December
187. Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey
188. Bad Guys in the Book of Mormon by Dennis Gaunt
189. Kat Incorrigible by Stephanie Burgie
190. Genesis by Bernard Beckett
191. Flint Heart by Katharine and John Paterson
192. Liesl and Po by Lauren Oliver
193. Dragon's Tooth by N.D. Wilson
194. Variant by Robison Wells
195. The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
196. Dragon Castle by Joseph Bruchac
197. Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
198. Cinder and Ella by Melissa Lemmon
199. Bumped by Megan McCafferty
200. Mastiff by Tamora Pierce
201. States of Wonder by Ann Patchett
202. The Aviary by Kathleen O'Dell
203. Possession by Elana Johnson
204. Angel Burn by L.A. Weatherly
205. The Education of Hailey Kendrick by Eileen Cook
Back in October, we had a RS training meeting where we each got a new Book of Mormon and the recommendation to read it, looking for certain phrases. I thought, "Why not read the whole thing by the end of the year? I'll be all ready for us to start it again for Sunday School." We'd been given a 90-day schedule and I figured in order to finish in time I started reading two or three days at a time (I only had like 72 days, which is tons harder than 90).
And then I stopped being in the habit of finding this new Book of Mormon and reading from it. It wasn't in a convenient place. I had other things to do during the day, and at night I wasn't going to leave my bed and go find the special book to read from (I had a different one by my bed that I would choose a chapter or so to read instead, on those days that I hadn't read already...which became more and more frequent). It got to the point where I was halfway through December and only halfway through Mosiah.
Kind of like last time we read the Book of Mormon on a schedule. I was still valiantly skimming in the evening on Dec 31, wishing that I'd kept to my goals better. I did perform slightly more admirably this year; I totally could've finished yesterday, but there's been something else going on at my house.
Appropriately, it's a Book of Mormon readathon. It's really distracting to try and read in Mormon when people in the other room are reading in Mosiah. So I gave up and joined them. I've had to find some quiet minutes the past two days to do my own reading.
And I finished; that's what matters. Actually, what matters is I need better self-discipline. If I treat my final projects like this I'm going to be in a sorry state.
But I am glad I finished. I like that book a lot. I hope that I can remember to open it up and read it every day.
So, once upon a time I accidentally started something by posting the following video to my Facebook:
Maybe you've seen it; if you haven't, it's not long--feel free to watch it. If you have, you're wondering what I accidentally started since there have been no flaming discussions in my comments. No one has a strong opinion about whether this is right or wrong.
Well, I started a couple things. A bunch of my Facebook friends (I think I've seen like 6 or 7 now) also posted the video, after me. It's possible they got it from one of their other friends, but it could've been me, right? It's been interesting to follow those conversations (not very interesting, but more interesting than my post).
Also I started myself thinking about this situation in my life. Part of my ponderings have been about how the video can't be accurate. There was definitely some editing involved, and the editing could've excluded some less savory responses. ("Savory" meaning, I guess, "What the filmmaker intended to portray.") There's certainly some guys out there that count girls as their friends.
What does "friend" even mean? What would "hook up" imply in my case (or in the case of most of the people interviewed)? How do these girls know that these guys secretly like them?
So the definitions aren't clear.
Now, as far as my life goes. Off the top of my head I can think of two guys I would unequivocally consider my friends, currently. If I called them in dire straits, they wouldn't hesitate to do everything they could to help. And they'd probably do the same for any other girl they know; they're pretty solid. Awesome friends to have.
(I do know more than two guys, I promise. The others are either fellows I'm "actively" pursuing, or fellows that I get along with just fine in our business-related interactions but have no real interest in seeing socially, or fellows that I'm not getting along with very well. Does that about cover it?Oh, there's also the fellows that aren't my friends anymore because we don't go in the same circles. Makes it harder for me to call them in dire straits, especially if they're in the subgroup of "married". Edit: I also forgot the generic acquaintances. I know them too.)
Anyway, these two guys I'm thinking of. I'm pretty sure they have no interest in dating me, and here's why:
Neither have asked me on a date.
Here's where people can start complaining, "But maybe they want to! Maybe they've been secretly pining for you all these months, Leslie, just waiting for your word. And don't forget that them asking you out doesn't indicate any more than just a basic amount of interest, anyway, so why are you making a big deal out of it?"
(Okay, that last part is my own personal soapbox. I doubt that my naysayers would bring it up at this juncture.)
The only answer I have to these complaints is: They don't want to. *shrug* Is there anything else I can say?
Also, I know lots of girls with married or otherwise-engaged (oh, I'm funny) guys as friends, and there's no reason to look for anything more than friendship. It's no good to say that "under no circumstances" it can happen. It happens in my life, it happens in other girls' lives.
