day 1 of school

WOW I had a long day today.
After a long flight yesterday.

I'm totally exhausted and jet-lagged (it's 4:40 am 'my time' and only 10:40pm here)...
but here are some tidbits from the last 24 hours.

A. make sure you know whether you will have to go through customs in the FIRST airport (the transit stop before the final destination), and whether you will have to WAIT for your checked bag to come out, collect it, re-check it, go through SECURITY AGAIN!!!! (because of that knife you picked up while you were on the FIRST plane for 9 hours)...and do that all within a one hour period of time before your connecting flight leaves. Check.

B. If the above occurs and you should happen to be sitting in the LAST row of the airplane (my total bad for not requesting to be booked on Delta for this flight, where I have many miles to prevent such horrible seat assignments), find a nice looking stewardess and ask if there are ANY free seats toward the front of the plane that you can sit in for the last 30 minutes before landing so that you can SPRINT off of the plane and through said lines.

C. Why did a small, un-chilled Naked Juice drink cost 4.99 at the airport?

D. It is SO much better to stay in a HOUSE with FAMILY for a month than in a hotel.
Full kitchen, awesome people, free wireless that does not kick you off at the hotel, dogs to play with, bikes to borrow, and generally a more relaxed and home-y feeling. Love.

OK and now to the first day of rehearsal!!!!!!!
Very quickly- it will be awesome.
I mean- super awesome.
The singers are all great, and the productions sounds super cool.

Thankfully even though this music HAS been absolutely challenging to learn, I feel PRETTY comfortable after our first musical rehearsal today. There was one section that I had to re-do twice before I got it right because of a different conducting pattern than the beats that I had learned it.
I also learned that I will be on stage the ENTIRE opera...even though I don't sing a lot of the ensembles, I just comment on them physically.
Soooo-- yea, there will be no knitting backstage. Or chocolate-eating for that matter.

And now, sleep.