n i c k y n a x . c o m

First and foremost, I’m thankful I had the day off from work!

The job has been less than enjoyable the past two weeks with the Broadway strike happening. First there was no work to do, which was unexpectedly more tedious than when there is work to do. You don’t realize how mentally exhausting sitting at your desk with little to nothing to do all day is until you’re faced with that scenario. And after a week of it, I was about to go insane. During week two, they’ve been finding some busy work for us to do, which is a pain in the butt and annoying as hell, but when it comes down to it, it’s a much better alternative to staring into space and losing my mind.

So yes, I am quite thankful to have the day off and get paid for it. I do have to work tomorrow, but I get the holiday pay which is lovely, and I’m still financially rebuilding after the vacation spending and have all of that holiday shopping coming up to get ready for, so the extra cash from working tomorrow will be a nice perk.

I started my Thanksgiving by sleeping in until ten. Ooh, decadent. I got up, showered, put on some underwear, and went to work on cooking.

I wasn’t going over to anyone’s place for Thanksgiving even though a few people invited me. As a Vegan, I just had no desire to sit down at a dinner table containing dead bodies and ingredients made from dead bodies and watch people feast upon them in the name of gratitude. And, due to the fact that I wasn’t going to be roasting a dead animal in my oven, nobody was interested in coming over to my place to celebrate the holiday.

I almost had a guest. Garrett had basically asked me to invite him over, so I did. I went about planning a larger meal than I originally had since I was going to have a guest. However, he later decided that he would rather eat turkey, so he opted out of coming over, instead choosing to go all the way to New Jersey. I’m not going to lie, my feelings were a little hurt, mostly because he basically asked if he could come over, so I opened up my apartment to him and spent more money on a menu to include more food for him, and then he just flaked out. But in hindsight, I’m glad he didn’t come. If he wasn’t going to be happy with what I served, then it’s better he not come at all and put a damper on the day.

Yet now, he’s telling me he wants to come over for the Thanksgiving leftovers. I find that rude.

But anyway, I spent today alone with Miss Jackson, but cooked a feast large enough to serve a small family. I think I dirtied, cleaned, and re-dirtied every dish in my apartment during the entire cooking process today. I’m sure there was an easier way to do everything, but since I rarely cook, I haven’t figured out those little shortcuts yet.

And I don’t know how other people do it, but I think it’s virtually impossible to prepare so many dishes at the same time and have them all finish at the same time so that everything is fresh out of the oven and piping hot and ready to go. I even tried to make it easier for myself by baking my pumpkin pies last night so that I wouldn’t have to worry about them today, but I was still doing a juggling act in the oven and on the stove trying to make sure everything was happening at just the right time so that it would all be finished cooking at the same time.

Talk about Mission Impossible.

But, when all was said and done, I had a huge feast that was a delicious reward for my efforts.

My Thanksgiving Menu

• Tofurky Roast with Wild Rice Stuffing
• Cranberry-Apple Potato Dumplings
• Mashed Potatoes with Mushroom Gravy
• Thanksgiving Stuffing
• Green Bean Casserole
• Sweet Potatoes
• Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream

All Vegan and cruelty-free. And even better, all delicious.

Yummy!

I ate enough for three people. Before I go back for even more, I’m taking a break to let some digestion happen. I’m sitting here on the couch in my underwear (yes, I’ve been in just my underwear all day. It’s my day off; don’t judge me), watching some television, and trying to figure out just how I fit so much food into my stomach.

I’m trying to decide if I should put my Christmas Tree up tonight still or save that for tomorrow night. All I want to do is put on my Christmas playlist, watch something holiday related (even though it would be difficult to listen to music and watch something on television at the same time) and finish designing my Christmas cards.

Yeah, I’m designing personalized Christmas cards this year. No, not some ridiculously trite picture of Miss Jackson and me in front of a Christmas tree or fireplace. I’m using my own photography (Christmas related, of course) as the image on the front and writing my own text for the inside. It’s just much more personal than something store bought. I’m even tossing around the idea of designing my own postage stamps for them, but that seems to be about twice as expensive as buying regular stamps, so it will depend on how the funds are holding up. Plus, the list of people I have to send cards to this year seems to have doubled. How the hell did that happen?!

Anyway, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving today. And I hope that this was the last Thanksgiving where your dinner table was also a morgue.

