This chiropractor is the one that knows to lighten up when I come to the office or I’ll be too nervous for anything to crack back into place, so he let down his official Dr. face when I walked into the office.  After exclaiming that this most certainly must be “National Melody Gets Injured Year” I tried to explain what happened to my ankle.

Well – I didn’t really have anything to say, because I couldn’t remember hurting it and so I just pointed to the spot where it hurt and then sat down on the table.  (Ok, so somehow I managed to find a lot to say, but it wasn’t really anything important.)  Customarily, he started probing my ankle and turning it this way and that; with each new direction he asked me if it hurt.  One thing hurt a smidge more, so I commented, but then offered that it didn’t hurt too bad.  He countered: “I know, you would have gone ‘ahhh ouch!’ if it had.” (His imitation of my reaction was quite precise – in falsetto and everything, lol.)

After some more diagnosing, he started pulling on my ankle.  Finally, I had to hold onto the table and he gave one hard yank.  A very loud pop resonated in the office as my ankle went to it’s rightful spot and I lay there in shock; there hadn’t been pain, but the pop sound was enough to make my insides quake.

“That was loud.” he commented factually.

“Well, I just had to be dramatic.” :-P I said, trying to shake out the quivering.  (He laughed at that – and this guy rarely laughs.)

After a few minutes of letting me calm down (his words precisely) the Dr. told me what happened.  Somehow, my tibia bone, which ordinarily rests on this ankle joint – he told me the name and I can’t remember it, starts with an M though – the bone had lodged itself deeper into the joint then it was supposed to be. Thankfully no ligaments or muscles were injured at all, so now I just have to rest the foot a bit more. (Ha! reasons why that is impossible will be disclosed soon ;-)

~Ellie

So now I’m trying to decide if I should just go when I can, or should I find a new church…  Most of my friends who went to my church have moved out of the area, so it wouldn’t be that major to go somewhere else, but I don’t want to.  I want my cake, and eat it too – as the saying goes.

I guess there’s just something hard about starting over again. and again. and again.  Me, who has always been a social butterfly and loved meeting new people suddenly has no drive to make new friends.  It’s weird, but I feel like the older I get the less friendly people seem to be.  We just get set in our patterns and ways that to be fully welcoming and friendly is unthinkable.  Maybe I’ve just been around the dance community too long.

But back to churches.  I’m just frustrated that the one church I want to invest myself in is at a time that goes against the career I feel strongly to pursue.

Come to think of it.  I guess it really doesn’t even matter, because I don’t have a car to go anywhere anyway.  So it turns out that this really does revolve around the Car/Job conundrum after all :-P

“the sun’ll come out, tomorrow…”
~Ellie 

This morning I took it upon myself to find a great chiropractor that works with dancers.  Considering the last chiropractor I tried offered the advice: “you just need to stop stretching,” I specifically wanted to find someone who understands how dancing works and would be helpful in figuring out what was wrong with me.  So off to google I went.  The very first hit was just what I was looking for!  This Dr. had been a professional dancer for many years and then went into chiropractoring because he saw a lack of knowledge of dancers in that field.  He now runs a thriving office.  GREAT!  Then I realized the importance of details.

This doctor is located in Arizona…

~Ellie

In the interim of my last post and now, I graduated.  From all the hype about college, I thought I might feel a tinge of excitement or pride or something.  But somehow, I just don’t feel like I went to college.  Sure, I stayed in a dorm with strangers and I took a bunch of classes, but what was so great about that?  I’m now trying to figure out a job that’s going to pay off my zillion dollar debt.  (not to mention the fact that I don’t have a car; I’m just in one of those ‘need money to get a car. need a job to get money. need a car to get a job.’ situations.)  Anyhow, my family came and picked me up and the whole drive home I was hoping to feel at least some sort of excitement or pride or something, but no.  Maybe eventually I’ll figure out what I’m missing, but until then, maybe I’ll pretend to be excited.

Aside from that.  I’m home again.  And it’s a little odd.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my family dearly and want to be here.  But at the same time, I feel almost trapped.  It’s like, here, I’m happy and don’t want things to change.  But I know they will, and being here – where there is so much familiarity – just makes it harder.  Coming back to something I held dear only to have there be changes is proving more difficult then I thought.

A friend’s mom always says that God will not take away something good from your life without replacing it with something just as good or better.  So for now, I’m clinging to the hope that one of these days, a change will happen that will be good…

Me.

Now, be forewarned, I have tried to ride with flat back tire, and it didn’t not work.  Perhaps some are able to figure out how to ride, but I am going to focus on the front tire.

First, you must pump the tire so you think it will be fine.  Then about halfway to your destination it can deflate.

Second, with the newly flattened tire, you’ll have to slow your speed down quite a bit.  If your tire is bent like mine you’ll have to pay extra attention to staying straight, because as you are riding very slowly, it will be difficult to keep the bike upright.  *If you happen to keep a pair of training wheels in your bag, this would be the time to attach them, however, if you don’t have training wheels, then continue reading.*

Third, be prepared to use your legs to help stop the bike. You can try to use the brakes to help, but because the tire is very squishy, the brakes will squeeze the tire without slowing it down at all.

