I came up with a tech solution today, and I can’t decide if it was incredibly technical or incredibly non-technical.

I’ll let you decide.

You can tell me what you think, if you care, or you can just listen to an enjoyable story.

You’ll be the judge of that.

So as you may recall, I’m in this production of Jagged Little Pill, and I decided I wanted to do cast gifts.

I can’t remember how much of the cast gift stuff I already told you about, so here’s a quick recap.

Often when Lauren’s in a show, she will make chocolate-covered Oreos for people.

I didn’t want to ask her to do that for this show.

She always makes them somehow themed to what that show was, and I wasn’t sure what the right way to do that was with Oreos anyway.

And after doing some thinking, I came up with pill bottles, and I ordered 100 generic pill bottles, and I got a bunch of labels, and I curated this cute little prescription label thing that talks about the show, and it says, I don’t know, may cause breaking out into song.

I don’t remember exactly what it says, but it was cute, and it lists me as the doctor, and then it has a note that says, note, I’m not the doctor, which is very funny if you know the show or if you know Alanis' music because she has a song that I sing in the show called Not the Doctor.

So it’s cute, and I filled them all up with mini M&Ms, and the whole thing’s cute.

I want to be clear.

If I haven’t mentioned it yet, it’s cute.

And I got all the empty pill bottles.

I got all the M&Ms.

I will say filling it sucked, filling each one sucked, but I got it done.

I eventually realized the best method was the scoop method.

Scoop the pill bottle in the giant bag of mini M&Ms.

But the labels, ah, the labels to print them was such a nightmare.

It used to be you would get custom labels, and they would give you, like, here’s a Word doc template that you can use or a Google doc template that you can use.

But now they all want to use plug-ins.

Like, hey, here’s this thing that you can use Word’s plug-in tool for, and it wasn’t working right.

Like, I got it to do what it was supposed to do, but when I was printing it out, it wasn’t aligning.

Now, I’m smart enough that I print it on a plain piece of paper, and then I hold the plain piece of paper up to the actual sticky labels, and they just were not aligning properly, and I couldn’t figure it out, and I was trying to do some measurements, whatever else, and then I suddenly realized what the ideal solution was.

Instead of trying to make this, like, layout get adjusted perfectly at print by eyeballing and printing on another piece of test paper and then checking and holding it up, I was like, no, this is not a solution that needs AI, and this is not a solution that needs me struggling.

This is a solution that needs my scanner.

So I fed a blank sheet of stickers into my scanner, and then, of course, my ScanSnap scanner was like, hey, I didn’t scan anything because that was blank.

So I drew some lines on the sides, you know, outside the sticker thing.

Scanned it again.

It’s like, hey, I didn’t scan that because it was blank.

If you turn off the skip blank pages, then I’ll show you whatever you scan.

So then I had to scour the app to find skip blank pages and turn it off, which I did.

I scanned it again.

Then I had a PDF that showed a blank sticker sheet.

I put that into Keynote.

I set my Keynote document to be the right pixel size for an 8 1⁄2 by 11, and I set the translucency of the…

Well, first I had the scanned sticker grid at 100%, and I started dragging my text boxes around to fit in the sticker spaces.

You get it.

You understand.

You’re following this logic.

And I had to make the stickers themselves, the labels, those transparent so I could see the original document through them.

And then once everything was good, I set the opacities of all those things to 100%, and I removed or hid the background sticker sheet and printed it.

And, of course, it was perfect because it was designed right against the sticker sheet.

I was very pleased with this solution.

It meant no more fussing around.

It meant that I was guaranteed to fit perfectly, and indeed it did.

I was so pleased.

And I got to tell you, my little pill bottles are cute.

Cute little pill bottles filled of M&Ms with a cute little sticker on the side.

And I think I have about 60 of them so far.

The cast is roughly 30, and there’s roughly 8 people in the pit.

Then there’s roughly 8 more people on the production staff, and then a few more to grow on.

So I don’t know.

And there’s plenty of leftover mini M&Ms, including an entire 5-pound bag that I didn’t open.

So my family will be happy.

I won’t eat that many of them, but still.

So anyway, my gifts are done.

It has been a rough rehearsal week so far where there’s a lot of down time.

They even sent a cast-wide note out this week being like, hey, we know it sucked.

It’s going to stop sucking soon.

And there is talk that we’re going to actually run some stuff tonight because we haven’t really been running stuff.

We’ve been doing the beginnings and ends of things and letting lighting do their thing and figuring out transitions.

And it’s like, man, I just want to run that show.

And it sounds like we’re going to do some of that tonight and run the full show tomorrow maybe?

We’ll see.

I accidentally took home my prop cell phone last night, so I have to remember to take it back to the theater tonight.

It’s a very cute prop iPhone.

iPhone Max?

Pro Max?

Yeah, it’s big.

But it really looks and feels like an iPhone, except slightly squishier.

Anyway, that’s all I got.

I hope you’re having a wonderful Wednesday, June 3rd.

Was that solution high-tech or low-tech?

I can’t tell.

I used a scanner.

That’s high-tech.

But it was also like tracing?

I don’t know.

Goodbye.

Lex.