Random Snapshots

super loved it!

The NKOTB concert that is.  As we were walking out this is what my friend Kery said to me and I felt the same way -- we super loved it!!

 

I loved all the old stuff they played and even some of the new stuff.  They are still great dancers and overall put on a really high-energy show.  You could tell they were having fun up there.  The crowd was really involved which was fun.

You just can't beat the people watching at a show like this either!  Some of the outfits I just can't explain.  There were a lot of ladies looking for action.  :)

I would definitely see them again.  This show made up for not having a chance to see them when I was younger though. 

 

Here's a link to a few more pictures -- NKOTB Flickr Set.

step by step...

I'm going to the NKOTB concert tonight!  I'm so excited I could scream!

 

I just picked up my ticket this morning and am sitting 12 rows back from the stage.  :)  My friend Kery already had a ticket 1 row behind me -- her husband surprised her with a ticket, but that meant she was going by herself.  I never pass up an opportunity to go to a concert so I was happy to see that good seats were still available this morning!  I'm hoping we can sit together when we get there.

Who was your favorite New Kid back in the day?

Mine was Donnie Wahlberg. 

Favorite song?  Probably Please Don't Go Girl or Step by Step.

good reads

My super smart friends Lindsay and Kim recently posted great lists of books on their blogs -- click their names to see.  I'm a life-long reader (thanks Mom!) and book lover so as soon as I saw these I knew I had to blog about it myself.   

The first 100 come from Lindsay, the next 50 are from Kim and the last straglers are my own additions.  Their lists cover a lot of territory!  Some of this stuff is classic, heavy reading and some is just stuff I think everyone should read.  I know I have many more on my to-read list, but these come to mind first.  I've edited the lists to reflect my own experience.  I also added another part to Kim's key -- some of these books I read many years ago and really don't remember them so I might re-read. 

Do you have any suggestions of your own?  If so, I'd love for you to leave a comment. 

When school is finally out I have planned to read some of the classics off these lists which I have yet to tackle.  I will read anything really as long as it comes with a good recommendation.  My favorite stuff is crime fiction, true crime, mystery, poetry and historical stuff.

Key

• BOLD = Read it
• Stike-through = not interested
• Italics Underlined = read part of it or in process
• **BOLD = Read it, but would like to read it again

1          To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2        The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Editor), Joseph Smith (Translator)
3          Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4        Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
5        The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
6          **Holy Bible
7          1984 by George Orwell
8        Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
9        Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
10        The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
11        Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
12        Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
13      Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
14        The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
15      The Giver by Lois Lowry
16      The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
17      Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
18        The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
19      The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Robin Buss (Translator)
20      The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
21      Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
22        Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, Margaret Atwood (Introduction)
23      Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24      The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
25      Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
26        **The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
27      New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
28      One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
29      The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
30        The Princess Bride by William Goldman
31      East of Eden by John Steinbeck
32      The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
33        Animal Farm by George Orwell
34        Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
35        Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
36      Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
37      Lord of the Flies by William Golding
38      Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
39      A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, Peter Sis (Illustrator)
40        **Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
41        Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
42      Life of Pi by Yann Martel
43      Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
44        A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
45      Watership Down by Richard Adams
46        Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
47      A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
48      The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49        Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
50        Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
51      Dune by Frank Herbert
52      The Odyssey by Homer, Robert Fagles (Translator)
53      Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
54        Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
55      The Road by Cormac McCarthy
56      The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
57      The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
58        The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
59        A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
60      The Complete Works of William Shakspeare
61      Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
62      The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
63      The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
64      The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
65      Night by Elie Wiesel
66      The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
67        The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
68      Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
69      The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator)
70      Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
71      A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
72        Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
73        Dracula by Bram Stoker
74      The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
75        Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
76      The Iliad by Homer, Robert Fagles (Translator)
77        Moby Dick by Herman Melville
78        **War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Henry Gifford (editor)
79        Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
80        Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Richard Andrews (Editor)
80      Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
82      Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
83      The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
84      The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
85      Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
86      The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
87      Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
88      Emma by Jane Austen, Fiona J. Stafford (Editor)
89      On the Road by Jack Kerouac
90        The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
91      All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
92      The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
93      The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
94      Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
95        A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
96      The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
97      Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
98      The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
99      Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
100     Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

 

Kim’s additions (in no particular order):

