Right-side Up Again

For various reasons, three weeks ago the world turned upside-down. Happily, nothing was lasting, and all is mostly back to the standard classes-practice rooms-rehearsals world of before.

Little happy highlights:

• I ate my first fresh pomegranate this week. (Pictures forthcoming. It is a remarkably beautiful fruit.)
• Opera casting for the spring was posted. I get to play a nymph named Naiad in the first bit of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. (We're only doing a scenes program instead of a full opera this spring.)
• My apartment is finally (relatively) clean. Laundry is now (almost) manageable again.
• Two teachers accepted my proposal to do a Shakespeare outreach program for their classes. I get to talk about Strauss's Drei Lieder der Ophelia with high school kids on December 7th, and then I get to play with Debussy's La Romance d'Ariel with 7th graders on the 14th.
• I'm learning the Pie Jesu from the Faure Requiem for an audition on December 2nd.
• The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous. It's often cold, but the sky has been oh-so-blue, and the leaves are just glorious colors against that sunny backdrop. I love the way the sunlight glints off them, especially in the midday period when everything is bright. About 3:30 pm is pretty neat, too, because fall always links with (younger) school in my mind, and that's the time I'd be going home from grade school or high school.
• A very pesky technical problem involving .mod files and conversion to a tv-playable DVD got resolved! Many hours of turmoil - solved! (The secret: get one of those hard disk camcorders yourself, install the software on your PC, and convert all the files on your own computer rather than struggling with doing it on a Mac.)

Tomorrow: my digital portfolio class with some video editing in the morning, followed by Italian conversation at noon, a meeting with one of the professors I'm serving through my grad assistantship, the full "memorized sing-through" of the Impresario, and then a voice recital at night to attend. It should be a fun day!

~Hope