hello friend

dear blog,

i'm sorry i have neglected you.  i had grand plans for you almost exactly one year ago.  and almost exactly one year ago, i discovered i was pregnant with my first baby.  my little owen james.  he's kind of occupied a large amount of my time and energy in the past year. 

one day i hope to have more time and energy to give to you again, dear blog.  you've always been there in the background.

love,
me.

ps.  owen blew raspberries for the first time a couple of hours ago and i almost melted. 

scratching at the door

Jezebel has figured out doorknobs.  Well, at least the doorknobs in my dad's basement, which have these scroll-handles that stick out to the side and allow my cat to reach up, bat at them, jump at them, whatever it takes until she can pull it down and release herself and her fellow inmates from the bathroom prison I temporarily locked them in. 

I'm sitting here at the computer, listening to her scratch at the door and jump at the knob.  Oh, and once I was watching TV in the theater room (no cats allowed) by myself and heard a noise and looked to the door, only to see the knob slowing bending down.  That was super creepy.

Ugh.  Jezebel is so stupid for being so smart.  Stress me out.  Dang.

Two Food Items I Cannot Live Without

Right off the bat, I would say it would be pretty difficult for me to live without skim milk or microwave popcorn. 

Many, many years ago I switched from two percent to skim milk (and frankly have never looked back).  Now when I drink two percent all I can taste is the fat.  I know some people argue that skim tastes like water, but I prefer it.

Microwave popcorn....ah.  I get these food cravings, and they go to one of two extremes.  Either I want something "salty" (like popcorn, cheese, chips, etc) or "sweet" (chocolate, poptarts, etc).  Three out of four times I just want the salty.  Hence, popcorn.

Now here's where I really start to weird people out.

I PUT THEM TOGETHER.

I like for my popcorn to be buttery.  I like for every single kernel to be buttery.  It would be gross, however, to dip every kernel in butter before eating it.  Realizing that, I had to figure out a way to spice up the non-buttered kernels.  I figured milk and butter are both dairy products, why not dip the popcorn in the milk?  Simple.  Plus, I remember being told in elementary school that hundreds of years ago, popcorn was the first form of cereal (not sure if that is accurate or not).  Boom.

Popcorn and milk.  Friends forever.  In my mouth.

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here (I've read all the italicized):

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 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 Alcott
12 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 Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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 Tolstoy
25 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 Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 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 Brown
43 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-time - 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 Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 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 Burnett
74 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 - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 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 Albom
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 Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Priorities

I remember, as a child, being extremely worried that there weren't enough arrowheads out there left to find. 

Resurrected Blog Post/They Said It

"It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone.  Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others."   ~Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen sure has a way of saying it sometimes. 

This make me think back to my first impressions of certain people who have made appearances in my life.  Some are still with me, some are banished, some left of their own accord, and some are dancing on the edges of the light.  There have been a very few people with whom I've felt my soul "click," so to speak.  It was as if once we'd met, a missing piece had been found, or a broken link in a chain had been joined.  I felt more complete, more whole.  I didn't even have to spend much time with them to know or feel this way, it just was.

Time feels deeper, like you are living much more in these moments than in others. 

And when one of the pieces walks away, it is painful.  And you miss the crap out of them.  And every time you hear a door open, you look up and hope they will be standing there.  Every time you hear the phone ring, you hope to see their number.  Every moment could be the moment. 

It doesn't matter how long it's been, I still miss you just as much.  Everything may have changed, but nothing has changed. 

Musings

Matthew 7:15-20 “Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them."

I am going to try and remember this everytime I find myself "trippin" as it was so aptly dubbed...

It got to a point where I prayed about it, and the next day God literally moved me, out of nowhere, from one work location to another.  I've never experienced such an in-my-face answer to a prayer before. Though I can't say I never looked back, because I definitely did.  ...A couple months later, I prayed again, and now it's back.  I keep praying that my desires be God's desires.  I know it's there for a reason, but the reason is beyond my current understanding.  

I've come to realize I cannot help how I feel, but I can help what I do.  I will not act, I will merely play the "wait and see" game.  Still going with the flow, to speak.  And apply the verse above.  How often was I there when you needed me, as much as I had a capacity to be, and then how often were you there for me?  I want to say I'm not an idiot, but being stuck in this feeling makes me feel like I am.  Let's just say I'm not being an idiot blindly....I see through you. 

An Historical Weekend

I feel as though I've just lived through a very historical time of life...this may sound cheesy, but oh well.  Like I'm going to look back at this weekend and tell my kids about it.  The "Royal Wedding" and the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death all at once! 

As far as the royal wedding goes, no, I didn't watch it (I was sleeping before getting up early to go to work), but I did DVR some highlights that I will watch later at my leisure.  I am interested in it despite being an American, perhaps because I'm in the middle of planning my own wedding, but I think mostly because I can remember being little and hearing about Princess Diana and Prince Charles and about William and Harry.  I had paper dolls from Princess Di's wedding.  I really wish I knew what happened to those....  I also remember her death, and how horrible it was, and then watching Prince William grow up to be a hottie (I'll admit I thought once or twice how sweet it would be to become "Princess Suzin" even though it would never happen). 

And as far as Bin Laden's death goes....Yay for America, yay that one more terrorist is gone from this world, who knows how many lives have been saved...but also will this trigger some huge negative reaction?  Should we really be rejoicing in the death of another human, no matter how depraved they are?  It's a confusing and difficult thing to ponder.  I do remember the morning of September 11, 2001 quite vividly.  I remember I had a 7:50 a.m. Spanish class, how tired I was in it, and how glad I was when the prof let us out a few minutes early.  I planned to go back to sleep once I got to my dorm room.  I got back to Shatford Hall, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and at the very top of the stairs, first room on the left is the tv room.  Someone was in there watching tv that early and I remember pausing, thinking about going in there to see what was up, thinking "these people are crazy to be watching tv so early when they could be sleeping!!!" and then walking halfway down the hall towards my door.  And for some strange reason the thought popped in my head, "what if something horrible and life-changing has happened and that's the news coverage of it they're watching."  I turned back and went in there, fully expecting to be wrong and see a re-run of A Baby Story playing, but instead I saw the first tower burning on tv.  I saw the second plane hit.  I saw people screaming and running in the streets of NYC.  I saw people in windows.  I saw people jumping out of those windows because that was the only way to escape the flames.  I saw buildings fall.  City workers running back into the dust rescue one more person.  I heard about the Pentagon, and being worried for Bethany's father who worked there (my suitemate).  I heard about the plane going down in Pennsylvania, and worried for Meredith's (my roommate's) father who was in the process of moving the family to a town eight miles from the crash location.  Somewhere in the middle of all the news coverage, I went down the hall and got Meredith and told her what happened, and she didn't believe me.  I had to make her come down the hall with me. 

So I guess when my kids want to know where I was when I heard that Bin Laden I'll have to say, "I was sitting in front of the computer tooling around Facebook when all of the sudden ten different people updated their statuses at once regarding Bin Laden's death, and I checked CNN.com and it wasn't even being reported there yet.  Someone else updated it was on MSNBC.com so I went there and got up to watch the news coverage on tv.  So basically I found out through Facebook."