best. week. ever.

I am seriously having an amazing week!

Sunday morning I got a text from MWR that I won 2 passes to cosmic bowling on base!  Our MWR has a text club, and they just randomly do giveaways where everyone is entered.  (I've been hoping to win a free pizza, but bowling is pretty neat, too!)

Sunday night, I got an email that I won another blog giveaway, this one from Take It From Me.  I won a Pretty Pushers labor gown--I've had this on my Amazon wish list since I found out I was pregnant.  So I'm really excited I got one!

I put in for the free Chick-Fil-A breakfast the other week, so I got to partake of that on Wednesday morning.  It's up by the mall, which I hadn't been to in a while.  I decided to try on some maternity clothes and see if I could score some deals.  I didn't do so well on the deals (or the maternity clothes, since they didn't have what I wanted in my size), but I did get a completely FREE necklace from Charlotte Russe.  By the end of Wednesday, my freebie haul looked like this:

I paid 6¢ tax on the candy bar; the Suave stuff was in my mailbox

And the number one reason I'm having the best week ever is that B and I get to go on a CREDO Marriage Enrichment Retreat sponsored (and paid for in full) by the Navy this weekend.  We had been on the waiting list, and I just got the call this morning that a spot opened.  This thing is at the Perdido Beach Resort in Orange Beach, Alabama (about a 20 minute drive from us).  It is right on the beach, and the picture on the website looks beautiful!  I'll be sure to bring my camera and let y'all know how awesome it is in person. 

The only rain on my parade this week is that B has a cold, but he can suck it up and deal with it during the retreat.  I've been wanting to do one of these for over a year, and they don't come our way very often!  I'm such a nice wife, huh?

Well, I hope everyone else is having as fantastic a week as I am!

hurry up and wait: my day as an extra

Today I had the opportunity to help a friend who is in film school at Regent by being an extra in her newest project. I believe it's a pilot episode for a TV show.  I'm usually a singer (although not much of a soloist) and have done a very small bit of acting, but lately I've started to feel the acting bug.  And as they say in 'the theat-ah', "There are no small parts, only small actors," so I'll take any gigs that I fit into my not-so-surprisingly empty schedule.

If there's one thing I've learned about being an extra, it's that most of the time you have NO IDEA what is actually going on in the scene. I couldn't hear the actors talking, and I hadn't read the screenplay so I didn't know the plot either. Nor did I really even care. All I could really tell is that this project was slightly comedic and there would be bowling alley scenes (since that's where we were).  The only sounds I could really hear above the din of falling pins were "Speed!" (said after by the sound person I think?) and that lovely clicking noise of the clapboard.  Also, sometimes the extras just have to make up some dialogue to pretend like you're talking in the background. We had a few "How 'bout the weather today? I want to order a hot dog. Now where is my 8 pound ball?" conversations.

After we shot and re-shot and re-shot the scene where I walked by and picked out my ball off the shelf, all I really cared about was whether we were "pretend bowling" (for noise reasons) or I could actually  throw my ball at some pins.  But we did eventually get to bowl . . . a lot.  I bowled five games with a complete stranger, a retired Air Force man who looked remarkably like my father.  My new BFF extra/father figure and I ended up discussing everything from our history in glee clubs to his recent lap-band surgery (ew) to our experiences at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Beyond the reminder that there certainly isn't such a thing as a 'free' lunch, probably the most important lesson I learned from this experience is that rented shoes actually hurt like hell after about four hours of relatively non-stop bowling.  And for those of you keeping score at home, my best game was a perfect . . . 100. Ouch.

Those five games pretty much tuckered me out, but all told, it was a great way to spend a Friday.  And that's a wrap.