September 4

One of the challenges Shimelle helps us get over in this project is the hesitation to believe that you can learn something new every day. Because it is true, we do learn something every day. It's just whether that something is worth scrapbooking, or even worth noticing. I think the latter may be my problem - I don't notice all the things I'm learning.

Saturday evening found us watching college football at home. I was struggling with my learning for the day, because I couldn't pinpoint one thing I had learned. We were watching the Auburn/Arkansas St. game, and they showed a picture of Toomer's Corner. Now, if you're not an Auburn fan, you may not know the importance of this intersection. It's right outside the Auburn campus, and after every home game that is won, fans flock to Toomer's Corner and TP it. There's even a live webcam where you can watch the action.

Auburn football runs in my blood. Even though I've never lived in Alabama, my grandfather was a professor at Auburn and the pastor of Auburn First UMC for a number of years. My father attended Auburn for his associate's degree. And Auburn is the town where I knew my grandparents. It always felt like "home" - especially to a preacher's kid who moved a lot and never really had one home.

I remember visiting during the fall, when college football was alive and kicking. My grandfather often worked at the games, and if we were in town my dad would go with him. That left me, my mom, my sister, and my grandmother at home, where Grama would cook while she listened to the game on the radio. Boy, she got into her Auburn football games!

I have a vague memory of going to Toomer's Corner one night after a game. I'm pretty sure it happened, because it certainly is something every Auburn fan should experience at least once. I must have been very small, likely riding on my father's shoulders, as the fans went crazy in celebration. Seeing Toomer's Corner on TV brought back all those memories of Auburn games, and Auburn itself - my grandparents' home, my cousins playing in the back yard, the sense of family that I was surrounded by as I grew up. To me, Auburn will always feel like home.

Today I learned that even though I never lived there, Auburn, AL will always feel like my home.

September 3, or Why You Don't See Any Scrapbook Pages

Friday morning I was feeling great. Two nights of sleep, and I was still manageably up-to-date with my homework (mainly due to the reading I was able to get done between the hours of 2 and 5am several nights before). I decided that I would finally print out some of my pictures and get them and my learnings on those beautiful pages I'd started the previous weekend and feel up-to-date with my LSNED book, too.

Here's what I found:

Today I learned: check your ink levels in your printer BEFORE beginning a month-long scrapbooking project.

I printed out two pictures, and they looked horrible. My husband had noticed a couple of weeks before that we were running low on black ink, so he ordered a new cartridge for that. (We live in a very small town with only a Wal-Mart for shopping. They don't carry our cartridges.) He didn't think to check the color cartridges because he rarely uses them. So, now, three days into LSNED, I am unable to print pictures. That kind of messes with my hope that this year would be "easier" because I can print pictures at home!

The new cartridges have been ordered - and I actually got a pretty good deal on them - and will be here sometime next week. So, maybe next Friday I'll still be caught up with my homework and can take the morning to put together 9 pages. :) They are all scrapbooked.

September 2: A Cooking Lesson

Thursday morning found me feeling much better. I slept through the night Wednesday night, which was a truly beautiful thing. Tuesdays and Thursdays are long days for me, because I have class pretty much from 8:00-4:45, and then rehearsal starting at 6:30. However, feeling better and having a reprieve from rehearsal prompted me to cook dinner. Or attempt to cook dinner.

I joke a lot that I cannot cook a meal without screwing something up. This is probably untrue - I'm sure that at some point in time I have made a meal that was edible without noticeably messing something up. But I certainly can't remember it. I have done things that others told me it was impossible to do. I had a friend once tell me that cooking rice was the easiest thing in the world, and that we did not need to spend the extra money buying the rice-in-a-bag rice. So, following her directions, I bought the much cheaper boxed rice, and proceeded to not only burn the rice, but melt the un-meltable, microwave safe bowl in which I was cooking the rice. Yeah.

When I cook, and successively mess something up, it's usually not that bad. Usually I mis-measure something, or leave something out by accident. And I guess Thursday night wasn't that bad, in relative terms. I mean, I didn't render any of our cookware useless. But we did not eat the dinner I cooked. I made rice (the rice-in-a-bag kind, thank you very much) and lemon chicken. After the chicken had been in the oven for over an hour, it still wasn't up to the proper temperature. Not even close. And when the asparagus I had cooked came out limp and disgusting (again - I'd tried it several weeks before and screwed it up then, too), we opted to order out for pizza.

So, my learning for Thursday night?

Today I learned that even when I follow the directions, I can still manage to screw up dinner, resulting in Pizza Night.

I took three pictures for today's learning: the chicken (still cooking), the rice waiting for chicken and the asparagus disgustingly lumped on the plate (I was that close to having a meal ready), and our eventual dinner - veggie pizza.

I wonder how many other days' learning this month will revolve around cooking?

September 1

Well, my learning for the third day of the month will clue you in to why I haven't posted any pages. But we'll get there. For now, I'm just posting pictures and learning. The pages will have to come later.

My learning for day one was:

Today I learned that getting on stage, even for just a rehearsal, is what makes everything else go away for me.

As for the picture, I just have a photo of my script at this point, but I may get a friend to snap a picture of me at rehearsal some night.

I got sick this week. I don't really know why. I still don't know if it was allergies or a cold or what, but I felt horrible! I didn't sleep for three or four nights - I'd go to bed around 11:00, lay awake until 1ish, finally go to sleep, only to wake up around 3 or 3:30, unable to go back to sleep. On the plus side, I got a lot of homework done in those wee hours of the morning.
 Along with getting sick, we started rehearsals for the fall Shakespeare production. This year we're doing a compilation show with scenes from 10 different plays - which means everyone's playing multiple characters. I'm playing Lady Macbeth (from Macbeth), Desdemona (from Othello), and Kate (from the Taming of the Shrew). I'm most excited about Kate.

