Literary Tuesday

Instead of a poem or book excerpt this week, this week I am posting one verse.

In my church group last week part of the lesson was about worrying. 

In the video we watched (God Is Closer Than You Think, John Ortberg) the

speaker offered this: if you can worry, you can meditate. 

So a few of us challenged each other to find a passage or verse and meditate

throughout the week whenever we were tempted to worry. 

I picked one of my favorites and have paired it here with another of faves - sunsets.

(These were all taken over the past few years from my back porch.)

 “The LORD your God is with you,

he is mighty to save.

He will take great delight in you,

he will quiet you with his love,

he will rejoice over you with singing.”

~ Zephaniah 3:17

Days 108 - 114 Supermassive Black Hole

That must be where all the photographs I took must have gone - to a black hole.

That, or maybe I didn't actually take many.

I think it's probably the latter.

I really hit a slump when it came to taking pictures this past week.  I did manage to go on several long walks/jogs, do fun things with friends and read a lot, but mainly I didn't feel like doing much and I didn't take many pictures.

As this is my blog, I gave myself permission to not worry about it!

Except that I did worry about it. 
But I'm over it now!

Day 108 or 109 (I cannot remember now) I finished Mockingjay. 

After feeling a little put off by the movie, I have to say that I really enjoyed reading the books.

I even may go see The Hunger Games again, now that my sister has completed the first in the series.

I haven't decided what to read next, apart from required reading for my church group, but I'm thinking about starting Frankenstein.  I think I'm also going to copy my lovely cousin Lois' blog and make a 100 greatest books challenge page.  Why not?

Speaking of Lois, I'm loving her Lois in London blog!  Her latest posts have been about her adventures in Haworth, Bronte territory.  I'm itching to go!

Day 108 there was a cool cloud pattern in the sky that morning.  Most of the pictures turned out a little blurry, but I think you can get the picture (haha).

Days 109-110 I missed completely.  I do remember that I did not do laundry and lived to regret it!

 Day 111 I went to a movie, rather spur of the moment, and took a picture of the ticket. 
Here it is, placed just-so on top of my wallet. 

Now, you may be asking yourself, is this interesting? 

Well, it would have been if you were at QFC with me the following day as a very

nice man was scanning all the items I intended to purchase. 

I was frantically trying to figure out why my wallet was not in my purse and then 

remembered I'd taken it out to take this picture the night before.

That was not at all embarrassing.

But all in all Saturday was a marvelous day.

I went on a very nice, very long walk/jog, and managed to put the tiniest dent

into clearing out last year's plants and weeds from my garden.  I have my work cut out for me:

Then most of the ladies of my church group came over and we had a girl's night, starting with chocolate and cheese fondues and ending with relaxing in a hot tub.

Day 113, Sunday, was a day for church and rest.  

A lot of rest. 
I enjoyed a four hour nap in the middle of the hottest, sunniest day of the year thus far.  Perhaps it was a waste, but I think I needed to catch up on my sleep.

Day 114 was another happy, sunny day! 
Two of my very dearest friends came over for the first BBQ of the season at Happiness Hill.

I stuffed myself and it was wonderful.

And the day ended with kitty sleeping on my lap while I was watching Frasier.
Not a bad day at all.

100 Greatest Books Challenge

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adam
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Day 107 - 4/16/12 Crazy Love

 Girl sees cat.

Girl loves cat!

Cat is intrigued by girl.

Does cat love girl?

Cat rebuffs girl.

Cat hates girl!

Cat chases girl away.

Day 106 - Your Hands Are Cold

Or green.  And scarred.  Goodness!

But the first lawn-mowing of the year is done!

It's so nice to have a mostly tidy looking yard again. 

Now it's time to catch up on all the weeding!

Day 105 - I Don't Feel Like Dancing

I love that they have included the song I Don't Feel Like Dancing is on Just Dance 3!

Instead of spending money on a road trip, two of my dearest friends
and I stayed in the area for a staycation.
We're going to England later this year and I need to save like crazy
so this was a fun way to do something different.
I expected it to be difficult to be so close to home (only 6 minutes away!) when I
had so much I needed to get done, but it was surprisingly easy to leave it all behind.
We watched movies and Gilmore Girls, had a fabulous breakfast and yummy snacks,

danced, went on a nice (sunny - huzzah!) walk and

played games.  It was grand.

Then I came home to my sister and our friend, Lorena,

making these adorable cupcakes:

 

Yum!

Family Friday 14

Welcome to Family Friday!

Today we have....

Amy!

Okay, the pose may look a little strange, so let me explain -

this was from a picture at one of our cousin dance parties!

She's dancing!

Because she's cool like that.

Amy is so good about thinking of new and exciting events for all the cousins. 

And putting them together.

