10 Non-Yarny Things About Me

Apparently it's meme season again, ladies and gentlemen.  I was tagged with the list meme to divulge 10 non-yarny things about me.  I prepared a video about this, but had technical difficulties in uploading it.  I actually did talk about it when I did a live stream on Mother's Day. But I will also share it here:

1. My undergraduate degree is in music ed. When I started college I wanted to lead high school choruses, but when I finished I wanted to be an opera singer.
2. I didn’t finish high school.  The college I chose had a program where excellent students could dive right into college after completing 11th grade.  I do not regret that decision.
3. I have been in at least three graduate programs, but still do not have a graduate degree.  I have most of a Master of Music in voice, which I attempted at two different schools, and I also started an MBA but lost interest.
4. I have failed at a real estate career in three different states.
5. I worship and adore dogs with all my heart (no big surprise there), but I am terrified of actually taking on the responsibility of dog ownership. I can hardly take care of myself!
6. I have met, studied with, and interviewed for writing projects, some of the most famous opera singers in the world. Some of them are still very kind to me.
7. The very best summer of my life was one summer when I was in school, when I spent six weeks in Austria, mostly in Salzburg.  (Carol Vaness, are you listening?  I still have reactions that I don’t usually share with girls when I think of your Vitellia in Clemenza di Tito.)  The second best would be in 2010, when my husband and I visited Munich, and one of our amazing adventures was a day trip to Salzburg.  I was totally unprepared for the emotional reaction I would have when we were there.  (Equally as joyful was Augsburg, near his mother’s birth place, and where we learned his Opa had been part of rebuilding the Dom after the war.)
8. I consider my succession of occupations outside of music as sort of slurping from one thing to the next.  I was an administrative assistant for a financial PR/advertising/printing firm, then a financial typesetter because I convinced people I had a brain and could learn, and then I used typesetting languages for programming of data-driven printing, then I started doing documentation and project management in that realm…...then I got laid off and never really wanted to go back.  Hence the subsequent forays into real estate.
9. I owe my love of poetry to the NYC subway system. There was a program (possibly still is) in cooperation with the Poetry Society of America called Poetry in Motion, where poems and poetry excerpts would be displayed in subways cars where normally there were paid advertisements. Seen the same passages day after day, reading them repeatedly, led me to appreciate them very much. I had previously thought I hadn’t the patience for poetry, but I do. I love the compact and skillful use of language to relate ideas and themes and feelings.
10. In the same way that I love poetry, I love all skillful use of language. I love 19th century Brit-Lit (Jane Austen was such a babe!), I love Shakespeare, and I love well written comedies and dramas of the golden age of movies and television.
11. (Bonus item)  I felt an amazing sense of entitlement when I turned 50.  “I don’t have to do that!  I’m 50 years old!”  On my 50th birthday I bought myself a BMW.  I was delighted with my own generosity.  I loved that car.  But I loved the VW Passat I had after that as well.  What car would I choose if I could buy a new car now?  Probably a Kia Stinger.  Or not.  Who knows?