Surprise, Surprise

Today Jireh (one of my friends from youth group) and I went to West City to help buy a present for Aonghas's Secret Santa person since he's been working everyday for the last week and hasn't had a chance to. I have to say his person is quite difficult! Either that, or maybe I haven't gotten to know him as well as I'd like. I'll have to do something about that next year! We also went to get a small 'thank you' present for Jenny, a girl in our youth group who has been in charge of sorting out our youth group's part in the Christmas play. 

You may remember me blogging about her keeping us in check earlier on. I admit I've felt a little bad as I've been a bit of a bad boy and have been joking around a lot, not to mention screwing up my lines in nearly every rehearsal, so I thought it would be a nice gesture to present to her a 'thank you' present on behalf of the whole youth group for all the excrement and stress she's had to put up with in the past couple of months. She probably doesn't read this so it won't ruin the surprise! 

West City was so packed, which is no surprise considering it is Christmas Eve Eve. I ended up being lazy and drove down the road to the mall to meet Jireh because I didn't want to get sun burnt, but I almost didn't find any car parks and just managed to find one on the very top level near the staff car parks! 

Anyway, we were originally thinking of getting her chocolate, but then we saw a bottle of grape juice was at a reasonable price (and both of us are on tight budgets right now!) so we got her a bottle of that. Directors are usually presented with a bottle of bubbly at the end of the final night anyway aren't they?

As for Aonghas's Secret Santa present, well after several hours of wandering around we couldn't find anything we thought would be good and decided to leave it up to Aonghas! We just had a man-chat at the food court before we had to go home to prepare for rehearsal later that evening.

We had our final run-through of the Christmas play later that night after we all had dinner together at church, which consisted of takeaways from a nearby...takeaway. I bombed pretty badly with my lines in the first run-through, but I have good excuses! OK maybe not in the first scene when I just completely lost it after a few sentences. In the last scene when I have lines to say though, I had a few people come upstairs with me and Ben was getting me to go through my lines and I missed my cue! People down below were calling out 

"Angel! Wake up!!!" 

I quickly bobbed up and said my lines without mistake and I'm pretty sure in time with the music!

In the second run-through I managed to get through my lines in the first scene more or less without mistake. I even didn't screw up any of the cello sound effects I had to make! When it came to the last scene though, I was with some other people upstairs *cough* Amy and Antonia *cough*, who were playing with my phone, trying to get into my text inbox. My phone then locked itself and asked for the PUK code which is scary! I quickly ran down and went on the net on Aonghas's phone to find it and enter it into my phone to unlock it. By then it was almost my scene and I had to run back upstairs and say my lines! Luckily I managed to improvise a bit instead of making weird sounds come out of my mouth!

I always do better the second time round, so tomorrow night I'll have to make sure I get it right the FIRST time round!