Downburst

My friend Katie Robison wrote a book. It is ridiculous good! As in, you don't want to put it down. It's exciting, suspenseful, unpredictable, a little violent, and a little romantic all rolled into one.

You can own it for your very own on:

Barnes&Noble: here

Amazon: here

You can also search for it on iTunes.

And read more about Katie here.

Read a review written by a friend here.

And the Amazon reviews here.

And all of my blog readers out there who know me, you KNOW that I give good book recommendations. So, read it, love it! Don't make me force you.

And if you don't have a Kindle or Nook, no excuses. You can download the Kindle app onto your computer for...FREEEE!

Kindle for PC.
Kindle for Mac.

Nerd

Sometimes I astound myself with how much of a nerd I actually am.

Especially when it comes to Harry Potter. I tend to know way to many intimate details from these books. I suppose I may have read them slightly more times than what is considered socially acceptable. However, this makes me entirely awesome when it comes to dominating sporcle quizzes during class . . . Hey, I have to stay awake somehow!

Yeah, with time to spare on them all . . . no it's not pathetic. I am particularly proud of that last one with 40 seconds to spare because there are some pretty obscure characters in that one!

On another, slightly related note Tony and I (mostly me) created a Google calendar (love those things!) with summer highlights to pass the time until August. To be honest, there is very little going on in the months of June and July. BUT you better believe the Harry Potter 7: Part 2 is on that calendar! There is no question as to where I will be on July 15, 2011 at midnight!

Books I've Enjoyed

I read a whole slew of new books this summer, and the time has come to share them.

The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck.

This book was anti-WWII propaganda that was banned by the Nazis. It's nice and short.

Angus, Thongs and Full-frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison.

Yeah, it's a teen novel. But it's worth it's weight in laughs.

Oh, and my newest favorite waste of time:

sporcle.com

It is an oh so wonderful waste of time!

My Humble Abode

Just last night I finally got around to hanging up the last of my posters. I also got the painting I bought in Jinja up after a couple near disastrous incidents involving hanging a picture by standing on my squishy bed and a rather unfortunate fight with a crooked command hook that was determined to remain affixed to the wall.

Anyways, I finally got it up. I was more than a little nervous that the whole thing might come tumbling down right onto my head during the night because you know that would happen to me. Luckily, it seems to be perfectly happy where it is hanging on the wall right above where my head goes at night. Let's hope we keep it that way!

Also, I have this awesome bookshelf. I am absolutely in love with it. I especially like it because I have lots of books to fill it up with.

Here goes:

Oh, and one last thing . . .

Happy Birthday to Me! (don't know why this came out blue . . . and I also don't know how to fix it . . . le sigh)

Wanderlust

So I was watching You've Got Mail for probably the one hundredth time today (actually I'm watching it right this very minute.) Meg Ryan's character says, "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"

Every time I hear that part I just think, "Amen, sister." Of course I have read lots of books, but then again I've been lots of places, too. I still want to travel to so many places though. I want to go to Greece, New Zealand, Alaska, New Guinea, India, Ireland, Romania, Hungary, Turkey (thank you to The Historian for inspiring me to go to those last three), Russia, Japan, China, France, Finland . . . well you get the idea. In fact, there isn't really anywhere I do NOT want to go.

Geez . . . so many places for how short life is really.

Speaking of travel, I went to Africa this summer. Remember? Yes?

Enjoy:

Spot the rhino in the above picture and you win a prize!

I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void.

I Want I Need

I'm going to Uganda.

I'm going to be there for almost four whole months.

I like to read.

In 2010 alone I have read:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The Lost Symbol
Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Anne's House O Dreams
Rules for Radicals
A Clockwork Orange
The Art of War
High Fidelity

Just how am I supposed to fit all that nonsense in my suitcase?

Which is why I need one of these for my trip I think:

It's a Kindle and this one is less than $70. I can upload enough books to last me for my trip and then I'm good to go for the entirety of my trip to Africa.

Brilliant, huh?

