For those of us here in Spokane there was quite a buzz around the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee attending the national community theatre competition in Rochester New York this year.  (AACTFEST occurs every other year and is hosted at a different location each time it is held.)

The “BEEs” brought home a couple of Awards… one for Musical Direction (Nancy Vancil) , and another for Best Supporting Actress (Lacey Bohnet).  We’re proud of all of them and appreciate their commitment to the art.

If you are interested in the run down of the awards you can go to the official site http://www.aact.org/aactfest/aactfest11.html.. I have quoted the award components below

AWARDS

Backstage Award — Musical – Sunday in the Park with George
Backstage Award — Play – Wiley and the Hairy Man 

Overall Best Production – Dog Sees God — Ohlook Performing Arts Center, Grapevine, TX
Runner-Up: Urinetown: the Musical -- Center Stage — Midland Center for the Arts, Midland, MI
2nd Runner-up: Sunday in the Park With George — Manatee Players, Bradenton, FL

Lead Actor
Nominations:
From The Zoo Story, Patrick Cathcart (Jerry)
From Second Samuel, Jonathan Conner (B-Flat)
From Dog Sees God, Evan Spreen (C.B.)
From The Bear, Gene Ravvin (Smirnov)
Winner: Patrick Cathcart

Lead Actress
Nominations:
From The Bear, Alana Kumalagova (Popova)
From Sunday in the Park With George, Dianne Dawson (Dot)
From Parallel Lives, Gail Montgomery
Winner: Dianne Dawson

Director:
From Dog Sees God, Jill Blalock
From Urinetown, Bill Anderson, Jr.
From The Bear, Igor Golyak
From Wiley & the Hairy Man, Cheryl Kramer-Milder
Winner: Jill Blalock

Supporting Actor
From The Bear, Eduard Snitkovsky (Luka)
From Spelling Bee, Mark Pleasant (Lief)
From Second Samuel, Steve Mitchell (U.S.)
From Dog Sees God, Lloyd Harvey (Beethoven)
From Urinetown, Paul Yakuber (Lockstock)
Winner: Lloyd Harvey

Supporting Actress
From Sunday in the Park with George, Grace Gibbs, Yvonne
From Spelling Bee, Lacey Bohnet, Olive
From Dog Sees God, Lacey Jane Smith, C.B.’s Sister
From Urinetown, Carol Rhumba, Pennywise
Winner: Lacey Bohnet

Costume Design:
From Sunday in the Park with George, David Walker
From Wiley and the Hairy Man, Cheryl Kramer-Milder
From Urinetown, Laurelei Horton
Winner: David Walker

Lighting Design
From The Bear, Mike McTeague
From Hauptmann, Dan LaMorte
From Spelling Bee, Bryan Durbin
From Wiley & the Hairy Man, Frank Milder
Winner: Frank Milder

Sound Design
From The Bear, Igor Golyak & Mike McTeague
From Wiley & the Hairy Man, Frank Milder
From Dog Sees God, Jill Blalock
Winner: Jill Blalock

Best Ensemble
Spelling Bee
Parallel Lives
Dog Sees God
Winner: Dog Sees God

Featured Actor
From Sunday in the Park With George, Ken Basque (Mister)
From Second Samuel, Brad Moon (Doc)
From Dog Sees God, Matt Purvis (Van)
Winner, Matt Purvis

Featured Actress
From Sunday in the Park With George, Ellie Pattison (Nurse, Peaches)
From Dog Sees God, Heather Biddle, Van’s Sister
From Urinetown, R. Jeanne Gilbert, Josephine Strong
Winner: Josephine Strong

Scenic Design
From Hauptmann, Dan LaMorte
From Sunday in the Park with George, Mark Lalosh
From Urinetown, Bill Anderson, Jr.
Winner: Urinetown

Discretionary Awards
Scenery & Projections: Mark Lalosh, Sunday in the Park With George
Choreography, Kelli Jolly, Urinetown
Musical Accompaniment, Spelling Bee
Outstanding Choral Ensemble, Urinetown

Here in Spokane we just had the Broadway tour of “Wicked” roll through.  If you have never seen the production I would highly recommend it.

The show is filled with some absolutely awesome songs like Defying Gravity and Popular but there is this song called For Good that really moved me.   Once I got home, I opened up YouTube and had to find it again.  I had a Facebook friend recently remind me of the talent of Sam Tsui and when I saw he was doing this song I had to share it.

