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

I made laundry detergent today! (Dots not included.) Recipe from here . I've been wanting to do this for a while, since the ingredients are way cheaper than store-bought detergent and are more natural. If you want to get ingredients for this, don't get them online unless you want to pay a lot more. Fels-Naptha soap was just over a dollar at Publix, and the washing soda and borax were both around $4 (washing soda at Public, borax at Wal-Mart). I have a load in now, so results TBD...

As much as I love living on the East Coast, sometimes it's frustrating looking at satellite images and seeing the entire Eastern seaboard lit up like a Christmas tree. You can't see anything at nighttime! There are some dark spots in Florida, if you're willing to camp out in the middle of the Everglades...but that takes a level of commitment beyond what my fear of being eaten by a python allows me to have. Idaho, on the other hand, is GREAT for stargazing, despite otherwise being largely bland and unappealing. (No offense, Idahoans.) Actually, now that I think about it, those are probably the necessary qualities that make a place good for stargazing. Last night, Ricky drove us up to the top of Mount Harrison around midnight for some sweet spacetime adventures.  It's about 9,200 feet high, which is basically nothing if you're from out west and practically Mount Everest if you're from a place known for being below sea level. It was crazy dark! I ha...

Having a graduate degree in English is a weird thing for the following reasons:      1) There is absolutely no way to tell someone you have one without sounding super full of yourself.      2) When people DO find out you have one, almost always their next response is either "So...are you going to teach?"* or "Wow, I guess I'll have to watch how I talk around you!" (The response to both is "That's really not what I got this degree for, but it's cute you think that.") So, pretention and way too much caffeine aside, I got my M.A.! The ceremony was very different from what I'm used to (read: SVU graduation), but it wasn't bad sitting through the hours of undergraduate names once I realized that the hundreds of people in the stadium were all taking pictures and generally not paying attention. We had to wait outside in the hot before we could go into the stadium. Out in the hot with those itchy white hoods that catch all the mak...

Well, I did it. I got through my very first 99 in 999 list! I wanted to get all of them done, obviously, but think 70/99 isn't too bad for a first go, right? I'm going to go with "yes," because I did so many things I wouldn't have done otherwise, and I feel super accomplished about it. Let's recap the last few I did, and then I'll tell you what my favorite items on the list were. #29 - write in a journal weekly for six months I didn't do this on the blog so much, and I thought I was sucking really bad at this goal--but then I remembered that I've been writing down three awesome things that happen each day, and that totally counts as journaling! Way to go, self! Too bad you didn't think of that months and months and months ago when you were oversharing on the internet. #35 - send a care package to someone I thought this was going to be one the simplest ones to do, but it wound up being pretty tricky! Due to a lot of safety and health res...

YOU GUYS. There are only 45 days left until my 99 list expires! I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by...there's still so much left to do that I'm going to have to roll over to my next list. Since I've been so bad at cataloging events as a I check them off (I'll be better at that next time, I swear!), I decided I'd better do an overview of everything I haven't already blogged about. And yes, I could do that when my list is over, but that's near the end of the semester when I have about a billion papers to grade, so...we're going to do this a bit early. #8 - read the New Testament cover-to-cover (August 2012) This was something I had already done in high school, but I felt it was important to read it again. I have my own opinions on the way many people interpret the Bible, but I think the best part--hands down--is the Gospels. Even if you have a different interpretation of who Christ is, those parables about the widow's mite and the...

(prompt from here ) Write about something you now know that you wish you knew earlier in life. How could this knowledge have helped you? If I could go back and have a conversation with College Me (all of six to three years ago), I think I would tell her to stop being such a self-righteous idiot. High School Me was a social moron (weren't we all?) and often quite mean, but the self-righteousness didn't start sticking its nose in the air until I went to a religious college. Don't get me wrong--my college was pretty awesome--but what happened for me when I was immersed in a religious environment was that I forgot how to not be a jerk about what other people believe and think. I thought that if someone self-identified as Mormon, like me, that I was then at liberty to tut-tut over skirt lengths and choice of movies and church attendance and marriage partners and wow, College Me, you were seriously embarrassing. College Me's preoccupation with other people's business ...

Even though my marching band days are far behind me, there's something about a drum corps show that is just so fun.   Ricky had no idea that drum corps even existed before we started dating, so I made it a goal to eventually drag him to an event, and--lucky for me!--DCI Orlando had some nice corps this summer. (For those of you familiar with the DCI scene, Carolina Crown took first--their show was awesome!  It was unpolished, but they had this crazy intensity.  The Cadets were cleaner, and I actually had them pegged to win it, but they took second.  The Cavies' show was surprisingly boring.) We weren't even sure if the corps was going to march, because there had been a threat of pretty bad rain, but the weather held out!  (Which was good, because we drove three hours to see it.)  Ricky agreed that seeing drum corps live was way better than watching YouTube videos.  I only wish DCI Orlando was later in the season so we could see more...