What can I say? The shingles is continuing to drive me bonkers. The systemic illness is more or less over and I no longer feel sick per se, but the rash area is alternating between numb and red hot poker and the hypersensitive skin over my whole torso gets irritated with every move, especially when clothes ride over it. I’ve thought about asking if I can go to work in the nude to avoid this problem but I don’t quite think either UAB or the VA is ready for that. I went out of the house this am without taking my meds so I didn’t even have some Tylenol on board so this afternoon was a bit of a chore. Now that I’ve gotten back home, loaded up on Tylenol, Celebrex and gabapentin, I’m in a bit better mood.
I will be leaving for Europe on Thursday. Please send good vibes that I won’t spend a transatlantic flight wishing to rip my skin off the entire way. Once I get there, I figure I’ll be able to keep myself relatively distracted and that should help some with the pain. I’ll take my meds with me as well. Two more work days to go and I have to make sure that I have everything squared away for an absence of three weeks. The travelogue will start up on either Thursday or Friday. It will be thirty five years, almost to the day since I last flew into Amsterdam so that should give me some thought tangents for some good stories. I have the travel diary I kept on that trip (in longhand – there was no internet yet). I should break it out and read it and see what was going through 22 year old Andy’s head.
I’ll be taking my Choir Boy script with me so I can pound lines. I’m supposed to be off book for the first rehearsal on July 28th. I usually play bit character parts without a whole lot of lines. I’ll have to up my game for this one. I was able to memorize Scrooge in A Christmas Carol a couple years ago so I should be able to do this as well. I’ve gotten some good news on some other projects for next season but things cannot yet be discussed publicly. Y’all will know in good time.
A combination of pain making me feel rotten and pain meds making me feel sleepy has put me way behind on writing. I have a couple of movies that require MNM columns and I am half way through a new chunk of book that I have to finish. I’ll get to it when I get to it. In the meantime, I lie around rewatching Game of Thrones from the beginning. (I’m just finishing season 6). When that show was good, it was like nothing else. I doubt we’ll see it’s like again although Hollywood will try. There’s a Tolkien series and a Wheel of Time series in the works. Rosamund Pike has just been cast as Moiraine in the WoT. She’s the right type, but way too tall. Moiraine is supposed to be physically tiny which is what makes her power all the more remarkable as she reveals it to our heroes as they escape the Two Rivers. (Nerd moment there…)
Life, The Universe, and Everything 