Fourth, remember that corners are going to be tricky.  With a flat tire, as the bike starts to tip, you might end up riding on the rim of the wheel instead of the tire.  This means you will need to come to a slow creep in order to keep the bike upright as you round the corner.

And that, my friends, is how you ride a bike with a flat front tire.  Please let me know if you have any questions.  I am quite experienced in this field and will do my best to assist in any way I can ;-)

~Ellie

It’s simply dreadful how much I have neglected updating you, but the last 8 weeks of classes kept me doing homework almost every moment of my day.  (And when I was not doing homework the last thing I felt like doing was writing…)  There were so many things that happened that I wanted to blog about, but I kept forgetting to write them down; so here I sit with nothing specific to write.

My spring break felt like a dream.  Not in an ethereal, blissful sort of way…  It was as if I fell asleep dreamed for five minutes that I was home and then someone shook me and I realized I was still in FL.  I am fully aware that I did go home, but it was particularly a whirlwind of a break.  To give you an example of how busy I was, my twin and I didn’t even get a chance to get together!

Friday morning proved to be an adventure for sure.  I was supposed to have a Chiropractor appointment at 8am.  Yes, 8 am on a friday morning.  Considering I have no car anymore, my mom and I took my dad to work (which meant I had to get up around 6:45am…) and then drove down to the dr’s office.  All during the drive, I kept trying to get my phone to turn on and it simply wouldn’t.  Having just charged it the day before, I thought it was a little odd that it wasn’t working, but there was nothing I could do about it.  We got to the office, and after filling out a bunch of paperwork, I handed it in around 8.  By the looks of things, I got the feeling my appointment was going to start late.  Around 8:20 my mom got a call from my sister.  A look of concernment crossed her face, and after a few “uh-huh” “ok” and “I’ll be right there” she hung up and told me what happened.  My sister’s car had run out of gas: in the driveway.  She was getting ready to leave for school and her car would not start, so my mom had to drive all the way back home to get her, drive her all the way to the school, and then drive all the way back to the chiropractor’s office.  I told her not to worry, there were plenty of magazines to keep me busy until she got back.

Off she went and there I sat.  My eyes carefully tried averting the box of donuts – quite unsuccessfully – so I sat there thinking how yummy they looked and how long I had been sitting there.  Thankfully, a nurse soon came to rescue me from the view and she took me for a tour of the office.  It was very impressive looking – all the equiptment for whatever you could need – there were 6 adjustment rooms.  That seemed a big silly, because why would one doctor need six rooms?  Then I found out there was more then one doctor working there… Anyway.  Because it was my first time at this office, they had me watch this video about the benefits of chiropractory.  Seriously?  Yes.  Why I would need to watch this when I was already at the chiropractors didn’t make sense – it only made me more nervous because I saw them cracking other people.  This video was also clearly made in the early 90′s…  But finally after watching this video, the doctor came in and was very helpful.  (I discovered that I apparently over-stretch :-/ try explaining that to a dance teacher when I don’t have all my splits yet…)  Eventually I found my way back to the lobby (my tour of the place left me quite turned around) and paid.  As I went to sit down to wait for my mom, one of the nurses looked out the window and said: “I think your mom is here; she drives a minivan?”  Yes, that was her – it was 9:20am.  That has got to be the longest experience at the chiropractor’s I’ve ever had.  But at least I felt better!

Later that day while costuming shopping, we wound up lost about an hour from home – but that’s another story…

And now it’s time to get my mind back into gear.  I have seven weeks of classes left until I graduate.  This is gonna be crazy.  But now that I’m finished my online class, I promise to keep you updated a bit more regularly.
~Ellie

This extraordinarily random thought process was prompted by my voice lesson on Wednesday.  I haven’t had a voice lesson in about 3 years, so I was very excited.  We spent the whole lesson breathing (well, the teacher was breathing and I was discovering something I thought I had been doing my whole life somehow was incorrect…) and vocalizing.  There came a point when she looked at me and kept telling me to relax my face, first my eyebrows then my jaw then my lips etc.  Confusion burst out in my mind because I was simply vocalizing with my singer face – the one where your eyebrows are slightly lifted, you’re smiling just a touch and singing five notes on the vowel “eh” is the most sincere thing you’ve ever done (slightly CelticWoman esque).

In instructing me to practice without said face I came upon a conundrum. (not sure that’s the appropriate word, but I like how it sounds…)  What would it be like if I sang as me?  Stop.  What?  But I don’t sing?  Part of what I like about musical theater is that I’m someone else when I sing.  Vocalizing fits into the category of being someone else, too – um, somehow.  I stood in the mirror trying to figure out how on earth to  sing up and down the scales without my singer face; not being a pretend person was entirely difficult.  So I came up with a plan.  I simply need to pretend to be someone who doesn’t make faces when they sing.  But that didn’t quite work.

