Happy Monday and Happy Halloween!

I’m serious craving some hot, spicy, apple cider! My taste buds are going crazy for some! So tonight while all the little goblins are intermittently ringing my doorbell and yelling Trick or Treat, I’m going to have to make a batch.  I don’t know where my regular recipe is, so I had to google for some.  Here’s a couple I found:

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Don’t they look YUM!!!

So…it’s Halloween.  That means it will soon be Thanksgiving. And THAT means Christmas is right around the corner! I gotta get busy! Last year, I made about 200 homemade Christmas cards for the college students my husband works with through our church. It seemed like a simple design!  It seemed like a good thing to do. But yikes! Making 200 cards took some serious chunks of time out of my month!  So, this year, I’ve decided on a really simple design. Whatdayathink? Pretty easy, right?

And lastly, I probably shouldn’t share my NEW awareness of my uneducated naivety, but I guess I will. You know, I’ve witnessed a least a half-dozen live performances of different pieces from La Boheme through the years.  I have loved the dramatic swells of the music…I’ve appreciated the technical difficulty of the music and the range the singers had to master…I’ve enjoyed the aria immensely!  But – it wasn’t until I went to see the entire opera (with sub-titles) that I learned that Musetta’s Aria wasn’t the serious, dramatic love song that I always thought it was. Am I the only one that has been mislead and thought this piece was a “serious” piece? The music is so….so dramatic and serious-sounding. I was totally laughing at myself when I learned the lyrics were so flippant! Yes, I’ve been duped all these years.  Silly, naive, uneducated me!

Want to listen?  HERE is Musetta’s Aria (without sub-titles) and  HERE is Musetta’s Aria (with sub-titles) – Be sure to watch the one w/out sub-titles first! :o)

Have a great day! Do or learn something NEW!