This Is A Happy Day!!

Today is a happy day for my family and I want to share the joy with you as best as I can with a blog, so here are two happy YouTube videos for your enjoyment.

[YouTube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=2U-rBZREQMw]

The Sun is Shining, Come On Get Happy,
The Lord is Waiting to Take Your Hand.
Shout Alleluia! Come On Get Happy,
We’re Going to the Promised Land!

[YouTube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=qJLZ7PcInV4]

Won’t you sing along? Everybody knows this one! There’s even subtitles.
I’m Singing in the Rain. Just Singing in the Rain.
What a Glorious Feelin’. I’m Happy Again.
I’m Laughing at Clouds. So Dark Up Above.
The Sun’s In My Heart!

I’m Still Dreaming; I’d Rather Be Singing

Would you rather be singing too?

Getting To Know Your Friends — Christmas Edition Part 3

This is just for fun, although I’ve added some household tips and Christmas ideas, so you might find it worth your while to read on. I’ve been tagged by a friend and I’m sharing the fun along with my readers. You too can participate either in your blog or through e-mail if you don’t have a blog. If you missed Part 1, it’s right here and Part 2 is here.

Welcome to the Christmas edition of Getting To Know Your Friends.

Here’s what you’re supposed to do, and try not to be a SCROOGE!!!

Change all the answers so that they apply to you. Then either publish it in your blog or send this to a whole bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person who sent it to you … ‘Tis the Season to be NICE!

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Our traditional Christmas morning breakfast of hot chocolate, croissants and panettone. I also love the French tradition of the 13 desserts, although I’ve never done it for my immediate family since there are only three of us. This year though, I’ve come up with a great idea. I’ll have the requisite Yule log or buche de Noel, and I’ll buy 12 individual-sized pastries from the bakery. We’ll have one bite from each! I think it will do the trick of keeping a tradition while not having enough dessert to feed two armies. Year-round I do not have a particularly sweet tooth, but I associate Christmas with lots of wonderful food and lots of sweets of all kinds. I have a huge extended family. We’re talking hundreds of people when all the generations get together. On my mom’s side of the family, we would do a potluck-style Christmas dinner. Each adult would bring one item for the dinner. It was that nuclear family’s contribution to the dinner and Christmas gift to the entire extended family. One person would bring caviar, another would bring smoked salmon, another oysters, another champagne, another boudins blanc (white sausages), etc., etc., etc. When you have so many people gathering, you also use the entire home, including the family room, formal entry and the bedrooms. My paternal grandfather would have buffet tables in every room. We would go from room to room and visit with family while munching on hors d’oeuvres scattered around the entire house. I remember one gathering where some of my cousins and I discovered the room with the red and black caviar canapes. We were very hungry and we discovered very good caviar. Not too salty and no fishy taste. When we left the room, there were almost none left for the adults. You snooze, you loose!

16. Favorite Christmas song? I have far too many to pick one. It was already very difficult to pick a top 13 for a previous post, but you can click here to see which ones are some of my favorites, and you can click here to see why I appreciate the 12 Days of Christmas even more now than I used to.

17. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Both. I have the misfortune of living far away from home, so most years I am the one who has the chore of traveling hundreds of miles during the busy holiday season. From time to time, the mountain thankfully comes to Mohammed, though.

18. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeers? If you give me enough time I will, but off the tip of my tongue, Rudolph is the only one who ever comes to mind. Did you know Rudolph was invented by a Montgomery Wards employee? If you are too young to remember Montgomery Wards, it was a department store similar to Sears. It was the first department store to trust me with a student store-credit card back when I was still a teenager. I thoroughly miss that store and Woolworth, too. How could they possibly close American institutions like that? What a pity.

19. Angel on the tree top or a star? I have several of both, and Mary with baby Jesus, and a needle, and a chandelier-like tree top. Remember I have trees in every single room.

20. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? As a child we always opened gifts on Christmas Day. Notice, I did not say Christmas Morning. My mom would torture us by not allowing any gifts, not even one, to be opened until afternoon. In the name of Christmas not being about gifts, but about God, my mom decided that the gift opening would almost be an afterthought. There would also be only one from Santa and one from my parents. Thank goodness for relatives, though with so many relatives, most did not give gifts to all of us children, but I usually received two or three more gifts that way, so at least I was not deprived. When I got married, my husband’s family was used to opening all presents on Christmas Eve so it worked out very well for us. Christmas Eve was at his parents’ house, Christmas Day was at mine, and nobody argued or got feelings hurt. Our son opens gifts on Christmas Morning as soon as we are done with our special Christmas breakfast.

21. Most annoying thing about this time of year? Atheists trying to jam their own beliefs down our throats because they can’t at least live and let live. Too many of them don’t just not believe in God, but are actually anti-God and make their own beliefs into a religion.

22. Favorite ornament theme or color? I prefer the old-fashioned kind of Christmas ornaments on a real, green Christmas tree. I also like my very artificial silver foil tabletop tree with tiny gold ball ornaments and “S” shaped swirl hooks. The white lights and even daylight reflect on the foil and the ornaments, so it does look quite stuning. Being silver, it looks very much at home even past New Year, and can be decorated with a timepiece theme or numbers/years. That tree reminds me of the tree my parents had bought in the late ’60s. I see no use for ornaments representing licensed products like Spider-Man, Star Wars and the like, not that I have anything against these types of things, but because they have nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas.

23. Favorite for Christmas dinner? Prime rib. My mother-in-law used to make an entire side of cow and it was the very best prime rib ever. No other home cook and no restaurant chef, even ones supposedly specializing in prime rib, can ever compare to hers.

24. What do you want for Christmas this year? The best gift ever would be one that only Santa or God (or just maybe my Realtor) could give me. I would like my house to finally sell in this horrible market where my Realtor tells us there is a 12 months inventory in our area and mortgage companies are not even granting loans to anyone but those with extremely fantastic, wonderful, spectacular, stupendous credit.

And here’s a bonus question from me, because this last one is kind of a downer and Christmas should be happy!

25. What are some of your favorite Christmas memories? Besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, growing up in Paris, France, my parents would take me to see the large department store windows (it’s similar to the New York City tradition). I would especially like the automatons and anything moving like the toy trains. We would drive on the Champs Elysees with the Arch of Triumph in front of us, getting ever closer, and around Christmas time, the City of Lights would explode with even more lights than the rest of the year. Each year I just could not believe my eyes at the sight of so many lights and so many beautiful things to look at. Between Christmas and Epiphany, my parents would take me to many of the churches in Paris so we could visit Baby Jesus. Each church would have its own gorgeous Nativity set. Some would even have several, and all were antiques, because Paris was not made yesterday.

Thursday Thirteen #9 — Favorite Christmas Carols

Welcome back to Thursday Thirteen, where I let my readers in on some trivia about me. Today I share with you 13 favorite Christmas Carols, and let me tell you it was a very tough choice because I not only love everything about Christmas, but I was also in my church choir, so I have so many fond memories connected with so many carols and hymns. It was sort of like asking a mother to pick her favorite children; it’s just not possible. So, in no particular order, here are my 13 favorites for the day. Ask me next week, and I’m sure I’ll come up with at least another 8 or 10 different favorites.

1. Silent Night
2. Do You Hear What I Hear
3. Mary Did You Know
4. Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant
5. The Twelve Days of Christmas
6. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
7. Joy To The World!
8. Handel’s Messiah
9. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
10. Jingle Bells
11. O, Tannenbaum!
12. O, Little Town of Bethlehem
13. Carol of the Bells

Be sure to check my pages full of Christmas Tips, Ideas and Resources and my Household Tips.

