Thursday, August 28, 2008

Warning: sappiness enclosed

Over the long weekend, Sonny came home and we celebrated our birthdays together with the family - just missing P.

First - the stuff I had been stressing about - my job was moved to California. I'm very much a Northeast girl - love the forests and the green and the seasons. The family is all here. Still, J and I thought quite a bit over the couple of days I had to decide and were considering it, a way to get out of any ruts we might be in. It ended up not working out because J will most likely be going to industrial design school here in the East when he finishes MCC and I couldn't be there alone for years.

Now, I have a bit of time to find another job within Kodak - here's hoping.

So, as we celebrated birthdays I couldn't help but reflect on the 33rd year of my life. The health scare that led to my adoption of bionic parts. The 4 days to decide if we could move across the country for a few years and start a different life. I am very blessed that I have such awesome parents, brothers (+ their others), and husband. Without them, this wannabe kickbutt chic would have been very lost and lonely and would have taken a lot more time to heal. Crises emphasize what's important. Good Lord, these really did. Thank you guys, soooo much.

OK, sappiness over:

Book #17: Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. This helped to motivate me to make some fundamental changes to my diet. It underlined the importance of avoiding processed foods and going organic often. I've nearly cut all of my pop consumption and really increased water intake as a result. I plan to switch to an unprocessed type of sugar - potentially crystallized honey. That said, I'm not totally swayed on the dairy and meat issues.

Book #18: Stranger than Fiction: True stories by Chuck Palahniuk. I have to admit the first stories in this are a bit fuzzy in my memory - I started reading it in the hospital on little sleep and stress, followed by pain meds. I did enjoy the vignettes presented and I think they have piqued my interest in his novels - now that I know a bit more about him I can perhaps overlook some of the more extreme elements of his style.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Looking forward to the weekend

Sonny's coming up for a joint birthday (mine & his) celebration this weekend. That will be fun. Life has been crazy of late and it will be good to be with the whole gang. I need to see if we can get a good pic for YoungMe NowMe on Color Wars.

Can't really tell the full story of recent craziness yet. By next week. Part of it included a whirlwind trip for J and I to San Diego last weekend. We departed Rochester at 7:30am on Saturday and returned at midnight Sunday/Monday. Total nutzoid. From Chicago to Denver we had a selection of flics, including Leatherheads and Prince Caspian. I was excited about Caspian - even though the volume differences between dialogue and musical interlude were annoying. I would say we were about 2/3 of the way into the movie - just as everything starts to come to a boil - when it shut off as we started the approach to Denver. Evil! Don't show a movie if it's longer than the trip! Now I have to move that to the top of the queue.

I seriously need to catch up on books because I'm doing well this year and I'm just being horrible about blogging them, but I don't want to do more than 2 to a post, so:

Book #15: The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self. J found this really powerful. I found it a bit to slog through. I don't remember any particular pieces that struck me, but I just didn't get into it and found much of the premise a bit too convoluted.

Book #16: A Knight of the Word by Terry Brooks. The Shannara series by Brooks remains one of my favorites - one of the few fantasy series that I loved in high school and don't find somewhat annoying today. Running with the Demon, the first book in the series of which A Knight of the Word is the second, also ranked high - bringing elements of Brooks' storytelling to today's world and carrying some of the moral undercurrent I like to see (we humans can seriously screw up life here, or we can work to make things right). Knight did not disappoint. In fact, I'm seriously considering reordering my to read piles to try to catch up with the prolific Brooks - I can't wait to see the latest!