swimming in October

Have you ever gone swimming in the mountains at night in October? It's beautiful (I know a little crazy too). I floated on my back and stared at the stars and watched my breath mist up and away from me. It was so calming and peacefull... I had the pool to myself and so just floated in lazy circles,tracing quilt patterns in the stars (I am at a quilting conference after all)

Summer!

Yea summer is finally here. I spent almost all day outside today and didn't need a jacket or an umbrella! I get to see the sun on my way to and from work which just makes life sooooo much more enjoyable (even if it is right at eye level while driving). My nephews and neices can play outside! (this helps me stay sane when they come to visit for more than one day). The garden is mostly planted and I won't really have to do anymore intense work on it until fall when everything needs to be harvested. Oh yeah and all the really great smelling flowers are starting to bloom like lilacs, and irises, next it will be roses and lillies. I love it!

2010 goal

I have been told my goal for 2010 should be to blog more.... sorry probably not gonna happen D'Nell...but my goal of not wasting money (I haven't bought any fabric at JoAnn's yet) and using what I already have is working ok. I've already been to the gym more times this year than i went last year. Hopefully I will have my car paid off this year (no more paying evil interest). I am doing better at finishing projects too ... I've gone to grandma Gs to quilt my yellow quilt, I finished all the blocks for my square dance quilt, and my santa wall hanging finally has buttons and eyes. Unfortunatly I finished the Santa wall hanging right after we put away all the christmas stuff so he will still be sitting in the sewing room until next year. Now I just have to make some cards or scrapbook pages to use my paper stuff.

Fall Break

I accomplished quite a bit last weekend ... I finally finished the green and yellow quilt top, I maded 10 more blocks for my log cabin quilt, I prepared and gave my 3rd R.S. lesson, I took Grandma Stones to the library and helped her find books she hasn't read yet (or in a long time) and then I sat and helped her start indexing for familysearch. Oh yeah and I finished two 1000 peice puzzles.

So this weekend I've decided I deserve a break and I'm taking one! After Thursday night I will only be doing the minimal amount of work required of me. I have put my family on notice that they are not allowed to get started on any big projects this weekend because I don't want to feel guilty for not helping out. And I won't help out if they decide to go ahead without me(well probably). I have a stack of books waiting for me and my car is going to the mechanics tomorrow so I can't run errands for anyone (sorry D'nell). Let the weekend begin :)

School

Everyone is getting ready to go back to school and I'm kind of jealous... What is with my family and being perpetual students? I doubt I'll be going back for at least another year or two though, but I'm definetly starting to think about it.

My fam just got back from Yellowstone and it was BEAUTIFUL. There were tons of wildflowers and when we went in to the park we even saw a bear. Almost the entire Stones gang was at Uncle Mike's cabin for the 4th and it was nice to see everyone relaxed and on vacation. Grandma, who doesn't like Yellowstone but came anyway because her whole family was there read almost the entire time, suprise, suprise. You could tell Grandma was missing Grandpa and remembering a lot of the good times that they had spent there together. The family dogs even joined in the fun and had fun running up and down between the lake and the cabins. Bruiser got a little too curious about the water and fell in (he didn't jump, he got too close and fell off the dock) I wish I would have got a picture.





I was supposed to be working on my Relief Society Lesson while on vacation, but did I get much done??? Of course not. Am I working on it now? Nope, I am still procrastinating even though, I'm teaching tomorrow. It's the Joseph Smith Lesson on Charity so I think it will be alright because my ward is AWESOME at charity and serving/loving others. All the ladies know how nervous I am at teaching so I think there will be lots of responses when I ask questions or for examples. Wish me Luck and keep me in your prayers.

You People

The person who sits next to me at work had caller today who kept getting angry and explaining how horrible we were at our jobs by saying "you people need to.... why don't you people..." it was probably a 15 minute "conversation" with "you people" used in every sentence. The lady next to me, who has a ton of patience, literally growled when she hung up the phone. (I was smiling in my cubicle enjoying the fact that I am not on phones in the afternoon.)

I love sitting where I do at work because I always here the most interest comments from my coworkers. There is another lady who sits by me who calls everyone hon and darling ... and says stuff like "I got an answer for you .. NO" when people call in and say they have a question. She is funny to listen to because she just tells it like it is and tries to lighten things with a joke, which is often unappreciated by stuffy CPA's and people being billed. In between her and me is a guy who has the dryest sense of humor and makes fun of us (mostly her) while we are on the phones. He sometimes pretends to hide from us when he sees us coming to ask him a question because we are always double checking our answers with him, but I think he secretly likes being the one everyone asks (he has been there longer and knows a lot more).

People call in and ask us a lot of weird questions but I think my favorite is still when people call in and ask "where is my refund?" and we are forced to explain that they owed taxes and inform them of when we received their payment.

Well Hi

Guess I'm in the running for worst blogger ever. oops. I have so much fun reading everyone elses' blogs that I forget to write on my own....

Anyway this weekend I have listened to a lot of broadway cause my mom is doing the roadshow for our ward so she brings up songs and I remember I haven't listened to them for a while and get out the CD's (She actually suggested I sing in the roadshow because I know so many of the songs... I think I just laughed)

What else? I did my taxes ... so exciting. Well actually it kind of was cause I thought I was going to have to pay, but I'm actually going to get a nice chunk of change back from the feds. I might just go out and by a laptop of my own with the money, so I won't have to fight my dad for the computer anymore.

hopefully it won't be so long before my next post and it will be a bit more exciting.