Happy Thursday!!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

Black Friday Holiday Shopping Sales, Deals and Savings

The morning after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year here in the United States and it even has it’s own name, Black Friday. While most people go shopping at ungodly hours like 4 to 6 a.m., I usually stay snug in my bed just so I don’t have to fight the crowds. This year we can have our cake and eat it too. With our store, infinitygoods.com, being an Amazon Affiliate, I was told of a special Black Friday opportunity. If you link to my store on Friday, November 23, 2007 between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, you will be able to stay home in your PJs and take advantage of special affiliate sales. No crowds, no bumper to bumper lines in the parking lot, you won’t even have to get showered and dressed before the sun is up, yet you can still shop to your little heart’s content and enjoy all the Black Friday sales, deals and savings. At infinitygoods.com we normally carry selected items of interest to families, but on Black Friday we’re linking to the entire Amazon Web site so that you’ll be able to save on all the sales, deals and savings available to Amazon Affiliates. So be sure to go to our store on Friday. It will definitely be worth your while because there will be hourly deals from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST along with thousands of products on sale for a limited time. There will even be gift wrapping for only $.99 per item to make the busy holiday season that much easier for you.

It works for me and it will work for you too. For more Works For Me Wednesday participants visit Rocks in My Dryer.

If you missed any of my previous household tips, just click below.

Don’t Waste Those Eggs!

Bookcases at the Breaking Point?

Organizing Household Binder

Holiday Shopping List

Holiday Decorating Tips and Ideas

Trading Card Storage

Freezer Solution

Large desk calendar inside guest closet

Child’s haircut without tears

Homemade bread stuffing

Plastic colander bath toy drainer/holder

Reuse plastic grocery bags in the car

How to increase Web site traffic?

16 Blog/Web site tips

Toy storage

In the meantime, Infinity Goods wishes you a great Thanksgiving

and a happy holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!!!

• Don’t know what NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are? Read all about it here and here.

• Want to know why I’m participating in both? Click here.

Holiday Shopping List

Here are my picks for a 21st Century Holiday Shopping List, and you can shop right here from the Internet and not have to fight for a parking spot at the mall. Just click on the links to see more and to purchase.

Music Downloads The teens and music lovers will enjoy Amazon’s new music downloads for their iPods, MP3 players, cell phones and other musical gadgets. Starting at only 89 to 99 cents per download, it’s in anybody’s price range and can be given even to paperboys (do they still exist??), teen gardeners, babysitters and others you want to recognize with a gift but don’t want to spend a fortune on. Your own kids will love a more generous download amount, and you will love this clutter-free gift which won’t be sitting around your home gathering dust.

Video Downloads Forget driving to the video store or messing with mail order video memberships. Now you can download your videos straight from your computer. Video downloads can be either rented or purchased from Amazon, a trusted Internet source for years, not a new fly-by-night company you’ve never heard of before.

Planet Earth – The Complete BBC Series is “a tour de force … a masterpiece,” wrote the New York Times. Using revolutionary new filming techniques, with a budget of more than $25 million, “Planet Earth” is the epic story of life on Earth as you’ve never seen it before. The Chicago Times praised it as “an absolutely extraordinary achievement.” Five years in the making, using 40 cameramen spanning 200 locations, this 11-part series is hailed as the ultimate portrait of our planet. It also features a 150-minute documentary about our future. “Simply radiant” said Entertainment Weekly and “breathtaking” according to Time Magazine.

