1:30 am

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):

1.Green Island Serenade by Vienna Teng
2.Not Over You by Gavin DeGraw
3.Oh My Stars by Andrew Belle
4.Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People
5.Rolling in the Deep by Adele
6.We Ever Pray for Thee by Mormon Tabernacle Choir

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.

So today will be interesting.

"Transcontinental, 1:30 am"

don't give up on this yet

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.

"Transcontinental, 1:30 am"

I can trace all my books [October 2011]

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 can trace all my books [September 2011]

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.

how much longer dear angels

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!

Title text: "Drought" by Vienna Teng

I can trace all my books [August 2011]

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

Title Text: "Nothing Without You"

my brief efforts engraved

I made a birthday card earlier this week. Looking at the finished product I just had to shake my head. It's like all my crafts: I made the effort, but it's so obviously Leslie that no one could mistake it for someone else's, especially not someone's with talent.

I didn't want to take the time to find a real card or real cardstock (or real paper, even), so I pulled open the scratch paper drawer and found two yellow cardstock cards inviting everyone to New Beginnings on February 24. I thought they were perfect for my purposes, so I taped the two written sides together. After I had them secured, I noticed that the cards weren't even the same size. Oops. I wrote Happy Birthday on one side, then worried that nothing on the other side would make it even more obvious that I'd taped two pieces together, so I hurriedly drew some balloons on the other side. Oh, and streamers. That's about the extent of my artistic ability. It was at about this point that I shook my head (and I hadn't even stained my fingers with the markers yet).

This is just so very typical. I'm not a very ... decorative person (my spartan office makes that clear), so whenever I try to make things cute the results are...really nice.

There was this one time I made my friend a social activities chart for his birthday...by hand...I haven't asked but I bet he's thrown it away (it was to encourage him to date, and he probably didn't want the reminder hanging around). I might throw it away too, mostly because it's ugly.

Ooh, and all my "cute" little amino acid notes to people! And this one time that I illustrated my letter to my missionary friend with pictures of me and other people doing various things (I took a picture of that one, but it actually contains sensitive information, so feast your eyes on my lovely valentine, which is the only one I have electronic record of).

Crafts and other such artistic endeavors are on my mind tonight because I'm trying to think of what I can do for a friend's birthday tomorrow. I'm a little bit tempted to just make a gift certificate for something she'll probably not appreciate. Thing is, while everything I touch is hopelessly tacky I have this hope that people can tell that I'm actually trying. That they think "Oh, sweet," instead of "Oh, ew."

Of course I'm sure it's all my latent sloppiness in other areas in my life coming to light in this very visual way. If I cared more, maybe I'd do better. (But that sounds depressing, and I'm sure it's not true.)


Let's leave on a happy note. Here's a Cyberman, Slitheen, and Dalek!

Title Text: "Passage" ~ Vienna Teng

I can trace all my books [July 2011]

Hello! Here's what I read last month. I'll give you an interesting tidbit, too: The last book on the list is a book I actually read in June, but I skipped a hundred pages and read the last chapter because I had to leave it in the car and not take it on the airplane. So we checked it out from the library and I read those last 100 pages to count it as a read.

July
111. Chronicles of the Red King: The Secret Kingdom by Jenny Nimmo
112. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
113. Waiting for Normal by Leslie Connor

114. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
115. Blackberry Crumble by Josi S. Kilpack

116. The Forgotten Locket by Lisa Mangum

117. Come Fall by A.C.E. Bauer

118. Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman
119. A Glory of Unicorns edited by Bruce Coville

120. Heartless by Gail Carriger

121. The Absolute Value of Mike by Kathryn Erskine

122. Changeless by Gail Carriger

123. Aliens on Vacation by Clete Barrett Smith

124. Sidekicks by Jack D. Ferraiolo

125. Gilda Joyce Psychic Investigator: The Bones of the Holy by Jennifer Allison
126. The Evolution of Thomas Hall by Kieth Merrill

your runaway imagination

There's a real whopper of a thunderstorm out there. Nature's pyrotechnics always evoke some sort of emotion in me, but tonight my thoughts turned to a certain young boy, in a similar storm, in a hut on a rock, in the sea.

