It was scene one, and the orphans were doing their “it’s the hard knock life” dance over and over and over and over. I have no clue what was wrong with it. But we were on the Canon City stage for the first time, since we’d been doing it in Florence up until now.

Me and Ellie were backstage with the dog catcher and the assistant dog catcher from the next scene. They were waiting to go on. We were waiting for the scene to change so we’d have something to do.

There was a lot of waiting going on.

But in the midst of the waiting the assistant dog catcher started talking about his dreams. During the school year he has really violent dreams, he said. And then he started rattling them off. Teletubbies with machine guns, Bugs Bunny with a grenade, teachers and schools and students getting blown up, it was hilarious and disturbing but of course I was fascinated because I am always fascinated by dreams.

If the scenes aren’t changing there is nothing to do. Me and Ellie were so bored we played Mashfry. It turns out that I’m gonna marry Kevin Jonas, live on a farm, have 23 kids, and drive a blue minivan. Ellie got a yellow jeep, a mansion, a couple kids, and the assistant dog catcher with the violent dreams.

I finally was like, “look. I have nothing else to do this entire act, there’s no way we’ll make it to act 2 at this rate, I’m tired, and my mom is here visiting. Can I just go?”

And I could. Awesome.

Tonight is looking to be another bad night, with the added bonus that I have to train in a replacement to do the quick changes on Friday, when I’m off to watch it.

It started at the third practice. I, while normally on stage right, went to stage left to get ready for a quick costume change. Ellie, the 11-year-old prop mistress was there, and so was this kid in a green shirt who acted in a few scenes and had gotten bored. I wrote about it here.

We acted crazy and had a great time, but I totally thought it was a one time thing. The kid in the green shirt wasn’t even supposed to be back there. I didn’t say anything that time, cause we were having so much fun, but when I got to practice the next day and saw that he was there, on stage left, I figured it was my duty to say something. But when I did, the lady I told said, “you mean Michael? The kid who’s doing the curtain?”

He was doing the curtain? And his name was Michael?

That was also the day when I got everything figured out and realized that I would have to stay on stage left. So for three whole dress rehearsals and four whole shows that’s the way it was. Me, Ellie, and Michael on stage left, goofing off and having the most amazing time.

For example, Friday Michael was strutting around like a model. Now while it may seem odd that a 12 year old boy would want to strut around like a model, it is just exactly the kind of thing that Michael does. He is a bit of an odd fish. Actually we are all odd fish. Ellie is bursting at the seams with energy, and Michael is OCD, and things just got extremely strange at times.

So anyway, Michael is strutting around like a model, and I whisper to Ellie, “when he get’s back, just talk to me like you didn’t notice his model bit, and he’ll get all ticked.” So we tried, but Ellie just couldn’t help but laugh and laugh and laugh.

Me: Gah! It’s no wonder you work backstage, you can’t act!

Ellie: Give me a line, and I’ll come in and act it.

Me: Why did you stick the cherry pie in the drier?

Ellie went behind the tormentor. Then she strode back in.

Ellie: Why did you stick the cherry pie hahahahhahah!!!

Me: I’ll show you how it’s done.

I went behind the tormentor. Then I strode back in.

Me: Why did you stick the cherry pie in the drier?

Michael: I didn’t do it! You did.

Me: What are you talking about? I saw you put it in the drier!

Michael: Well fine, but you dared me to do it!

Ellie: He wanted to make his socks red for valentines day.

We continued on like this, but presently we decided to do something new. I would be the big sister, Ellie would be the little sister, and Michael would be the dad. Ellie would come in and say that I had hit her.

That one lasted until Michael and Ellie were ganging up on me so much that I stomped off saying “nobody understands me!” and they totally cracked up.

That is just a sample, the tiniest of samples, of the things that went on on stage left. And then, yesterday, I got to the theater and was told that Michael was no longer doing the curtain.

WHAT?!??!

Yeah. He had been fired.

Well. I wasn’t too happy about that, and neither was Ellie. But it was hard to get a clear idea of what he had done wrong. I mean, we knew that the night before he hadn’t closed the curtain quite quickly enough but it didn’t seem like a big enough thing to fire him for.