So the Ponder part of this blog post…  In our day to day interactions with everyone in our lives I can’t help but wonder what or how those interactions effect me and my outlook on things.  How a new perspective or the simple interaction of a simple wave or a Facebook post causes me to be different in some way.  Do you remember in the movie Jurassic Park when Ian was talking about his theory and he used the water running down her hand as an example?  Totally unpredictable and the fact that it did something one way in that exact point in time would not necessarily be true if done again because we can’t get back to that exact point in time and the exact conditions that caused the result… The idea that everything in the world has a connection at some level is rather interesting to think about.   How do the things I say and do effect others and how do they effect me?

Anyway this song is awesome, sung by Sam Tsui and Nick Pitera.  It is my favorite piece from Wicked.   What do you think?

As many of you know I am involved with local theatre.  I don’t get on the stage but really love the tech and crew stuff and have been stage manager, light board operator, and stage crew.  The current production I am involved with is at the Lake City Playhouse in Coeur d’ Alene, ID.  It is called Urinetown.  BAD Title, Great Show.   The show is built on the premise of worldwide ecological disaster causing extreme measures to be taken to support society.  One of those extreme measures to control water usage is that all toilets are public and you must pay a fee to use them.  If you choose to violate the laws in this regard you are carted off to this place called “Urinetown” which as Little Sally (one of our characters) describes it is a metaphysical place.

Beyond the central concept of the show however is a show filled with parody, jokes, and a huge amount of energy!  We have an extremely talented cast and the first time I heard them sing some of these multipart harmony rounds I was absolutely amazed!!!   Not to mention the choreography… all just TOP NOTCH.  This is community theatre, small stage, entirely volunteer and the product that they put on the stage is absolutely wonderful.

If you enjoy theatre and you happen to be in the Spokane or Coeur d’Alene area I would encourage you to attend and not just because I am working the show but because it is just so much fun.  You will be treated with some choreography and musical styles from other shows you may know… shows like Les Miserables, Fiddler on the Roof, or Westside Story, and you will be supporting local community theatre at the same time.  You can reach the box office at (208) 667-1323.

1. Structure of the post. By structure I mean the layout. Paragraphs are utilized, bold and italics where necessary, lists, etc. A post that consists of one long paragraph is probably not going to get much attention from readers.
2. Include a relevant picture on the post.  This adds a level of visual interest and in some cases could even be pertinent to the topic at hand.  Please keep in mind when using photos that you should respect the copyright of the owner.   There are a number of services out there like Acobox where you can get hosted blog photos.  You can also use Flickr, or Google, etc…
3. Spelling and Grammar should be checked on all posts.  No one expect all blogs to have professional copywriters with exceptional grammar and spelling skills but in this day an age obvious mistakes should be corrected.
4. Link to other content. If you make reference to something that is available on the Internet it is always nice if you can link to that content to make it easier for your readers to get there.  In the above paragraph I liked to all of the image providers that I mentioned… this is just an example.
5. Write to your target audience. Blogs are not one size fits all.  You have a group of people that read what you write.  Try to keep your posts/articles on topic for that targeted group.  Don’t write about rocket science if you primary reader is the backyard gardener. (Unless of course there was some breakthrough in rocket science that is important for backyard gardeners to understand.)

Again, these 5 items may seem to be basic but it is absolutely amazing to me how often we fail to keep them in mind.

1. Cat’s don’t “need” me in the truest sense of they word.  They tend to do just fine by themselves and really to me only seem interested when they need or want something from me.  I’ve been told they “sense” that I am not a cat person.
2. Cat’s never seem to focus on anything.   You can easily distract them with a ball of twine or some other toy.  They can bounce from distraction to distraction and seem to be quite happy doing it.  I’ve been told they focus on the distractions… that’s what they are good at.
3. Cats will climb all over everything.  Boundaries don’t seem to matter.  My kitchen table, the stove, bathroom vanities, you name it and it is their territory.
4. The incessant need to make sure that you know they have claws.  When you push them away or put them down, they will let you know that they also know how to use these claws.  Make sure you provide them with an acceptable scratching post or they will use whatever they can get those claws into.
5. Cats want to be awake when I want to sleep and if it’s mating season it is absolutely amazing the amount of noise that you can get out a cat when they are on the prowl.