I still laughed at the movie! It was interesting to see a guy's perspective and for girls to admit that they're often suspicious of their guy friends' motives (is that not what they said? Trust me, that's what they were implying). I guess it's just the sweeping generalization that bugged me.
Let's be friends!
("Unwritten Letter #1" -- full of applicable lyrics)
Happy December! I think it is, anyway. The class that I've been way concerned I couldn't get into because "it's complicated" looks like it will finally go through! I'm wearing a "new" sweater (it's Jennie's; I took the tag off though). I get to hear an Apostle speak tonight. And I didn't read very much in November; at least it felt that way. I've been going days at a time without reading any new books, with flurries of "productivity" between.
174. Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls by Wendelin van Draanen
175. Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George
176. Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett
177. Michael Vey: Prisoner of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans
178. City of Lies by Lian Tanner
179. Secrets at Sea by Robert F. Peck
180. Conspiracies by Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill
181. Beauty and the Werewolf by Mercedes Lackey
182. Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby
183. Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park
184. Pumpkin Roll by Josi S. Kilpack
185. Wisdom's Kiss by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
186. Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos
If I can keep up this "not reading" thing maybe I will keep to within 200! But probably not, because there are already like 4 books from the library I haven't read yet.
Here are some of the songs, in alphabetical order, that played on repeat in my head last night (some, because I'm pretty sure I've forgotten a couple):
Hooray! I kept looking for the off-switch for the music player in my head but I could. not. find it. It was nice to eventually have #1 in my head because that's actually part of my "Quiet" playlist that I play when I can't sleep. Not that it helped. #6 was there only briefly, after I desperately tried to find a nice quiet Conference hymn to relax me and send me to sleep. Didn't work. #5 got in my head because my sister, ignorant of my tragic insomnia, turned on music to do her hair by, and that was the first song, and it was loud.
I was in bed with my lights out by 10:30, and the closest I ever got to sleep was probably within half an hour, when my "Quiet" playlist was playing and I was concentrating on breathing, then on reciting Articles of Faith/counting sheep/counting potatoes/counting bananas/picturing the Creation in a detached way that let my mind wander (clearly). But I was still awake when the Christmas lights turned off at midnight. I was still awake an hour and a half later, when I decided to turn on my light and my computer and engage my mind in something besides annoying songs on repeat and imagining scenarios for the next day. I was still awake an hour later when I turned on my light again and opened my scriptures and stared at the page. But then I must've eventually fallen asleep because I think my alarm at 5:10 actually woke me up, providing me a lovely 2 hours' slumber.
Not sure if I was asleep when my sister turned on her music, but sobbing and raging at her apparently didn't wear me out enough to fall back asleep (I accused her of not waking up for scriptures like a NORMAL person, because everyone knows it's more natural to awaken early and read scriptures than it is to lie in bed until you have to get ready for school), and around that time it started getting light anyway, so I gave this whole sleep thing up as a bad job and constructed my night-time playlist.
I've been getting complaints lately that I don't post to my blog often enough. People don't really care about my booklist if that's all they're getting. Well, this month I planned to remedy that; I thought maybe I'd resurrect my "If I were that kind of grateful" November segment, but then I was in a bad mood and forgot to be grateful for anything the first week of November. Or most of the month. So that went out the window.
A week or so ago I started an open letter to about half the guys in my acquaintance letting them know I'd accept a date from them even if I'm not interested, but it's not like most (or any) of them read the blog, and if they do I don't think my letter would necessarily have spurred them to action. So I let that fall by the wayside too. No one wants to hear me pontificate on how dating should be, and specifically, how dating me should be.
And the only other thing that's been on my mind lately is some reminiscences of my hospital experiences. I tell people I don't really remember it, and that's true. But sometimes little things will remind me; like we heard about deep-vein thrombosis on the radio in the car sometime and I remembered the little foot-squeezers they had me wear after my surgeries to prevent the clots from happening. And also they made me promise to take my blood thinners. Often when I see a can of Sprite I'll remember how that would be all I consumed during most of my hospital stays (except for the one time they let me eat breakfast and there was a belgian waffle with strawberries and bacon and my surgeon came and talked politics with my mom and as soon as he left I threw everything up). And there was that one time a nurse gave me a unicorn because they asked me if I wanted anything and I asked for a baby unicorn, if they could manage it. (They did their best.) I was able to tell my sister that she would have time to make patients happy as a nurse.
If I think about it, I pretty much do remember most everything. So when I say "Oh, I don't really remember it" I guess I'm lying. But that's still what I'm going to say when asked.
So, you see, there hasn't been a whole lot for me to post about.