It's Harry James Potter's golden birthday today, turning 31 on the 31st of July, and my thoughts have been with him quite often lately. I know he's a fictional character; I know all of his friends are fiction; and I never had any doubt that the world in which they live, with magic and Hogwarts and mystical creatures, is fiction. But I still consider Harry and his compatriots some of my good friends.

(On a sidenote, I always thought it strange that those kids who grew up reading Harry Potter would be really excited for their eleventh birthday just in case they got a letter from Hogwarts. Letters don't come on birthdays. They come in July. Sheesh, and they call themselves fans!)

It's also author J.K. Rowling's birthday today, which is cool I guess. She created the world and I certainly do love it. The complexity of the characters prompted me to ask my own questions about what their lives would be like, what thoughts we could imagine going through their heads because of the way they act, the kind of people they are "off-page." And I guess it's no secret that I've tried to answer those questions myself. I've been pretty involved in Harry Potter fanfiction in my day. (And whatever. Back when I first started I didn't know there was such a thing and I don't care that it's dumb, lazy, or whatever other pejorative people use to malign the art. I call it practice, and proof of my abiding love. Or something.) Being involved with that also got me some pretty cool friends that I still keep in touch with to this day. Love of the books, of the characters, carries across a broad spectrum.

With the advent of the final movie, and this upcoming birthday, I've spent a little time wondering just why I feel so strongly about these kids. It's not like these are the only great books and great characters I've met lately. (Be sure to come back tomorrow to see what books I read in July.) And you know what? I don't have an answer. Maybe I met them at the right point for them to live in my brain (I was in 7th grade, for what it's worth). Maybe I identify with the characters more than I do others (I, like many other girls in similar situations, was convinced I was Hermione for a long time. Until Hermione became her own character in my mind, which is much more pleasant!). Or maybe I have to obsess over something, and this world has the complexity to keep my interest.

All I know is, after having maybe watched Half Blood Prince and skipping the first half of Deathly Hallows, I cried shamelessly through much of DH pt. 2. Not because the movie was so awesome (I dunno, it was fine) but because seeing it on screen helped me play it out in my mind again, with my characters (I've always been ambivalent about the casting in the movies), feeling the way they must have felt, remembering that these were real fictional people. I knew what was to come, and my heart went out to them. I was surprised at my reaction -- I don't know if you can tell, but I don't even like the movies -- but didn't try to hide it.

Point being, Harry Potter is awesome. The books are better than the movies, and I think I need to read them again, if only for gems like these:

Harry suddenly turned to Ron.

"Charlie," he said.

"You're losing it, too," said Ron. "I'm Ron, remember?"

(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Chapter 14, "Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback")

Ah yes, so much to make rereading worthwhile.

Title Text: "Radio"

sometimes she believes it

Oh, I noticed that my blog got hacked. I noticed days ago. But every time I went to make another post to cover it, I didn't have anything to say. And maybe I like people thinking I'm an awesome jumper! And that I am willing to play with people!

Neither of which are necessarily true.

I have been playing softball with my ward lately. People that aren't good at sports understand the slightly pitiful feeling you get when your athletic teammates compliment you on "good" plays. Or nice running. Or hey, way to hit the ball! There was a lot of that, but I brushed it off with my best self-deprecating smile and said, "Thanks," or "Yeah, it was definitely the game-maker." I got that from the opposing team, too, which was worse. Because you always worry that they're secretly making fun of you, right?

Before my first game I surreptitiously looked up the symptoms for retinal detachment, in case I ever get hit in the head with the ball. I'm hoping that if such a thing ever happens to me, I'll be able to calmly say, "Someone needs to take me to the emergency room now, please." (And if I'm lucky, it'll be the truly hunky boy on the other team, impressed with my stiff upper lip, and he'll stay with me the whole time, holding my hand as the doctors prepare me for emergency surgery.)

Ah. See, this is why I try not to write blog posts too often. It gets too stream-of-consciousness and I reveal my secret self. So much for being impressive.

The blog post I was going to try to write had to do with the dozens of books I've read so far this year. I was going to make a little rec list. But looking through my accomplishments, it's a tough job. I like a lot of the books I read. And it depends on the kind of person you are and the kind of book you're looking for. I can usually say which books not to read, but that's kind of a downer list. Hence this post, marginally about softball.

Just don't expect me to do any jumping anytime soon.

"The Tower"