Sunday, January 25, 2009

Tagged

Two Surveys (and hey, another post in January)

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

1. I miss my old dog, C. J., daily.  I know my parents feel the same way as me, only probably more.  I really love my dogs now and anticipate growing into the same sort of relationship with them, but I miss sharing sleep time with C. J. and his crotchety moods.  He was a good dog.

2.  I am currently experiencing a professional crisis of sorts.  I will leave it at that.

3.  Baking is my true passion.  I love baking anything from bread to cakes to pies.  While it's not the best thing for a slim waist line, I do feel better about eating my own sandwich bread each week instead of the cardboard one purchases at the store.

4.  For completely renouncing high school after I graduated, I still maintain friendships with people from high school and have also married somebody I met in high school.  I'm not the type to attend any sort of reunion though, so don't expect me to come busting through the doors next year.

5.  I'm going to copy Camille on this one and say that I too did not get the WOW experience from college.  I think it was definitely my fault though, for never being myself.  And I never made the right choices... okay, I was never sloppy drunk, but I made decisions based on what I thought I should be rather than who I actually was at the time.  Ahhh introspection.

6.  While I keep up with absolutely nobody, I still look back on drum corps as a wonderful experience.  Could I do it today?  No.  Well, I physically couldn't do it today either.  It was a great "push yourself to the limits" type of experience though.

7.  I am a librarian, but I despise most librarian puns and stereotypes.  It's not that I'm trying to defend the profession, because I don't really care that people think that I sit around and read books all day, but the cutesy factor with comic strips, youtube streams, etc. that are sent around among librarians and the library community is just lost on me.

8.  2007 was a wonderful travel-packed year.  I remember that summer in particular fondly as the first time I fell in love and saw many beautiful Western states.

9.  I tend to prefer short, long-bodied dogs.  I love my dachshunds and I also think corgis would be an excellent breed to own.

10.  While my brother and I are generally polar opposites, we both struggle with showing our emotions to the general public.  He has gotten better since he has had a kid, and I hope the same will happen for me one day.

11.  Since I have moved to Colorado, many opinions and views I previously held have completely reversed.  
12.  I will never identify with a political party.  Every time I try, I get angry with said party and feel the need to reverse my views.  I always feel the need to retreat when one party has a strong presence.  

13.  I have never had naturally long nails in my life.  I just can't do it.

14.  I struggle with change way more than I thought I did.  I will never consider myself mature, and my lack of adaptation is one of those reasons.

15.  I have lived in three states: Georgia, Indiana, and Colorado.  I have only been a resident of Georgia and Colorado though.

16.  One of my greatest enemies is my mind.  I am a, now proven from taking a strengths test, thinker.  I have great ideas, but they take time.  I also run way too many scenarios in my head.  Some of these scenarios are not logical and make bad situations much much worse.  My mind has been in overdrive lately.

17.  I think I would like to live in the Northwest someday (Washington or Oregon.)

18.  I would like to have at least one child before the age of 30.

19.  I believe in fate because I feel like it brought my husband and I together.  Jon and I were living in completely different states (the grad school years) and we just happened to graduate at the same time and also just happened to move back to Georgia after grad school.  After re-meeting him, it blew me away how much we had in common and how perfect we were for each other (okay this occurred about 5 months after we met again.)  Had we not gone to some high school homecoming together back years and years ago, we might not have made any sort of reconnection.

20. I can not eat in many of the chain restaurants I used to frequent as a teenager.  Most make me sick because everything is so processed and over seasoned.  I can still eat fast food though.  Weird.

21.  My favorite soap scent is English Lavender.

22.  I look awful in a cap sleeve shirt.

23.  If I had to live in another country it would definitely be somewhere in the UK.  I'm such an anglophile.

24.  My favorite thing about Jon is his laugh.

25.  I'm working on being proactive and taking charge of my life.





Second...

Here are the rules:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 2 to 5 sentences, along with these rules.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual book. Pick the CLOSEST!
6. Tag five other people to do the same!