1.       The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
2.       I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
3.       Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
4.       Beloved by Toni Morrison
5.       Essential Rumi by Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi
6.       The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
7.       M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang
8.       Holy Quran by Allah
9.         Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
10.      Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose
11.     Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
12.      The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
13.     The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
14.      The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
15.     The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
16.     Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
17.     The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
18.     The Art of War by Sun Tzu
19.      Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
20.     Beowulf
21.     The Republic by Plato
22.      The Crucible by Arthur Miller
23.     Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
24.     Roots by Alex Haley
25.      The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
26.      A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
27.     The Tibetan Book of the Dead
28.     Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
29.     Paradise Lost by John  Milton
30.      James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
31.     Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
32.     The Aeneid by Publius Vergilius Maro
33.      Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
34.     Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
35.     The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
36.      **The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
37.     The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
38.     Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence 
39.      Walden by Henry David Thoreau
40.     Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
41.     The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
42.     The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
43.     Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
44.     Seven Valleys and Four Valleys by Baha'u'llah
45.      **How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie  
46.     The Kama Sutra
47.      Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
48.     Watership Down by Richard Adams
49.     Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
50.     Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

 

My additions (in no particular order)

1.         She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb

2.         Marley and Me by John Grogran           

3.         The Witches by Roald Dahl

4.         A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

5.         Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

6.         The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes

7.         Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

8.         In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

9.         **Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

10.        The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

11.        The Shack by William P Young

12.        One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

13.        The Stranger by Albert Camus

14.        A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway

15.        To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

16.        Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

fireworks

We got to watch the fireworks last night from the rooftop of a friend's apartment building.  She lives in the S. Lake Union area.  It was very cool and ended up being the best Seattle-fireworks-viewing-spot we've found so far. 

The sunsets around here are really amazing!

I brought my tripod with me to set up some long exposures and I got a few good shots.

 

 

 

 

 

I have a billion more photos to go through from the daytime fun we had as well.  It was such a gorgeous (and hot) day to be outside exploring. 

Hope you all had a great weekend!!

happy 4th of July

Thank you to everyone who has served this country, past and present.  These men and women have afforded us the freedoms which we enjoy today. 

Please take a moment to remember them today and consider their sacrifice. 

I'll leave you with a recent photo of my favorite Marine because who doesn't love a man in uniform?!  I love this country!

Enjoy the rest of your day and BE SAFE!!

friday favorites

The Sookie Stackhouse Book Series: I.AM.HOOKED.  I started Book 4 yesterday (please, please, please don't leave a comment telling me what "potentially" happens in future books!) and I think I'm on Chapter 7 alreay.  I've flown through Books 1-3 and like a crackhead have gone to the library, bookstore or Kindle store at the end of each book to try and obtain the next.  :)  I'm reading Book 4 on my iPhone via Kindle since I couldn't find the book in the store or at the library and I needed it right away! :)

A lot of people refer to this series as the "grown up" Twilight and I guess that is mostly true although the series was written well before Twilight.  I like them both equally and for different reasons. 

True Blood on HBO: If you already watch True Blood then you know Season Two started a few weeks ago.  Adam and I have been hooked on this show ever since we watched the first episode.  Last year we watched the entire Season One in less than two days via HBO On-Demand (Comcast cable).  We couldn't wait for Season Two and have trouble waiting for the next Sunday to come around! 

I know most Sookie fans love Bill Compton, but I do not.  I am Team Eric all the way -- especially with Alexander Skarsgard in that role.  He's perfect for the role with regard to his description in the book series as far as I'm concerned.  The TV series storyline differs a lot from the book series so that may bother some people, but it doesn't really matter to me.

The Hangover: Holy crap, this movie was hilarious.  I don't believe I stopped laughing the entire time.  I have heard the exact same review from literally everyone I know who has seen this movie.  Some of the stuff was over the top, but somehow they managed to make it seem hilarious and not stupid.  If you've been to Vegas you will have a few extra laughs.  It really made me want to go back soon.  The main cast was great and really had a comedic chemistry together.  I will definitely be buying the DVD when it comes out.

Dexter: I think this might be my new (new-to-me) favorite show.  The First and Second Seasons just became available via Netflix Instant (we stream through our XBox 360 and I HIGHLY recommend it!) so Adam I and started to watch it last night.  We don't have Showtime, but we've long wanted to watch this series.  Last night we got through episodes 1-3 and I think we're both hooked.  I love anything that has to do with crime - both fiction and non-fiction - so this show is very interesting to me.  I cannot wait to watch more episodes. 

 

I'd love to hear what you are reading and watching.  :)  Happy Friday!

one down, one to go

I finished up my first Embossed Leaves sock last night and started the second right away. 

 

I'm really anxious to have a pair because I love how the first one turned out.  I think it will be even better after I get a chance to block it.  I should have no problem avoiding SSS (second sock syndrome)!  :)

goodbye June, hello July.

Man, June flew by fast didn't it?!  I think the closer I get to finishing school (5 weeks, 6 days) the faster the weeks, days and hours are flying by.  I haven't been able to keep up with anything lately, including this blog.

I do have some goals for July though.  Just a couple of things I'd like to accomplish without putting too much pressure on myself during this last class. 

