April 8th, 2012

Happy Easter!

The Easter bunny is coming by this afternoon after my husband gets home from work, so we’re passing time bowling for bunnies.

April 5th, 2012

Giving up. Giving in. Simple.

It’s no secret that 2012 has sucked balls. I can’t quite get over the hump and everything just keeps getting more overwhelming and more frustrating and I just can’t keep things under control.

It seems like this would be emotionally driven, and I’m sure it partially is, but mostly it’s my house/home/life keeping where I feel like I am failing in every single area. As much as I like them, and I plan to keep them going, I don’t think lists of 12 things a month are going to fix things.

So rather than giving up completely just drifting forever, I’m turning my life over to Real Simple magazine. No. They have nothing to do with this. It isn’t sponsored, endorsed or even encouraged.

What happened was this: I impulsively bought a Real Simple at the store the other day. I used to subscribe but had let my subscription lapse when I didn’t renew any magazines after I had spencer and I figured I had some extra time to read what with my Internet being down and all. I was reading it and had a bit of an epiphany.

I’m probably pretty close to their target demographic – upper middle class/middle class mom in her 30s. But why does my life look nothing like I imagine the Real Simple lady’s life to be. Mine is In shambles, hers is put together and fabulous.

I’m going to give my life a makeover Real Simple style. Every month I’m going to try all of the recipes, learn important life lessons and do all the things! I’ve already purchased.a new hair brush and purple (!!!) eye shadow.

But on the subject of buying things, Real Simple is pretty consumer driven and I’m trying to cut back on stuff, but if the mention a trend and it is something I need anyway, like a hairbrush, then I’ll consult their wise guidance.

I’ll be starting with the April 2012 issue and I’m excited. It has a lot of things about small changes to save money, being organized and, of course, purple eye shadow.

I wrote this on my phone. Apologies for any wonkiness.

April 5th, 2012

12 in 2012 – April

Let’s see how I did on March’s list:

1. Organize the playroom and make it more functional for storage and play. – DONE
2. Finish the Marco Pierre White biography so it isn’t sitting in my kindle app 2/3s read for another two months. (I like it, but I don’t looove it. I don’t normally finish books I don’t like) – DONE
3. Clean the pile of mystery in the corner of my bedroom. – DONE and my hamper lives there now so it can’t really happen again
4. Find and start using a free calorie/weight loss/fitness app. – TRIED I’m on my third. Still not finding one I like.
5. Find a decent shade of daytime lipstick, preferably red. – DONE for now
6. Get taxes done. – DONE, now just waiting for our monies.
7. Get refi paperwork done. DONE – And approved, baby!
8. Organize the cupboard with Spencer’s cups/plates and the good storage containers. – DONE
9. Change over our bed to the sheets/comforter I bought 6 months ago and just haven’t washed. – DONE
10. Get the crib out of Spencer’s room and into the trailer/garage attic/storage. ALMOST It is out of his room, but not yet permanently stored.
11. Delete/sort the photos on my desktop. (Screen grabs/downloads/the misc ones) PHASE ONE COMPELTE If I am being perfectly honest, the stuff is off my desktop, but now lurking all mixed up in various folders. Maybe 100 things were deleted, so that’s good.
12. Clean the refrigerator shelves. NOT DONE – I cleaned the door and the door organizer things, but didn’t take everything out and clean the shelves.

Let’s see what I did when I wasn’t doing the things on my list.

Books read:

• The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef (ok if you like restaurant tales and biographies, 2nd half much better than the first)
• And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder
  (amazingly good. The tragic tale of Nancy (of Sid & Nancy) as told by her mother)
• Fifty Shades of Grey/Fifty Shades Darker (meh. Humor can be found if you remember it had it’s start as twilight fanfic and the smut factor is a little tame.)
• Slow Cooker Revolution
  (not read as much as flipped through)
• Born Wicked: The Cahill Witch Chronicles, Book One (read this for BlogHer Book Club, review up this week)

Discs Watched:

