A Celebration List

While considering what I might resolve for the coming year it occurred to me that such resolutions often seem to serve only one purpose: to remind me of my failures over the past twelve months. I have a bad habit to go quickly to my shortcomings and examine only my inadequacies. So instead, I’m going to reflect a bit and celebrate my successes. I think this will give me more confidence in my future resolutions.

1. Came to terms with not working outside the home and finding joy in the opportunities it has given me. I know that this will not last, so I want to savor it – not be ashamed of it.

2. Feeling good in my skin (more days than not)

3. Teaching myself how to knit and turning it into a real passion!

4. Getting over my fear of the sewing machine and jumping in with both feet. I still have much to learn, but am quite proud of my growing skills.

5. Being able to be there for my family when tough times occurred.

6. Nurtured old friendships and made new ones.

7. Successfully being married to Shawn for four years!

To Do List

1. Call Kaci
2. Schedule dentist appointment
3. Pay bills
4. Balance checkbook
5. Finish laundry
6. Iron
7. Clean house
a. vacuum
b. windex
c. dust
d. clean bathrooms
e. clean kitchen
f. mop floors
8. change sheets on bed
9. make grocery list
10. wash dog
11. organize closet
12. bake banana bread
13. go to gym

Orangey Goodness

Hurray! I received an new envelope from my Ravelry Knitting Swap. This time I received some amazing goodies from “Silverbirks” in Benbrook, TX. She decided to go with an orange-colored theme, knowing that it is my favorite color. And did she ever hit it out of the park! Take a look at all the treats I got.

I really love being able to be a part of this swap. It is so much fun to make up packages and send them around the country. It gives you a look into peoples lives and what they like and dislike. It also seems to give a sense that the world is a little smaller by sharing a common interest with others around the workd. Plus, when you get one in the mail, it makes you feel so special.

Knitting Swap Swag

I participated in my Ravelry knitting swap for July, which had a”Summer Fun”and here is the great things that I got from “Solopoodle” in New York: a TON of knitting patterns, two NYC postcards, some tea bags, a knit check (used to check needle size, gauge test swatches, and measure your work), a yellow lab puppy bookmark, some wool wash, stickers, a bit of pretty blue grosgrain ribbon, some aqua buttons, some sticky notes, a yummy Tootsie Pop, a mini beach ball, two yarn samples, and some beautiful hand made stitch markers. So excited!

Shuffle

Last 20 songs that shuffled out of my ipod:

1. French Fries With Pepper by Morphine
2. Wang Dang Doodle by Koko Taylor
3. Blue Orchid by The White Stripes
4. Ella Y Yo by Omara Portuondo
5. Guilty by Billie Holiday
6. Superbacana by Caetano Veloso
7. Buono Sera by Louis Prima
8. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John & Kiki Dee
9. Broken Train by Beck
10. P.Y.T by Michael Jackson
11. Funkin’ Around by Outkast
12. WDA by White Denim
13. Oh L’Amour by Erasure
14. Baby Please Don’t Go by Muddy Waters
15. La View En Rose by Edith Piaf
16. Skin and Bones by The Naysayers
17. Mo Money Mo Problems by The Notorious B.I.G.
18. Hello! Let’s Go To A Disco by Ursula 1000
19. Clarinet Concerto in A Major: II. Adagio by W.A. Mozart
20. Just Like California by Old 97’s

Knitting Swap

I signed up for a knitting envelope swap on Ravelry this month. I thought that it would be fun to send things to people who have also caught the knitting bug, not to mention getting fun stuff in the mail myself! I mailed out my package a couple of weeks ago and just got mine in the mail today! Check out all the cool swag that I got: a cute knitted tapestry bag, some different types of tea, some star stickers, wool wash, some cute crocheted flower appliques, two handmade note cards, and a knitting pattern for a bag and cami. Not to mention a sweet little card from my swappee in California. How nice!

Items

Random items found in my purse:

Sunglasses in case
Car keys
C.O. Bigelow lemon hand lotion
Black ink pen
Red Muji pen
Reading glasses in case
Black plastic barrette
Nine gum wrappers
Travel pack of tissues
Empty pill case
Travel bottle of Tum Smoothies
Stick of Blister Block
Shout wipe
Tampon
Drawstring from pair of sweatpants
Three pieces of Stride gum
Moleskine notebook
56 cents
One silver hoop earring
Wallet
Cell phone
Combination lock
earphones

How do you stack up?

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Put a % after those you’ve read a portion of.
3) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
4) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total read and put it in the title.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen ( )
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (x+)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (x+)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x+)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (x+)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens ( ) 
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (x) – Thomas Hardy (x) Worst book ever-forced in high school
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (%)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x+)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger ( *)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (x)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (x)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (*)

14/25

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (x+)
34 Emma – Jane Austen ( )
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (x+)
37. Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (x+)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (x+) Childhood favorite!
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (x)
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 (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (x)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan ( ) 

13/25

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel ( )
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (x+)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (x+)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck ( )
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (x+)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (x+)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (x)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (x)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (%) -Language was awful, skipped through about half of it.
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (x+)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (*)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (*) 

12/25

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (x+)
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 (x+) Who doesn’t love this one?
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker (x+) I read it about once a year, another favorite.
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 (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (x)
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 (x)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (x+) Yet another favorite.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Toole ( )
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (%)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (x+)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo ( ) 

9/25

48/100 total. Pretty good, but I think I need to try out some more classics. I think I am going to write some of these down for the next time I go to the book store/library.

****Thanks to Tabula Rasa for bringing this to my attention*****

Contents

Have been cleaning out my purse this morning and decided to catalog its contents:

1. Orange case for glasses (glasses are inside)
2. Green case for sunglasses (glasses are inside)
3. Wine cork from Mac Murray Ranch Pinot Noir
4. Two pens, black ink
5. Key chain
6. Small moleskine notebook -graphing paper
7. Lemon CO Bigelow hand lotion
8. Five gum wrappers
9. Two pieces Stride Winterblue gum
10. One nickel
11. SONY Cyber-shot camera
12. Aveda Be Curly curl enhancer hair product
13. Travels size Tums Smoothies container, empty
14. Half used packet of travel tissues
15. Four band-aids
16. Two tampons
17. Two Shout wipes
18. Band-Aid blister block stick
19. Two packets of toothpicks
20. Blue pill case with one Zyrtec and two Excedrin
21. Kate Spade card that came with purse “occasionally she dreams of italy. she dreams
of cheese shops, persnickety fiats, and very fine leather goods.”
22. iphone
23. Buckeye necklace
24. Small pink make-up bag: Bert’s Bees Lip Balm, CO Bigelow Lemon Lip Cream, Clinique Superbalm in lilac and raspberry
25. Black leather wallet