"More to do than can ever be done..."

Hi.

Well, this week has been an interesting one thus far.

Monday I had chemo and it took forever and a day to get done with. I got there 7:30 a.m. for my blood test and had to wait over two hours to get the results because they had to manually count my white blood cells since my counts were too low for the machine to count them. So we finally got the results back for that and Pitot decided I'd still have chemo that day. We dropped my dosage of CPT-11 and continued on with the rest of the treatment. I finally got to go home around 3:00 p.m. I was not happy. Luckily my hip X-ray had been rescheduled; I would have been doubly upset if they had still made me get a stupid X-ray after having chemo all day.

Tuesday afternoon I had photography. We watched a video on surrealist photographers and I was not impressed. I do not see how a photograph of a mutated turkey nailed to a board is supposed to express anything besides a strange fascination with the disgusting, but that's just me. After the movie I sat in the lab for a little while and watched the other half of the class that was having a studio hour. Whatever they were doing looked complicated and I get to learn how to do that today (at least I get to if I can get my film developed in the hour before class).

After photography I went home and took a nap. I had planned to go shopping with Mom, but I felt sluggish and thought sleeping sounded better. So I napped and then my family and I got ready to go see the Lion King musical at the Orpheum theatre in the Cities.

I don't even know where to begin to tell you about this musical. It was amazing. The costumes and effects were so cool. If you've seen the Lion King movie before, you know it starts with the song "Circle of Life." Well, the first part of the song says, "There's far too much to take in here," and as we sat watching the start of the musical, that was a very true statement. They had life-sized costumes of elephants and rhinos walking down the aisles toward the stage, which was full of people dressed as zebras, cheetahs, and antelope.

The sets were something else too. They literally rose out of the base of the stage or somehow would "magically" appear for the next scene. I say "magically" because the sets were so huge I have no idea where they had room to put them all back stage and how they managed to move them on and off so fluidly.

The best actor for this musical was easily the lady who played the baboon Rafiki. Oh my goodness, she was amazing. She would stand up there and jabber away and you could hear all the guttural stops (those clicking noises that are common in African languages) as she went along. Her singing voice also trumped the rest of the cast; you could definitely tell when she was or wasn't part of an ensemble. The adult Nala also had a wonderful voice. Her feature song, "Shadowland," was spectacular and as soon as I heard it I knew she was easily going to overpower the adult Simba's voice when they sang "Can You Feel the Love Tonight."

So that was my exciting Tuesday. I got to see a musical I have wanted to see since I was a little kid and I am very happy that I finally got the chance to.

Now on to Wednesday...

It kinda stunk really. Well, I guess it wasn't too bad. I had to shoot my roll of film for photography, which wasn't so bad, but I felt crummy that day- don't know why. My little scene I was shooting was difficult to light; thank goodness my dad was so helpful in finding lights and moving them downstairs for me. We finally got the lighting all figured out and I started shooting my roll of film. Halfway through, the camera opened for no apparent reason. I didn't press the button on the bottom and the back of the camera had been snapped shut. I lost my roll of film to light exposure and was quite upset that I had to start over again. Luckily I finished my second roll without incident and I'm hoping the pictures turn out well today.

That was the interesting part of my day, I guess. In the evening Mom and I watched the red carpet show for the CMA's and then watched the Mythbusters blow-up a water heater, which was really cool.

Now today I have photography and before class I have to rush in there and develop my film so that I can participate in the studio. I'm horrible at getting stuff done on time. Developing film just bothers me. It's boring and cold and dark. I've tried to listen to my MP3 player while I work on film, but it always claims its battery is dead when I turn it on. Stupid technology.

I guess that's about it. I still have to organize my stuff before I head in to RCTC, so I think I'll go do that.

~Cheryl

"Circle of Life"- Lion King