We went to see him at intermission and he did the classic Michael babble. Half the time me and Ellie have no clue what he’s saying. So it was hard to get a clear idea why he was gone, but he mostly blamed it on other people anyway. And then today he said that people complained about how much we were goofing off backstage, and so they took him off.

Well that scared me cause I knew we goofed off a lot, but I thought we were always very aware of our duties, and made sure that they came first. It made me annoyed that no one ever said anything to us before pulling him off, because I think I, as the oldest by far, could have settled things down more if I knew we were any sort of problem. But when I talked to Marcy about it she said that only one complaint had included me so she didn’t think I needed to be told. But I guess Michael had more complaints and so they decided that it was a mistake to get someone so young to do it.

And Ellie, being young too, was in danger of being dismissed as well. I think she did well enough today that she’s still on, but man. Things can be so great and you can be so close to people, and then bam, they are gone forever. It is freaky.

Especially because of the increasing possibility that I’ll move to back to Oregon shortly and never ever see these people again.

Ha ha ha.

I also bought a pheasant-under-glass. I don’t really know what they’re actually called. They look like this.

There was this song we used to sing at school about my mother being the greatest cook ever who could make a chocolate cake without a recipe and make bologna taste like Pheasant under glass. I didn’t think Pheasant under glass sounded particularly appetizing, but when I asked Mom what it was she said it was just Pheasant meat under a glass dome.

Ever since then I’ve called those glass domes “pheasant-under-glasses.”

Well I’ve been getting into baking lately and I kept looking at goodwill for a pheasant under glass. I finally found one yesterday.

I made a bonnie butter cake with two layers and frosted it but it still looked pretty awful. So I stuck a plastic pear on top of it. I thought maybe the plastic pear would make it look more artistic. It helped a bit, but then the pheasant under glass didn’t fit on top of it. So I sunk the pear deep into the cake, and it made the cake fall apart even more.

It’s so weird. I never thought I was the domestic type. Amy cooked and cleaned and sewed and I hated it all.

What changed?

Homemade cake is really good.

I now have to do once pace of economics and finish up various books and reports on books that compromise my Christian Literature and then I’ll be done. And it’s mostly enjoyable work so it shouldn’t take too long.

And then I’ll get a netbook. Oh yeah!

This Thursday Annie starts up again!

Next Tuesday my Mom comes!

So it seems as though my life is falling into place and going smoothly. I have my life very nicely and neatly planned up to October 20 and then I have no clue what on earth is gonna happen to me. It’s a strange feeling, really.

My landlord is selling my house. I don’t have a job. In a couple of months I could be living permanently in Colorado, or I could be living permanently in Oregon.

I am very tired of explaining my life to people. Life would be so much easier if everyone read my blog.

For instance, when I came to Church with a band-aid on my chin, I got asked a gazillion times what happened to me. But a few people came up to me and said, “so, how is your chin doing?” They already knew what happened, because they read it on my blog. It was so amazing.

I got a blue dress for free today.

The other day I was eating a brownie and I had the following thought process. “Bleh. I don’t really feel like eating this brownie. I’ll look in the fridge and see if there’s something else to eat. Oh! Sweet, I have lettuce! Wait a minute…I just had the weirdest thought process ever.”

When the tooth was out of my head the dentist and his assistant stood there exclaiming at the size of my root canals. Apparently I have abnormally small root canals. “No wonder we couldn’t do the root canal yesterday,” they said.

Today I sneezed and my chin hit my knee and started hurting like crazy again. Who does that?

Every day my life seems to get more complicated and confusing. No, I haven’t been feeling sick again, (THANK GOD) and there is no relationship drama in my life, either of the friendship type or the special friend type. The drama is this: I don’t know where I’m gonna end up. So ever since my trip to Oregon in August there has been a possibility of me moving back home. I’m no longer allergic to helminthosporium, after all. However, I’m not sure I want to go back. Living in Colorado I am doing things I would have been far too scared to do living at home. Like finding community theater and getting involved. Or going to the dentist all by myself.