The Bible Experience: Old Testament (Inspired By) You can no longer say the Bible is boring or that you don’t have the time. Now you can be entertained during your long commute by an unprecedented cast of more than 400 actors, musicians and clergy, including Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Bishop T.D. Jakes, LL Cool J, Forest Whittaker, etc. in this dramatic audio recording of the Bible. Even the youngest child can “read” the Bible by listening to the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Complete Bible and the whole family can gather around, too. This audio Bible is from Zondervan, the world’s leading Bible publisher.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT This is much more than a toy, it is science lessons in a box and was recommended to our son by his science teacher, a research scientist who participates each year in the DARPA Urban Challenge with Autonomous Robot Cars. Mindstorms is exciting for children and teens (adults too) and will nurture their curiosity. Parents will love that it’s not some mindless, brain-rotting toy. If you missed the posts about the Urban Challenge, you can click here and here to learn about the cars that drive themselves and will be picking up our groceries in the very near future.

iRobot 560 Roomba Vacuuming Robot, Black and Silver The Jetsons have finally arrived. This round vacuum may not look like a robot, but it will automatically vacuum your home, spend extra time in the dirtiest spots and return to one of its two battery chargers to ready itself for the next clean up and you won’t have to lift a finger. Spend the extra time laughing with your children, cozying up with your spouse or pampering yourself.

This great carnival of shopping list ideas was thought of by Chili at Don’t Try It, where the rest of the participants are listed.

For more on holiday shopping, check out my post about Black Friday Sales, Deals and Savings and visit our store on November 23, 2007 from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST.

• Don’t know what NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are? Read all about it here and here.

• Want to know why I’m participating in both? Click here.

Starbucks Throws Children and Parents Into the Street

Starbucks strikes again. I keep hearing in the community, in the news, and on the Internet that Starbucks does not like children, and at least based on the experience we had a few days ago, I can say it’s absolutely true.

Our son’s teacher had prearranged with the local Starbucks manager in Oak Park, Calif., to have a small group of 6-10 homeschoolers accompanied by parents to journal for one hour. The thought was to have comfortable seating, pleasant music and, since the weather is getting chilly, perhaps even a cup of hot cocoa all while the children and parents wrote in their journals.

It seemed it would be a better experience than sitting in a school district classroom, which seems particularly uninviting to all of us who are so used to the pleasures and comfort of homeschooling.

We would have gained a clean, well-lighted place to write, and in exchange Starbucks would have gained some free community outreach in an affluent area which is extremely family oriented, all the while gaining some extra business at a time of day the manager had claimed was always slow.

Well, that was not to be.

Despite the prearrangement and the fact that several parents were already purchasing drinks and snacks, the manager asked the teacher to leave even before several of us had the chance to arrive, claiming there were too many patrons there that morning despite the seats still available both inside and on the patio.

Now, I ask you, since almost every single one of us had made a purchase, were we not patrons?

Mind you, we were not a group of screaming preschoolers or scary teen gang members. The three children who had already arrived were polite and quiet elementary school children who were accompanied by both a school district teacher, and one parent each.

Starbucks did not refuse to serve us. No, they gladly took our money. Starbucks refused to allow paying customers to sit down and sent children out into the cold!

When the teacher went to Starbucks to prearrange this, the manager had the choice to simply say no, or that she didn’t feel comfortable doing that, or that it was sometimes a busy time of day so it might not be comfortable for us, or any polite customer service excuse she wanted to give. But instead, she chose to tell the teacher yes, that it was a slow time of day and that it was “fine,” only to rudely go back on her word.

That’s not how to win repeat business or create community goodwill, Starbucks. That’s not only the perfect recipe for losing business today, but also for losing business tomorrow when those children become adults.

As you can see by this blog post, it’s also the perfect way to earn bad press for all the World Wide Web to read.

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• Don’t know what NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo are? Read all about it here and here.

• Want to know why I’m participating in both? Click here.

Pavarotti Remembered In His Own Words

Luciano Pavarotti, 71, died at 5 a.m. this morning, Italian time. His latest recording of sacred songs is scheduled for release in early 2008.

He earned the title of “King of the High C’s” when he hit nine high C’s in quick succession at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1972 during performances of “Ah! Mes Amis” in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Regiment.”

In his own words, here are a few memories and thoughts of his life.