Put an end to the Turkey Holocaust.

I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to talk about this for two weeks now. I kept intending to write about it, but every time I sat down to write something, another topic popped into my head. But I’ve nothing else blog-worthy to talk about at the moment, so the time has come to share this exciting news.

On November 6, elections were held in my hometown for Mayor. And one of the candidates for that position just happened to be my very own mother. And as if the results of that election weren’t obvious considering the fact that I’m devoting an entire blog to the topic, my mother did, in fact, win the election and will be Mayor of hometown.

What the hell?!

I never knew she had any interest in that sort of thing at all. She never showed any signs of it before. Once she retired about two years ago, she had all these free time on her hands and ended up joining the city council last fall. I guess she got bit by the bug then. But seriously…How on earth did my mother end up as Mayor?!

Not that I’m complaining. Far from it. I think it’s outrageously awesome. And what’s better is that her Mayoral status pretty much makes me the First Son of that town, which I’m sure comes with a myriad of benefits.

For example, I bet I will now get a statue of myself erected on the courthouse lawn in the middle of the town square.

I bet, as First Son, I will get the street of my choosing renamed in my honor.

As the First Son, I bet I get a extra pickle when I eat at local restaurants.

Yeah, I get nothin.

But it’s nice to dream, right?

I’m gonna use my connections with the new Mayor to make all sorts of things happen in that town. First up, gay marriage. It’ll be the gay marriage capital of the Midwest. I can see the looks of horror on the residents’ faces already.

The possibilities are endless.

I think I’ve figured out how to make a mobile version of the blog so you can all read it when you’re out and about in the world. And you don’t even have to do anything different. It’s the exact same URL and it should auotmatically recognize that you’re on a mobile device and give you the mobile version of the site.

In fact, I can even post blogs from my mobile device which makes the whole thing even better. Top it off with being able to post pictures and that’s just a big old recipe for tomfoolery.

This is gonna be fun.

I’ve got a bit of a cough and some general achiness going on right now, so I am spending the evening curled up on the couch with Miss Jackson watching television and being completely unproductive. I think I am about to set a record for the number of times a person can check their email and facebook in one hour. So, to change it up a bit, I decided to blog.

With this strike going on and continuing through this weekend at the very least, the threat of me being temporarily out of work until it’s over has been on my mind. So, naturally, I’ve been trying to think of things I could do to make some money during that period of time should it end up happening. And I’m coming up empty.

It got me thinking about when I was younger, and how I had a new dream job every other week. There was always something new I wanted to be, and I threw myself into each of them wholeheartedly. For that week.

I remember there was one period of time during my childhood when I wanted to be a cashier at a grocery store. That was mostly because I thought the scanner was probably the most amazing thing in the world and to get to use it all day long at work was about the most fulfilling thing I could imagine at that age. Coupled with the fact that a cash register also seemed like an incredibly exciting machine (toy), there was no doubt in my mind that the only thing I wanted to be as an adult was a cashier.

Then I moved on from that pipe dream and decided it would be better to be a bag boy at the grocery store. How exciting to take the food people bought, put it into bags systematically, and then carry them out to their car for them. Now THAT was a dream job.

That is, it WAS a dream job until telephone operator came along. And not just any telephone operator, but the kind from the earlier days of telephone where people told you who they wanted to talk to you and you would take some sort of plug thing and put it into a slot and manually connect them. I wanted to sit at my telephone operator desk and plug and unplug people all day long. A wall of sockets in front of me with cables tangled around each other. It looked like a complete mess to everyone else, but to me, I would know what each cable was and what it was doing there. The simple fact that that job didn’t even exist anymore was not enough to deter me in my desire to be a telephone operator. It was destined to be…

Until the day I decided to it would be much more fun to be a ventriloquist. I even went so far as to have Mom buy a ventriloquist dummy from the JC Penney catalog for me. His name was Lester. He came with a small record (yes, a record) that gave you a very basic lesson in how to be a master ventriloquist. After practicing for about five hours straight, it became clear that I was not cut out to be a world famous ventriloquist. Lester and I broke up and went our separate ways.