"About 10 minutes before the end of the kneading cycle, check the dough and adjust its consistency as necessary with additional flour or water; the finished dough should be soft and supple, not sticky."

From The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion


Friday, January 23, 2009

New Discovery


So I've never been much for anime.  Well, I didn't know what it was really about and still didn't even like it very much when I help out with the library's anime night (they showed Bleach.)  Hubby is really into anime and when he realized that I will be hosting these anime movie nights once a month, he decided to ease me into it with some Hayao Miyazaki movies.

Wow.  I have only watched three of them, but I am completely blown away.  If you don't think you're into anime, but want to give it a shot, start with these, and not the TV shows or the manga converted into anime.

Jon first showed me his favorite, Castle in the Sky.  



This is a beautiful movie is basically about a boy and girl's quest to find a mysterious floating castle called Laputa.  Of course this quest is met with much hardship including multiple factions pursuing a crystal that the girl carries with her (one of these factions ends up being good and helping the boy and girl.)  My favorite scenes are when the children actually reach the castle and visit its beautiful gardens.

Next up was Howl's Moving Castle which quickly became my favorite.

  
This movie is loosely based off of a Diana Wynne Jones novel with the same name.  It's about a woman named Sophie who has a chance encounter with Howl after being pestered by some men in an alley.  When the Wicked Witch of the Waste discovers that Howl has taken a liking to Sophie, she curses her so she is a ninety year old woman.  She also is unable to tell anybody about the curse.  Fearing her family won't believe her, she heads out to the waste and ends up living with Howl, a cute boy named Markl and a fire demon named Calcifer (he moves the castle Howl lives in.)  First, this movie is incredibly visually beautiful.  The scenery is amazing and the town is reminiscent of old German villages.  Second, I love the humor dispersed throughout the movie.  Third, I love watching Sophie and Howl come into their own by the end of the movie.  I think it ranks as one of my favorites of all time.

I finally watched perhaps his most famous movie, Spirited Away.  




This movie is about a girl and her parents who are moving to a new house when they get lost and end up at what they think is the ruins of an amusement park.  In fact, they have entered the spirit world.  Her parents eat the food and turn into pigs and it is up to the girl, named Chihiro (she becomes Sen after a witch named Yubaba takes her name in exchange for work) is forced to work to get her parents back.  She gets help from a new friend Haku and Chihiro's loyalty to him is key in the story.  This is another beautiful film and I can see why it won an Oscar.

I plan on watching all of his films in the future and I look forward to exploring the more artistic forms of anime in the future.

Friday, January 09, 2009

2008 Review

I know I haven't reviewed December books yet, and I'm honestly not sure if I'll get around to it! But I will list my ten favorite books of the year.  They have been reviewed in earlier posts, so I will not review them again.

1.  A Room With a View by E. M. Forster
2.  The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
3.  Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
4.  The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman
5.  Persuasion by Jane Austen
6.  American Gods by Neil Gaiman
7.  I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
8.  The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
9.  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
10.  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

I don't feel the need to sum up 2008 (other than books of course.)  It was a high-low year with a lot of great points and a lot of very sad and disappointing moments.  I hope there will be less of the latter in 2009, but we take things as they come like most people.

This year, I've come up a with a reading strategy.  I will strive to read one classic per month (this might be difficult since many are very long,) one graphic novel per month (an area in which I am lacking,) and one (reread of course) Harry Potter book per month (because by the time I'm finished, I'll be ready for the movie.)  Whatever I can fit in between will be lovely too.  I also have to read a bunch of leadership books, which I will not review because they are likely going to be boring!

I've been doing a ton of thinking lately reevaluating certain areas (okay area) of life.  Not to worry, this has nothing to do with my married life.  After all of this thinking I still remain confused and unhappy and it's basically up to me now to change it.  There might be more on this later, but I doubt it. Just know that I am trying my best to get through this and in the long run, it's not that big of a deal.  I do, however need to vent and am trying to find the right outlets for now beyond my mom and Jon and garbled emails to Adrian.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Hmmm...

I need to vent.