Standard disclaimer: these are just some notes that I accumulated over the course of the last few months, when I was too "busy" to document them here.
Monday, April 16 - Friday, April 20
While a majority of things were done by now, there was still a lot remaining. In an overworked and underthought move (the dreaded double whammy!), I decided to take a week off from work and spend it working on the play, either in my garage or at the school. I still had to do:
- the Paroo house, as it was merely a couple of dollies with flats attached.
- the curtain flats and remaining "generic" flats were left to be done
- the piano needed to be completed (it was a pile of wood and a drawing in my garage)
- the library desk was partially completed, but needed to be finished
- the side curtains still needed to have their height expanded
- the footbridge still needed to be "imagined".
Not to mention a ton of little nits. And the stage crew was completely untrained and the whole thing, at this time, felt like a disaster in the making. I hadn't even thought about the setup of the auditorium: things like taking out seats for the "orchestra", messing with the Symfonia synthesizer, microphone placement....things that sucked my time and energy during this week. And everything had to be "available" for rehearsal every night by 3PM, including me.
I set to work on the piano, knocking the basics out in a morning, and finished up the last little 
bits on the library desk. Kristie and I ferried them over to the School in our car and I had the kids lug them over to the auditorium. Late Monday and Tuesday night, I ripped all the cardboard "siding" (in the wind no less -- quite a feat) and attached that to the front of the house. I also cut the porch floor and built the railings. At this point it looked like something from a ghost town or a ghetto rather than a quaint Iowa farmhouse...but it was progress. It still didn't roll like I wanted it to, but I had many other battles to fight.
I already had the lumber to build the remaining flats, I just needed to put them together, so that was next. God provided beautiful sunny weather this week, so I worked out on the lawn one morning, preassembling the remaining eight 8ft by 10ft flats. Luckily these were going to be single-sided and they weren't quite as well made as the original ones! Josh showed up at lunch that day and offered to do all the final assembly if I'd get him out of classes...sold! Greg and Shaf hung around that day and helped immensely..covering up the floor where the seats had been removed and doing a ton of the small stuff. I would just ramble some sort of instruction, and Shaf would grab Greg and in about 30 minutes it'd be done. Very handy with tools that Ryan! I still had to solve how I would cover these flats...I was hoping that I could use the left over fabric that I found up in the catwalk that was used to cover the auditorium walls...but there wasn't enough. On to other problems though....
About mid week, my work on the stage came to a screeching halt and I totally got derailed on the sound and set up for the musicians. This was the first time (1 week until Opening Night) that the musicians really started working in the room and with the actors on stage. Monitors needed to be set up, connections to the board for the instruments...all the things that I really hadn't thought about and truly had a blind spot regarding. Not that I was expecting a specific person to handle all this stuff...but I never imagined that it would be me, wishful thinking perhaps! Each
day it seemed like there was new problem to be solved and I would have to make something work, while the rehearsal was going on. So I would work all day as fast and hard as I could until 2:30PM, get things straightened up enough so rehearsal could happen. Then I'd literally fight fires during the rehearsal, then speed the girls as fast as I could home, turn around and work on things for the rest of the evening into the wee hours of the morning. It was quite a "vacation"! But I was gearing up for the tech rehearsal on Saturday...and while things weren't great, after a week of hard, hard work, we were sort of ready.