• Drive (AWFUL)
• Moneyball (good but slow)
• Breaking Dawn Part I (hilarious)
• North by Northwest (I don’t remember this being this slow)
• Young Adult (great)
• Martha Marcy May Marlene (odd)
• In the Shadow of the Moon (boring)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (great)
• (started) The Killing Season One (too soon to tell)

Goals for April

1. Call dentist I’ve had a broken back molar for awhile. It doesn’t hurt, so I’ve been avoiding the dentit, but I’m thinking I can’t put it off any longer.
2. Clean Oven This one? Dumb move. I accidently set my oven to self-cleaning and then quickly turned it off. However, my oven door stayed locked so I figured I might as well add this to the list because I would have to run the cleaning cycle to get the door unstuck. Which I did today and it seems the oven blew it’s thermostat fuse or something and the oven part of my stove no longer works. This is why I don’t clean things….
3. Clean out middle dresser drawer I have tank tops shoved in a corner of it and no clue what is in the rest of the drawer
4. Paint numbers on Spencer’s bins This was part of the big reorganization last month, but I never finsihed the last part. I need to get everything painted so I
5. Exercise 12 times My goal is 3 times a week, but I thought writing it this way would keep me from quitting if I missed a week or something. Already done 2 days and it is only the 2nd. Woot.
6. Clean out front yard section for sunflower patch. I had a huge plot of sunflowers the summer I had Spencer. It was so beautiful, but I let the spot get overgrown. I bought some seeds. Time to take back my yard.
7. Reorganize cabinet under phone in kitchen. This one is a disaster. It started as baking stuff and seldom used cookware and morphed in to beverage storage and all sorts of things that make no sense and fall out when I open the door.
8. Clean out nightstand books. I think I need a little come-to-jesus meeting with my book situation and I need to just get rid of the ones I am never actually going to read.
9. Deal with odd socks. Hopefully, after my book overflow is dealt with, I can use my bottom nightstand drawer to hold odd socks until I think of a better solution. I am attempting to wash everything in my hamper ever time, but somehow I still have odd socks. It is so frustrating.
10. Get new lampshade for bedside light. Yay! A fun one.
11. Mail back/return all outstanding items. I have a few things that have been sitting waiting to go back to Zappos. Since early February.
12. Cook something from 3 cookbooks I already own. I need to either use my cookbooks or put them away. The internet has rendered my cookbook collection fairly obsolete, but I still love them, however, they sit idle, collecting dust.

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April 5th, 2012

BlogHer Book Club: Born Wicked

I must say Born Wicked, by Jessica Spotswood,  is one case where I judged the book by it’s cover and got it all wrong. Or maybe I’ve been reading too much supernatural fiction set in the modern day to realized that this book was set in the past from the cover. I had a bit of trouble pinpointing when the book was taking place. By page 30, I had settled in to deciding it took place in Anne of Green Gables time* and a few pages later the author cleared up the matter by explicitly stating that the book took place in Rhode Island in 1900.

Overall, I really liked Born Wicked. It is chock full of things I like – witches, intrigue, scandal, redheads, creepy religious overlords, gardeners. Really, it has it all. The author did a good job pacing the book. The plot builds right from the beginning without tons of exposition, which is nice. I like books where you jump right in. I did get confused here and there (see location/era issues above), but it wasn’t anything that detracted from the book.

The biggest bummer is that it because it is the start of the Cahill Witch Chronicles series, the book doesn’t have a satisfactory ending so much as a cliffhanger. A successful one, too. I not only was surprised, but I really want to read the next book to see what happens.

Rather than recount the plot and inadvertently giveaway any spoilers, I thought I would try and give an idea of the tone.  It reads more like a modern novel than historical fiction. For the most part, people speak in modern day words (this is a big issue for me with a lot of fiction set in the past), the women are spunky but work within the system enough that I don’t feel like the characters are anachronistically feminist. The witchery is mellow – simple one word spells rather than long poemy things. (Long pages of spells drive me insane).

I really liked it and would recommend it to readers of supernatural fiction, young adult fiction and historical fiction alike.

This post was sponsored through my participation in BlogHer Book Club. I was compensated for my time reading the book and writing this post, but my opinions are purely my own.

*Turns out I wasn’t too far off, Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908.