So now look at your [Job or Task] and look at some of the reasons above…  I’ll use Project Management since I am a bit familiar with it…

1. Team members will often think that the PM is really not needed and that their job is to make their life miserable, holding them accountable for their portion of the project.  When people want to go it alone in a project things will quickly start to become problematic.  The sum of the parts is much better than the lone wolf.  (ummm cat)
2. Projects need to be organized, well communicated, structured, etc… If you are easily distracted or have team members that are easily distracted the project becomes at risk.
3. Everyone needs to know their boundaries and work on the things that they have been assigned.  I am a firm believer that you can’t manage ever single task.  You need to allow your team members the flexibility to do their task and all of its sub-tasks in the time allotted, holding them accountable.
4. Having claws… In a project I might consider this to be the hidden agenda.  Either the project sponsor, the team members or in some cases even the project manager have an agenda that they want to accomplish that is not part of the project but they will wield their claws to get it accomplished.
5. Time management in projects is so important to meet the deadlines agreed upon.  If we aren’t meeting the deadlines we end up with again a project at risk.  Doing things “on your own time” never works well with projects.  I don’t care if you do it at 2am as long as I don’t have to get a call from you at 2am that you are running up against problems or need to discuss a change order.

So I guess the reasons I hate cats can be fit into the analogy…  I wonder if it would work with dogs?  Perhaps another day! There was a super bowl commercial that was done a few years back by EDS… It was absolutely one of the funniest and well done!  I’ve included it from a YouTube search below… enjoy!

In today’s posting I am going to give some insight on how I manage projects using Microsoft Outlook, ClearContext’s IMS (outlook bolt on), Nelson’s Email Organizer (NEO) and Excel.   My goal has been to try to get everything I do that is work related consolidated into a single location and while Outlook is getting pretty close, my work environment requires some additional reporting structures that keep me away from my single trusted system.

For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, or Total Workday Control (TWC)by Michael Linenberger it is all about changing the way that we work.  This can be as simple as the little things like grouping like things together and working on them all at the same time to much more complex and time consuming changes like rebuilding your workspace, developing filing systems, etc.   The key for me was to latch on to an idea or two from these methodologies and work with them, integrate them into my day to day routine and then add more once I had mastered the ideas I was working on.

When I started as a project manager, I found rather quickly that the medium that people wanted to use for communication was email.  I quickly went from an email box of 20-30 pieces of significant email every day to 200-300 pieces of significant email every day. (I use the term significant to mean all spam removed.)   Combine that with customer face time and varying degrees of access to email and I soon found I was not able to keep up.  I needed solutions that could help me manage and find things much easier and more efficiently than I had in the past.   The solution I found at the time was Nelson Email Organizer.  This is a great tool and one that I use to this day for email search and correspondent management from right within Outlook.  NEO was my first attempt at managing each piece of email in my Inbox, giving it a home, and knowing and being comfortable with the fact that I was going to be able to find it again if needed.   Another KEY feature of NEO was the ability to search across multiple mail stores.  Remember that 2GB limit that Outlook used to have?  My solution was to create separate Archives and move messages into those archives.   The down side to that is the messages were no longer easy to search in Outlook unless I loaded each of the archives one at a time and performed the search.  Because NEO created its own set of indexes that are super fast, this restriction was removed and I could literally keep years worth of email and search through 10s of thousands of messages in a matter of seconds.

NEO and Outlook worked well for me for quite awhile but NEO didn’t help me with managing tasks and so I went on the hunt once again for a web solutions for project management.  Ultimately I stumbled across GTD (Getting Things Done) and TWC (Total Workday Control).  Take a look at the graphic.  The concept with these systems is that as messages come into your inbox you need to make a decision about them.  You ask yourself if you need to do something with this email… If not you probably just need to file it away as a reference or better yet if it isn’t going to be needed just delete it. (NEO would help me with this so this was nothing new.)  The other side of the equation however is more difficult to deal with.  If I need to do something with it, what is it that needs to be done, who should do it, when should it be done, etc… As the variables start creeping into the picture so does the complexity in managing the process.   As you can see from the graphic there are generally 3 choices… I do it now, I delegate it to someone else, or I hold onto it until a future date.  It was something that hit me as being so simple yet almost unbearable to manage.  That is where the ClearContext’s IMS product entered the picture for me.  With IMS not only are the non-actionable items manageable but the actionable items become manageable as well and all linked to appropriate projects and people.  I downloaded and installed ClearContext and I’ve never looked back.  Keep in mind, I don’t claim to be a GTD or TWC guru and I don’t do all of the things that I’m supposed to do nor will I probably ever do them all.  I don’t even use all of the functionality that exists within ClearContext’s IMS product (yet).   The point is I use what works for me and as I fine tune my process I may also find I use more of their concepts or in the case of the software the tools.