New Job

As most of you have prolly heard, I got a new job at the Tax Commission .... so I "officially" moved on Tuesday and got started on my new job today ... funny thing is my "new" job was created so they could get rid of my old unit, so as training for my new job I will basically be doing my old job and slowly taking on new tasks (and getting paid almost twice as much)... I was excited about my new job cause I thought I would have less time on the phone but as it turns out for a while at least I'll probably be answering more phone calls, because the other people in my old unit will be leaving before the people that were hired in the new positions are trained on the phones... oh well at least the days will go fast because I'll be busy.

Halloween (or the post that I meant to post on Halloween but thought I accidentally erased)

Remember when you were a kid Halloween was like this HUGE holiday, and when you got done trick-or-treating you were sure it had to be midnight cause you walked forever and went to every house? Yeah it's kinda funny to realize that when you were a kid Halloween probably ended at 8 p.m. and you didn't really go to that many houses. Just a random thought.

ANYway so this Halloween I was reminded why I don't watch scary movies that often, it is 2 a.m. and I am wide AWAKE. We watched Stay Alive and White Noise tonight and while they didn't have the most unpredictable plots, they certainly made me jump. I think my friends spent more time watching my reactions than actually watching the movies. I got home to find my family forgot that I was still out so all lights were off and doors locked; finding your house key while standing on a deserted street in the dark isn't much fun, but at least I gave the people inside as much of a fright becuase they thought someone was breaking in.

New Room

My room has lights!!! yea!! so who knew that picking out new lighting involved so much drama ... I chose what I thought were pretty simple lights at Home Depot, turns out switching lights from florescent overheads to regular lights takes a bit more work than normal especially if the ceiling also needs to be reinforced to accommodate a fan. oh well it done now and I love it ... I don't have a door yet, but one thing at a time.

Books

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Star the books you LOVE.

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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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* (loved it!!)
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 Meaney - 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
52 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 Night-time - 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* (abridged)
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 (started, but boring)
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* (abridged?)

Memory Tag

Okay Friends. I don't usually do these...but I had to give in.

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you.

Hair

My hair is so boring that I have decided to splurdge on a nice haircut and style. So any suggestion for how I 'should change it ? Chop it off?, Dye it red. any and all suggestions are welcome.

Oops

I totally stink at blogging-- so I am borrowin a funny story from my sister. My sister has been texting this guy Jacob in her pharmacy class all semester long, then when she talks to him in person it's like completely weird because he ignores her questions. So Yesterday she sends and e-mail from her phone and signs it with her name. A little while later she gets a text message saying hey Niki this is Erik I was wondering who had been texting me all semseter. She had been texting the WRONG person the whole semseter. I laughed so hard when she ended her story by saying "So many things made mch more sense after finding out it was Erik"

God;s secret angels

Don't you love it when someone outreaches your expectations ? There is a lady at my work and she always has something negative to say about everyone... so I try to be nice to her but I also try to limit the time I have to talk to her, but the other day she overheard me say I was nervous about an interview I was going to and she told me not to worry and just be my normally happy self.... She made my day and gave me so much confidence going into the interview. The weird part is that I had avoided saying anything around her because she had just been complaining about how she had applied and hadn't gotten an interview. She was the perfect person to give me confidence because I rarely hear her say anything nice about anyone so I believed her when she said I would do great. I am not avoiding her so much now and I hope she interviews for a job soon so I can wish her luck and return the favor.

Thank goodness, it was just an earthquake.

so my job at the Tax Commission has been going pretty well. It is pretty mindless work so I get to listen to books and music all day... which I like but will eventually get bored of. On Thursday I even got there early so I could leave at 2:30pm. Getting up early involved a bit of a change in routine, so at about 7:30am when my computer screen looked like it was moving I started taking deep breaths and telling myself that I was fine and if I needed to get up and take a break I could. I blinked a couple of times and relaxed my shoulders. I then opened my eyes and noticed the cord for my earphones was swinging quite a bit and heard a couple of people asking if they felt that. Needless to say I was relieved that my coworkers did not see me having an anxiety attack (which usually involves puking), but I quickly moved onto being afraid that I was going to be crushed to death in an earthquake because my cubicle wouldn't provide enough protection. Don't worry though everything turned out all right and I am obviously still alive.

Clifford the little red truck

My dad has been trying to get me to drive a manual transmission for the last six years. He made the mistake of trying to teach me in his Toyota, which had a tricky clutch, and I was too freaked out by stalling every ten seconds to want to continue trying, so I only occasionally gave in to a lesson and drove around the neighborhood. On Monday however I walked out my front door and was confronted with the fact that the only cars left at my house were the two trucks (both are stick shifts) and if I wanted to get to the library ( the library is the most relaxing, comfortable place in the world) I would have to pass through numerous stop lights while operating a manual transmission. I made to the library and back without stalling once, although I'm sure if anyone saw me they thought I was crazy because I screamed every time I shifted gears without mishap. I was even able to find the lights in my moms truck and didn't forget to turn them off when I got home. Yeah for me!!!

YUM

I am one step closer to becoming a domestic goddess. Grandma "G" showed me how to make peanut brittle today -- and it is sooooo easy even I can do it. I love the stuff and now I can make it whenever I want to. YUUUUMMMM

singles ward

Aren't singles wards kinda crazy? I went to church with some friends a couple of weeks ago and we stayed after for a "mingle". We were standing in a group and one of our friends, Dustin, was standing a couple feet away from us, and the stake president came up to meet us. He then turns to Dustin and asks his name, and tries to introduce him to us girls. When we all answered yes that we knew Dustin, the stake president's face fell and you could tell he was disappointed that he didn't get to play matchmaker for us. It still makes me smile to think about it.