when at first i don't succeed,

nothing short of expletives could express my frustration right now. i just finished a long, personal, gratifying post and my internet connection faltered as i hit 'publish', losing the entire thing! grr..
i definitely can't retype it so here's the bare bones version:

i almost drove to detroit tomorrow a.m. for an audition for a lead in a dreamworks film starring beyonce' knowles. i stopped myself when i realized the call was for plus-sized african-american women only...most of me was glad i caught that detail *before* trekking to the metro, but i admit the storyteller in me wished i had missed it and gone - it would have made great material...

today i saw melvin, my favorite cat who lives at mom nakamura's farm. he was born in my closet when i was an adolescent, and my mom gave him to justin's mom a couple of years ago...a lanky, neurotic, slightly aloof creature..he's really happy there now, but when he sees me, he always saunters up and looks right in my eyes(cats usually don't do that), stares right into them and makes his gravelly 'smoker's meow' sound. and sometimes he presses his small golden forehead against mine and just leaves it there for a long moment. i think i'm his conduit to another world full of feline memories... justin says he's probably thinking,"you remind me of this girl i knew once a long time ago..."

last night at rehearsal for camelot, we danced for three hours straight..or, i should say, they danced - i tried to act the part of dancer. please pray for the young man who has to pick me up and twirl me in a circle...he had to do it probably fifteen times last night..and if i weigh$$$, and he lifted me 15 times, that means he lifted a total of #!*%, which means you should pray for him.

we helped mom pick up about 250 bales of hay from the field today, which is a pretty small load compared to what we're used to. As we stood around after throwing the last bale up onto the trailer, we looked at the neighboring field and joked at the trail of bales dropping behind the farmer's baler as it chugged along..
"good thing that's not OUR hay! heh heh.."
"OH NO! guys, we have to start all over and pick up that WHOLE field too!!.....HAHAHHA!!! just kidding!"
"seriously, isn't it nice to have a small load for once?"

yeah, you can see it coming. i got a call at 10 pm from mom nakamura, who had just gotten a call from the farmer, who wondered why we didn't pick up the neighboring field of OUR HAY! so mom and the volunteer who's staying the night(our valiant courtney-you met her last week digging trenches and staying on a bucking horse) converged with justin in the field. right now, in the dark, the three of them are loading several hundred bales onto trailers that have already been loaded and unloaded once today..
for those of you who haven't thrown hay before, here are a few fun facts:
each bale weighs between 50-80 lbs.
each person lifts almost every bale since it works best in an assembly line.
to protect your legs from hay rash, you wear long heavy jeans even in the late summer heat.
you brave the rash with your arms because it's simply too hot to bear long sleeves as well.
for days afterward, the people you interact with are divided into two categories:
those who have done hay before and wordlessly understand,
and those who ask you what kind of rabid hamsters attacked your arms..

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