1. Print some photos.  I don't care how many or what they are of, I just need to print some instead of letting them live on the computer!  A few months ago I purchased an Espon Artison 800 and that printer is the shit.  The quality if fantastic and I've loved the photos that I've printed so far.    
2. Update my blog banner.  I think that speaks for itself.  :)  I also am considering moving my blog to another host.  I would like to be able to post larger photos in the future and currently I can't do that on Typepad unless I upgrade my format -- aka: pay more.  I'm looking into Squarespace, but open to other options, advice, opinions.
3. Continue to work on my EliseJoy summer minibook.  I don't have a photo of my own yet, but it's turning out to be pretty cool.
4. Get my Sock Summit homework done -- this should probably up in the #1 spot since it is the most important thing I need to do in July.
5. Eat better and workout a little more.  Constant goal for me which I hope becomes easier once I'm finished with school.
6. Finish up at least one knitting UFO (unfinished object).  I'm working on a delicious pair of socks right now which I think I can finish up since the yarn is sport weight.  Here's a sneak peek:

 

That's all I have for now.  Happy July everyone!  I hope you are all enjoying your summer. :)

 

follow the leader

This meme has been going around blogs lately.  Since I have nothing else to blog about I'm going to jump on the bandwagon. 

Outside my window... I see sun, finally this week!  Otherwise it's a quiet morning in downtown Renton outside my office window besides the 2 dumb teenagers smoking in the parking lot.  No crackheads yet which is always a plus.

I am thinking... that if I don't lose some weight soon I might lose my mind.

I am thankful for... many things -- my health, my job, my husband, my family, friends new and old, the list goes on.  I'm especially thankful for my husband and the fact that he's my best friend.  we have a lot of fun together.

From the kitchen... I'm not a fan of the kitchen.  I just don't like cooking lately.  I have been trying to cook at home more though -- both for my waist and my wallet.

I am wearing... a new summer dress, tank, & light sweater all belted. 

I am creating... a million things in my head, but nothing of tangible form.  in my head I'm sewing skirts, knitting cardigans and socks and making mini books.

I am going... nowhere until 5pm then we're hitting the gym before going home.

I am reading... Club Dead by Charlaine Harris.  I'm 1/4 way through and I'm addicted to the series -- both the books and the TV show.

I am hoping... that my knitting mojo comes back soon.  I'm also hoping my next class stays filled so I don't have to push back my finish date again. 

I am hearing... Kings of Leon playing from iPhone in the speaker dock on my desk.  my laptop is humming too which is really annoying.

Around the house... I'm really anxious to get some things done.  I need paint some rooms and get some photos hung up to spruce the place up.  I can't wait until school is out!

One of my favorite things... afternoon naps on the weekends.

A few plans for the rest of the week... a couple more days of work.  this weekend I'm taking two sock knitting classes with Cookie A and I can hardly wait!!!  I will be in Cookie A heaven all day Saturday.  Sunday I hope to get a few things done around the house - chores.

wishing I had time for...

...photo editing:  I have many photos to share that have accumulated over the past 3 months.  Editing takes time.  Time that I do not have right now!  So for now I'll share my daily mugshot of the day taken on my iPhone. (Disregard the fact that my makeup looks so dark in relation to my neck.  I think that's an optical illusion -- I hope!?  In addition, I should really learn to love lipstick - geez, you learn a lot by taking selfies all the time.)

You can view more of these here if you're so inclined -- Daily Mugshow.

...learning to sew:  I should have learned to sew before I moved away from a family full of seamstresses!  But, now I'm left to learn on my own.  With You Tube and the amount of instructional books out there I think I should be able to learn some stuff!  I would like to make a few skirts for summer and I hear that is pretty easy.  Advancing to dresses would really be the thing I'm most interested in.  I love a dress that fits well!  I can sew the basic stuff -- pillowcases, napkins, simple bags and I even made curtains.  I need to bone up on the basic rules and terminology more.  I've heard great reviews on these three books -- any other recommendations?

...learning to stitch: I've done embroidery here and there.  (I think I can say that about almost every craft out there!  Thanks Mom for allowing me to grow up in a crafty home!) Mostly when I was younger and I never really advanced beyond the basic stitches.  It's coming back into style though as a modern craft much like knitting and sewing.  More variety of patterns are available too.  When I have some time to set aside I'm going to start with this kit.  Click the picture to take you to the kit's link.  Sublime Stiching has some VERY cool patterns that I can't wait to try!!

Other things I'd like to have more time for right now -- finishing up some knitting UFOs (I have enough to last for a while!), knitting socks and sweaters, cleaning my house (haha!), running, Pilates and reading.  Not too much to ask, right!?

7 weeks and 3 days until I'm done with school.  Not that I'm counting.  :)

That means that there are only 6 weeks and 4 days until Sock Summit 2009 -- more on that later.  

Happy Friday!