As with most of the rest of the country, Jennifer and I had a three day weekend. During the week leading up to it, Jennifer was wanting to know what we should do to occupy our time. We couldn’t do a road trip, because we’ve been saving up for another vacation coming up in June. While the comic convention Comicpalooza was going on at the George R. Brown convention center, I didn’t feel much like going, and I knew Jennifer wouldn’t want to go. In the end, Jennifer decided she was going to do something she had been wanting to do for years, and that was repaint the guest bedroom.

Jennifer has never liked the paint color of the guest bedroom. She had originally planned for it to be the “red room”, as each room in the house is painted a different color. The red color she had picked was supposed to be a rust red color, but it wasn’t until she had the walls painted that it turned out to be an ugly reddish-brown color. Since then, the room has been referred to as the “brown room”. The brown room over the years became a sort of catch-all dumping ground room, with one of the cats’ litter boxes in the back corner, Jennifer’s old school desk filled with books from our childhoods against one wall, and a corner filled with boxes of wrapping paper and the kitty carriers. About the only times the room was used as anything but a dumping ground was when the cats used the litter box, or when my friend George would stay the night during one of our game nights. (The litter box would then go into my office for the duration of his stay.)

We decided early on that the two main tasks of our work on the guest bedroom were to paint the walls and get rid of much of the clutter. To that end, we spent most of Friday evening moving all of the furniture out except for the bed and the dresser; those two items were going to stay anyway and would have been too awkward to move, so we covered them with massive drop cloths. We didn’t find a paint color we liked until we went to Lowe’s Saturday morning. The paint color we ended up getting was a much lighter shade of brown that ended up looking a lot nicer on the wall. We spent most of Saturday afternoon painting the bedroom with the first coat, and let it dry overnight. Sunday morning, we got up bright and early to apply the second coat of paint (plus touch up the areas we missed with the first coat). It went pretty well, other than the fact that we ran out of paint before hitting the last wall. We had to go out that afternoon anyway (we had tickets to the Alley Theatre production of Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club), so while we were out we picked up another gallon of paint, and finished the room that night.

This morning, we finally got around to taking all of the drop cloths off and rearranging the room. The desk was not put back into place; we decided to move that to the library, which will replace the white couch we have in there now. The couch itself is going to Purple Heart, as we never use it and it’s only used by the cats. Thus, whenever someone sits on it, they’re covered in cat fur. The kitty carriers went into our main closet, while the wrapping paper went into Jennifer’s office for the time being. The bedside table went into our bedroom while a smaller one took its place in the brown room. We also rearranged the room, and the new arrangement gives an illusion of a lot more space than was originally present. The litter box went back in, of course; it’ll be moved back into my office whenever we have company staying the night.

All in all, we can say we’ve had a very productive weekend. We are very happy with how the room turned out, and Jennifer has said repeatedly that the color of the walls is so much better than what they originally were. While we don’t intend for the room to become a dumping ground again, we can’t guarantee it won’t. As it stands, this has been the beginning of several changes in the house. The library is already being redone, as is the front part of the living room. Of course, we can’t finish the library until we get the appropriate furniture donated. Still, we’re happier with how the house looks now, and can’t wait to finish implementing all of the changes we’re working on.

So, Jennifer and I have been taking advantage of seeing local theatre here in Houston over the past few months.

I have to admit that before I dated Jennifer, I wasn’t really into theatre at all. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it; I simply didn’t know anyone who really wanted to go and I didn’t feel like going by myself. Furthermore, I had never been to anything like a small community theatre, so going to those never occurred to me either. However, it turned out Jennifer was a theatre geek, to the point where her bookshelves have several plays on them. Needless to say, since then we’ve been to plenty of live performances.

This year we’ve actually been to two performances at the Alley Theatre, which is Houston’s largest theatre company, thanks to tickets provided to us by our friend Julie. The first play we saw was A Few Good Men; we didn’t know what to expect from it, but as it turned out we enjoyed it a lot more than we did the movie with Tom Cruise. We also saw The Elephant Man, which, despite its name, is NOT connected to the movie starring John Hurt. That one was well-acted, but to be perfectly honest we’re not sure we liked the story itself. We have tickets to see Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club this weekend; being a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, I’m really looking forward to seeing this story, even if it isn’t based on an actual Arthur Conan Doyle story. :-)

We’ve also been going to smaller theatre productions as well. As I mentioned in an earlier post, a new theatre group called Bayou City Theatrics is in town. Since the last post, we’ve seen their productions of Little Shop of Horrors and Aida (the Elton John/Tim Rice musical, not the Giuseppe Verdi opera). Little Shop of Horrors was well done and we really enjoyed it. Aida, on the other hand, was a bit weaker. The woman who played Aida wasn’t that good; in fact, Jennifer pointed out that the woman who played Nehebka would have been a better Aida in her opinion. Also, unlike the previous two shows Bayou City Theatrics put on, Aida was done in a black box theatre configuration, and as such there were several times when we found it difficult to hear what the actors were saying or singing. We consider this a one-off; we’re still almost certainly going to go to their next performance.

We’ve even branched out a bit to smaller local theatres. On Sunday, we went with our friends Debby and Scott to the Pearl Theater in our home of Pearland to see their performance of Murder at the Howard Johnson’s. One might not think that Pearland would be home to a local theatre, and I would not blame anyone who does; it actually took us a bit of time to locate the theatre, as it was located in the sticks of Pearland in a converted small factory building. I have to say, the seats were comfortable and they did a great job with the set. However, none of us had heard of the play before we got tickets, so before the show started we looked it up on Wikipedia. When the play was over, we understood why it only lasted three performances on Broadway: in short, it was pretty dreadfully written and not very funny at all. The actors did the best they could with the material they had to work with, but they just could not overcome the bad writing. We’ll probably give them another chance, but we weren’t that impressed with our first show there.

I suppose the sad thing is that for the latter two groups, the shows we saw were the last of the season, and the Alley has one more show before their season ends. However, I’m not a big fan of Agatha Christie, so I don’t think missing the last Alley show will hurt my feelings too much. Still, I’m hoping Bayou City Theatrics gets a second season, and we may give Pearl Theater a second chance. As for the Alley, we’ll see what they have to offer next season. In any event, I enjoyed myself at these live theatre productions, and I’m looking forward to more.