before & after

before




after
thanks mama d!

what i'm doing vs what i want to be doing

It has been ages since I've blogged. Months ago, a good friend of mine gave me a brass snail that she picked up at a garage sale, and suggested that I slow down just a tad. I placed the snail in a spot where I see it every morning when I wake up, but so far, it hasn't helped. Have been busy finishing my undergrad thesis so that I can actually graduate this Saturday (done!), working on a conference committee that I stupidly agreed to be on (over!), applying for a home repair grant (submitted!), and moonlighting at a greenhouse 'cause school has left me dead broke.

*sigh*

What I'd much rather be doing is lingering in bed on the weekends, putting on some groovy tunes and cleaning my house, drinking cider while working in the garden, and on rainy days like today (a holiday that I'm working, by the way) re-using some of the material from my awesome snake skin crushed velvet pants that really shouldn't be seen in public any more (if ever they should have been) to make myself a new bag.

tagged by the claw

1. Go to IMDB.com and look up 10 of your favourite movies.
2. Post five (5) official IMDB "Plot Keywords" for these 10 picks.
3. Have your friends guess the movie titles.
4. Then tag three people.

10 movies!!!??!? My ten favorite? This is so hard. Okay, here goes...

1. Piano / Breast Feeding / Restaurant / Female Nudity / Butcher
2. Dominatrix / Crime / Art / Trust / Biza
3. Buddhist / Famous Score / Male Female Relationship / Princess Diana / Fish Out Of Water
4. Myth / Mystery Villain / FBI Agent / Mind Game / Ship
5. Female Nudity / Surgeon / 1960s / Pig / Historic
6. Prostitute / Female Nudity / Frame Up / Pimp / Female Full Frontal Nudity
7. Plotless / Mixed Drinks / Drunk / Darkness / Countryside
8. Crying Baby / Spanish Civil War / Book / Horse / Maze

I came up with eight. And you're probably all asking, what kind of degenerate movies have I been watching? Let me just say, in my defence, few of these make any sense to me. So, now who do I tag? The 80s movie guru Mama D, the craft queen over at Jumilla Bugs and the absentee Bee.

And speaking of movies, you can catch the back of O's head in this trailer. So proud.

summer reading list

Last year, I didn’t get very far with my summer reading list. Not sure what happened. September came up too fast and then I was stuck reading textbooks again. Have decided not to try and finish last year’s list. This summer, I have a theme. Inspired by the movie version of Jane Eyre, which Karen was kind enough to loan me, I’m going to spend the summer reading gothic fiction. It has only been a couple of years since I read Jane Eyre, so I’m not going to start there. There is so much else to explore. So, here’s the list:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (and a book of short stories by Welty that Elliot got used on credit for me)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates (not strictly Gothic, I'm told, but in the Gothic style)
Grey Woman by Elizabeth Gaskill (ditto)

I’m mixing up the styles, I know, but I am sticking to all women writers. The music I listen to is almost exclusively by men, so I feel like I need to balance things out a bit.

Will probably end up adding to this list as I met an English prof at a party last Friday and she teaches a class on Gothic literature. She's going to send me her "must read" list, which is very cool. I really don't know anything about the genre.

Have been doing some non-ficiton reading as well:
Night by Elie Wiesel
Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon
Naturscape Manitoba

It has been such a pleasure to read for pleasure again!

anybody still checking in?

Whew! It’s been ages. Finally done school. And I mean *done* school. Well, for now, anyway. Spent half of March and most of April in front of the computer for hours every night writing my thesis. That’s in, mark has been submitted, and I’m good to graduate on 26 May. Hurray!

As soon as school was out of the way, my life was taken over by the Manitoba Libraries Conference. I sort of volunteered to be the registration coordinator, and while I was finishing school, I sorely neglected my duties. That runs 7-9 May. 3, 07

Then… what? Relax? Mais non! I’m back at the greenhouse for the spring planting season. Have had a couple of shifts there already. It’s so good. I’ve been planning my garden in my head, but actually doing very little to get it going. Being at the greenhouse is inspiring me.

Yesterday, my mom and sis helped me clean the old, dead growth out of my beds. It’s amazing how much stuff is already well up. The lungwort is in bloom. The oregano is mature enough to start eating. Same with the chives, but then they are always early. Marjoram, mint and thyme all are coming. My succulent garden pretty much looks like it does year round… short and sweet. The perennials in the front garden are a bit of a mess. The grasses are very overgrown and there is a ton of weeds. The rose bush is causing me a bit of worry. I think it might have a fungus, but (one of the perks of working at the greenhouse) I have plenty of experts that can tell me how to deal with it. The one upside of not doing this in the fall is that I have a ton of ladybugs in the garden now.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been up to. Haven’t done laundry. Haven’t cleaned the house. Haven’t blogged. I have been keeping up on my blog reading, however. At the height of my school craziness, it was nice to know that life out there just kept going on.