{christmas cards}

David and I just finished up our Christmas cards and I am seriously in love with them.

No, really.

I love everything about them, but especially the envelope presentation. I realize that is a little odd, but I love it. You see, I had this vision of how I wanted them to turn out and they exceeded my expectations. You always take a risk when trying something like this, because sometimes things don't look half as good in reality as they do in the imagination - but these? These knocked my vision out of the water!

Here they are in all their festive red and green glory:

This is the front and back of the 4x9 envelopes. The top/front has the address and the bottom/back has our return address. I love this "envelope wrap" idea, and have wanted to do this on wedding announcements for a really long time. Our Christmas Cards were the perfect opportunity! 

 A closer look:

The front.

The back. Look, our return address is now Lehi!

This is what the labels looked like before we put them on the envelopes.

Oh, you wanted to see what the Christmas Cards actually looked like? 

(Click on them for larger images if you would like.)

Also, see my Christmas tree list on the post below. I realize that posting so close together means that many people will miss that post... but I may or may not be able to handle the music that automatically plays from this post when I open my blog. I just need one more post before it goes away.

{a list}

A

list of

the reasons

that I love this time

of the year: Reminder of 

the love of the savior 

Jesus Christ. Lots of time 

to spend with family members 

and friends. Delicious orange sticks 

in my stocking. Sleeping in and staying 

in my pajamas for the rest of the 

day. Sending out pretty Christmas cards 

in red envelopes with fancy envelope seals on 

them. Sue's amazing Christmas sugar cookies and 

delicious cheese-chip cupcakes. Finding new traditions 

to incorporate with my family.  No school

or homework. Cuddling up with David and lots 

of big blankets while reading and watching movies. 

Putting up Christmas lights and then watching them blink

through a frosty glass window. Making delicious pizza with my

family on Christmas Eve. Having two families to celebrate Christmas

with. Listening to Christmas music while watching the snow fall outside.

Sharing it all with 

David and looking
forward to many

more Christmas 

seasons together.

It's a Monday.

Friday is only 4 days away.

I hope that I can make it. I've had a hard time getting started today and feel like it should be Wednesday at least. But, Christmas cards are in the mail - I'm almost done with work - and the latest wedding announcements that I have been working on will be done and ready for delivery today.

That means today has been a successful and good day.

These are some other things that have been happening around the Peaden household:

Painting our beautiful blue wall.  That was the deal with our Landlord - we could paint if we wanted, but we had to paint it back before moving out. It was SO worth it! We started painting on Saturday and got everything all primed up - but when we went to open the leftover paint (from when we painted the room a year and a half ago after we had to tear up the carpet to get it replaced) it had gone b.a.d.

Apparently, you shouldn't keep paint in a storage shed where it can freeze during the winter, boil during the summer, and then freeze again during the next winter. Think really bubbly oil-water, with little bits of paint chips floating around in it. Or rather - don't think about it. It may make you sick. 

This means that tonight after work, David and I will be stopping at Sherwin-Williams to pick up the "custom paint color" of an ivory/off-white that our Landlord had created to paint all of her apartments. 

If anyone wants to join us - it's going to be a party!

------------

We have slowly and steadily been making progress on our packing. We have one whole wall full of boxes that are packed, and we feel pretty good about that. It's still a little difficult right now, because we still have time that we have to live in our apartment and we are trying to keep things relatively un-disturbed. Our focus has been on things that are hidden away in forgotten drawers and corners that we don't use on a regular basis. But, with only 10 packing days left... it's about time to get everything packed up!

-------

We have just recently started watching Psych and we LOVE it.

Also, because of Psych, we discovered the term "dramedy." We now know that this is our favorite genre. Thank you Psych and Netflix for teaching us so much. Also, thanks to all of those who suggested Psych to us even when I was skeptical. It great!

-----------

 My friend Allison is incredibly talented and creative. She decided that she was going to tie-dye a wedding dress and asked if I would take some pictures for her. Check HERE for some of the pictures that I took of her and HERE for the whole story.

-------------

I was able to take pictures for one of my greatest childhood friend's older brother. The Cragun's lived just around the corner from us in Ephraim (and actually... we bought their house from them, and then they moved around the corner) and they are one of the most wonderful families that I know. I had so much fun taking pictures with Steve and Natalie, and am so happy for them and their soon-to-be little family! I've spent a lot of time editing pictures lately, and am happy with the improvements I have been making with my photography skills.

p.s. 

We are right in the middle of the Abigail/Shawn/Juliet love triangle. 

