I had two weeks of summer this summer.

This post was originally written on Monday Aug. 24th.

Today my teacher asked me to act like a chicken while a nuclear bomb was falling from the sky. I am taking beginning acting. It is kind of an interesting class. I haven’t taken an art class since I got kicked out of ceramics in high school. It was a kind of funny for me to hear my teacher talking about how you feel and express and how acting is an art and putting on a play requires many skilled artists, costume designers, set builders, actors, musicians, etc. It was just a little weird juxtaposed to all of the classes I have taken over the last couple years just by nature. I have been having a very technical education to this point and to have something explained by how it expresses through “feelings and emotions” sounds almost alien in the classroom. As part of this class I am expected to keep a journal, so I think that the idiot book is going to get a little more artsy fartsy over the next 16 weeks… Funny thing I just realized, I have kind of been keeping a home work journal any way, with all of the lab postings I have done… Anyway… I am gong to do my best to keep a genuine introduction to acting journal as well as keep my entries just genuine in general. I have a feeling that everybody is going to get to know a bit more about me than they knew before, assuming that any body beside Jake actually reads this.

Today a couple of the exercises we did were to form lines based on different criteria, age, height, blue, etc, and organizing ourselves from stage right to stage left. Some of the exercises we did today were some of my favorite games to watch at the National Comedy Theatre. These were “what are you doing?” as well as “Freeze Tag.” I am not going to explain them, but they are fun stuff. By the way, in case you were wondering, no, my teacher is not an idiot.

Shifting gears, I just came back from… dah dah dah dahhhhhhhhh! New York. It was awesome. I went on a Revolutionary war tour with my brother Jake and my dad. It was awesome. I managed to spend time with them as well as jakes wife Reagan and their beautiful daughter, Piper. Here is a link to a chunk of pictures that were taken during the trip. *link* It was really a wonderful experience for me, and I cannot wait to get back there and do it all over again with my beautiful wife. Just a couple of highlights:

We…

Rode our bikes from uptown to downtown…

Walked across the George Washington Bridge…

Ran out of time during the day to see the sights that we wanted too…

Kept touring and looking at monuments even in the dark…

Ate Barbecue until we got sick…

Ate a slice of pizza that was bigger than my head…

Rode the Subway…

Broke down on the subway…

Had the driver come over the speaker and explain that we maybe hit something with the subway…

Had a total blast the whole time no matter what!

Our mission was so intense that we had to continue a couple of our tours into the night. This is a picture of Jake and dad at one of the many parks we visited with the George Washington bridge in the background. I think that it was close to 10 pm around this time.