13 Characters I Have Played on Stage

It’s been a while since I first participated in Thursday Thirteen on this blog, so I thought I would give it another shot. Some of you may know that I have sung opera professionally since college, though I haven’t seen the stage since Jack was born (but that’s okay). Part of the fun of the opera thing was the opportunity to play so many different kinds of characters and wear so many different and interesting costumes and wigs. Here are 13 characters I have played on stage during my opera “career”:

1. A Geisha in Madame Butterfly
2. A Dragonfly in L’enfant et les sortileges (The Child and The Visions)
3. A “lady of the evening” in La Traviata
4. A witch -in Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball)
5. An evil stepmother - in Cendrillon (Cinderella)
6. A Puritan in The Crucible
7. A Harem Girl in Abduction from the Seraglio
8. An Orphan in Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose)
9. A High Priestess in Aida
10. An Israelite in Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar)
11. A Philistine in Samson et Dalila
12. A Gypsy in Carmen
13. Second villager on the left, in multiple other shows. Part of the joys of being in the chorus!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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Summer Reading List- Best Books for Kids

WearyParent.com is hosting a writing project around recommended summer reading for kids ages 8-18, and since I LOVE books I definitely wanted to participate. The books on my list are ones that I still read regularly when I have time, and have read them all 4 or 5 times each:

1. Anne of Green Gables Series, by L.M. Montgomery - great books for girls of all ages
2. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis - wonderful for all ages as well
3. Little House on the Prairie Series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder - girls of any age should enjoy these

I have others of course, but I’ll stop at three. What are your favorite books?

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

That’s one of my favorite questions to ask people. I like to hear about the worst work experiences people have had… I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I have had some terrible ones and it’s fun to swap stories. I’ve been thinking about a “group writing project” around this subject for a while now- let’s share our worst jobs for a little amusement. I’ll get us started, and then you post a link in the comments to your worst job story on your blog and I’ll start a little list at the bottom of this post. Or, you can just share in the comments area if you like. I’ll get us started:

My worst job ever has to be the paper route I threw for a year in college. It was the Dallas Morning News and it had to be delivered in the middle of the night. I would get up about 2am, go to the place where the papers were delivered, roll them, bag them and load them up in my 1979 El Camino and take off. I had about 180 papers on the weekdays and about 250 on weekends to deliver in neighborhoods and apartments. I would finish about 4am and get home to sleep for a couple of hours before I had to get up for my 8am class. On the weekends it took longer because I couldn’t get all the papers in the pickup and had to go back for a reload. Those suckers were HEAVY on Sundays- 7-8″ thick rolled up. It was a challenge to get them from out the car window and up onto the yard, or up to the 3rd floor landing at the apartment complexes. The worst times were when it rained and I and the car would get completely soaked, and/or when it was cold (about the coldest it got in Denton, TX was in the upper 20’s). You can’t roll papers in gloves, so my hands froze. The pay was also pretty bad. Every once in a while I was able to get someone to help me out and do the driving. I would sit ensconced atop the giant pile of newspapers and yell “turn right!”, “take the next left!” etc… I’m sure it would have been an amusing sight for anyone who looked out their front window by chance at 3:30am!

I had a couple of other terrible ones in college, including teaching voice lessons to 7th grade boys who didn’t want to be there and whose voices were changing, and temping in a 2nd shift job at a place that made little rubber pieces for cars in the middle of the summer in Texas with very little air conditioning. I don’t regret having any of these jobs though. Doing things like that and sticking to it gives you a much better perspective when things don’t go quite your way in the cushy job in the cubicle farm. It could always be worse. Much worse.

Here are some others who’ve had some terrible jobs:

Katelyn at WorkinginPJs.com

Friday Fun

The Many Numbers of the Beast

A very cute site, featuring a little white monkey who makes things

What does this sign mean?

The best way to keep up with your favorite blogs

Do you ever wonder, as you’re visiting around to your favorite blogs to see if there are new posts up, if there might be a better, more efficient way to keep up with them? There is. It’s called a Feed Reader. Each blog has what’s called an RSS feed and you can subscribe to the blog’s feed and have new posts delivered to you, instead of you going around, wasting your valuable time, just checking to see if there are new posts. I converted to using Google Reader several months ago, and I’ve never looked back. I still might visit the actual blog now and then to comment on a post, but for the most part, I can enjoy their post and pictures without ever having to leave my feed reader.

If you’d like a more detailed explanation of how this works, watch this video that explains what RSS and feed readers are in plain English.

Ready to give it a try? If you don’t care for it, you can always switch back to the old, time consuming way. Okay - there are multiple feed readers out there, but I’m going to recommend Google Reader because it works great and lots of us already have Google accounts. If you don’t, it’s easy to sign up. Here is the link to Google Reader to get started. Once you’ve signed up, just click on Add Subscription towards the middle on the left. Paste the blog URL address that you want to subscribe to in the blank and voila! You are subscribed. Almost all sites have RSS feeds these days, so you can even subscribe to your favorite news source, etc. When you’re on a site, after you’ve signed up with Google Reader, and you decide you’d like to subscribe, you can just click on the little RSS icon (like the one in my navigation bar at the top) and it will add it to your reader. (you won’t see this on a lot of the blogspot blogs- subscribe directly through the reader instead) You can also just click on the Subscribe button on your Google Toolbar if you have that installed. It will only appear on sites that have an RSS feed available.

Each time you want to check to see if there are new posts on your favorite blogs, all you have to do is long into Google Reader and if there is a new post, you will see it listed. Give it a try. I currently have 2 subscribers to this blog, and one of them is me! Let’s see if I can get that up to 10 or 15. I have 75 subscribers to my professional site, 32 subscribers to Printables4Scrapbooking, and 116 are subscribed to FreeStuff4Kids!

Please let me know if you try this and have any problems at all. I’d be glad to help. You can either e-mail me at randa [at] randaclay [dot] com or leave a comment here and I will respond to it.

P.S. If you have a blogspot blog, you should consider turning on the feed option. Go to your Dashboard, then click on Settings, and then click on Site Feed, and choose “Full” in the Allow Blog Feed dropdown menu.  If you choose Short, it’s just annoying because it only sends a partial post to the reader.

Jack @ 22 months

Such a big boy… almost 2 years old! Jack has finally made the switch to 1 nap a day. I never dreamed this transition would have taken so long. I keep struggling to find the magic sleep formula that will help him to sleep later in the morning and take longer naps, but it eludes me. People talk about their kids taking 3 hour naps every day when they were his age, and I try hard not to be envious.
He makes frequent and repeated use of the word no, of course. We’ve been working to teach him to say “no ma’am” or “no sir”, and he does it a lot of the time. Let me tell you, “no ma’am” is MUCH easier to listen to over and over than just “NO, NO, NO!”

His favorite phrase (besides no! no! no!) is “see ya later, alligator” - or as he puts it, “slay gator”. He loves to visit RBC and run around the halls and play with the water fountain. He wonders every time we get in the car if we’re going to see the church, and he shouts “CHURCH!” every time we pass it. Recently we were there as Mommaw was finishing work, and I let him wander around a little by himself through the hallways. Suddenly, we heard him crying from somewhere in the distance, and followed the sound to round the corner and see him standing in the middle of the hall looking very distressed. He was happy to see us… he’d gotten lost after he rounded that last corner and didn’t know how to get back! As he followed us back around to more familiar territory he said with relief, “Now…. church!” So funny!

Little patient

I looked back today to see when the last time was that I posted here, and it’s been 10 days! Well, I’ve been super busy, so I guess I have an excuse. I’ve been blessed with several new clients thanks to my friend Char referring them to me.

Jack had outpatient surgery yesterday. I won’t go into the details here, but it was a corrective surgery for something he was born with. It went well, but yesterday was a long day and today isn’t starting out as well as I would like. It will pass, and we’re thankful that the surgery is overwith finally.  We had a long wait between the time we arrived and when he went back to the operating room.  He can’t stand to be cooped up so he ran laps around the halls- he must have run a mile!  Jack entertained all the nurses by saying “see ya later alligator” at every opportunity.  You might think it a little strange that I have a picture of him from yesterday, but he looked so cute in those little yellow PJs they put him in, I just had to.  He looks like he knows what’s coming huh?

Good friends already

Jack and Emily are beginning to interact in a really sweet way, and I love being around to see the beginnings of their relationship.  He likes to lay in her lap, and she pounds on him, and he thinks it’s funny and then she laughs… so sweet.  Of course, there are plenty of not so sweet moments, usually involving Jack waltzing up and stealing whatever she’s playing with. He doesn’t want to play with it of course, he just wants it because she has it. Or, him taking her pacifier out, putting it back in again clumsily while she holds her mouth open waiting for him to hit the mark, taking it out again, etc… until I put an end to it.  In the picture below, they’re watching a video together.  They sat there cozily like that for a good 10 minutes.

Stay at home mom salary

Just in time for Mother’s Day:

Stay-at-home mother’s work worth $138,095 a year | U.S. | Reuters

The benefits package is great! If only it included a few more vacation days.

What would you do if you found out you had a brain tumor?

I have been keeping up with a blog lately that I thought I would share with you, because it’s an inspirational story and reminds us all that God is very near during the most difficult times in our lives. Heather at EspeciallyHeather.com has a brain tumor. Heather has already been through a lot in her young life, as her third child had to have a heart transplant at age 5. She has learned to trust in God for the peace that passes all understanding. She was originally told the tumor was inoperable, but it turns out they will be able to operate and possibly remove the tumor, and she is going into surgery tomorrow. The outcome is uncertain as it is a very dangerous surgery.

If you want to start at the beginning of Heather’s journey through this difficult time, start with this post. Wait… first, go get a box of Kleenexes.