Dance Like You Don't Have A Nation!

Had to share this. Because these people were awesome.

Closing Time...

...every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

So. It's been awhile. Lots of big things have happened. Namely it's been a bit over three weeks since I lost my job. I'm actually relieved. I really hated spending two hours a day in the car commuting - despite listening to some awesome audiobooks - and I hadn't really been given any opportunities at the company to show them my worth. Add on that an announcement back in December that we were being acquired by an ENORMOUS company in California and basically I knew my days were numbered.

I was proud that I lasted to almost August I mean I've known since December that they were going to get rid of me but it took them a lot longer to realize that. I've been applying to everything in the area that has popped up since last year and was hoping I could leave them before they let me go, but that didn't quite pan out.

I'm not upset, I'm trying to look at this as a good thing. A reason to finally get my personal life back on track, finally get my physical life back on track, and actually enjoy life doing things I like to do. I'm eating better, I'm getting into an exercise routine that will have me ready to restart the c25k in September, and I've spent some quality time with my family. It's been good to decompress.

I'm hoping that by October I'll have found a new job at a company that actually finds me valuable and understands my creativity.

In the meantime I'll work on me and I'll work on my writing. I'm two chapters shy of finishing my first novel and I've got a few other stories in various different stages of completion. I've even got a young adult series planned out and hope to really pursue my dream of being published. I even have a great pen-name picked out and I just am ready to do this!

Paper Anniversary

A year ago today was pretty much the most epic day ever!

I heart my Silly.
Happy Anniversary sweetie!

Avid Reader, or Maybe Just Pretending...

Another one of those fun little memes from the Interwebs. A lot of these I've read parts of, but I won't bold them out until I've finished them...

1. The Bible (King James Version recommended)
2. Gilgamesh, Anonymous
3. Analects, by Confucius
4. The Iliad, by Homer
5. The Odyssey, by Homer
6. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
7. Aesop’s Fables
8. Oedipus, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles
9. The Orestia, by Aeschylus
10. The Republic, by Plato
11. The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle
12. Histories of Herodotus
13. Hortensius, by Cicero
14. The Aeneid, by Virgil
15. The Metamorphoses, by Ovid
16. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
17. The Confessions of St. Augustine
18. The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius
19. On Loving God, by Bernard of Clairvaux
20. The Mind’s Road to God, by Bonaventure
21. Didascalicon, by Hugh of St. Victor
22. The Summa Theologica (selections are okay), by Aquinas
23. Beowulf, Anonymous
24. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer
25. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by the Pearl Poet
26. The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
27. The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
28. The Fairie Queen, by Edmund Spencer
29. The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
30. Utopia, by Thomas More
31. Four Great Tragedies (Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, & Lear), by Shakespeare
32. Henriad Tetrology (Richard II, 1-2 Henry IV, & Henry V), by Shakespeare
33. Four Great Comedies (Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, & The Tempest), by Shakespeare
34. Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin
35. The Temple, by George Herbert
36. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
37. Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
38. Tartuffe, by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
39. Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, by Immanuel Kant
40. Pensees, by Blaise Pascal
41. Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
42. Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope
43. Candide, by Voltaire
44. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
45. The Federalist Papers, by various authors
46. The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution Independence Day is coming, cue up 1776 and Gettysburg!
47. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
48. Lyrical Ballads (2nd ed.), by Wordsworth and Coleridge
49. Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
50. A Practical View of Christianity, by William Wilberforce
51. Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
52. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
53. Grimm’s Fairy Tales
54. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
55. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
56. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
57. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
58. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
59. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
60. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
61. Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope
62. Narrative of the Life of Fred D., an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass
63. In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
64. The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
65. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, by Edgar Allan Poe
66. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
67. Unspoken Sermons, by George MacDonald
68. The Idea of a University, by John Henry Newman
69. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fydor Dostoyevsky
70. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
71. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
72. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
73. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy
74. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
75. Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche
76. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles
77. The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov
78. Rerum Novarum, by Pope Leo XIII
79. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
80. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
81. Howards End, by E.M. Forster
82. Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
83. Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
84. Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard
85. Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot
86. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
87. The Plague, by Albert Camus
88. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
89. Deus Caritas Est, by Pope John Paul II
90. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
91. Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller
92. The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
93. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis
94. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
95. 1984, by George Orwell
96. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
97. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
98. Silence, by Endo Shusaku
99. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
100. Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
101. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Waterson

Only read 7 completely? I feel like a horrible person...though now that I have this I'll have a nice long list of things to look for audio books of at the library.

Thank You

O beautiful for heroes proved 
In liberating strife. Who more than self their country lovedAnd mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness And every gain divine! 

O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea! 




Thank you to all of those who have served.
Happy Memorial Day.

Good Morning Angels!

I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not - probably not, since I've been a horrible blogger - but back in January my sister and I adopted Marines. We did it through an organization called Soldier's Angels and we did it for a lot of different reasons. Basically although most of my reasons are very personal, the long and short of it is I'm anti-war, but pro-troops. Some of these men and women are only 18 years old and they are risking their lives so that I can live mine in safety, and for that I will never be able to thank them enough.

So what is it like being an Angel? I write my Marine weekly letters, just talking about life and the ridiculous things that happen here and there. I try to tack on silly photos or comics - something to just get his mind away from whatever he's doing for a few minutes. I also send care packages once a month full of everything from toiletries to snacks. The whole thing takes me on average half an hour each week and I buy a lot of the care package bits at the dollar store - so despite the quantity of things I've sent it hasn't cost me much money. (Honestly, I wouldn't be able to do something like this if it cost me an arm and a leg, I'm a lady on a budget!)

Not only are there really awesome very involved team activities and large-scale campaigns, there are also other smaller campaigns, ones that take up even less of your time that what I've chosen to do. Our friend Libby is part of the letter writing campaign where she just writes letters and they are distributed to soldiers who do not typically receive mail. She's told me she always slips in a Calvin and Hobbs comic with her letters, it's the little bits of normality that make what these soldiers are doing tolerable. I cannot imagine being away from home for so long and not having much of any contact with those you love. Or worst yet, not having any loved ones at home to tell you how awesome you are and how appreciative they are of what you're doing.

From the few responses I've actually gotten back from my Marine, he is extremely grateful. He's so glad that he has people "back at home" who support him and are thinking of him, and I am happy that I can brighten his day.

So as we approach Memorial Day I put it to you Dear Readers, will you be someone's Angel?

Manjoyment Monday: Brother Dan

Today is my brother Dan's 30th Birthday!
In celebration of this auspicious occasion, Dan is today's Man.

"No International Incidents."

I have 3 words for you Dan:
Happy Natal Day!
Fuck yo couch!