Belt Notches

"And if it were not a sin against charity, I should say that I hope Don Quixote may never be cured, for with his recovery we not only should lose his pleasantries but his squire Sancho Panza's as well; and either of them can turn melancholy itself to mirth."
-Don Antonio, as spoken in Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. LXV

Finally I can add one more novel to the list of classic literature I have read! Don Quixote is the not the longest book I've conquered (Les Mis holds that honor), but it WAS a close second and definitely took the longest for me to me to finish! I've been working my way through Don Quixote's misadventures for over two years. That paperback stayed with me through four houses, three states, and two beaches. It was not quite the tale that Wishbone made it out to be, but it was satisfying nonetheless. I'm happy to be done with it.

Unfortunately, the big finale of placing Don Quixote snugly back in the bookshelf is overshadowed by the nagging reminder that I am not yet at liberty to begin a new novel. There is another book that needs finishing before I can tickle my fingers down the library shelves again. I began reading The Pilgrim's Progress about a year ago during a particularly dull stretch of Don Quixote. I quickly realized that Pilgrim's Progress was not a book I could casually read on the side. So I put it in the drawer of my nightstand with the promise that I would not forget it there. This afternoon I pulled it out and replaced the pink post-it note on page 28 with my best bookmark (a segment cut out from the cover of a wall calendar). Although dripping with detailed symbolism, I am convinced this will be a much faster read for me. It has a third of the page count of Don Quixote and its font is twice as big. Maybe only one year? :)

Next on the list, I hope to complete the Jane Austen collection by reading Emma. Looking forward to it!

"This Hill, though high, I covet to ascend,
The Difficulty will not me offend.
For I perceive the Way to Life lies here:
Come pluck up Heart, let's neither faint nor fear;
Better, though difficult, the Right Way to go,
Than Wrong, though easy, where the End is Wo."
-The Pilgrim's Progress, Page 49

Sleeting Outside and in My Head

I am resigned to the fact that I will have five girls. Mostly because I want the experience of raising both a son AND a daughter, and I doubt I'll be that lucky. Although I'm pessimistic about my chances to score both female and male offspring, I do think it's really cool in this age of knowledge, technology, and custom-anything that we still cannot choose the gender of our children. You get what the Lord gives you!

Bryan doesn't understand watching the same girly movies again and again. Sometimes I wish my college roommates still lived with me so we could giggle over the Mormon Pride & Prejudice late at night. At least my future five daughters will watch chick flicks with me.

I like that Gwyneth Paltrow has a long neck and makes it look good. I have a long neck too, but I blame mine on the neck-brace I had to wear after being in a car wreck in 6th grade. I'm pretty sure it stretched it out.

I am so glad I went to public schools instead of a private or home school. I'm convinced I'd be completely dysfunctional outside my church and home were it not for the secular exposure provided by public schools. For this reason I kinda feel sorry for home school kids. Then I remember the crazy scholarships they get for being so smart and my pity is gone. Why is dysfunctional spelled with a y? I suppose its spelling should be a little off.

I'm watching the old Emma now (which explains some previous statements). "I love John! ... I hate John!" The last bit of this movie absolutely transfixes me. "Marry me, my wonderful, darling friend!" Excuse me while I go give Bryan a kiss...

I assume nobody really cares to read this blog post. I figure you must be very bored to have read this far, and you must be glad for the reminder of why you don't share your own pointless thoughts with others. But I like writing. Not that I'm very good at prose, but I really can't stay away from it for too long. One of my favorite things at work is to compose emails.

I've been thinking about pulling out my old journals and blogging the quotes of my fourteen-year-old self. I'm convinced they would be very entertaining and almost equally embarrassing. But perhaps the distance of 12 years is enough to make me laugh instead of cringe. We'll see.

Surely I'm not the only one who thinks it's weird when couples say they're "trying to get pregnant". That phrase makes me uncomfortable. As it should.

