I wanted to make the punchline the title of this entry, but I didn't want to give away the joke...

Good morning! So, the things at the Binghamton are going fairly well. For a more detailed update, keep reading...

Funny things continue to come into my life in the form of one Jonathan Stults, who immed me yesterday morning at 7:30am with this link, and nothing else.

I like it because people yell in caps always. As per usual?

Voice lessons and the like are being a challenge, but practicing every day and knowing what Tim wants from me is good. He was very pleased with me last week so I'm happy about that! He is currently gone singing at Kansas City Opera, so my assignment for while he's gone is to learn all the possible repertoire for when he comes back. And possibly pick a Strauss set? It's a little crazy town, but I'm excited. Piano is also going well.

Along the lines of finding things to do around here, apparently there's an awesome Cider Mill in Endicott I intend to check out, a production of Rocky Horror that will run until the end of the month (because can you ever have too much community theater? I think not) and a Haunted House somewhere in Maine, NY. I'm almost boycotting the haunted house because of the name of the town. Does everywhere in the state have to be named after somewhere else? And the thing is, towns in New York doesn't just take foreign and elsewhere city names...they take country and state names too. Dear New York, You are most bizarre. Love, Heather.

More humor continues to come from the immortal Paul Schleuse. Yesterday, we were talking about my research project in class (roughly, Handel's use of Lutheran chorale tunes in his compositional work in England as contrasted with Bach given that they come from the same German musical tradition). He suggested that I do some looking at Buxtehude, because he was the big composer in the generation before Handel and Bach. Then he said "I think this is the 300th or 400th anniversary of Buxtehude's birth or death or something...There's a LOT of Buxtehude going on!" So basically, Buxtehude = hanky panky. And thanks to one Stephanie Lehman, the good professor is terrified of me. It may or may not have been let out of the bag that he is my away message often. I believe this terrified him because he had no idea what instant messenger was. I summed up by telling him he's basically a celebrity to my friends? I think that helped?

Rehearsals for Don Giovanni are funny, and I like them. It is so thrilling to be in an actual opera! And the chorus is pretty small, so I get to be downstage and talking to main characters fairly often. Well, I say fairly often, but the chorus is only on stage three times in the whole opera because it's Don Giovanni. Oh well.

Now for the punchline of the entire entry...

Last night, at rehearsal, I got invited to a Mary Kay party.

Um. Have we met??? The last time I was invited to anything remotely like that it was at Lacey Stevens' birthday party in seventh grade. I mean, I'm kind of a fan of the Mary Kay line of skin care products I guess??? I'm going to go to the party tomorrow night because it's going to be fun, and because it will help me know these people who I deal with daily, and because there will be sandwiches. And because LaToya is nice. But, but...I could end up with a Mary Kay lady at the end of all of this. That means I'm turning into my mother. And that, my friends...as much as I love her...that is NOT okay.