Katie's 99 in 999 (currently 55 in 555!)

Ricky and I actually joined the church choir here within the first month of moving, but I didn't have anything exciting to take a picture of until this month.  Luckily, the Christmas season is full of "special musical performances," and I volunteered to play a clarinet accompaniment to the choir's rendition of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" (which is a great piece for a clarinet sound, for the record). My choir director was concerned because she couldn't find an accompaniment part for the piece that fit with the piano part we already had.  "Don't worry," I told her, "I finished two whole semesters of music theory and I can totally write a part for this.  How do you feel about a descant?" A note: playing the clarinet in high school/college: not that impressive playing the clarinet in grown-up world: SUPER IMPRESSIVE transcribing/composing basic pieces in college music classes: not that impressive transcribing/composing basic piec

This was one of my favorite goals so far.  I love crafting, but I hate tracking down all the supplies and setting everything up and other responsible organized things, so I never muster up the desire to actually do anything.  It's a shame, I know, especially since everyone and their dog has an Etsy shop nowadays and I feel like I should get a piece of the action. Anyway, my woes of laziness aside, I was presented with two awesome opportunities for creativity--a wedding and a baby.  (Not mine.)   Gift #1: Back in October, Alaina (one of my best friends and fellow English major) got married, and I knew she absolutely needed something literary for her home. On one of my thrifting excursions, I found a copy of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (a literary staple!) from the early 1940's, and it was crafting love at first sight.  (Luckily, Rebecca isn't one of my favorites, or else there's no way I could've taken it apart for the project.)  I bought four small canvases

This is the thrilling conclusion to this post , in which I explain how my very favorite husband bought me Cirque du Soleil tickets for my birthday and how excited I am to see the show. IT.  WAS.  SO.  GOOD.   (The show, not the blog post.) It was a sold-out house, making parking and traffic pretty crazy, but we left early enough for Miami that we had plenty of time before the show started to grab a bite at a super-shady Wendy's and talk about how much we hate Miami. Cirque du Soleil lived up to every expectation I had for it, which is saying something, because I've been building expectations for seven years now.  I laughed and screamed and took blurry pictures and smiled like an idiot the whole time.   One of the few redeeming qualities of big cities is that awesome things come to them--like Cirque du Soleil. We were literally five feet away from the stage, which actually turned out to be a disadvantage because a lot of the stunts were 30-50 feet in the air.  My neck hur

Long time, no see, blogosphere! I've been up to my eyeballs with schoolwork this past month, and I rewarded myself with a few days of breathing easy after my last final before tackling "the blogs" again.  I've got a few things to catch up on, so let's recap, shall we? Besides re-reading HP7 (which needs no review) for the movie premiere this past month, I picked a book off my shelf that I snagged at the Green Valley Book Fair a couple years back.  (If you are in the BV/Lexington area and haven't driven to Staunton for this too-amazing-for-words book fair, you're missing out.)  Thursday Next is a sequel to The Eyre Affair , a novel I read in my undergraduate genre studies course and absolutely loved.  The sequel, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good, but I'm not too heartbroken about it because the book only cost me $2 (see book fair note above).  I'm not sure how to begin as far as description goes.  It's not a futuristic settin