So now I’m in the process of discovering who Melody the singer is, while trying to breathe silently :-/  Thankfully warming up won’t always take up the whole lesson and I can get back to being the me who heartily enjoys being someone else :)

~Ellie

In order to follow my steps, you must have frozen long grain brown rice and have taken it out of the freezer and let it soak in water for about 8 hours.  Then you empty the soaking rice and water (non measured, of course) into a pot.  Turn the burner on HI and then walk out of the room.  It is imperative that you take no note of what time you started cooking – or else you’d actually know what time it should be done. (if you know how long it is supposed to cook for that is, and the truly ignorant cook, doesn’t…)

After spending about 15 minutes on the computer you decide it will be a good idea to check the rice and make sure nothing is going wrong.  You see, if you are cooking the correct way, by this point it would have boiled over if you were out of the room.  Recalling that you haven’t heard any singing coming from the burner, you look in the kitchen and discover that you forgot to put the lid on the pot.  So now, most of your water is boiled away, and the rice really hasn’t cooked too much.  Immediately you should reach for the lid (if you can find it) and cover the pot to help the rice cook the rest of the time.  Only, because it has been cooking without the lid for so long, the water immediately revolts and starts bubbling twice as much and trying to escape from the pot.  Turning the burner off of Hi and down to Low at this point would be a good idea.

Because of the violence with which the water is boiling, you’ll need to stay watching the pot and constantly lifting the lid up so the bubbles die down a bit.  Taste testing the rice is quite silly because it won’t be done.  Just let the water finish boiling out which should take about 3 minutes.  (Timing suddenly must become important because you’ve washed too many burnt pots.)  Then you’ll take the pot off the burner, put the lid in the sink, grab a spoon, and enjoy.  The rice will taste unique.  It isn’t uncooked, but it’s not quite fully cooked either…

And that, my friends, is how not to make rice.
~Ellie

Shortly after getting settled in the waiting area, a plane landed and the people started exiting.  It must have been from the Netherlands, or the like, because the only person who came off speaking English was wearing a PSU sweatshirt.  Everyone else was dressed very Europeanesque and spoke what sounded like Dutch.

Aside from the distraction of the people getting off the plane, there really isn’t too much to do while you’re waiting to catch your flight, except maybe people watch.  There aren’t nearly as many unique characters this time, most people seem to be quite normal.  Except there’s one girl who is quite unique.  She’s got two bags, one purple bookbag, and one purple medium size suitcase.  Both of these bags look like their completely stuffed and would explode were they to be opened.  I got an image of when Lucy is trying to pack everything for a trip and she sits on the case while Ethel tried to shut it.

Anyhow, this girl is wearing dangly earrings that match her sweater and then extremely fancy spoke earrings in her second hole that really doesn’t match the lower earrings.  Accompanying earrings in the jewelry department are two mismatching bracelets – one on each arm – and three non-coordinating necklaces – a key, a long/big heart/a short locket.  She’s wearing a cream jacket/sweatshirt over a regular green sweater, over another green shirt.  I do believe were she to have found a way, she’d have worn several pairs of shoes.

By the interesting array of clothes, it would seem to me that perhaps she simply could not fit another thing into her bags, and therefore settled for wearing whatever else she could.  In an effort to remain slightly hidden, she’s wearing a black hat pulled quite over her eyes.  Were she not so silly looking, one might think she’d be a suspicious character.  I can only imagine the looks she got while going through security…

And now I’d better get my computer back in my bag; if it’ll fit.  My stuff just might explode if I’m not careful.  Yes, I am the crazy girl with the layers that didn’t fit in the exploding luggage :-P

~Ellie

My living room has been in a crazy array of clothes all day today.  For part of my senior project, I’m putting together dances to a few songs from Les Miserables.  While I’m home where there is a car, my mom and I figured we’d do some costume shopping.  After hitting four thrift stores yesterday, I got most of what I needed.  However, I came to the discovery that it’s not good enough to find rags, they have to be rags that can be danced in.  And it would be nice if they all coordinated in some way.  Then there’s the process of trying to compare everyone’s figure to mine or my mom’s to see if the costume will fit.  Considering most people are tinier then I am, my mom very graciously tried on most everything at the thrift stores to determine if it would work or not and we went from there.

I, however, was the raggedy scarf and shawl tryer-on-er.  You see, in “At The End Of The Day” there’s this pose that is quite linked with the song of people struggling with their life and reaching forward as if for help.  Like this:

So, I made sure that every scarf and shawl were able to aid the wearer in looking desperate for a better life.  While singing at the top of my lungs :-)

Deciding it’d be best to lay out everything together to see what I still needed to get, we got the thrift store costumes, the costumes from our attic, and the costumes from our dress-up closet and laid everything that could be considered on the living room floor.  Several of the skirts were too narrow to dance in, and a slit wouldn’t work, so that helped eliminate some options.  Eventually we got most of the outfits together and came to the conclusion that it was actually a pretty nice pile of raggedy clothes.  I made a list of the few things missing and then we put all the costumes back into bags.

After such a successful time with the first dance, I was hoping subsequent costuming would go equally as smoothly.  Dumb assumption…  Now there’s about 8 1950′s style dresses gracing the living room floor trying to be sorted into color, size, and dance piles.

But I suppose that will just have to wait until tomorrow, as my brain needs a break!
~Ellie