Movies and Elly

Elly-the-dog is five months old today. She is gi-normous.

We watch a lot of movies and lately, it's been almost as entertaining to watch Elly during the movie as it is to watch the movie. Most of the time, she lays next to the couch, peeking around the edge at the TV every once in awhile. Some strange sound from the movie will catch her attention and she'll look up at the TV with her head cocked to the side, a slightly puzzled look on her face. It makes me laugh every time.

We watched Cloverfield over the weekend. In Cloverfield, there is much yelling, screaming and crying. Elly seemed to be paying a little more attention to the movie than usual, but I didn't think much of it.

Near the end of the movie, I noticed that Elly was on her belly, creeping closer and closer to the TV, eyes glued to the screen, until she was right under it. She lay there for a minute, staring up at the movie, then jumped up on her hind legs and started licking the screen.

I called her over and the poor dog was shivering. Goldens can be very sensitive to emotions, and my best guess is that all the screaming and crying were getting to her. I felt a little bad...

So, way to go, cast of Cloverfield. Your performance was so good that you scared my puppy.

I kinda rock

So. I'm taking an online geography class this semester. I started off pretty great in it, worked hard for the first couple weeks...

Then came Elly. And, I'll be the first to admit, I slacked off. It wasn't all intentional, life jumped into high gear and the down time I had seemed more pleasurable spent doing things like sleeping rather than doing homework.

In said geography class, we are required to do a country study. This country study was to be 10 pages long, have at least 3 sources, only three of which could come from the internet, and there also, in addition to the 10 pages, had to be at least 2 hand-drawn maps. I chose my country (Germany) a couple months ago and intended to get to work on it at some point...

I was pretty sure this paper was due on April 26th. So on Sunday (which would be April 20th), I decided I'd better get myself in gear and get busy. About 3:30 in the afternoon, I told Chris I was going to spend about an hour or two working on the paper and I jumped on the computer...

...And discovered the paper wasn't due on April 26th.

It was due April 21st.

I had a minor meltdown at that point and considered just blowing the paper off. (After all, it's only worth 30% of my grade...) But I pulled myself together and got started about 4:00 in the afternoon...

I emailed my 10 page paper, complete with THREE hand-drawn maps, to my instructor last night at 8:45pm.

During the not quite 29 hours I had to put this paper together, I also managed to take my dog for a walk, watch a movie, sleep for about 6 hours, and work a 9 hour day.

I'm just a little impressed with myself right now.

Trouble the Water - Nicole Seitz

This week, the
Christian Fiction Blog Alliance
is introducing
Trouble the Water
Thomas Nelson (March 11, 2008)
by
Nicole Seitz

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Nicole Seitz is a South Carolina Lowcountry native and the author of The Spirit of Sweetgrass as well as a freelance writer/illustrator who has published in numerous low country magazines. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism, she also has a bachelor's degree in illustration from Savannah College of Art & Design. Nicole shows her paintings in the Charleston, South Carolina area, where she owns a web design firm and lives with her husband and two small children. Nicole is also an avid blogger, you can leave her a comment on her blog.

Seitz's writing style recalls that of Southern authors like Kaye Gibbons, Anne Rivers Siddons, and Sue Monk Kidd, and this new novel, which the publisher compares to Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, surely joins the ranks of strong fiction that highlights the complicated relationships between women. Highly recommended, especially for Southern libraries.



ABOUT THE BOOK:

In the South Carolina Sea Islands lush setting, Nicole Seitz's second novel Trouble the Water is a poignant novel about two middle-aged sisters' journey to self-discovery.

One is seeking to recreate her life yet again and learns to truly live from a group of Gullah nannies she meets on the island. The other thinks she's got it all together until her sister's imminent death from cancer causes her to re-examine her own life and seek the healing and rebirth her troubled sister managed to find on St. Anne's Island.

Strong female protagonists are forced to deal with suicide, wife abuse, cancer, and grief in a realistic way that will ring true for anyone who has ever suffered great loss.

"This is another thing I know for a fact: a woman can't be an island, not really. No, it's the touching we do in other people's lives that matters when all is said and done. The silly things we do for ourselves--shiny new cars and jobs and money--they don't mean a hill of beans. Honor taught me that. My soul sisters on this island taught me that. And this is the story of true sisterhood. It's the story of Honor, come and gone, and how one flawed woman worked miracles in this mixed-up world."

"...a special sisterhood of island women whose wisdom and courage linger in the mind long after the book is closed."
-NEW YORK TIMES best-selling author SUSAN WIGGS

HOORAY!!!!!

WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON WE WON!!!! (Boy, when you type the same thing like that over and over, it starts looking really weird.)


We live a couple miles outside of Lawrence (hometown of KU), and our little hamlet of a town went insane after the game... horns honking, people whistling and cheering, whooping and hollering, fireworks all over the place... it was a madhouse around here for about an hour. And, I have to admit, we were out there screaming and hollering and cheering and whistling with the rest of them. Elly-the-dog even put in a happy bark, and she's not much of a barker...


I'm a little curious to see how many people show up for work today, since I work in Lawrence and many co-workers are not only die-hard KU fans, but die-hard drinkers... Somehow, I have a feeling not everyone will show up.


KU won the championship!!!!

Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk KU!!!!

'kay, I think I've used up my allotment of exclamation points for the day.

My dog is a dork.

Elly-the-dog recently got it into her head that when she sees the camera, she needs to try to eat it. Believe me, trying to take a picture of a dog who is trying to eat your camera is not an easy task.

Last night, she was being really goofy, but not trying to eat the camera, so I took a picture of her...

...and because my dog is a dork, she closed her eyes right as I took the picture.

You've just got to love her...

It just keeps going and going and going...

Life has been... busy? slightly crazy? hurtling along at insane speeds? Right now, I think I'm so far behind with just about everything that I'll never catch up.

I had to give a speech last night in my public speaking class. I sincerely tried to work on it ahead of time, really I did. I picked a topic (ice cream) found a couple books, printed out some info I found online... Monday night, I attempted to work on the speech, but Elly-the-dog wasn't having any of it. (She's always a little nuts on Mondays... I think being left home by herself all day after having us home for over the weekend makes her a little crazy.) So I researched and wrote my speech yesterday afternoon in about 30 minutes. It was completely awful, I guess, but I was grateful that most of my classmates were either not terribly prepared or were very nervous, because it made me feel a whole lot better about my own speech....

And the geography class I'm taking online? Unfortunately, it's a work at your own pace class (he doesn't care when you do the lessons as long as they're done by the end of the semester)... and... I'm on lesson 3. We have a big project due the end of this month that I haven't started working on at all yet. As much as I want this semester to be over, I'm dreading it because I don't know if I can get caught up.

I'm feeling distinctly uncreative right now. So, rather than making you suffer through any more drivel, I'll just be quiet.

Oh, except to say, KU won again over the weekend! Go Jayhawks!