I thought, maybe if I can find a job I’ll be able to stay. But I haven’t found a job yet. I have other things to occupy my time, like schoolwork and Annie, but they won’t last forever.

So the new twist in the plot is that my  landlord wants to sell my house. Sell it! So what does that mean? Huh? Huh? I don’t want to move again. I don’t want people traipsing through my house to see if they want to buy it. I’ts a lose-lose situation.

Then I find videos like this on youtube and think perhaps I would like to be at home after all.

I am so confused right now.

You must know that I suffered two major calamities when my chin hit the floor that fateful morning. The first was a very bloody chin that refused to scab over until Saturday night, causing lots and lots of soaked through band-aids in the trash can. The other was my tooth, which was so tender that my daily menu went something like this:

Breakfast: Cook up some oatmeal, stick it in the blender.

Lunch: Cook up some dairy-free clam chowder, stick it in the blender.

Supper: Cook up some ramen noodles, drink them whole.

I had to go to the dentist. I just had to. And I was so incredibly scared, but of course I did it anyway because I had to.

So first off mom called the dentist, got their address, and made an appointment for me at 12:20. But then they called me and said they had an opening at 10:20 so I went early.

When they x-rayed my tooth they saw that there was a big crack in it. Basically, the dentist said, they would pull off the broken part, and then they could see if it was possible to save my tooth or not.

So my chair was tipped way back and they gave me those sunglasses to wear and I think that was about when I started crying. It was so embarrassing. I have never done any sort of medical procedure without my mom sitting right there, and here was this strange doctor poking around in my mouth and I felt this huge overwhelming feeling of fear and loneliness. So I lay there, trying to stay calm, while little rivers of tears ran into my ears.

The verdict was this: either the tooth had to come out (cheep procedure) or I had to get a root canal and crown (expensive procedure.) Basically, do I want a gap in my grin for the rest of my life?

But I wasn’t the one paying for this procedure. My parents were. So I took a break to call them. My mom wouldn’t answer her phone (she still thought I wasn’t going in until 12:20), so I called my dad. “I’ll call mom and get back to you in 10 or 15 minutes,” said Dad.

So a half hour passed and the dentist and his assistant kept checking to see If I was ready yet and Dad would not call back and I was embarrassed. Finally I called him back and he said he couldn’t get a hold of mom and finally finally finally mom called and said to just go ahead and save the tooth, even though it was expensive.

Fine. So my mouth was propped open, and the dentist began to do a root canal.

But what? Something was wrong. I’m still not exactly sure what it was but they couldn’t do the root canal after all. A specialist in Pueblo would have to do it, or else I would just have to pull the tooth.

Well the good news was that this decision did not have to be made instantly. The bad news was…

• How am I supposed to get to Pueblo?
• MORE expense???
• MORE trouble???

So they gave me the info and I went home and I still don’t know what I’m gonna do cause I still haven’t talked to my parents cause my cell phone died.

I know Annie or the 50’s dinner would have been a more exciting topic but right now the tooth is weighing heavily on my mind.

But then my chin shot forward and hit the floor with a bone jarring thud. I looked around, slightly dazed, and realized that I was not in dreamland, there was no mysterious lady needing my help, and I had just hopped off of the top bunk when someone else’s alarm clock went off.

I was spending the night and Knepps, because all the parents and big kids were gone. It was 5:30 in the morning. Everyone was asleep but me. As I turned off the alarm clock and prepared to climb back into bed, I realized that my hand was wet.

Blood? Perhaps I scraped my chin up a bit. I went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and saw that my whole chin was bloody.

Nice. I got a washcloth and tried to wash it, but most of it wouldn’t come off. That’s when I realized that there was roughly a half inch squarish circlish patch of skin missing from my chin.

That’s when I started bawling and called my mom.

This happened not last night, but the night before. It is a bit improved by now, but I still had to stick my cereal and soy milk in the blender this morning and drink it. And the wound is closing. What originally looked like a patch of skin missing is now looking like a half inch cut, that got scraped way open.

