Oh, what a week

As usual, just when lots of blog-worthy things were happening, I had no time to blog. The past week has been one of the most jam-packed on record: we put on a show, we packed up all our belongings, we moved said belongings into storage, and we drove from Houston to Vienna... Virginia.

There's at least a week's worth of material in there. I could tell you about how a week that I dreaded for months turned out to be incredibly rewarding, exciting, and generally great (surely there's a lesson in there somewhere). About how, despite all my questions and quandaries about what I want to do with my life (or even the next few years), I was reminded that this job is something I love and something I do very well. Or about sitting on the lawn during Saturday night's Tosca performance listening to the whole audience erupt in cheers when Tosca killed Scarpia, and the woman behind me who yelled, "You GO, girl!" I could fill you in on all the details of our highly organized move, but I don't have the words to tell you about the most important detail of all: our amazing friends, who turned out (in shifts, no less) to help us pack and unpack the moving truck, bringing with them laughter, support, and (of course) muscles of steel. I could tell you about the tears that came as I stood with CM in our empty apartment, the first home we shared. Or about inadvertently dropping off our apartment keys early in our hurry to get out of town, and almost being stuck outside with the Bossy Cat stuck inside.

The road trip could provide plenty of blog fodder as well. There was the carefully researched town an hour outside of Houston where we spent our first night, only to discover it was a pizza no man's land, when pizza was all we wanted. There was the Bossy Cat, who roamed all over the car looking for a good spot and wound up on a pillow between us in the front seat. There was some quality time spent with Papa Melear, who just moved to Tennessee a week ago and is already more settled in than we ever were in a year and a half of living in our apartment, and the incredibly Southern pancake house he took us to for breakfast, which had a waitress whose accent and voice have to be heard to be believed. There was the novelty of being in the same car with CM after 2 years of making the same drive in separate cars, and the relief on arriving at our fantastic apartment in Tysons Corners.

It's too much. I'll never get through everything. How about I just show you some pictures instead?

Scarpia, Tosca, Maestro CameraMan, and me

Empty apartment

The whole family in the car



CM's Tennessee biscuits and gravy



The Melear men