It's a tough call. I think that Juliet is wonderful but Abigail fits so well with Shawn. This is the first time I have ever really gotten into a Television series that was still on the air (usually I'm into things more along the lines of Remington Steele, Quincy, and Mork and Mindy) so please bear with me!

I just love them both!

Happy Sunday!

 Wasn't the Christmas Devotional wonderful this year? David and I stayed home and streamed the devotional live from lds.org (which, by the way... I love their new website!). It was so nice to cuddle up on our couch and listen to the words of our living prophets. 

In case you missed it, check it out here:

(If you want to know about my faith, mormon.org is a great new resource.)

We finished out our Sunday by drinking some Hot Chocolate and eating Sue's special Cheese Chip Cupcakes (brought to Logan especially for us by Jeff and Kevin) while watching a Christmas Carol.

We had a wonderful Sunday and we hope that you did, too! 

Love of Reading

I love to read. I always have. When I was younger, I would crawl into the bottom shelf the linen closet next to my bedroom with a flashlight and read to my hearts content. (I'm sure this was to avoid any chores I was supposed to be doing.) Actually, I would read everywhere: Inside, outside, in my room, in the car, at the kitchen table, at school, on the computer etc... Once, when I was in Elementary School I was supposed to be listening to my teacher talk at the front of the classroom, but instead I had a book under my desk that I was reading whenever I thought I could get away with it. My teacher caught me and told me to put it away. I wasn't in trouble until I started arguing that anything I was reading in the book was definitely making me smarter than anything she could be teaching me. (oops.)

I also love to read ANYTHING. I'm a bit of a weirdo because of the variety of books I like. Of course I love the classics like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. I'm a sucker for LDS romance novels. I enjoy reading history, and went through a phase last year where I couldn't get enough of the French Revolution. My favorite author writes Science Fiction almost exclusively. I read newspapers and magazines and even the fine print on the bottom of advertisements. If you like to read, I am confident that we can find a book in common that we love - no matter what your favorite genre is. I love them all.

I wish I could really explain how much I love to read. I am so grateful that David likes to read, because some of my favorite times spent with him are reading together on the couch/floor/porch. It becomes a problem sometimes, because many times when we should go out and be social with other people, we opt to stay home and read books. I'll be honest though, I have read more in the past 6 months than I have in the past 5 years. Homework really puts a damper on reading for fun.

So, one of my friends just posted this on Facebook.  Apparently the BBC came out with this book list of classics that everyone should read. They say that the average person has only read six of these books. I have read 25. I feel pretty good about that. There are several books on this list that are on my personal "To Read" list. (Specifically Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell - It is next up on my list.) I don't think that I will ever read all of these books, but I would like to read many of them.


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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 Graham
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 - A.A. 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
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 - E.B. 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 (contained within the complete works)
 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

After going through this list, I feel like it is very poorly thought out. How do you think that they compiled this list of books? It seems like such a random assortment, but without even representation. I love Jane Austen, but to have 4 of her books on the top 100? And next to Whinny the Pooh? Also, they have The Chronicles of Narnia, AND The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Umm.. those are the same thing. Besides, who is the BBC to say who should read what books. They only have British/European/English authors anyway... they are missing all sorts of great books. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin.
  
Sidenote: Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy was quite possibly the saddest book I have ever read. Ever.

Hmm... Maybe I will write my very own list of books that everyone should read. (Enders Game would definitely be on it.) The hard part is mixing old classics with pop-culture must-reads. How can you say "this book is among the top 100 books ever written" when it hasn't had to stand the test of time. I don't think that its really possible. So instead, I am going to write a list of books that I love/have read. It will be my very own version of the "Official List that Everyone in the Whole World should Read" but will lean more towards "Books that I would recommend to anyone because I loved them that much." (Or maybe even "I didn't like this book because it made me cry the entire time and the ending was the saddest possible ending the author could have ever imagined but I think I am a better person for it and so I am including it on this list.") I guess we will just have to see what the list develops into.

Here we go:
1. The Ender/Ender's Shadow Series by Orson Scott Card. Seriously, my all time favorite. Especially when you get into the Shadow Series. A-mazing. 

2. The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy. I love everything about this book. It is also my favorite play. Percy Blakeney is right up there with Mr. Darcy. And speaking of... 

3. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. A classic - definitely belongs on this list. 

4. The Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis. I read this when I first got to college and loved it, it gave me so much insight into my actions and how to become a better person. 

5. The Harry Potter Series - J.K Rowling. These books create a whole new world of magic and adventure. I love everything about them and think that everyone should read them. 

Well... There you go... the first five books on my list. I think that I will continue to add to it as I think of books that need to be added to it. What books do YOU think should belong to this list?