And this is one reason (among others) why I have a strict personal policy against facebook friending people I work with. My blog posts link to my facebook Notes. This nonsense is not the kind of thing you want your coworkers reading. Hopefully none of them Googled me and found my blogspot and are reading this right now. If so... grrr. Not cool.

Homeless No More?

What a great weekend! My sister came into town, I got to play with her babies, I had a sleepover with my brother, my mom made opossum pie, and I bought a house! Not one of those plastic houses you buy with pink money to put on Park Place, I bought a REAL house! Well, maybe. I guess I don't really know for sure until they hand me the keys at our closing date.

We've spent the last eight months pouring over house listings online, so after moving to Arkansas and landing a job it only took two weeks for us to find and put an offer on the perfect house. And only a few short hours after that, we got the call that they accepted our offer! We expected a counter-offer with compromises, but luckily for us the owners have already moved out of state and are just anxious to sell the home!

Bryan and I were very subdued in the agent's office while writing up the offer. The agent asked why we weren't more excited. I shrugged my shoulders, "We know it's not ours yet." I figured we wouldn't get excited until closing day, but now that we know they accepted our offer the excitement is building. I know things can still fall through if the inspection fails or some unforeseen problem arises, but it's getting harder to hold back the giddy expectation of home ownership!

I'll keep you updated, and I promise to post a picture if we make it to closing day!

Finish Another Blog Post About Finishing Things: Check!

Continuing my theme of completing things I set out to do, I've decided to make a list of some short-term goals. This is mainly for my own benefit, but if I get one or two comments on this post then it's worth sharing. :)

Finish the baby doll quilt. I bought the fabric, cut the pieces, even sewed it together, but after sewing the completed top together with the batting and back fabric I realized my immediate need for a fairy godmother to undo my mistakes and give me a clean slate. My fairy godmother came in the form of a $2 seam ripper from Michael's. Now I just need to actually use it and start another round of sewing. Have I mentioned that I have no instructions on how to make a quilt? I have an idea of how it should work, and that seemed good enough to start the project.

Finish out the golfer illustration and get it selling on iStock. I owe it to Tru (the model) to get this done before he leaves Cherry Point next month!

Finish Don Quixote. I've spent about 9 months trying to get through de Cervantes' masterpiece. It is a very very very long book and the last quarter of it is proving to be my most difficult hurdle. I've been slacking off lately and haven't read a chapter in a few months, but yesterday I had a brilliant idea of something that will motivate me to finish the last bit of that book. The beach! Yes, I've decided that this summer I will take regular trips to the beach for reading time to finish Don Quixote. (But don't expect this to mean that I will come home this fall with a tan—it is physically impossible to alter my fair complexion.)

Finish the canvas paintings. Well I have this big empty space on the wall above the landing in our staircase and Michael's had their blank canvases 40% off last week, so I put two and two together and knew it was a sign from God calling me to create some original art for the empty space in my home. So now I have three canvases, two paint colors, and a few pencil-drawn thumbnails. I'm thinking something along the lines of a series of organic silhouette images in neutral colors. But I do tend to think a lot and do very little. :\

Hopefully this public admission of my intentions will keep me accountable to actually getting these things done!

Follow-Through Complete

Sometimes it's hard for me to finish things that I start, like this blog post for instance. I've had a draft of this post saved for over two weeks, and even though I'm typing in it now, I'm not sure that I will be able to follow-through and click the Publish Post button today.

As promised, here is the completion of the partial illustration I showed you in the last post. I'm still not sure if I'm done with it though. Maybe I'll change the color of his shirt or bag. Something about those colors just aren't jiving with me. The other two images I showed you last time have each sold three times this month. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about quilting. I've never done it before, but I think I might give it a go. This link is the coolest quilt I've ever seen. I'd love to make one like that, but this virgin quilter will require an incredibly basic pattern for my first time. I'm going to do a practice run by making a baby doll size quilt (which will probably be a gift to Flora) about 20" x 20". If I can master that project without getting bored or frustrated then I'll promote myself to the big leagues and start on something, well, big!

