Journey, part II

The room I'm staying in,
the result of a couple hours of assembly.

Hey everyone!  It's been a teeney bit longer than I was expecting since my last post, but I guess it's better now than later.  :P  Anyway, the day before yesterday (Saturday), my parents and I arrived here at my place in Brattleboro and moved all of my stuff in.  We did a bunch more shopping for extra room stuff and had a lovely Thai lunch at the Thai Bamboo restaurant in town.  It's by far my favorite restaurant here in Brattleboro that I've gone to.  There is always such an incredible amount of flavor in their dishes and soups.

My parents stayed over with me in my room that night and in the morning we went for some more shopping at Wal-Mart and Price Chopper, got a wonderful $5 lamp, as well as some shelves, a refrigerator and a microwave, and some food.  As we were going to lunch, I ran into my old Smirkus Camp counselor, T (he's here for the year as well attending NECCA's Intensive Training Program).  We all went together to the Co-op to get some food and then headed back to my place for me to say goodbye and whatnot.  The move-in process was very smooth in general.  The only real problem that we had was that my iHome transformer blew out when I was trying to plug it in, but I am grateful that everything else went so well.  I don't get cell service in my room though, which is kind of awkward since if I'm not online, there is no way for anyone to contact me, but hey, that's a little bit of Vermont for you.  Other places in town as well as at NECCA itself I get sufficient service.

Me, petting the awesome cat of awesomeness.

My place, by the way, is essentially a shared apartment.  It's in what would look like from the outside, an ordinary house, but really is divided on the inside into apartments.  We have six people here sharing the same apartment.  There was an additional floor added onto it (which used to be used as attic space) where most of the bedrooms reside.  The combined kitchen and living room are shared by the six of us.  T pretends he lives here.  :P  We share a total of two full bathrooms, one of which contains the washer and dryer.  It's pretty nifty.  One  of the other tenants (i.e. - not of the people in our shared apartment) owns a cat that stays outside most of the time.  That made me very happy. :D

The rest of the day was filled with what I assume will become typical shenanigans.  T, Stacey (one of the other Pro-trackers staying here), and I went to a nearby playground, went on the swings, and attempted random circus on the annoyingly slippery poles.  We went back, and met Christi, another person staying here as well, and I tagged along with them as we went to the Co-op to get some dinner to bring back.  We all chilled out in my room, ate dinner, and Stacey popped in for a bit and we talked about life and whatnot.  It was a nice get to know people night.

slanted cielings are slanted

There is a couple living in the room next to me, Anthony and Christina, as well as someone living in the one room downstairs, Shannon.  They are all very nice people, but, as expected, I am the youngest of the bunch by some years, but it seems to be working out alright.

Today, I woke up, and was lucky enough to blow a fuse while trying to warm up water to make tea.  I feel like these might be some long first few weeks haha.  I had some cereal, and then went out with T and Christi to the Guilford Fair.  It was tiny, but nice.  NECCA had a little station set up with an aerial rig for a little self-promotion thing.  They did three performances throughout the day, and we caught the last one at 2p. We bumped into a bunch of my friends from Smirkus camp there, so it was a nice little mini-reunion.

We had orientation for Pro-track people at 6p today.  It was very informative and we finally got to see all of each other's wonderful smiling faces.  There were some faces I already knew, and others that I had stalked on Facebook.  Elsie directed the majority of the orientation, but Bill, Serenity, Aimée, and Deena were also there for the first half.  We first discussed the mechanics of the program and the basics schedule breakdown.  The schedule fluctuates quite a bit every week, with changing private classes as well as types of group classes.  Sometimes we will have some guest instructors, such as two from Pilobolus coming to teach next week.  I'm really excited for these really unique learning opportunities.  In general, group and private training for Pro-track occurs on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.  That doesn't include free-form Open Studio training time.

There was also one last minute addition to our group, which by complete chance was someone who I had already known.  He was from Chicago, but last summer at the AYCO (American Youth Circus Organization) festival we tried doing some duo lyra together.  It's a rather interesting coincidence.  I knew the circus world was small, but I've been recently finding it to be more intricately woven and tighter than I had ever known.

Classes start tomorrow morning at 8:45.  I am incredibly excited to experience the collective talent of our group.  From what I have seen so far, it appears to be very promising, and we certainly are given many great resources and plenty of time to discover what is right for us as individuals as well as a group.  Today in orientation, we were introduced to training sections of NECCA that I had never even been in before.  The opportunities here are really priceless, and I can't wait to see what we can do with them.

It's definitely time for me to go to bed now.  It's been a long couple of days, and I quite frankly am just tired.  ~.~  Posts about upcoming training are soon to come!

Trevor

P.S. - I replaced the countdown clock in the sidebar with our performance dates in December and May.  More information will be posted as we get closer to those dates.  I invite all those interested to come.  Hope to see you there!