Christmas Arrived!!!

When I got back this afternoon from helping Aunt Barbara with some more online shopping for her kids and grandkids, there was a HUGE box by my front door!!! WHOOOT! So I hauled it inside, cranked up some Christmas music, and dove in! I figured that after seeing the picture of wrapped gifts Laura sent earlier it would be safe to open the shipping box. Well, the first thing I saw peeking through the packing peanuts was bits of bow, and an unwrapped set of measuring spoons! My first thought was "Oh crap! I wasn't supposed to open this yet!" But then the bits of bows registered, and I then saw that the spoons were adorably attached to a gift that said "Merry Christmas! Open this gift upon arrival. Save the rest for Christmas Day :) " Phew, what a relief! So then I noticed a Crickit cut ornament with writing on it... it was a precious note from my oldest Niece. Next I found one from my second oldest niece! (Oddly enough, both these native Arizonians mentioned it being FREEZING up here!) By this time, I am all misty! I find several other adorable cut-outs, with notes from everyone in my oldest sister's family except for their 3 youngest children, who are just too young so far :) I am thinking that I need to make a poster or something to put all the cuteness on! So then I started digging out all the rest of the gifts from the cascades of peanuts (which were JUST what I needed to hurry and get Amy's packaged packed and mailed by tomorrow!) and they are beautiful!!! So after arranging them to look cute in front of my bookcase that has a string of lights on it so I could take pictures, it was FINALLY time to get to that gift I got to open upon arrival!

After carefully opening this pre-Christmas gift, there is a roll of material, but it just didn't look like pajamas or anything, which is usually the only open-before-Christmas-morning gifts I've ever gotten. Well, tucked inside the front edge is another card with a quote at the top: The art of wearing an apron is to not only protect your clothing, but to look good while doing so! - Unknown and then a note from my oldest sister. It was great! One side has very festive holiday ornaments and the other has an awesome print full of celtic knotwork circles. VERY awesome!!! Who knows, it may just be the inspiration/motivation I need to make cookies to take out to others this year :)

THANK YOU FABIANOS for making this an awesome Christmas already!!! I am very excited for Christmas morning to dive into the next group of beautifully wrapped gifts!!!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!!!

(pictures will be posted after I get them downloaded)

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

The ones I have read are in red

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most, but not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
2 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime-Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

30.. Wow, I have always been a reader, didn't realize I was so extraordinary *lol* Having varied tastes helps!

The Big Four-Oh

Well, ready or not, here it is... the big 4-0. This is also the beginning of my 365 Photo Project, "A Year In The Life." Thanks Laura for the inspiration!!!

Unwrapping Fun!

While down in AZ 2 weeks ago, we celebrated my birthday early. I got a great book from Mom & Bill; "Broken Things to Mend" by Jeffrey R. Holland. It was beautifully wrapped with great ribbon (that is still on the book cause it looks so cool) Then was a fabulously wrapped gift from Amy... which then prompted a whole slideshow of pictures... see above (if it works!) AAhhhhhh how well Amos knows me!!! This was truly the gift that kept on giving!!!

If you can't tell, the last pictures was the cute little tin with a beautiful hand-embroidered monogrammed handkerchief! Amy, you rock!

Scribling Practice

Here are some scribles that I've been trying out recently. These were done with red transfer rather than black pencil carbon, which I liked both on the black and the white. I was disappointed with how poorly the green showed up on the black, although I love the blue on the black. The small random picture is my first scratchings on a piece of scrap vellum and OH MY GOSH am I in love!!!!!! If I could afford it, I would do EVERYTHING on real vellum! WOW!

Wyoming's Rib & Chop Shop

So tonight Aunt Barbara and I decided to catch dinner somewhere new after we hit Wal-Mart, and after driving all around Cody looking for somewhere interesting and new, we ended up at the Rib and Chop place right on main street Cody. It was interesting. It had the look of a place trying to be more upscale... although the tables were covered with butcher paper. The good news was that there were crayons on the table too, so I colored a LOT :D It looked pretty fabulous by the time we left :) Our waitress wrote her name for us backwards and we were quite impressed. The food was pretty good, and mostly reasonably priced. I had the ribs, and Barbara had the chicken-fried steak. I think I liked hers better than mine, although mine was good. The best part was the desert that Barbara got. It was a Pecan chocolate meltaway or something like that. It was YUM!!! MUCH better than my pre-packaged-then-defrosted tiny slice of cheesecake. All in all, for the food, I think I would prefer Bubba's out by Wal-Mart, which has (I think) better food and a VERY different atmosphere. Bubba's is TOTALLY down-home, rustic, country, casual, and has the yummiest Corn Bites for appetizers. Well, I was going to totally do a longer writeup, but after a long day, I'm just too tired. I would eat there again, but unless I was with someone who wanted a more upscale "feel", I would hit Bubba's instead. Over all, Wyoming's Rib & Chop Shop gets a total of 3.75 stars out of 5. Eventually I'll come up with an actual rating system for the fun new places we go to try out.