I was really not looking forward to how busy I was going to be, and to having to be all active and stuff during rehearsal, with me being sick and all. But Wednesday night, when we blocked my scenes, I found that I had this sudden energy and excitement that came from nowhere. I felt better.

I've had this experience before - during The Importance of Being Earnest, I think I was having an allergic reaction one night because I had this horrible stomach ache, and I almost called in sick to rehearsal. But it was close to performance and I didn't want to disappoint, so I went anyway, and somewhere in the middle of rehearsal, my stomach stopped hurting and I found I was actually enjoying myself, despite feeling bad.

In the musical Next to Normal, the daughter, Natalie, sings a song called "Everything Else." She's playing the piano, a Mozart piece, and singing about how when she plays the piano, everything else goes away.



Now, everything about Next to Normal resonates with me in some way or another, but this song has taken on particular meaning in light of my learning Wednesday. It was exciting to me to realize that acting is truly what makes everything else go away. And I am lucky to get to do it.

I'm Ready, Are You?

I decided to go ahead and make some "blank" pages for my LSNED scrapbook. There was a football game on, and that's usually a good time for me to spread out my supplies on the coffee table, because we're surely not going anywhere for at least 3 hours!

I ended up making 10 pages (over two games-I'm not that fast). I'm doing front and back because of my limited supply of original paper. I guess I could have added in some cardstock and done a front for every day and not a back, but since I started with sketch paper, I knew it would look different, if only to me.

So, here are my ten pages! I haven't put the date on any of them, and haven't even put the "title" (Today I learned...) on some because I'm not sure where I want it to go yet. But, I figure this is a very good start!

I'm planning to do my journaling (what I learned) on the yellow strips on each page. I decided to do a mix of 3x5 and 4x6 photos, and then there's one page with 3 3x3 photos. So, we'll see how this works out. I'm a little concerned because when I choose a page for one day, the reverse side has to be the next day. Hopefully that will work out, though. I guess we will see tomorrow!

I've got my camera ready. Here we go!

School Days

School began this week! It's my last semester of coursework, and I am really excited about the classes I'm taking this year. As far as education courses, I'm taking a methods course and a technology course. Then for English I'm doing one on novels of the 1900s, ancient literature and mythology, grammar, and a research course. The research course is going to be very beneficial, as I'll basically be researching my senior thesis, which I'll write next semester. More about that later, though.

Weekend one and I already have a ton of reading. So's the life of an English major, I guess. The first novel we're reading for the novels course is Dubliners, by James Joyce. It's a collection of fifteen short stories that all relate to one another. So far I've read the first seven. Some of them are really interesting. My favorite so far is The Boarding House. It's about a woman who runs a boarding house with her son and daughter. Her daughter strikes up a relationship with one of the boarders, and when the mother finds out, she confronts the man intending to force him to marry her daughter. It weaves their perspectives together, and tells the story without telling the story. One of Joyce's techniques was to present the story without narration or interpretation, and to let the reader interpret it him or herself. Pretty interesting, but it makes you work for the story. It's certainly not easy reading!

In other book news, I finally got my hands on a copy of Mockingjay, the third book in The Hunger Games trilogy. The local public library got their copy in and, since I requested it, I was first on the list to get it. It was so new the glue on the library cover wasn't dry yet! I haven't cracked it open, since I made a promise to myself I would read for school before reading for fun. But I'm hoping I can knock out my school reading tomorrow and have all day Sunday to indulge in Mockingjay. I can't wait to find out what happens!

The Alternative Bucket List

I follow a blog called Unclutterer. It's a really interesting blog that explores ways to unclutter your live, both physically and emotionally. The blogger, Erin, offers suggestions on how to reduce your amount of personal possessions, how to organize everything, products to aid (and impede) organization and uncluttering, and various other things. Her posts are always good for either a laugh (her Wednesday Uni-Taskers area always enjoyable!) or an idea to implement in my own life as I seek to be less cluttered. (She has yet to tackle scrapbooking, as far as I know. I'm afraid. I'm very afraid.)

Today, scrolling through my blog reader, I was brought to a recent post about an alternative bucket list. Instead of trying to summarize Erin's post, just go read it and then come back. I'll wait.

Since I recently breathed new life into my bucket list, this post caught my attention. However, when I went to the site linked to in the Unclutterer blog and read some of the comments, I couldn't help but thinking that this had really turned more into a forum for complaining. I can appreciate Erin's list of things not to do again - fighting for a parking space is not worth anyone's time. But it seems like the negativity that radiated from the comments on the original post only made me feel kind of depressed, instead of uplifted.

I don't think that was the intent. It can definitely be empowering to say "I'm not doing that again!" or "I won't stand for this anymore!" and some of the lists included items such as that. "I will not give up" was one that encouraged me, and "tolerate all the not-subtle racism around the mosque in downtown NYC" was an appropriate item for something people should not put up with. But I was surprised at the number of comments that included something about the disgusting nature of public restrooms. Really? Yeah, they're gross. We all know that. You know what you're getting into when you go into one. You're going to put that on your list of things the world should not tolerate?

Having said all of that, now, I'm not sure what I would put on my Alternative Bucket List, as I will call it - hey, I guess that can be item number one - I will not use curse words on my blog. Well, there's one thing. I should probably put something like I will not stress about the future I can't control, but hey, we're trying to be realistic here. Though, since I'm in the middle of a weight loss adventure (sounds so much better put that way than "diet"), I'll throw in this: I will not weigh over 200 pounds. I think that's a good start.