I got flu.  It’s not very interesting.  I have spent days at home feeling horrible.  My body temperature moved from my normal 36.3 to 39.1 C (97.3 to 102.4 F). My pulse and blood pressure increased.  And I spent much too long in that state where you are too ill to do anything but not ill enough to just sleep the whole time.  I’m starting to get better, so maybe now I will be able to do something with my days, even if I tire quickly.

January has sped past.  I have managed to keep up with my personal goals, apart from the exercise ones.  I will need to try harder to sort out classes or soon it will be March and I will not be any fitter.

Most of my spare time is taken up with work on Big River.  I still can’t speak my lines with a Kentucky accent.  (An example of the Kentucky accent can be heard here on the International Dialects of English Archive.) I can say some of the words, but the majority of them elude me.  There are some words in my native accent that most English speakers would find hard to reproduce.  The Northern Irish version of “How, now, brown, cow” would make Henry Higgins despair.  But what I hadn’t realised was that my natural way of saying “how” would make it incredibly hard to change the word.  I can change the vowel sound but changing the position of the “h” in my mouth to start the word differently is tormenting me, and probably all those who have to listen to me try.  I’m a little horrified that I’m understudy for a character who has a Deep Southern accent, but I think I’ll tackle one accent at a time.

I have an audition at the weekend for a musical theatre class. I hate that audition songs have to be so short and I’m really struggling to cut the piece down to 1 minute so that it still makes sense.  I’m also breaking the unofficial audition song rules by singing Andrew Lloyd Webber.  “Unexpected Song” is not one of the more popular ones, so I imagine it will be fine.  I just can’t bear singing another ugly song, so I picked something with a tune that could be hummed by most people instead of the difficult Sondheim stuff I have been singing lately.

As usual winter is taking a toll on my health, but I’m trying to set realistic goals for each day.

“Why, what’s the matter,
That you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”

–  William Shakespeare,  Much Ado About Nothing