Can't remember the spiffy title I had thought of earlier...

It's been an action-packed couple of days. Sort of.

I finished The Dark is Rising today, and found the book SO MUCH better than the movie. I was glad that I saw the show before I read the book, because it allowed me to enjoy both of them. Had I gone in reverse order, I probably would have cried during the movie. :)

Book 1 was pretty boring. Just ask Jess. Book 2 was awesome (the one I just finished). Book 3 ties together some characters from both. We'll see how it turns out.

We had a nice 3-hour nap today. It was wonderful. Minus the part where 3 or 4 of Joanne's grandkids started pounding away at the piano that's right above our bedroom. It would have been frustrating even if we hadn't been trying to take a nap.

Last night was Ben's 1st birthday party. Fun and good times were had by all. Especially the kid who hacked up a lung. Seriously, he had a bad cough, and I hope that the other little ones didn't catch what he had.

Mandy and Paul came over for lunch today, which was both fun and tasty (they weren't tasty--lunch was). It's not often that we see them here in our neck of the woods.

Our stake president commented briefly in sacrament today about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. How sad is it when people see the best solution to a problem is killing the person who's making the problem. Granted, it's one way to deal with things, but it's not a very good one. Same thing happened to Jesus Christ and Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Sad stuff. Seems they should follow Michael Scott's advice and "hug it out."

Also in regards to the assassination, I was surprised when I read about it. Those sort of things seem to me to be things of a time long ago (the 1960s and earlier--JFK, Franz Ferdinand, etc). It's weird to see it happening again.

Also in sacrament meeting, a guy from our ward mentioned how Joseph Smith had been wondering about which church to join for two years before he went to the grove and received the First Vision. It was neat to learn that he didn't just have a question pop into his head, pray about it and then--whammy! get an answer like he did. It took time and effort. That helps me feel better about when I don't get answers to my prayers very quickly.

Jess also mentioned on our way home from church that a couple weeks ago they had learned in Relief Society that the grove Joseph went to was one that his mother often went to in order to pray. It wasn't just some place that was arbitrarily chosen for his first vocal prayer. Cool stuff.

One of the other talks mentioned what Elder Ballard said recently about using new media to participate in conversations about the church. I think that's why my mom started her blog...

Happy 2nd-to-last day of the year, everybody.

Media update

Jess and I went to see The Seeker: The Dark is Rising last night at the dollar theater (wonderful place). The show was pretty good for the genre (cheesy adolescent feel-good family fantasy movie) and we enjoyed it for the most part. We did laugh at a couple of plot twists, but all-in-all, it was worth a dollar apiece. Biggest annoyance: the (maybe retarded to give them the benefit of the doubt) kids to our left and family behind us who all talked at full volume during the movie. Really, who does that?

I finished Persuasion by Jane Austen this morning, and have to admit that I enjoyed it. Austen has a sharp wit, and I love the irony and biting humor that she has in her books (at least the two that I've read). The version of the book that I was reading has the original last two chapters in it as an appendix (apparently Austen wrote two new ones right before publication), and there was almost no difference in them at all--she only changed the way in which Anne and her dashing Captain Wentworth finally discovered their true feelings for each other (that they hadn't changed after 8 years) and get back together. A lot of the text was conserved verbatim. I don't even know why they included the first couple pages.

Next to read: The Dark is Rising series. They were already in my reading queue, but having seen the movie made me want to read the books even more. I'm gonna go to the library today to pick them up--they've got like half a billion copies of each one, and they're all checked in. That's a lot nicer than the Golden Compass was. Good luck trying to get a copy of that book. Sheesh.

CHRISTMAS VACATION!!!

It's finally here! Finals are done as of noon today, and now it's time for a couple of weeks of no more school. Hooray!

I've got a list of things I'm wanting to accomplish over the break (so it's productive), and today Jess and I knocked out one of them--we fixed the fan in the bathroom so it's clean and not as noisy as it used to be. Sweet! And then Jess organized my ties for me and put them on a new tie hangar. Life is good.

Still to be done over the break: Fill out the FAFSA, send in a rebate for the tires we just got on the car, expand my book queue, defrost the freezer, and organize our important papers.

Last word from Dr. Cates--it sounds like we're on for the plant project. There have been a lot of ups and downs, and I'm sort of tired of being told one thing and then another. Here's hoping that we actually get to be hired and start working.

Thanks, Liz, for your book suggestion. Everyone else--please feel free to suggest books for me to read. With my handy-dandy queue, I can easily keep track. The future is now! Peace.

Spanish Lit books

I just finished two books for my intro to Spanish lit class, and they were pretty good. En la ardiente oscuridad by Antonio Buero Vallejo is a play that Buero Vallejo wrote during Franco's regime in Spain. It was sort of a secret rebellion/commentary on life in under Franco, but sneaky enough that Buero Vallejo didn't get booted out of Spain. It's about some kids at a school for the blind, who pretend that they aren't. Along comes Ignacio, who gets sick very quickly of the lie that the others are living, and his ideas start spreading to other students. How it's handled, and the surprising conclusion made this a great read. I'm gonna hold on to this one.

The other is Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela by Elena Poniatowska. She's originally from Poland, but grew up in Mexico. The very short book is a series of fictional letters from Angeline Beloff, a Russian in Paris, to Diego Rivera, famous Mexican painter. They had shacked up for 7 or so years, had a child who died, and Rivera went back to Mexico. It's a sad book, but it was an interesting read.

I'd recommend both if you can handle the Spanish. I'd love to see En la ardiente oscuridad done as a play, which my professor mentioned had happened several semesters back right here at BYU, both in English and Spanish. Drag.

Cool idea

So I just saw a cool idea on another blog that I want to implement, so I'm writing it down here so that I don't forget about it. The guy has a "reading queue" to help him keep track of all the different books that he wants to read. He's even got a random number generator to help him decide which one to read next. I've got a lot of books that I wanna read, so this is a pretty good idea for me, too. I've actually got something of a list on my computer, but it's in a Word document that I pretty much never open. Maybe if I put it online it will help me stick with it.