of trick-or-treaters ever since we've lived in this house)!  

even though it was rainy and windy, we still had a lot of fun!  i took far less photos this year than previous years since it was so wet outside, but we did manage to snap a few on our phones inside.

hope everyone had a happy halloween!

love, laurie

. . . 

previous halloweens: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

happy halloween!

happy halloween!  i'm looking forward to handing out candy after work tonight to the trick-or-treaters who come to our house.  leko's already on the lookout for those trick-or-treaters!

happy halloween!

love, laurie 

beetlejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice

on saturday i worked a film screening of the 1988 movie "beetlejuice" at our local cultural center.  it was a perfect film choice right before halloween and there was a surprisingly large turnout of people.  it has been years since i have watched that movie and i forgot just how bad it was . . . seriously, why do people like this movie so much?!

love, laurie