Some of our events have included a tie dye party,

cousin prom,

a science party,

a Firefly viewing marathon,

making videos incorporating fruits and veggies,

a Star Wars party (I was so sad to miss that one!),

a Whoville dance party,

watching all three extended version of The Lord of the Rings in one day,

two parties in different parks,

and most recently

a Bob Ross party.

Amy is bold and courageous and lovely and effortlessly cool and so much fun.

I have many memories linked with her and our sisters, Melita and Lori, such as playing Gem and the Holograms outdoors as kids, fighting over whether we should watch Robin Hood (again) or Anne of Green Gables (again), making all sorts of crafts, singing endlessly in the rear window-facing seat of her parent's yellow station wagon, making twisted versions of beloved fairy tales and years later editing them and putting them onto DVD, playing at the school across the street, embarking on the best road trips of my life, relaxing and hiking at the cabin, playing Speed Scrabble, making faces after eating the sour grass on Whidbey Island, watching countless movies, playing with/baby-sitting/creatively conspring with younger cousins and painting more rooms than I'd care to admit!
(Which reminds me - want to help me paint my office, Amy?  Just kidding.  Or not.)

We also went to New Orleans on a Habitat for Humanity trip about a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina.  That was an experience I don't think I'll ever forget.

Amy is also the person that taught me to screen print in the first place!

She's a great friend and a wonderful cousin!

Day 104 - The Best Part

...was that there was plenty of ketchup for our first work BBQ of the year! 

Or maybe it was getting a free, yummy lunch.

Or maybe it's was the fabulous sunshine.

Or just perhaps it was the Great Paper Towel Debate of 2012 - do you put the roll in so the flap is in the front or the back?  Is it better to do as the diagram on the dispenser suggests and put the flap in front so that it's easy to tear off, or do you go with your instincts and put the flap in the back so that it's easier to grab the paper towel in the first place?

These are serious questions that deserve respect and open and honest dialogue.

I think my favorite part was realizing this BBQ is just the sign of more to come - more sunny days, more BBQ's and more hilarious conversations with my family of coworkers.

Happy Friday the 13th!

Day 103 - Off We Go

On our way to a friend's house for a movie night. 

It's been a weird day - delightfully sunny in the morning, gray and rainy in the afternoon and then sunny again in the evening. 

If it must rain, I suppose I don't mind it raning while I'm at work!

Day 102 - 3/11/12 Puttin' On the Ritz

Watching a few episodes tonight while working on Friday's print.

Oh, how I love this show! 

It's all brilliant. Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry are perfection. The opening music, costumes, sets and all the snappy dialogue, sublime.

The expressions on Bertie Wooster's/Hugh Laurie's face alone are reason to watch.

I'd rather not try to pick a favorite episode, but I quite enjoyed the last one we watched

last night with the "Ask Dad" musical.

We had to rewind (reverse? yikes - what's the proper term for DVD's?) the scene where Bertie yells "fire" so we could laugh at it all over again.  And when Jeeves sings in falsetto?  Kills me.

Thanks to YouTube, here are some favorite scenes from this and other episodes:

Happy watching!

Day 101 - Restless

Literary Tuesday

After finishing The Hunger Games last week I started reading Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger.  It's the story of "eleven-year-old Reuben Land, and asthmatic boy in the Midwest who has reason to believe in miracles. Along with this sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother, who has been controversially charged with murder (from the back of the book)." 

Sound intriguing?? 

  

I'm 3/4 in and, as per usual, I'm delaying finishing it.  I both love and hate it when good stories come to an end.  I obsessively watched all four seasons of Prison Break in just over a month, yet put off watching the final two episodes because then it would really and truly be over.

Can you relate?!

I'll miss this family, particularly Reuben's sister, Swede.

Here is an excerpt, from the chapter entitled By the Grace of Lurvy:

In retrospect it’s hard to believe I didn’t see instantly what to do with that money.  But when it’s the first you’ve earned by sweat you see it as special and by golly not to be spent on less than the desire of your grasping heart.  The more I thought about old Alfred and his cedar canoe, the more I saw myself paddling one just like it.  Convinced similar exquisite vessels lay concealed in dairy barns all over the country, I told Swede of my decision.

          “We’re out of food, Reuben,” she answered.

          Having used great gestures describing the canoe I planned to purchase and the adventures we would enjoy thereafter, it irritated me that she would change the subject.

          “Well, let’s go get some then.”

          “We can’t.”

          I really did need it spelled out for me; the truth is, I’d been wondering when Swede would take the initiative and suggest we go up to the Red Owl for groceries.  We often did the shopping, the two of us, pulling our painted wagon, Dad’s money in my pocket; in the winter we used a toboggan.

          “If we spend any more money right now,” she said, “we shall be broke.”

