Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

I'm done!  The recital went very well; pictures later (probably tomorrow).  Service also went well; managed to make sufficient mistakes in rehearsal to force me to pay closer attention to the music during service, and everything went well there too.  Yay soloists (including catagon3), and yay Carson Cooman for (1) writing kick-ass music, and (2) being a good enough friend of our director to come and play organ on his own compositions that we sang.

*blink*  That wasn't very grammatical, was it.

Anyway.  Done with singing for today; hopefully voice will be back for tomorrow's early service, where I get to sing even more!

Well, I did make it through the first half of choir rehearsal.  (Mostly.)  And I did have the intelligence to realize that trying to sing further would be just plain stupid because I was already in the process of losing my voice, and didn't care to repeat Sunday's episode.

Hrmph.  Wanna be all better.

Bidding on a copy of Phoenix Wright 1 over at eBay.  Wish me luck...

[EDIT: Got it.  For cheap!  $21.50 *including* shipping!  Yes, nezumiko, you can borrow it when we're done.]

(I has a frog voice.  Good thing I didn't bother setting an alarm to go to choir this AM!)

Boy what a boring post.  Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Still sick.  Slept more soundly last night, due to nose moving away from 'constantly drippy' into 'stuffy but still breathable.'  But still, when the alarm went off, my main thought was that I wanted more sleep.  So here I am, home again.

I am mildly puzzled by something though.  My throat is (unsurprisingly) scratchy due to the postnasal drip thing.  The huz and I just compared singable ranges - there's this concert we're supposed to sing in Friday, see, and the first dress rehearsal is tonight.  (I'm not going, huz doesn't know yet if he is or not.)  Anyway.  How is it possible, in the shape that I'm in, to hit a clear high C-sharp (yeah, the one up above the treble staff) without much difficulty??!?  Admittedly, my throat is now unhappier because I did that, but still!

Back to bed for me now.

I just did formal singing practice for the first time in precisely a week!  And it mostly went very well. 

I haven't felt like trying to practice for the last week due to Drama With Dad, which made life last week just kind of nasty.  Every evening last week, I put Tazz Cat in the garage for the night, and he's gotten used to having me sing something to him as a kind of tuck-in.  Well, I'd try, but I'd run out of breath and feel almost totally exhausted after every single damn line.  Probably had something to do with my stomach muscles being in a perpetual state of "clench" for several days running.

Then Sunday, I got to church a little early (I was scheduled to read), and our wonderful choir director Matthew came and asked me if I'd like to sing something for offertory.  I said sure, and he introduced me to a short hymn that I'd never seen before, but was quite pretty.  Anyway, singing that seemed to go pretty well - things worked, and I wasn't dead-exhausted at any point. 

So I practiced today.  It went well - yay!

We watched our copy of the (TV-screen-size) Lion, Witch and Wardrobe last week.  I was enamored enough of it that I went and ordered a cheap copy ($20 including shipping) of the extended edition with three discs of supplementary material on Amazon.  Early happy birthday to me!

I have just pre-ordered the 'Dragon Fossil' shirt from pandemonium_bks.  It will be purple.  Purple is good.  More early happy birthday, though I'll actually pick it up my birthday week.

We had a great time this past Saturday with orichalcum and her family up in San Franciso.  It was, somewhat astonishingly, sunny and reasonably warm weather up in the Embarcadero. 

The huz and I started reading HP Deathly Hallows aloud last night.  We finished chapter 1.

The huz is unexpectedly on vacation for a week before starting his new job next week.  He'd originally expected to start in September after finishing up the project with his current employer.  But on Monday, said current employer decided to cancel the project.  You know, the one that was only a month away from shipping, and that everyone in the group has devoted the last year and a half to completing?  Yeah, that one.  But he gets a week of unexpected (and paid-for) vacation, so that's a good thing.

I practiced singing for the first time in a week yesterday morning (I'm finally basically all better).  Tazz really liked it - he was meowing and purring, and got up on the table and made as if he wanted to jump up on my shoulders. 