Then it was onto being a magician. I was obsessed with magic as a child and had tons of magic books and those little magic kits. They all had the exact same tricks in them, but I had to get each and every one I found. And everyone summer I would go to Adventureland for my birthday, and one of the performers there was a magician. I would always go see his show each time I was there. One year when I was about 10, he pulled me up on stage to be his assistant, even giving me an actual magician’s name. I was Nick, the Halfway Decent. I was so proud. I remember he had me hypnotize a young lady he had also pulled out of the audience (after trying to set me up on a date with her. Sorry, dude, never gonna happen), and then I made her levitate. I thought I was the shit. I mean, come on, I was Nick, the Halfway Decent. That’s a pretty big deal.

The whole magic obsession lasted much longer than all the other passing whims I had,  and to some degree, still lingers with me. I have a great appreciation for magicians and while I no longer have a desire to be one, perhaps it wouldn’t be too shabby of an idea to be a magician’s assistant and spend my days appearing and disappearing from boxes, getting impaled with swords, and tossing my hair while a giant wind machine blows across the stage.

Do any magicians have male assistants? I’m gonna have to look into that.

Those were some of my aspirations as a child. I didn’t accomplish a single one. But that’s ok. Because even though I may not be a world famous cashier, or an accomplished telephone operator, or a highly respected ventriloquist, there is something that can never be taken away from me.

I am, and always will be… Nick, the Halfway Decent.

Let’s see…

The WGA is on strike right now, thus shutting down most of Hollywood.

The Broadway Stagehands Union (Local One) is on strike right now, thus shutting down Broadway.

I would just like to point out that I am NOT on strike and showing up to work everyday.

Unfortunately, it’s not working out so well.

I don’t want to get into specifics, because I’d prefer to keep my professional life out of this blog, and I’m sure the company I work for would prefer the same thing. So, just to skim the surface, I work for a company that is Broadway related. And since Broadway has been dark, work has too.

The past two days I’ve spent a majority of my day fiddling about in Excel making lists and charts just to keep myself busy. I’m starting to get really concerned that if this strike doesn’t end soon, then I could very well be out of a job. At least for a period of time. And after taking two weeks off from work and right before the holiday season, that’s not something that settles my nerves.

Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to appeal to Local One and the League of American Theatres and Producers to stop their pissing contest and stop being so pig-headed and come up with some sort of compromise and get the hell back to work.

Please and thank you.

*   *   *

In unrelated news, I was checking out my site statistics just to see what goodies I could find in there, and it turns out some of you people are stumbling across this blog via some very interesting Google searches. I’m not exactly sure how these searches lead you here, but, well, they did.

The two best ones that were recently Googled were:

• Crowded Subway Boner Butt
• Roommate Boner Hidden Camera

Whomever you are, I’d like to be your friend.

You obviously didn’t find what you were looking for in my blog, but if you did eventually find what you wanted….could you send me those links?

Please and thank you.

I finally got around to uploading some pictures from the vacation last night, and instead of making you search through all of the pictures on my Flickr site, I figured I would be nice and just give you direct links to some snazzy little slideshows.

First up are some pictures from the first week of vacation at Walt Disney World. I didn’t take many, as I’ve been so often at this point that I’m finding it more and more of a challenge to find new and interesting things to take pictures of or new and interesting ways to take pictures of the same things again.

Next up is a slideshow from the second week of vacation on the Disney Magic cruise with stops in St Maarten, St Thomas, and Nassau.

To see any of them full size, your best bet is to mozy on over to the Flickr site directly and browse around. There’s currently about 500 pictures there at this point, so you may even find some other ones you like as well.

I hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think!

I’ve now been home from my two week Disney vacation for a week now, and still haven’t gotten back to normal life.

I still have empty suitcases laying around that I just haven’t put away yet. I still have laundry I need to do. I still have mail to go through and bills to pay. I just have no motivation to do any of them.

The vacation was wonderful though. Not perfect, by any means, but still wonderful. I learned a valuable lesson though. There really is too much of a good thing. As great as being on vacation is, after about a week and a half, I was very much ready to come home and get back to work.

I’m gonna focus mostly on the cruise in this entry as I’ve been to the theme parks countless times and there really wasn’t anything new or noteworthy. But seeing as how this was my first Disney Cruise (and first cruise in general), it was a completely new experience for me.

