Moving the mail...

We have had a busy week so far as mail is concerned... first, we've been very pleasantly surprised to receive so many wonderful Christmas cards and letters from friends and family. We've left the composition and posting of our own pretty late, so no doubt it will once again become a "New Year" letter instead of a Christmas one. It does seem a bit like we'd be threshing old straw by writing one, since we've written frequently in our blogs, but letters are still better to give and receive than email, I think. I tried to write regularly during my stay in Ireland, and managed to write and post almost twenty letters during the month I was there (most of those were to my grandmothers, and to Maggie and the kids, in case you were feeling miffed at not receiving one). If you haven't sat down and hand-written a letter in a while, you might consider it; it necessitates a whole different kind of contemplation, one that we don't spend enough time doing in our keyboard-krazy world of email.

Secondly, some Christmas presents arrived from my parents in Belleville, already wrapped (no peeking, drat) and ready to go under the tree. The boys are excited and are counting down the days on their playmobil advent calendars. (If you haven't seen these, they make a great gift for kids). Other presents from our immediate and the extended family are in process of getting wrapped, so we'll be well-supplied with cadeaux when the 25th arrives.

Lastly, a purchase that I made on ebay finally arrived. We were given an art nouveau candelabra a few years ago by Bruce, who found it in an auction in Victoria, but it is back in our house in Canada. It looks like this:


Maggie and I were talking, because we used this piece most evenings for dinner in Toronto, and missed it here, so rather than shipping it over I did some searching around for a similar design, and found this complementary one, which arrived in excellent condition, from an antique collector in Arizona, of all places:


So we are feeling very proper and fancy AND illuminated at the table now. What's even better is that last night, while Maggie was sitting at the table, I had the golden opportunity to stand in the kitchen, hand our new acquisition to Malcolm and say those famous words...




"Take this candelabra over to mother, Malcolm."

If you don't recognize those words, then you need to look here:



It's amazing. "Wideo Wabbit" incorporates classical music, Groucho Marx, on-camera smoking, same-sex kissing, mockery of domestic violence, at least one deliberate assault with a pastry, electrical shocks, high explosives, massacres by native americans, cross-dressing, speech impediments... 1953 really was the GOOD OLD DAYS, wasn't it?

"Wideo Wabbit" also deals with candelabras, and auditions, and both topics were part of my day yesterday. I already explained about the former; for the latter I went to the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, or the Brussels Opera house, and met up with an agent who was in town to see the evening performance of Rusalka. He had heard me in Ireland, and it was a lot of fun to sing for him. Unlike most auditions we actually had almost an hour together, which was a luxury, and I feel good about how I sang, and what we discussed. More on this later... in other musical news, there are a number of projects shaping up, but nothing finalized, so I don't want to say more for the moment.

Now it's off to drop my bio/cv/photo/cover letter in the mail, to yet another director... gotta run before I miss the last mail pickup!

p.s. As always, don't forget to pay a visit to Maggie's blog, and please feel free to comment on anything I've written here. M.