I Have A Time Machine And It Took Me To 2006

How on Earth did I forget about this song??? It brings back beautiful memories of my senior year of high school and one great trip to Santa Cruz.  Also what? Johnny Depp is in this video? Weird.

The Sadder But Wiser Boy For Me

Musicals. They get me. Deep. And when I get a craving for one it won't go away until it has been thoroughly satisfied.

For the past two or so months its been The Music Man. My love for Meredith Wilson's spectacular spectacular goes back to childhood. For a long road trip my grandma made a copy of the soundtrack on a tape for me so that I could listen to it on my Walkman (Whoa. Remember cassette tape days?) and that thing was played and replayed until the tape wore out. One year for summer school choir we did a staged version of "The Well's Fargo Wagon" and I reveled in mocking the hilarious voices of the actors. Oh man oh man. I love that this musical is about real people! The character's and actors aren't glossed up doll faces that sing in perfect harmony. Except for the school board barbershop quartet. Mmm!!! Their voices are like melty warm sugar.

So an interesting fact about The Music Man is that it is President Monson's favorite musical! That justifies my fascination right? I adore the fact that his sense of humor is so great. I don't need to go into detail about how great the musical is or why its ok that I love it, I just want to share my obsession. Some people drive down Main blasting their Top 40 hits radio with the windows down to get attention. I prefer Robert Preston telling the absolute truth about my dating life. I'd rather have the boy that's been around the block. One who isn't a pushover. It's the sadder, but wiser, boy for me. Really, "I hope and I pray that Hester will win just one more A" is probably my favorite literary reference in the whole thing, and that's saying something since the names Balzac and Shakespeare are thrown around like rice at a wedding through the whole thing.

Now stop reading and head out to Grecian Urn rehearsal! You're going to be late!

"SIT DOWN EULALIA!"

Happy Earth Day!

Emily rode over to my house two days ago and was telling me about the new bikes that she and her husband Ben recently got. They've made it part of their week to go on daily rides around town together. They invited me to join the other sunny day (its been nothing but rain ever since) so Em and I made a run down to the store since they got his on sale just the day before. Of course the two wheeled piece of wonder that I fell in love with was not one of the sale ones. Oh well. If it's good for the Earth and my body and eventually my gas costs its worth it right? This is the beauty that I picked out!

Yep. Even pink girls can have their wishes come true! What's funny is that I don't think I've ever owned a bike that wasn't pink! My first one was white, pink, and purple with streamers out of the handlebars. So great! Oh wait. I was terrified to ride it! Charly put training wheels on it and if he let go for even a second I was convinced that I would fall off. What a wuss I was. There was one after that I think, but I can't really remember all that clearly. What I do know is that I haven't had a bicycle of my own since at least middle school. I just hate riding up hills! They're awful and not fun at all! It's like, who wants a work out that bad? And this town is the flattest thing since pancakes so I'm set!

Ben, Em, and I went out for an hour and a half and I loved every minute of it! When I was in Boise last week I found a vintage picnic basket so I'll have to track down some bungee chords and strap the sucker onto the back for summer lunch fun!

Now that I'm a biking girl I had to check out bike related goods on Etsy! Here are a few of my favorite products! Shop away my Earth conscious friends!

Bird and Bike Art Print

Old Fashioned Bike Necklace

Handlebar Bag

Cycling Cap

Nice Bike! tags

Pinup Girl Shirt

Bike Chain Clock

Magazine Cover!

For Rhetorical Studies the four sections were split up into groups of about four people to be a publishing group producing a new magazine. I am the sponsoring editor for Gideon Publishing over crafts and hobbies, and health and beauty. Some of my other responsibilies were writing the cover article based on a paper we all contributed to and creating the magazine cover. I just finished the cover and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Its not going to actually be in print, just an online mag so I'll post a link once we have it ready to go! Tomorrow we present for the rest of our class. Wish us luck!

-Gideon Publishing

Backstage

For a few filler credits this semester I signed up for a stage makeup class and I think its the best thing I've ever done! So far I've learned how to do

• male and female corrective makeup
• middle age
• old age
• extreme old age with latex
• beards and moustaches
• wigs
• "grossies and gories" (wounds, burns, bruises, scars)

There is a 10 hour minimum requirement for working backstage during the campus plays so I've spent the past three weeks in the pit of the Snow Building. I had no idea how fun it would be! I've really perfected my old man face on a few of the guys in the production. Oh, we're doing Macbeth, did I mention that? I'd never seen or read the play before and now I really feel like I'm a part of it. Cast pictures are being taken tonight so I'll be heading back to the theater in just a few. Hopefully I'll get some good pictures of faces I've done. All I have so far is work from class. Isn't it interesting how we become so emotionally invested in our passions? I'm attending the show tomorrow night after I get the guys ready and it will be so exhiliarating to see my work on the stage! Closing night is Saturday and I don't want it to come!

Good news: Children of Eden starts in about 2 weeks...

I Heart Books

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Highlighted are the ones I want to read. I'm about three chapters into Wuthering Heights and my plan is to finish it over Christmas break, along with about 3 other books...

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible – X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X

Total: 6

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

Total: 2

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -

Total: 3

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden-
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -X

Total:3

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving-
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery- X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy-
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - X

Total: 4

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -

Total: 1

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - X

Total: 2

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - X
76 The Inferno – Dante -X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

Total: 2

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 Tuesdays With Morrie - Mitch Albom -X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton-

Total: 2

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -X

Total: 4

Total Total: 29

*Crystal Ball Revealed*

With graduation not as far off as I had always imagined (think April) I keep getting the question, "So what are you going to do with your life huh? huh?" The only answer I can seem to give is "You know; eat, breath, sleep, read fashion magazines and check Facebook". But times have changed sister! (or brother)

This is the plan:
Buy a few packages of Rit dye in black and charcoal and apply to entire wardrobe
Fly to Paris and habitate in a dusty attic
Get a job at a corner cafe
Survive on crusty baguettes and fine cheese
Take long walks in the park and adopt a charming small dog




In other news, my cupcake obsession has not been satiated yet and this tatalizing Cupcake tour of New York was brought to my attention by a new favorite blog Magpie & Cake. New York would make a satisfactory backup plan if I fail to survive the swim across the Atlantic to France.


I can't seem to focus completely on this post because I've been engulfed in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on my iPod for the past few days. Maybe I'll complete my thoughts later. Or maybe not.


Oh yeah, and in other entertainment news (since it is new release Tuesday and all) I added Gossip Girl season 2 to my collection and saw Julie & Julia. Fantastic movie! Perhaps that is what stimulated my desire to travel abroad...