I hate New Year's Resolutions. I do not perform well under pressure. Regardless, these are the things I want to work on in the coming year:

1. get into shape. I will be turning 30 and feel like that's the end of the road for juvenile eating habits.

2. begin to write more regularly.

3. be a more appreciative friend.

After a LJ/fandom hiatus, I feel like I'm back. Woo!

Well, it was sort of a hiatus. For quite a while I've been shuffling my fandom interests since a) Miami & WaT are now dead to me and b) I keep forgetting to watch CSI b) right now I am in love with all anime/manga fandoms. Then I was procrastinating through NaNo month and frantically finishing my yuletide story....

But that's all done.

And I have a pile of WIP stories with my name on it. Staring at me. Poking me with sharp sticks.

I haven't been reading much fic on my flist in the past couple of months, but I'm thinking of using the holiday weekends to fix that. We'll see what the family has in store, though.

OK. back to work.

So I was just reading a review of Phantom of the Opera in the strib. Now, it's the musical version, the Lloyd Webber one. Being performed by "untrained" vocalists, for the most part (except Minnie Driver, who's lip synching), according to the strib.

Now, I'm not here to argue the merits or lack thereof of Andrew Lloyd Webber as a composer. No, my question/observation is this; quality or not, Phantom is an extremely challenging show to sing. There is *no way* an untrained singer could sing Christine. I mean, it was written *for* Sarah Brightman. For her voice specifically.

That's just crazy.

Boy I'm chatty.