Warthog

Hi, remember me? I know it's been a few months, but I'm that girl. You know, that girl who thought she'd never get a house, who saved her Mac from his suicide attempt, and who moaned for months—nay, years!—at her Marine husband's absence overseas. Yeah, that's me. You've missed me, haven't you? Well you can thank this twenty-something's return to blogging for inspiring me to grace you with my presence again. Really, it's been too long. Let me see if I remember how to do this...

Here's something I found very disturbing. We have some friends here from Maine, and when the wife saw Bryan's razorback baseball cap she asked,"What is Arkansas' mascot? Is it a warthog?" Yeah. A warthog. Oh, how our friend from Texas laughed when she said that. We love our razorbacks, but man is it embarrassing when your mascot is mistaken for a warthog. I kind of wish Arkansas had stuck with their original mascot long ago of the cardinals. At least they're not in the pig family.

A couple blogs down I was upset about not having a house yet. Well I finally got a house not long after that post, but now I want another one! I want a house in Arkansas! I am soooo looking forward to house-hunting in Arkansas this summer. I've already got about 10 homes bookmarked online that I hope will still be on the market in six months. Oh, but there's one little catch. I kinda need to have a job in Arkansas before we will get approved for a mortgage. Minor detail, right? So shoot me a message if you can guarantee me a full-time job six months from now!

What's my pseudonym?

It's been over a decade since I attended a young author's conference, but the influence of that elementary school diversion has finally paid off. Today I began my great American novel. It's very pretentious, full of sentences long enough to fill a page, and even a few brand new words which I made up just to serve my purposes. All attributes of a celebrated classic. But don't expect to get any sneak previews of my literary masterpiece. It will take at least ten years to write and revise a novel as thick as the Bible and twice as confusing as Shakespeare. When it is finally finished I will lock it away in a safety deposit box only to be published upon my death. It's a fail-proof plan for success.

Lately I've been beside myself with anticipation of going back to North Carolina this month, finally getting on the housing wait list, and looking into available jobs on base--all signs of Bryan's eminent return from Iraq! The closer it gets the longer the days seem to strrreeetch. I can't wait!!

Xanga: May 9, 2006: Post-JBU Goals

No more JBU. Here are my new goals to keep myself from becoming brain-dead after college:

• Become an Adobe Certified Expert. The tests for this are really hard, but I'm up for the challenge just to have that title. I think I'll start with the InDesign test.

• Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Since the dustcover is in my portfolio I should have some thoughtful thing to say about it when I show it to potential employers.

• Cook dinner twice a week. I think it's best to approach this cooking thing slowly.

• Join a Bible study or home cell group with somebody I don't like. It will force me to find some good in them and maybe even help me grow spiritually.

• Read a book about Okinawa/Japan. Ideally this would be done at Barnes & Noble over a cup of Marbled Mocha Macchiato *before* I move there. (Move to Japan, not B & N)

• Train for a 5k. It's been way too long since I've done one of those. Right now I can only run a single puny mile. Anyone want to do this one with me?

• Keep in touch with friends. It's sad, but this has been really hard for me in the past. Kinda like Xanga, I pretend we're still involved, but the reality is I haven't updated since I can't remember when.

• Be on a reality tv show. I don't think this will better me in any way, but it would be nice to have a room redecorated or my ride pimped. American Idol also could be fun. Maybe they'd like me if I did all my performances rolling around on the floor.

• Write a book. This book will either be about graphic design, long-distance relationships, or how stupid, unfair, ridiculous, perverted, and dominating a certain branch of the military is. Right now I'm leaning toward graphic design.

• Sell photos on iStock.com. Freakin' harder than it sounds.

• Convince a lady at work that I'm better than her at everything and I know infinitely more than she does. That would be nice. Maybe then I'd get some r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

• Become ambidextrous, really. I've been working on this one for about a year and a half now. I'm convinced it can be a learned trait.

• Work somewhere other than DS. It's just like Siloam. A great and wonderful place to be, but it sucks you in and eventually you have the urge to get as far away from it as you can.
.