Category: Blog Posts About Me

I volunteered for Bring Your Child to Work Day this year and had fun watching the kids yesterday.  Ironically I think they taught me more than I taught them.  Our group had three volunteers for about 60 kids but they were surprisingly well behaved.  I had two bathroom runs, rescued a girl who lost her shoe in a race, and had to separate a battle for a wristband but we didn’t lose anyone so I considered it a success.  🙂

Cathy from Energy Operations was there to teach the kids about renewable energy.  For some reason my camera couldn’t focus very well with the bright window behind her but it is still watchable.  I loved watching the kids perk right up when she mentioned candy for getting the answers right.  She was vying against cartoons for their attention but candy prevails.

Eric the Magician (Eric Tate) was there to entertain the kids and it was fun to watch how skeptical they were of “magic”.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, we went to see Wicked on Saturday night at the Orpheum Theatre.  The Safeway Employees’ Association (SEA) was one of the group sponsors that night, so there were a bunch of people from Safeway.  Before the show, we went to Osha Thai for dinner, which was really nice.  We sat in the balcony, which ended up being great.  I never once thought we were sitting too far away, or it was too difficult to see what was going on.  Even though I wasn’t allowed to take pictures in the theater, I was able to go to the Orpheum website and get a virtual view of our seat location, which is shown below.  The theater was spectacular, but I am easy to impress, being that I don’t go into buildings like that every day.

I expected to not like it as I was fully expecting another rendition of The Nutcracker (sorry, hate it) but was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually loved it.  It wasn’t boring at all, the singing and dancing was good and most importantly I was engaged, which isn’t always easy being that I have the attention span of a two-year-old sometimes.  We got there a few minutes early and talked to the usher for a few minutes about the show.  She told us Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) was being played by Vicki Noon who is an understudy but was better than the person who normally plays her, so as she put it: “we were in for a treat.”  Elphaba (Vicki Noon) rocked it, I loved her singing.  The show was funny in parts, the costumes were great, the stage was all decked out (awesome dragon hanging above it), the acting was great, the sound was awesome, and if you ever get the chance you have to see it.  Who would have thought I would ever say that!

Beginning of the Show

Grand Finale

Gary and Charisse invited us to join them at the Brentwood Cornfest last night in Brentwood, CA.  Charisse works for the High School so she was able to get us into where they shoot off the fireworks from the school football field.  Being so close to the fireworks was great because they were really LOUD (the first few were really loud) and really BRIGHT.  To give you an idea of how close we were, I kept having to shift the video because my camera was zoomed all of the way out.  The weather was fantastic last night too, not too hot and not too cold which made for a great evening.