          Her emphasis on shall put me in mind, as it was certainly meant to, of Pastor Reach, whose inflections left you in no doubt of his good sense.  I was smitten into silence while Swede stacked dishes in the sink and ran water on them and waited for me to make myself gallant.

          But I was more interested in canoes than gallantry.  I was annoyed that we were out of money and Christmas almost here; also that Swede knew we were out of money before I did, and her younger than me.  I was annoyed that I’d worked hard to earn twenty-five dollars and now would have to give my twenty-five dollars to Otto Schock, the Red Owl man.  There was a lot to be annoyed about, and I could afford to grouse because Dad had eaten his small breakfast and thanked us and gone back straightaway to his bed of exhaustion.  I stood festering in the kitchen. “You don’t want a canoe, then?”

          I like to believe we have all said things that approach this in stupidity.

          Swede didn’t answer but swabbed the dishes and rinsed them and laid them up to dry.  Normally I’d have taken a towel and wiped them myself, but it’s difficult to do productive work and fume simultaneously – the labor dissipates your righteous steam – so I stood glaring at the back of her little blond head, which was tilted in thoughtful mien.  Sensing she was going to say something sagacious, I started to leave the kitchen but was too late.

          “In Little Women,” she said – see? – “when Jo cut off her hair and sold it to pay for Marmee’s train fare – you remember?”

          Well, of course I remembered.  After the shearing Jo had gone home and stunned them all with her sacrificial present, the profit from her bounteous hair, her one beauty, as her sisters so backhandedly put it.

          “If Marmee had begged Jot to go cut off her hair and sell it,” Swede hypothesized, “I wonder how heroic a thing it would have been.”

          I didn’t say anything.  But I thought: Aw, crumb.

Day 100 - 3/9/12 Night and Day

Day or night Topaz will accept a little chin-scratching.
Until she's done.

Day 99 - 3/8/12 Easter Song

Easter Song

"Hear the bells ringing

They're singing

Christ is risen from the dead!"

(Did anyone else play that song on their cute little child-sized record player

repeatedly as a whilst cleaning their room?

No?

You missed out.)

Nothing about the following pictures particularly screams "Easter," but Easter it was!

I was too busy talking and eating to take as many pictures as I normally would have.

This is probably the most awesome bike in the world:

 It's electric and it has a cool name and I want one.

With the push of a button and a twist of the wrist you switch from manual power 

to using electric power and the bike does all the work!

And it folds up!

Many of us took turns riding, which was fun, but nigh scandalous for those of us in our cute dresses.

We decided all the bike is missing is a basket for flowers and baguettes.

Hello, Maxx!

 The laser pointer was a hit with the canines.

Everyone looked so cute!

I'm partial to sparkles, myself, and think Emma's sandals and Miss Lily's dress are fun!

Happy Easter, everyone!

Day 98 It's a Beautiful Day

Stuck in traffic on the way up to my parents house on another beautiful, blue-skyed afternoon!

"There is some blue sky, let us chase it!" ~Marianne Dashwood, Sense & Sensibility

Day 97 - Alleluia

To me streaming sunshine feels like a benediction.

Family Friday 12 & 13

Today's (and make-up for last week's) Friday Family prints are...

Susan and Emily!

Auntie and niece.

 

 Auntie Sue, my aunt and Emily's aunt, is like another mother to just about every child in our family.  I can't really think of an exception...

I have a treasure trove of memories of times spent with her and at their house - endless work on a large variety of craft projects, making family videos, playing with her daughters, being quiet while my cousins napped, hot-glueing glass rocks to Amy's ceiling around a painted sky (did we really do that??!), even living there for a few months years ago.

She made it all fun and exciting and warm and comfortable. 

She even let me watch Anne of Green Gables over and over and over again.

I remember her telling me she prayed for me when I had my first real interview for what ended up being my first real job at Eddie Bauer, knowing that I'd be stressed out, and it was one of the times that sticks out in my memory of  being a time when I was acutely aware of God's direction in my life.  Even though that job only lasted 6 months! :)  To me, it meant a lot.

 There are too many good things to say about Susan, so I'll stop before I get all teary-eyed.

Emily Susan!

(Funny, until now I forgot they share a name.  I didn't plan it that way for this week.)

Emily is a sweetheart. 

I'm enjoying every moment of working with her this year and am encouraged and delighted every time she steps into my office for a chat.  (Not that that happens every day - we do serious work here! :))

She's such a great source of encouragement.

 I also have so many hilarious memories of times spent with her at her old house/my new house.  Along with her sisters we had indoor picnics, adventures in hair-cutting, Disney dance parties, watched too many movies, painted many rooms, made strange art, and enjoyed (more or less) a whole host of other random activities. 

Emily has an amazing, really gorgeous, singing voice and I can't wait to see what her future holds. It's going to be great!