“When I was born, my mother was under 20, my grandmother 38, my great grandmother 56. They had many sisters. I have three daughters with my first wife and one with my wife, Nicoletta. I have had many secretaries in the past, around 10 to 15, all women. I was born with women all around. This is perhaps why you see me so happy. They protect me so that when I am on stage, I only have to think about my singing.”

“Our family had very little, but I couldn’t imagine one could have any more,” Pavarotti said. He was the son of a baker.

“In my teens I used to go to Mario Lanza movies and then come home and imitate him in the mirror.”

“Whenever I went to visit him (Arrigo Pola, his music teacher whom he continued to visit right up to Pola’s death), I took a lesson. He was a very significant teacher for me. I give him the impression that I still need him — and it was true. Not that I need to study with him, but that I need him to hear me and tell me, yes, it’s good like that or not like that. In fact, I’m doing exactly what I did the first day I met my teacher. Nothing has changed, not one comma.”

“You should ask one of my colleagues if I am lazy. I make them work like pigs.”

“I always want to be serious, a professional person. And if you ask me what I want to do now, it is the same thing. My goal is to be remembered as a very serious professional singer who has begun his career in the world of the opera; sings, let’s say, 25 years in the opera house; and for the last 15 years of his life, goes a little outside the world of opera to meet other people — especially with the television, who is a great sister in publicizing everything, including music.”

Speaking of his yo-yo dieting with a reported high of 396 pounds (180 kilograms) in 1978, “Maybe this time I’ll really do it and keep it up.”

“In act II of Tosca, sitting on a little classic baroque chair during rehearsal, I told the stage director that I couldn’t sit there, it will explode. He said ‘no, don’t worry I will reinforce it with iron.’ During rehearsal Tosca sang close to me while I was sitting on the chair. She put her hand on my leg, it was fine. On the night of the performance, she was more exuberant, and sat on me. They are still looking for the chair. And that was the premiere.”

“For many years I always dream that I am in my dressing room, in underpants and the orchestra begins to play. And I wake with a jump. Once in the Paris opera, I prepared for an 8 p.m. start, but at 7 p.m., the opera began … and I was in my underpants. It was an incredible night.”

“I’m a very lucky man. I’m not selling anything but music.”

“I take it day by day, I never make plans. I do what is demanded of me. … If it comes to me and I like it, I go. I have been singing for 41 years, and for the last 10, I have

been making music outside opera. Now I’m able to take it to people who never knew this music existed. We had a concert in China and millions got to watch it. We cannot do that in an opera house. Some people are afraid of opera music. But once they know, they are not afraid anymore.”

“The word commercial is exactly what we want. We’ve reached 1.5 billion people with opera (with the Three Tenors concerts). If you want to use the word commercial, or something more derogatory, we don’t care. Use whatever you want.”

“First of all, I never sang for legend. I sang for the composer first of all. Secondly, if there is a legend, the Three Tenors concerts make the legend more.”

“When I go on stage by myself, I try to be good. When I go on stage with the tenors, I try to be better!”

“Some say the word ‘pop’ is a derogatory word to say ‘not important’ — I do not accept that. If the word ‘classic’ is the word to say ‘boring,’ I do not accept. There is good and bad music.”

“I want to give something back to the younger generation. Teaching I think is the most difficult thing; teaching is more difficult than singing. Why? Because you have to transfer a thought from your brain to the brain of the other person and the throat of the other person. I want to teach people who really are good.”

“I won’t give the twins anything more than I gave my three daughters. Of course, back then, my career was in full swing. This time I will have more time to devote to my children.” (A baby boy died during childbirth, the girl, Alice survived.)

“Alice was born during the making of this record (Ti Adoro). She has inspired me so much. I dedicate this record to her.”

“Now I only need God’s help — and it really seems to me that he is giving it to me.”

“I cannot live being thought not a good person.”

“I was a fortunate and happy man. After that, this blow arrived (pancreatic cancer). And now I am paying the penalty for this fortune and happiness.”

Pavarotti recordings can be found here.