Also I should be better about putting pictures on my posts so people read them, but I don't. Maybe that can be a goal for next year. If I end up having things to post about then.
Hello! Interesting month, kinda. One of these books I accidentally read twice in one day. One of these books isn't even officially published yet. And none of these books are the book I waited all month to read, but I promised myself not to complain about that any more.
At this rate, I'm going to be hard-pressed to stay under 200 books, so I'm not going to artificially impose that limit. If it happens (and believe me, I can imagine a future where I don't read 18 books in a month) that'll be great, but in the meantime all I hope for is a nice round number.
October
155. Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt
156. I'll Be There by Holly Goldberg Sloan
157. The Emerald Atlas by John Stephens
158. What Your Doctor Can't Tell You by Kevin B. Jones
159. Across the Great Barrier by Patricia C. Wrede
160. Peter Nimble and his Fantastic Eyes by Jonathan Auxier
161. The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
162. City of Orphans by Avi
163.Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan
164. A Plague Year by Edward Bloor
165. Adventure at Simba Hill by Susan Runholt
166.Troublemaker by Andrew Clements
167. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
168. Seeking Persephone by Sarah M. Eden
169. The Last Little Blue Envelope by Maureen Johnson
170. As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott
171. Changes by Mercedes Lackey
172. Snuff by Terry Pratchett
173. 13 Gifts by Wendy Mass
I did a horrible, horrible job keeping track of my books this month. I simply wasn't writing them down. Not a huge deal, except it made it hard to remember what I had read. I looked at my mom's booklist (she's actually read more than me now, since I read so little in September) and pieced together things from there. I did forget that I read two Harry Potter books. They were fun. So, here's what I think is approximately my list, a good third of which was read this week alone:
September
141. Tyger Tyger by Kersten Hamilton
142. Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
143. Red Blazer Girls: The Mistaken Masterpiece by Michael Beil
144. Any Which Wall by Laurel Snyder
145. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
146. Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy by Bil Wright
147. Geek Fantasy Novel by E. Archer
148. Small Acts of Amazing Courage by Gloria Whelan
149. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
150. Deadly by Julie Chibbaro
151. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick
152. The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan
153. Wither by Lauren DeStefano
154. Awaken by Katie Kacvinsky
And can you believe it? It's stats time again already! I'm not sure I'm very pleased with what we're going to see...
Total number of books: 154
Number of First-time Reads: 134
Number of Rereads: 20
Average number of books per month: 17.1
Number of nonfiction books: 3
Number of fiction books: 151
Yep, my rereads shot up, and my nonfiction reads stayed the same. I'll work on that.
So this one time my hair started growing back. And it was two years ago this month. To celebrate two years of being cancer-free (tests this week came back clear), I thought I'd take a little picture journey with you, an indulgent and sometimes disturbing journey, but one that may be fun.
Our story starts in early March 2009, when I got portraits of my long hair taken. Ah, it was lovely, long, and straight. I loved my long hair, to the point that when the time came for chemo to start, I still hadn't cut it -- because I wanted to be beautiful for the dance.
I ended up going to the hospital instead of to the dance, and the next week my lovely long hair started to fall out.
So I cut it in late March.
This isn't a cute picture, but it does show the length of my chopped hair (my roommate Allison did it for me, because I didn't feel up to going to a salon and paying for something that was going to fall out anyway). At this point my hair hadn't really started the deluge, so I could go out in public without a hat.
In fact, it was in trying on wigs that I began to have to wear hats, because a little patch right at the front of my head had come over all bald. Happy birthday to me.
Unfortunately I can't find the pictures of me appearing progressively more alien as my part widened (I can see the picture in my head, but I can't find it; must've deleted it for sheer weirdness). Suffice to say, I lost about 98% of my hair.
But not all of it.
Two months later (May 2009) and that last 1-2% of my hair held out strong. In this picture you can almost see that I've got most of it back in a ponytail, so it almost looks normal (well, normal for a bald head, yeah). Usually I let it hang down and it looked...weird.
For some reason (and I think I'd still make the same choice again, for reasons I still don't know) I didn't want to get rid of the rest of it. I was proud of my little hairs for sticking through it. No one got to see it, anyway. (Except for my family, and I guess my roommates. I was very diligent about hats during this time.)
My mother eventually prevailed (she was tired of me scaring my siblings' friends) and got me in contact with a razor and voila:
The worst picture ever! I wish I could remember the context of it. June 5 was my big ol' surgery, and this was a couple weeks after. I must not have been feeling too good...
Since I had surgery in June, they skipped one of my rounds of chemo. That meant that my hair (with high hopes, I should think) decided to start growing back in July. I'd forgotten about this event, and this picture, until I ran across both. As you see, there's starting to be a little fuzz:
This picture taken in July 2009 can double as the late September picture too, because I looked about the same.
