Enchantment

This book is a biography on Audrey Hepburn, they've moved the biographies to a prominent position in the library and Audrey Hepburn is one of my favorite actresses so I got the book. It was really interesting to learn more about Audrey Hepburn and her life, I'd learned things here and there over the years and it was nice to have her whole life laid out with a little more certainty of truth than on a website. I think it must be one of the great ironies in life that so many people want to live like the stars do, when in reality the stars are quite often unhappy. Though Audrey was not the characters she played I think the sweetness and elegance we saw on the screen were not far from the truth. I was a bit surprised and disappointed to learn that she had multiple affairs over the years but aside from those she seems to have been the wonderful person I thought of her as. I was also a bit surprised to a good deal of her movies a bit snubbed by the author, in particular Sabrina which is a favorite of mine; stating that the characterization and chemistry both were lacking. Perhaps it can be chalked up to differences of opinion, or being star-struck, who knows but I though that the characters were alright and I loved the connection between Bogart and Hepburn and thought it was very convincing and much more so than that in the later version of the movie. Who knows.
I did really enjoy learning more about Hepburn's work for UNICEF, and how unselfishly she gave her time and talents and reputation, working very hard for children in desperate situations as she too had been in as a child.
Dancer, actress, fashion icon, wife,mother, humanitarian, beauty, Audrey Hepburn. She had quite a life.

Pirates!

That's the title of the book I just finished reading...agian. I've read a few of Celia Rees' books now and I really like her writing, it's very captivating and thrilling. Pirates, somewhere in that word there is such a thrill and it sweeps the masses with a strange sort of envy, just look at the sucess of Pirates of the Caribbean.. Somewhere deep insided tons of us would like to be a pirate to sail the seas, pilliage and plunder. In the last century I think being a cowboy was the secret fantasy, now it's pirates. This book is full of vicarious piraty adventure, evil foes and damsels that can bally well fight for themselves, that's what I really enjoy about this book, I love an emancipated woman, freed from the restraints of society etc. I don't really care for damsles in distress, helpless feeble minds I've resented such stereotypes all my life. Anyway if ye be seeking pirate thrills out on the open sea, then this be the yarn for ye.

New Painting

It's so exciting to be starting out on a new painting. I generally sort of dred laying out the outlines and setting up dimensions but once I get to the actual painting that's all forgotten. I'm really excited about this painting, I've been planning to do it for months. I originally intended to do it in oil which has been part of the hold up, I'm not set up right now to work on oil painting, but I decided it could be done just as well, maybe even better in watercolor so it's under way. Now that I've started I wish that I hadn't waited so long, I'm painting something really beautiful that I saw one morning as I was walking to work and I can't remember it quite as vividly any more. I held off because I've been working on a serise and this piece doesn't go with the serise but now it's under way and I can't wait to get it all down like I remember it.

Update on Goals

So, it's been a few weeks and I suppose I should report on them. I am loving the dictionary project, utterly geeky/nerdy/etc. as it may seem I have really loved doing it. I have thirty some-odd words that I'm finding definitions for. I like finding new words and bigger/better words to express myself with; it's very interesting to find out what words, even commonly used word, are defined as. One of my favorite resources is the Oxford English Dictionary, it's so massive and very thourough. I've really enjoyed having this project and look forward to furthering my efforts.
Next goal, the reading of the Book Of Mormon in German, Italian, and ASL: I've kept this goal up...with the exception of being out of town(it would have been a lot to pack). It was rewarding yesterday when I could read a few verses in Italian by myself. Italian was the most recent language I've studied and that's probably why I can do so well, I'm not remembering as much ASL as I'd like but I am finding some things coming back to me and German...is the hardest, I haven't had any classes for about three years and I find I get my pronunciation a bit confused with Italian but I'm doing what I can.
As for the goal of reading... I'm still reading Vitruvius and Jung regularly but I haven't done so well on reading other things. I took a stab at Grimm's Fairy Tales but I haven't gotten very far there or much interest to go further. I do have a bunch of unread library books that I just renewed so I suppose I'd better get on top of reading some of those.
I almost forgot my goal to exercise, which shows how well that's been going. I have had some improvement in that aspect but there's lots of room for improvement there.

Dear Seattle...

I love you. This weekend my family went on a reunion in Washington state and we got to spend an hour or two in Seattle. I'd never been to Seattle before and I thought it was AWESOME! It was a Sunday, so all we did was drive and walk around and that was kind of a bummer because we hardly saw anything there, I can't wait to go back there some day and really see Seattle. Anyway we did see some cool stuff while we were there.These shots are from when we were driving into the city.

