Huh.

Shortest jury duty ever. There was one case for the criminal courts this week, and 110 potential jurors. I didn't get called for voire dire, so I'm free for three years. I was there for all of an hour and a half. Yay?

(It would have been interesting to see the trial process, but I guess it's good not to have to go downtown every day this week.)

Choir

Community Choir in Nashville!

No Doc, but still. Choir! My voice placement is Wednesday. Given the little sample of music they want you to know, they seem to be looking for some very tenor-y altos. And some really alto-y sopranos. I don't think I can even reach some of those alto notes, and they want you to know both parts for the placement. Ow?

(See icon. I like hanging out above the staff, thanks.)

No matter, though. Choir! Any choir! (Although hopefully it's more like Kenyon's than Exeter's.)

The Nashville Symphony is also auditioning chorus members this month, and in January as well. But the requirements look like a horrifying hybrid of the Chamber Singers audition and the Opera Workshop audition. I figure if I'm not even sure what an "art song" is, that's probably nothing I need to try. (Maybe in January? If I seriously brush up on my veryveryveryvery basic sight reading skills? And recognize that I'd probably still make an utter fool out of myself?)

"Ballykissangel...oh, that HAS to be made up."

Bah. Netflix is taking forever these days. I'm on the one-at-a-time plan, and I sent back my last DVD on Tuesday. They're just now shipping out the next one, for arrival on...Tuesday. More than a week after the last one. Pah. (I guess, technically, this is actually the USPS's fault. The last time I had Netflix, they would've had the next disc to me by Saturday. Perhaps the volume has gone up faster than can be handled.)

But anyway, more Ballykissangel tomorrow! To celebrate, I'm using one of my two new Assumpta icons. Isn't she purty?

I did manage to get the "Ballykissdibley" Comic Relief special from my library yesterday. Heh. I'd never seen Vicar of Dibley before, but I'd heard of it. I watched some of the actual episodes on the DVD as well; it's definitely amusing, but unfortunately I can also predict the next joke about fifty percent of the time, so I don't think I'll watch any more. But I would like to see some of the French & Saunders sketch show, 'cause Dawn French is hilarious.

As well as getting that DVD, I wandered into the poetry and the Irish history sections. Yeah. As usual. The Nashville Public Library apparently has greatly increased its stock of LitCrit volumes since I was last there, not to mention of modern poets. I got a bunch of Seamus Heaney¹, and a couple travel essay collections or memoirs, and a book on the Troubles in Belfast from the seventies to the nineties, because I still don't know as much as I ought about that place and time period. I usually stuck to the Celtic Twilight and the Easter Rising when researching and writing about Irish independence movements.

Have also been reading, er, Ballyk fanfic, very little of which is any good. But they've got the names of the characters spelled out, which is interesting. I will never understand how one can get something like "Porrig" out of "Padraig." Where does the "d" go? And let's not even go into "Shivan" from "Siobhan," although at least I knew that one already. Irish spelling is on crack. Or "craic," as they'd spell it. *facepalm*

I keep thinking, "Hey, it would be neat to learn Irish!" And then I look at the orthography and run screaming. Even if that weren't a problem, I could never learn this language because I will never in a million years be able to wrap my brain around cases. A semester of Old English taught me that much. Any number of irregular verbs in Spanish didn't phase me in high school, and gendered nouns were even okay, although I didn't ever really get why they were gendered, but the idea of declined nouns just makes my head spin.

Speaking of reading and writing, does anyone else find that letting an LJ entry sit for a while just takes away any desire to finish it and post it? I have a half-finished entry on rereading Tam Lin (which segues into rereading Alma Mater and to W.B. Yeats and then on to some stuff about being an English major...yeah, it's rambly), but it seems that if I don't write an entry and post it in one sitting, I can't bring myself to bother finishing the thing. Hmmm. And I still haven't done the plot vs. language poll I meant to do last week. Oof, I'm lazy.


¹ I think after a year in the UK and a trip to Ireland, I can actually appreciate him and his fixation with land much more than when we read him in Irish Lit. Interestingly, the exact opposite has happened with Yeats; not that I appreciate him any less (check out the 4,000-word paper I did on him and William Morris that year, for one), but I've moved on from his early fairies-and-landscape-related stuff and am now more interested in his later works, which don't have much to do with land. Anyway, his poetry that does deal with the landscape of Ireland isn't as...hmmm...true? evocative? as Heaney's is. Of course, the seventy-odd years separating them doesn't help much. Not to mention the fact that Yeats' poetry is generally considered to have gotten steadily better throughout his lifetime. ...I'm destroying my argument here, so I'm going to stop.