It's like that thing where you say the same word, over and over...

...and it loses all meaning?

There are some very weird fan-generated Murdoch Mysteries videos.  This is not even one of them. But you can see that Yannick Bisson is an expert on smizing.  (I suppose puppy-dog eyes are a helpful tool.)

Busy busy over here--everybody getting sick (sidebar: tummy meds still working!!) while I desperately try to avoid illness in preparation for rehearsals starting tomorrow night!  (The chorus of the concert performance I alluded to a few posts back.  The audition did go fairly well, despite my jitters, and while they were quite complimentary, I wasn't cast in any of the comprimario roles I was interested in-- they were probably precast anyway.  I decided to sit in in the chorus, despite not having sung in an opera chorus since 2006--and then only as a favor!--and because there's more music to learn, it may even be more helpful for diction education than a comprimario part.)  The process has indeed been helpful in my comprehension of general diction in the given language.  (Vague Girl is being Vague.)  I feel that learning pieces in this language will be a lot easier in the future because of the work I'm doing now.  Plus I get to hang out in the vocal basement, my favorite place to live.

In other news, we are getting ready for Christmas, albeit slowly due to the aforementioned illnesses and music-learning.  We have a wreath on the house, and we bought a tree at Costco Thanksgiving weekend, but we haven't brought it in yet.  (There are NO TREES available here after December 10--it is so weird--so you basically have to buy early, cut off a few inches of trunk and keep it in a bucket of water outside if you don't plan on putting it up right away.  My father's birthday is next week, and he was grumpy about it, so we never put up the tree until afterwards.  Ideally, it would be up already, though.)  We had Rosina write a note to Santa, which she will deliver to our neighbor/professional Santa (who she knows is "Santa's Helper, not actual Santa") on Sunday.  We have not done any shopping for her yet, but I am almost done with a life-size knitted puffin. It's a very clever pattern, with lots of short rows and slipped stitches used to great effect.  I just didn't know it was going to be so BIG.