The last tool that I have started using pretty extensively is Excel.  I find that I can use it to keep track of a lot of information in an organized form and have at my fingertips information about each project that I use on a day to day basis.  With Excel I am able to streamline common project tasks and gather information on the items that are repeated for each project that I work on.  The members at Excelforum have really helped me in this end goal by helping me create scripts that keep track of tasks as completed, and scripts that help create new task spreadsheets with a limited numbers of keystrokes. Most recently I created a script that will create Outlook tasks for each and every item in a project that I need to track.

While my methods are not perfect… the goal is and has always been to increase my productivity.   I’m always looking for great new ideas so if you have any to share please do so.   In the next few weeks I hope to share with you some of the scripts that I use in my Excel workbook.  I also encourage you to take a look at  ClearContext or better yet go to their website and download the application and give it a try.

Since our current economic condition here in the USA has us all thinking in terms of Billions I thought it might be interesting to put that term into perspective.  The number is almost an incomprehensible number and while it just seems to roll off of people’s tongues what does it really mean?

A billion seconds ago – It was somewhere around 1959.

A billion minutes ago – Jesus was alive.

A billion hours ago – our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

A billion days ago – no one walked on the earth with two feet.

A billion dollars ago – about 8 hours and 20 minutes at the rate our government spends it.

Let’s look at Katrina and New Orleans and their request for 250 Billion Dollars to rebuild…

If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans that means every man woman and child in the city would get $516,528.

Each of the 188,251 homes would get $1,329,787.

If you are a family of four you would get $2,066,012.

So what about the $700 Billion for the bank bailout?

That is enough money to fund complete medical care for every man woman and child alive in the US for 11 years!

There is just something calming, soothing, mysterious, peaceful, and awesome about the underwater world.  People are given opportunities to experience through film / tv / video (IMAX or as in the example above YouTube) but there is just something about being immersed in the experience.  It would offer a great education opportunity for people of all ages, it could provide a great research facility, it could be an additional tourist attraction for the tourism and convention bureau, it could be a great volunteer opportunity, it could be a retreat from the hectic day to day activities.   Is the old Y building the right place?  Probably not but it shouldn’t hinder the grass roots movement to bring this reality to the Spokane area.

The above video of the 2nd largest aquarium in the world (in Japan) is one that I found to be absolutely awesome to watch…(Shot by Jon Rawlinson) I launch it in full screen pretty regularly and noticed that it is now on the Facebook page for the Spokane Aquarium.  I love how the people are just little silhouettes and how we really are miniscule and just a small component of what is LIFE on this planet.

What are your thoughts on and aquarium in Spokane?  Would you support it?

RENT the musical by Jonathan Larson is filled with great music and a story that has touched the lives of millions of people.

“Set in the East Village of New York City, Rent is about falling in love, finding your voice and living for today. Based loosely on Puccini’s La Boheme, Rent follows a year in the life of a group of friends struggling to make it in the big city.  They include Mark, a filmmaker and the narrator of the story; his former girlfriend, Maureen, a performance artist; Maureen’s lover, Joanne, a public interest lawyer;  Mark’s roommate Roger, a musician; Mimi, an exotic dancer, with whom Roger falls in love;  Tom Collins, a computer genius;  Collins’ lover, Angel, a street musician and drag queen;  and Benny, a former member of the group who, after marrying into a wealthy family, has become their landlord.     How these young bohemians negotiate their dreams, loves, and conflicts provides the narrative thread to this groundbreaking musical.” (MTI Musical Theatre International)

The musical is coming to Coeur d’Alene and the Lake City Playhouse in January of next year and as the stage manager for the show I thought I would start doing some searching around for information, videos, etc… It became apparent that Seasons of Love was the song that people remembered the most and is undoubtedly the anthem of the show.

This post is dedicated entirely to that song.  Over the next few months every time I come across a rendition of this song I will post it.  You do the same in the comments…

Here is the cast from the movie:

And this from the original cast:

And here are some deployed US soldiers: