Strange Adventure

Every year for our vocal recital, my voice teacher puts on a show. Many recitals tend to have one student perform [clap, clap, clap], sit down, next student performs [clap, clap, clap], and so on until all students have performed their pieces. My teacher likes to make this entertaining for the audience and stretch her students so that they're not just singing, but acting as well. This year we are performing selections from the Gilbert & Sullivan productions of, Pirates of Penzance, Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard, and The H.M.S. Pinafore.

During our rehearsal last night, we practiced "Strange Adventure" from The Yeomen of the Guard. While singing, we will apparently be dressed in Renaissance period dress and dancing. This piece is written as a 4-part (SATB) a capella quartet. I get to sing the bass part (up an octave, of course). This is a great song. Found a version of it on YouTube that I like (the song starts about 2 minutes through the clip) - check it out: Strange Adventure.

As for mine and Ed's 'strange adventure,' we went to IKEA on Saturday. We love IKEA! It's one of my favorite places to shop (along with COSTCO, Michael's and Macy's - but I'll save those three for another day). We could spend the day getting lost in IKEA and just thinking of all of the possibilities. As an added bonus, they have a cafeteria there and serve a Swedish meatball lunch (so yummy!). So, we trekked down to IKEA and wandered there for a few hours. We found the perfect entertainment center for our guest room. Here's the great part, it was on sale for 50% off! The sales clerk saw us looking at it and writing down the warehouse locator number so she went and checked and found that there was only one left in the warehouse. She came and told us so we raced through the rest of the store (not an easy feat) to pick it up and then had to maneuver the cart with two big boxes on it back to where we were, so we could continue our meandering through the store. Now, IKEA is a one-way street. Trying to steer a cart the wrong way through the store to get back to where we started was like trying to run against the current of a raging river! But this story has a happy ending, we got our entertainment center, ate the Swedish meatball lunch, and had a fun afternoon just wandering through IKEA.

Now comes the fun of rearranging things in the house and making everything fit just right. So Eddie has been working hard on that project. Hey, I just do the shopping here, Eddie's the handy man! :)