A Hilarious Misfortune

I took this picture when I was in England. We were at Stourhead which is where part of Pride & Prejudice a la Keira Knightly was filmed.

I took a picture of myself:

With the intention of photoshopping Mr. Darcy in later. This is the same place where he proposes to her the first time you know with the:

DARCY: Miss Elizabeth. I have struggled in vain and I can bear it no longer. These past months have been a torment. I came to Rosings with the single object of seeing you. I had to see you. I have fought against my better judgement, my family’s expectation, the inferiority of your birth, my rank and circumstances – all these things -but I am willing to put them aside and ask you to end my agony

LIZZY: I don’t understand.

DARCY: I love you. Most ardently. Please do me the honor of accepting my hand.

Look for these images in this scene:

But I digress . . .

The point was I wanted to photoshop Mr. Darcy into a picture of me in the same place. I finally got around to doing it today. I pulled up a picture of Mr. Darcy looking at Keira. I magnetic lassoed Mr. Darcy, masked and fixed the lines, cut him out, flipped him (vertically) and then dragged the picture into my original . . .

Needless to say, it failed miserably. I need to pay a bit more attention to file size next time perhaps. I didn't even both with cropping the original as I had intended because let's face it, what's the point?

Geeeez

The good news and the bad news

So just when I seem to think that life is going along swimmingly, (graduate school apps done, full time paying internship in progress, warmish weather, good ward) I indubitably have to go and do something stupid.

It's just a simple fact of life.

To start off this story, I must show you my driveway. It is very skinny and sharply curved.

And here is this pesky corner as well:

Are you seeing what I'm getting at yet?

No?

Yeah, I don't think I need to explain anything more.

Yesterday was just one of those days. Everything seems to be going great until you smack your rental car into a wall. 

On my way back in from taking these pictures I almost stepped on this guy:

Seemingly harmless when viewed as a single incident. But when you had a rather disturbing dream about bugs crawling all across your living room floor the previous night complete with massive, gapping whole in your living room floor, the snail seems like a rather ominous omen.

I also took a tour de force (I think this is the right word and if not it should be) of downtown Glendale on foot this evening. We parked in the structure just across the street from the gym, and I decided to walk a block up to Borders to see if they sold headphones because don't you know it is most uncomfortable to worry about your headphones popping out of your ears when you are just trying to run. The nice albeit misinformed man in Borders told me there was a Target in the mall just across the street. Turns out this mall just across the street only has an entrance around the other side of the block. Then I proceeded to wander around this massive mall for nearly 20 minutes before finally locating said Target. By that time I was utterly and completely lost. The sensible thing to do in this situation was to ask for directions back to Brand Street. The helpful security guard at Target (they have those in California) proceeded to direct me to a point that was at least a mile away from where I needed to go.

However, I can confidently say that downtown Glendale is a rather nice little place. Oh, and I did not have to worry about my well-earned headphones one little bit on my necessarily shortened run.

But luckily, I can even this post out with the good news which I have (with readers in mind) saved for the last in order to end this post with feelings of pleasantness rather than despair in the form of a $580 rental car repair bill, squishy bugs and unnecessarily long sojourns for a pair of pink skull candy headphones.

It was this guys 4th birthday yesterday:

I am officially a great-aunt of a four and a six year old at the ripe old age of 22. He had a Thomas themed party, and as evidenced by his general distraction when I tried to wish him happy birthday on the phone he had a rather good birthday party.

And a very very good friend of mine (that's you jessica) had her first day at her grownup girl job today. I am very proud of her. She has some big decisions to make from what I hear, but I know she will be just fine (and make an excellent choice too!).

Congratulations!

(I think the imagery of this picture is very appropriate. Big decisions, wrecked company car both evidenced in the big scary fish staring us in the face--see?)

I also finished the third Anne of Green Gables book today. Those books make me so happy. Don't get me wrong, I love my thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, doom and gloom, the future is going to be bookless novels, but there is just something so wonderful in reading these books. They are so real. The story seems like is could be my story, or yours, or anybody's story really. 