September 2009, the light from the window illuminating the slightest specks of fluff covering my scalp. The long wait was over; my hair had finally stopped falling out. Now it had begun the journey of regrowth, one that is still continuing...
I still didn't let anybody see my hair yet. I wore a lot of wig and some hat while in public (and I was a missionary, so public happened), and by November
.
I looked totally gangster.
But I still couldn't imagine the idea of letting people see me with my hair super short. I mean, I was a girl (am a girl) and had certain ideas of femininity that I actually wanted to uphold, because I'm oppressed like that. But finally the day came.
January 1, 2010. I gritted my teeth and actually went on a date with no wig, and no hat. The guy didn't know anything about anything, which may have been a downside because then maybe he thought I wanted my hair to be so punishingly short. And that time when I was like, "I don't know how to do it when it's this short!" and he asked when I got my haircut...awkward...
January 2010, what a pretty boy. And what straight hair, too! It did not stay straight like that.
February 2010. I look at pictures like this now and think "Surely my hair didn't look like that!" But it did, and it did actually look nice, in a "my date's hair was longer than mine" kind of way. And he said I looked nice, so that's all that counts, right?
Still gangsta in March. Aha! It's been bugging me for a while because I couldn't figure out what I was wearing or what was going on, but then I figured out it was one of my cancer blankets (I collected them). I was wearing a blanket. Gangsta-ly.
My hair continued growing, slowly but surely, which was awesome since my self-esteem seems inextricably tied to the length of my hair. By Kyra's wedding in April 2010, I was starting to be okay with it (as long as I didn't look at it from the back!).
Some weird things seemed to happen sometimes though. Can you believe I went out with it looking like that? This was in May.
I don't have too many pictures of my hair looking normal during the summer. Here's what happened when my sisters decided to straighten it. Never again. (The worst part was when a client stopped by to drop off music and this was the first time she saw me.)
See, this is cute! Maybe I should go back to having bangs, as illustrated in this October 2010 picture. My hair was finally long enough to do something with, which was super exciting.
February 2011 was the next time I had much of a picture taken of me. And obviously I took it of myself, in the mirror. I must've thought I looked classy in that outfit and my glasses and my hair so curly and getting long!
Long enough to put in a ponytail even! As long as I use two (one for the top, one for the bottom). This is how I did my hair for all of spring break, April 2011.
In June I discovered that I could actually put my hair in a side ponytail and it would stay! I was way excited and took tons of pictures of the event. I still have this thing where I think of my hair as really short, compared to everyone else's. It was about this time when I realized that it was actually getting long. I couldn't even call it short anymore!
This was taken two weeks ago. I've been pestered and pressured to get my hair cut for months now, but just look at those curls! How can you say no to those tiny ringlets? (Completely natural, by the way.) Something else I love about this picture (and other pictures from this evening) is how normal I look. This is a hairstyle I employed all through high school and college, and I think that feeling normal is one of the best parts of my lengthening hair.
Sometimes (okay, about every other day) I just have to embrace the uniqueness of my curly locks. It's so exciting to see the way my hair evolves as it gets longer, and a major reason for not getting a haircut is my worry that suddenly my hair won't be curly anymore. Or half of it will curl half won't, or it'll be completely unmanageable and I'll have to start actually doing it. No way. Not while I can still get it to do that ^ without even using a hair dryer.
Well, I hope you had fun indulging me and my nostalgia. Here's to many more months and years of hair growth!
Good morning! It's September! I didn't read too much in August. I just didn't have the heart for it. (Is that what I said about July too?) I enjoyed some of them though. If only there had been any princessy romance ones; I'm definitely noticing a trend in my favorite reads. But I'm still reading other things...Behold...
August
127. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
128. Wishful Thinking by Alexandra Bullen
129. Warped by Maurissa Guibord
130. Foggy with a Chance of Murder by G.G. Vandergrieff
131. Knightley Academy by Violet Haberdasher
132. The Secret Prince by Violet Haberdasher
133. Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster
134. FitzOsbornes in Exile by Michelle Cooper
135. Jane by April Lindner
136. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
137. A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper
138. Queen of Hearts by Martha Brooks
139. You'll Like It Here (Everyone Does) by Ruth White
140. Visconti House by Elsbeth Edgar
Food so far
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It's always fun to go to a new area and try the food there. Here's a bit of
the food we've gotten to enjoy since moving here:
1. Peaches and grapes and ...
Utah Trip Part 2
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You're reading part 2(!) of the photo dump from six months ago. It's
tempting to just forget it, but THESE PLACES WERE SO BEAUTIFUL AND WE LOVE
OUR FAMILI...