We had rough seas for most of the trip, which I actually found I preferred. I enjoyed the rocking and swaying of the open seas. What’s the point in being out on the water if you aren’t going to experience the movement and motion of the water. If I’m on a ship, I wanna know it. Nothing violent, mind you, but some good sized waves made for some fun maneuvering on the ship, which added to the overall fun of the entire experience for me.

One thing that was kind of depressing was the other guests on the ship. One of the great things about a Disney Cruise is that they really do get guests in every age demographic. There were infants, children, teens, adults and seniors. The only issue with that is that the number of adults in my general age range was very minimal. Most guests were either below the age of 20, or at least 10 years older than me. I couldn’t probably count on two hands the number of people I saw that were between the ages of 25-30. So, meeting new people and getting to know them was a bit harder as there weren’t many people in my age range to hang out with.

That didn’t completely ruin the trip for me though, but it will be something I take into consideration before my next Disney Cruise.

The ports of call were interesting.

First was St. Maarten. I was really anticipating this to be a beautiful island. Partially owned by both the French and the Dutch, it was bound to be gorgeous, right? Wrong!

This island was a shithole. The only thing that was remotely attractive about it was all the butterflies. Other than that, I have no desire to ever visit again. The only shopping you can do on St. Maarten is for booze or jewelry. Neither of which I have any interest in whatsoever. But I did get a nice panoramic image of the island from the aft deck of the ship before I said goodbye to the hell hole.

After St. Maarten, I was starting to get worried that all of the islands we were set to visit would be as much of a disappointment as that one had been. But St. Thomas was quite beautiful.

About five minutes into an island tour I took, we were snaking our way up those winding mountain-esque roads that have no edge. Just a plunge to your death. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, while we were trekking up the road, we witnessed a head-on collision and one vehicle started spinning out of control and almost flew off the edge. Welcome to St. Thomas!

I also took a skyway ride up to Paradise Point and got a gorgeous view from up there. While up there, three gentlemen from the Mariner of the Sea (which was in port with us that day) adopted me as their husband and we had a little photo shoot up there and hung out for a bit. Finally people my age. Too bad they were on a completely different cruise ship.

Here’s a picture of the harbor I took from the top of Paradise Point.

That’s the Disney Magic in the front, followed by the Explorer of the Sea and the Mariner of the Sea. There’s a Norwegian Cruise Line ship in the middle of the harbor, and up and to the left of that, in the distance, is two other ships along the other shoreline. It was a crowded day in St. Thomas.

During the tour, I managed to get this panorama shot as well.

Our next stop was to be Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas, and arguable one of the main reasons to even go on a Disney Cruise. I was really looking forward to this port of call for obvious reasons. I had also planned to do all of my beach time at this one. I had reserved some snorkeling time as well as some time to feed and swim with the stingrays.

Hurricane Noel had other plans in mind.

Unfortunately, do to the hurricane’s path and timing, we were unable to go to Castaway Cay. I was pretty bummed out. But they found an alternate place for us to go, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

We ended up heading to Nassau instead. I got to visit Atlantis and tour the grounds, which was nice, but the highlight of visiting Nassau had nothing to do with Nassau at all.

By complete coincidence, the Disney Wonder (Disney’s other cruise ship) was scheduled to be in Nassau the same day. This is a very rare occurrence for the two Disney ships, and you could tell by the reactions of the crew that this was a pretty big deal. We were told that it had been years since both ships had been docked together, making it quite the photo op. The crews of each ship spent the entire day running back and forth from ship to ship visiting friends and coworkers they hadn’t seen in a long time. The ships kept blowing their horns (they play the first seven notes of When You Wish Upon A Star) to each other as they pulled in and out of port. For any big Disney fan, it was quite a big deal.

And yes, as if you hadn’t already guessed, I managed to take a panorama shot of both ships docked together.

The photography company onboard (Shutters) also took some pictures to commemorate the rare event, and I’m gonna share some of theirs with you as well.

There were about 2500 hundred pictures taken between myself and Tyler, who went with me. But I just don’t have the energy to sift through and post them all. Once I get some albums made on Flickr, you can see them there.

But for now, it’s back to adjusting to being back in real life and back to work. And back to planning my next vacation, which begins on January 9 when I go back down to Walt Disney World to run the Marathon (my second), for which I have severely slacked off in training.

That’s my mission for the next two months.

Train my ass off.

Oh, and Thanksgiving and Christmas too. I suppose those are important.