I love reading a story that feels so familiar to me even though I have never read it before. The story is simple, the characters and plots are real. They don't show a perfect life or an ideal world but rather a person who is almost always able to see the beauty in a very normal world and make the best out of even the worst situations.

Here is a little sage wisdom from Anne of the Island which is the book I finished tonight:

"Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them."

Amen to that.

Done, Done and Done

I'm done. No more undergraduate college for me. I anticlimactically finished up college today as previously outlined in yesterday's post.

I also celebrated in said way mentioned in said post.

Have I mentioned how much I love A Christmas Carol before? (Ok, I know I have. But I love it, I really, really do!) Even Jim Carrey can't tarnish the story with his sometimes over the top ridiculousness.

It's the perfect Christmas message I think. And rather than try to tell you how good it is myself, I'll let President Thomas S. Monson tell you:

If we remember, “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mosiah 2:17), we will not find ourselves in the unenviable position of Jacob Marley’s ghost. When he spoke to Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ immortal A Christmas Carol, he spoke sadly of opportunities lost. Said he, “Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”

Marley added: “Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!” (In The Best Short Stories of Charles Dickens, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947, p. 435.)

We can learn a treasured lesson from the pen of Dickens and from the example of Christ. As we lift our eyes heavenward and then remember to look outward into the lives of others, as we remember that it is more blessed to give than to receive, we, during this Christmas season, will come to see a bright, particular star that will guide us to our precious opportunity.

for the full text

AND

The story is a portrayal of the Spirit of Christ, which can turn men’s lives completely around. It is a story of selfishness being replaced by generosity. It is a story of unconcern being replaced by deep concern. It is a story of hate being replaced by love. It is a story of sweet benediction when the little crippled child, Tiny Tim, calls out, “God bless us every one.”

for the full text

I love that he loves Charles Dickens just as much as I do.

If all goes according to plan I'll be in Tennessee on Sunday! Somebody Scream!

Books

First of all: My apologies to Jessica because today's post was supposed to feature my bread pudding I made from her recipe. However, due to fast Sunday with Navajo tacos and baking about 4 dozen snickerdoodles I just didn't have time or the appetite. BUT I do have the ingredients and will be making it very soon! I wouldn't want the bread to go bad.

I love books. I really do! Much like my taste in music, my taste is books is extremely eclectic. I like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Jonathan Safron Foer, Mark Z. Danielewski, J. K. Rowling, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkein, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer (guilty pleasure), Thomas Hardy, Louis Sachar, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Aeschylus, Homer, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Bronte Sisters, anyways you get the point.

My reading group finally got around to picking our read aloud book for the semester. And the winner is:

I was personally pulling for The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis, but it was ultimately the kids' decision. And the only reason I kind of didn't want to read this one was because I have already read it more times than I care to admit. Despite my unwillingness, I am pretty excited to hopefully recruit a few more Harry Potter fans!

This summer I made it my goal to read Les Miserables, the complete unabridged version. It may have took me the better part of three months, but I did it! I'm sure glad I did, too. Maybe it was a little bit unnecessarily verbose at times, but geez does that man know how to craft words. What really fascinates me is the fact that it was originally written in French, and even the translated English version is so beautiful you would never know it was not originally written in that language. It is not often that a book can make me cry. As a matter of fact, I can't think of any other instance where one has, but this one did. It is a beautiful story, and unlike most extremely long books, definitely worth the time and effort of reading.

That being said, the point of this post is that I am reading A Tale of Two Cities right now (the two are related because of the French Revolution themed plots). Well, to be precise I am rereading A Tale of Two Cities. I read it once my sophomore year of college, and I couldn't for the life of me describe the plot anymore; I'm not ever really sure if I knew what was going on when I read it. Therefore, I have decided to read it again. 

I really do love Dickens. I absolutely hated him when I was forced to read Great Expectations as a 13-year old freshman in high school. However, when I finally picked up another Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, about 5 years later I loved it. Since then I have read Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol. I have a running tradition of reading A Christmas Carol every year before Christmas day is over. 

Anyways, books are good! I highly recommend picking one up! I am also full of lots of good recommendations.