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 smal...

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 30-5...

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...

Confession: I did not actually finish this book in the month of October. I know that makes me a terrible person.  I realized on Halloween that I hadn't finished it (which is pretty sad, because it's incredibly short), and it just so happened that we had church, choir practice, a dinner invitation, and another get-together (I think that's the married people term for "hanging out") that day, leaving me no time to finish the book.  So, I finished it on November 1st, and hopefully all you monitors of my progress will forgive me and let this one slide.  October was, after all, the month of midterms and the like, and since we're currently in the month of giving thanks, you should be thankful that I am so honest about these things.  You're welcome. To add insult to failure (?), this was a book I've already read multiple times.  It's one of my favorites.  For those who aren't familiar with it--which is nearly everyone, even people schooled in the H...

This goal seems pretty trivial, but I LOVE puzzles.  They're so therapeutic, which is why I should do them more often...and yet I never do, which is why I put it on my list. A few Christmases ago, I received "The World's Smallest 1000-Piece Puzzle" from my good friend Sara George-Kreider, and I'm ashamed to admit it took me almost two years to actually put it together.  Eventually, though, I did, and it was awesome!  It wasn't one of those stupid puzzles where the water and the sky look exactly the same and you put one in the wrong place and it throws the entire puzzle off.  Instead, there was a subtle but clear differentiation between what was water and what was not. It's the little things.

On the last Saturday in September (procrastination, as usual), Ricky and I made the 3 1/2 hour drive to the Orlando, FL temple for what threatened to be a supremely awesome day.  (For those of you unfamiliar with the purpose of LDS temples, there's a website !) It was hard leaving our dear Washington, D.C. temple behind--after all, we did get married there--but we were excited for the chance to make Orlando our "home base" for the next few years.     Not as impressive as the D.C. "towering over the Beltway" look, but still impressive! Isn't this place gorgeous?  You can't see the fountains in this picture, but the temptation to jump in them was pretty strong.  It was SO HOT. No Jensen outing is complete without an awkward, "look, we match" picture.   95% of the time this is a total accident. The temple was, as usual, amazing.  You know that feeling you get when you're on vacation and you realize that you have nowhere to rush to and n...