We also went to the waterfront, it was sooo beautiful there, I have been thinking that I might like to live in a port city some day. Unfortunately my camera died at the waterfront so I don't have pictures of all the cool stuff we saw. While we were at the water front though we got to see the famous Pikes Place market and the fish market which is also famous for those guys who throw the fish...they weren't actually throwing the fish at that point in the day but they were still there.
We also went to Auburn, Washington to see my uncle's memorial which had a stunning view of Mt. Raineer.
This is what it was like at the cabinwhere we were staying. Washington is so green and it's kinda weird, you can't hardly see for all the trees.

Bloomability

Bloomability by Sharon Creech is another on of my favorite young adult books. Frankly I still really like that age range because they're easy to read but can be fun stories. I reread Bloomability in one afternoon/evening. I love this book for how different it is from almost everything I've read, all those books, and it's got such a posative look at life and carpe deim, although that phrase is never mentioned in the book. The book's main character is Dinnie who's life has been very different from mine and I'd wager to say, very different from most people. Dinnie and her family have had a somewhat nomadic existance moving from one spot and "oppertunity" to another. Suddenly Dinnie finds herself with an aunt and uncle in Switzerland where they work at a boarding school. This book is about Dinnie's "oppertunity" and the people she meets there. I highly recommend it.

Two Books

I just reread two books that I really love. The two books were written by Richard Peck and I first read the first one when I was in middle school. A Long Way from Chicago is set in the early 30s and narrated by Joey. In the book Joey recounts the summer visits he and his sister Mary Alice made to see their Grandma. Each chapter of the book is the story of a year's week long visit. Grandma Dowdel lives in a small town in Illanois and Grandma herself is quite a charachter, each year there is some crazy adventure that happens on their trips.
The next books is a sequel to A Long Way From Chicago, called A Year Down Yonder, this book told from the perspective of Joey's little sister Mary Alice. A few years after the first book takes place and visits in the summer have stopped, Mary Alice is sent to live with Grandma Dowdel until her parents can get back on their feet. This book has more of Grandma's antics and adventures but also leads to a greater understanding of Grandma. This book also talks about Mary Alice's adjustment of being a city girl in a small hick town.
These books are very human and warm. It's interesting to take a peak at how life is, or might have been in a small town. I like historical fiction and how it allows a flavor of what life was formerly like, although obviously fictionalized. I recommend these books, they're young adult/children's books but they're still very enjoyable.

Goals

I've been a bit too slovenly of late and to combat that I'm kicking off a new week with some new...and old goals.
The most interesting of these goals (I feel) is to start making my own dictionary. To give background information on this goal, I've been thinking a lot about raising children, when I have them, and my desire to homeschool them. Today in a moment of being unable to focus, I was thinking about how a cool way for kids to be able to learn and have self motivated learning would be for them to make dictionaries, to define words and add to those definitions as they come to understand them better. As I was thinking this I also thought that I should start working on myself so that when the time comes, I can implement these grandiose ideas I have for education. I had a teacher who, when we discussed something, would tell the class to research certian words and find out just what they really meant. I confess that I generally didn't do this, at least not to the degree that I should. To make up for past sins and to further educate myself I'm going to start a dictionary, I'm going to get a book, one that should be lasting I'm thinking maybe a moleskine.With the book I'm going to find out what words really mean and have meant, I'll start with ones that I didn't look up for the class. I want to find my definitions from a variety of places like the Oxford English Dictionary or Bible Dictionary and lots of others.
The next goal is more simple and perhaps more practical, but no less daunting. When I was at school I did a lot of walking to get around and I called that my excircise, however I no longer do that and so I'm going to make an attempt to get more excircise. This is not going to be an Earth shattering regime by any means, I'm thinking more along the lines of walking to and around the park or merely riding the excircise bike when I'm watching tv, things like that. I might even try and drag my brothers into it.
The last goal for the moment is to give CPR to my language skills. I've taken German, American Sign Language and Italian; I'm quickly losing whatever I knew of these languages so this is yet another attempt to renew what I knew. I am going to try and have a three day rotation where I will read the Book of Mormon in each of the languages along side the English version (with the exception of just watching the ASL version because it's to hard to go back and forth between video and book). Anyway I hope to actually stick to this one without having a grade riding on it.