I also have a bruise on my knee so I think I must have sort of landed on my chin and knees. But I was so out of it it’s hard to know.

Opening night of Annie is tonight! Yay!

And I missed my Thursday special. Oops! You have to forgive me though, my thoughts were consumed with hurriedly cleaning my house so that my landlord could show it to the real estate lady, trying to get a day’s worth of schoolwork in, blending up food, caring for my poor chin, and the last dress rehearsal. So stay tuned for next Thursday!

Ok, before I begin, I’d like to explain that since I was a blogger before this website came into existance, my original blog always seems to get first priority when I feel like blogging, leaving this one in sheer neglect. I am trying out a new method now, copying and pasting all my entries over to this blog even if they do not have anything whatsoever to do with my book. I may referance earlier posts, causing confusion, or I may talk about things that you won’t “get” unless you’re a Mennonite, but whatever, that’s just the way I blog. My “real” blog can be found at emilysmucker.wordpress.com

The kid in the green shirt got roped into curtain duty. So now he’ll be backstage all the time. Except when he’s on stage. Sweet.

Apparently my landlord is going to show my house to someone tomorrow. Which means I’ll have to get up early and clean. Fun fun. It also means that my landlord wants to sell my house. Even funner.

Why is it that I can never exactly remember what the positive reviews of my book have to say, but I can remember specifically every detail of criticism I’ve ever heard about my book? And even worse, I agree with them. Like, this one girl said that I kept repeating myself, especially when I talked about how I felt while I was sick. I actually laughed when I read that one, because I often think the same thing about my book. Honestly I didn’t have that much diversity in my feelings.

I just recently read two books on purity. The first was Passion and Purity, which I had to read for school. Then just the other day I got a package in the mail, and it turns out that Lorenda had sent me a book called Before you meet Prince Charming. I finished it in record time, and while those two books could spawn a whole boatload of deep thinking blog posts, I’ll focus on one subject I found amusing: dating.

Most of the time Elizabeth Elliot and Sarah Mally had very compatible views. Wait for the right guy, remain pure, etc. But when it came to the subject of dating, Sarah really had something to say on the matter, with long lists of why the world’s system of dating is wrong, how it’s much easier to get to know someone in a setting other than a date, etc. She was a little vague about what the alternative was, but she did mention courtship a few times, and it was obvious that she was one of these “courtship not dating” people. But from what I can gather, courtship, the system of dating I’m familiar with, going steady, etc, is all pretty much the same thing. Having a relationship with once specific guy, pretty much with marriage in mind, instead of going on casual dates for fun.

But in Passion and Purity, Elizabeth Elliot acted like this system of single one-time dates was the norm. Then, in one chapter, she goes off on a rant about “going steady.” She didn’t think it was fair for a guy and a girl to try to claim the other exclusively for themselves without committing themselves to getting married. It was a form of impatience, she said.

I find this kind of funny. But I think it goes to show that you can’t pin down one dating system and say, “this is the way it should always be.” Elizabeth’s own story of her and Jim’s relationship is proof of that in and of itself, I think. And both books brought up the subject of arranged marriages, and how in the days of arranged marriages the marriages lasted, and today they don’t. Why?

I started thinking of arranged marriages then. I thought, “If you had to either go out and pick a guy to marry, just pick him out without dating or anything, or let your parents do it, which would you choose?” And as much as I dislike the idea of arranged marriages, I really would have to let my parents do the picking. Which sort of put the whole thing in a new light.

Savannah made me a purse today. It’s pink.

I used to not like pink. It was too girly. Then once I asked my mom what her favorite color was and she said, “pink.” So then I thought perhaps it wasn’t too stupid to like pink and I’ve liked pink ever since.

But I used to feel sick looking at pale pink things. It was so weird. I remember talking about it with my cousin Hillary, and she said that pink made her feel sick too. But for her both bright pink and pale pink made her feel sick, while for me it was just pale pink.

This was at Jenny’s baby shower, so we’d have both been eight almost nine. Jenny had a lot of presents that came in big pink bags.

