So this is my last full weekend off in a while. I am refusing to work 7 days a week, because frankly it's not necessary and I'm not paid over time, but I will be doing some hours on Saturday for the next little while. Today so far I was very lazy for the morning and am now gearing up to end out to Virginia where a friend is taking me to a Natalie MacMaster concert. People seem to want to take me to Canadian things (in addition to the Canadian things that I take myself to) and while I've never particularly felt the need to see her in concert, I'm sure she's quite good.

In celebration of the women's hockey team victory over the Americans, I wore my Olympic mittens to marketing class. I adore our VP of Marketing, as most of us fellows do, however, I am the only fellow with a nickname - he calls me Canada. You might think this unoriginal except that he tested many others before deciding that Canada was the right one. It is beginning to catch on around the KC too. He usually greets me with "Oh, Canada" to which I will alternately reply "Oh Marketing" or "Oh Michigan" where he is from. Anyway, he gave me a particularly hard time about our men's defeat to the US last weekend and we have a bet on for the Gold medal game. The mittens were much coveted (as they are awesome! thank you to my second home in Oakville for giving them to me)

I'm not quite sure what to do to watch the game tomorrow. I'm sure many bars will be showing it, but where to find sympathetic supporters is another question.

This week we also had our role-playing development class. This is where we have to act out asking people for money. It was in interesting exercise, but since it was mostly improv (we didn't have background on the people/corporation/foundation that we were hitting up - so no time to plan an approach etc) I'm not sure entirely of practical it was. We were paired up and I was with Damion - we both have theatre backgrounds and have no issue with speaking in public or making stuff up on our feet, so we did really well. It was helpful to discuss after where people could have improved or areas that they should have focused on - I was a little surprised at how bad some people were, but I think this may have had more to do with their general lack of comfort with the public speaking element. I hope so at least or they haven't been paying attention these last six months!

And in general I'm happy to have made it through week one of our McNally celebration. This week coming the second show starts rehearsals so it's just going to get busier. So far (touchwood) I seem to have found my groove with the actors and director. I'm not feeling the stage management love at this point and I'm trying to think that they are all anti-social and anal retentive but frankly that's where I'm leaning. Everyone keeps saying how great they are - and maybe they are...for DC. Where I'm from, we don't need 3 stage managers to put up a straight play with four actors in a 450 seat house ( TWO weeks of prep as well). Where we then have to find someone else to run lines with the understudies because all 3 are needed in the rehearsal hall at every moment. We also wouldn't hire 4 designers, all of whom need assistants because of their scheduling issues. Again for a 450 seat house.

But maybe that's just me.