I got to spend close to two hours with Zelda yesterday morning after practicing.  I hadn't intended to spend anything close to that much time on it!  I had a great time, even if I haven't yet found Ooccoo in the desert dungeon.

*thud* I feel like I've accomplished a lot in the last few weeks.

In my Travel Agent role, I purchased airplane tickets for my parents to come and visit at Christmas about two weeks ago. Then I purchased tickets for the huz and me to go to Storyreading Reunion in September. Add that to the tickets and hotel stuff that I did back in May for the trip to New York next week, and you get a lot of travel stuff.

In my Librivox Metacoordinator role, I catalogued three projects in three days. Did lots of staring at and editing of archive.org pages and creating Librivox catalog pages. A fourth project technically under my jurisdiction became ready for cataloging yesterday (of course), but kayray very graciously took care of it for me. Thanks, Kara!  (For the curious: The three projects were The Burgess Animal Book, Fabulas de Esopo vol. 4, and Time and the Gods.  Good stuff all.)

Work's been going along fine; nothing particularly exciting. I've been helping to hand-pick bacterial colonies, which is time-consuming, tedious, but useful; having less dead time at work is part of the reason I haven't been posting all that regularly. (For anyone curious about what hand-picking means: Take round agar plate with little white colonies growing on it in one gloved hand. Take one (or more) sterile toothpicks in your other hand. Apply tip of each toothpick to a single colony. Deposit toothpicks into individual wells in a 96-well bacterial growth plate. Repeat until 96 colonies have been picked into the plate. Remove toothpicks, label plate, and repeat for all plates.)

Singing stuff has been going very well indeed. I had my first voice lesson in about a month earlier this week, and my teacher was very pleased with the progress that I've made. I'm doing real bel-canto singing now: all the sound production is taking place up in my head above my cheekbones, where it's supposed to. It feels great.  Now the task is to solidify the breathing, support, technique, etc, and we can start having some real fun.  :D  The question for me, of course, is how much longer I'll continue taking lessons, given that I've kind of gotten to a Really Good Place.  I want the additional control that further lessons will give me, but at some point the rate of return is probably going to decrease to a point where it's no longer worth paying a fair chunk of money on a weekly basis.

Finally, the huz and I went to see Paprika last night.  It's a fantastic piece of anime, which may well get its own post one of these fine days.  We loved it.  If you are interested in anime, dreams, reality, and the intersection of them, you should go see it.  I would not at all mind seeing it a second time.  (Oh hey nezumiko - it looks like it's playing for another several days at the local theater, so if you missed it this week, you can still go conveniently!)

We have nothing planned for the weekend, except starting advanced skating class on Saturday.  Yay, a quiet weekend at home!

1. On Monday, I had my first voice lesson in a couple of weeks.  My teacher was able to lead me into keeping my throat open and relaxed while singing, even the high stuff.  It felt like a new door had been opened.  Then on Tuesday, when I was practicing, I found a Really Useful image to think of when I breathe in: Not only am I thinking down (with my diaphragm), but I'm thinking back (to stretch and relax the larynx - this part has the lovely side effect of elevating the ribs in my back too!) and also up through the back of my head (to help generate the lift and space I need to get the resonance that I want).  When it works, it feels like it really works!  Everything's open, free, relaxed, not forced... Hopefully I'm doing things right, and not screwing things up.

2. Last night I got to have my first rehearsal with our new choir director Matthew.  Working with him really is wonderful!  He's challenging us: last night consisted largely of: read through a piece with piano accompaniment once, or twice in one case, and then he'd have us try it a capella.  Great fun, as far as I'm concerned.  :)  And of course he's a marvelous musician, and huge fun to work with.  It was a lovely evening, ending with drinks and dessert after rehearsal.  (And we're doing a piece this Sunday that I actually felt the need to take home and learn (at least for one transition spot).  Novel, what?

In other news: I am now the proud holder of the first Gold Medal in the household for a Wii Sports training exercise!  (in the Golf: Hitting to the Green exercise, if anyone cares)  Yeah, boring life I know.  ;)