Now the end of this random post is near, and I am ready to hear you OPINIONS on one of the following three subjects:

Dating: What are your thoughts on the matter?

Arranged marriages: If you had to go pick out a guy to marry (without dating!) or let your parents do it, which would you choose?

Pink: have you ever felt sick looking at this color?

Come on folks! I’d love to hear what you think!

“Emily, be ready to go by 1:00 sharp,” Mom called through the door.

“1:00! I thought we were leaving at 2:00!”

“No,” said Mom patiently, “We start at 2:00, but it takes half an hour to get there, and it takes a little while to get in and set up…”

Oh great. I hurried to get ready.

When I put on the magenta button down shirt I realized I had made it a little too small. Not immodestly small, but small enough that it was uncomfortable. But of course I had no time to find something else to wear. Mom and I rushed out the door, with Jenny singing “It’s not, one-oh-clock sharp anymore, it’s not, one-oh-clock sharp anymore…”

But we made it in time anyway. And it was hot.

All the Authors were crammed behind this table in a room with a glass roof. It got hotter and hotter. And it was a slow day. We had wanted to be there on Senior day, which is always Wednesday and never slow. But for some reason they changed Senior day to Thursday so we were kind of sunk.

And hot.

My magenta shirt stuck to me. It was wet in various places. I could hardly stand it. So I went into the bathroom, tried to dry my shirt out by shaking it around, and leaned against the cool tile wall.

When I was done went and washed my hands, and then I opened the door to walk out. Lo and behold, I was staring into a broom closet.

Oops, wrong door.

I rejoined Mom. Hot hot hot.

Everyone seemed to have these paper fans. But where did they get them? At the Lane Community College both, I finally heard. So I went looking for the Lane Community College booth.

On the way I found a booth that sold these amazing bags from India. I admired them, but didn’t buy any.

Finally I found the free paper fans.

Carola Dunn, who wrote murder mysteries, had a British accent, and was probably the most interesting author there, had this really pretty folding fan. Later I was told that they sold fans like that at the same booth with the amazing bags from India, so I bought a couple. But by then it was cooling off some.

Anyway, so I fanned myself and drank water and tried to stay cool, but it wasn’t working. My shirt was too tight.

“I just wish I had a baggy t-shirt to wear,” I said in frustration.

“You know,” said Mom, “I think there was a booth that was giving away free t-shirts.”

So she went running off to see if she could get me a free t-shirt. When she came back she was holding a large blue thing. “The only size they had is extra large,” she said with a laugh.

I wore it anyway, and it made a world of difference. I could stand the heat after that.

It says Talecris Plasma Resources on the front and on the back it says DONORS ROCK!! with a big white guitar and an orange splash.

When I got home I made it into a dress and felt very creative.

That is the story of the big blue t-shirt.

The rest of the story of the fair is, I sold 18 books. It seemed like nothing after sitting in the heat for 6 hours but when I told the guy next to me how many I had sold he was amazed, so I guess I did OK.

But even not counting the books and despite the heat it was a lovely experience, chatting with the other authors, taking breaks to go look through booths, people watching, blue t-shirts…

Imagine that your whole life was just a couple weeks long.

And all you knew how to do was eat.

Oh, there’s a cake. Yum. Crunch crunch. (only I suppose you don’t really crunch cake unless it’s been sitting out for a long time but those were the only eating sounds I could think of.)

Look, there’s a cookie. I think I’ll eat that too.

Oops. I died.

And that was your whole entire life. How much impact could you make on the world?

Ultimately, that is the life of a mosquito. Only of course it’s not cake and cookies they’re eating, it’s a meal of horse blood here, another meal of Emily blood there…

And then it dies, but it’s changed someone’s life forever.

Somehow that just about blows my mind.

That all the horror of my west nile was the fault of such an insignificant thing.

And all the wonderful loveliness of my book was, again, because of such an incredibly small creature. After all, without my west nile I would have had nothing to write a book about.

If you think your life is insignificant, remember the mosquito.

That is all I have to say.