Coraline? What about Creepoline?

Sorry for the cheesy title, but you just have to understand! David and I were looking forward to a great movie that we could cuddle up and enjoy after a long week (and it WAS a long week) back at school. David and I are avid RedBox goers, and Friday night we rented the fabulous movie "Race to Witch Mountain," which is a remake of a great older movie. Full of suspense, humor, and happy endings! I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Saturday morning came far too early and I had to be at the library at 7:30 to meet up with my boss and the other managers before our first staff meeting of the year (started at 8:00 in the am. Blech.) Needless to say I was again very exhausted and my wonderful husband picked up another movie from our beloved RedBox to complete our relaxing evening at home. Which brings me to the point of this post. I had previously told David that I wanted to see Coraline because one of my friends had said it was good. (Lets be honest, I want to see basically every PG movie out there. Beggers can't be choosers, eh?) I followed up this statement with the following: "Or maybe she said that it made her want to sew buttons on her nieces eyes. Whichever one." The last statement was lost among the crowd Walmart shoppers (I am sure we were at Walmart, we seem to make at least three trips a week to that place.)
So my adorable husband brought home the movie Coraline. :) I was pretty excited and we popped a huge batch of popcorn in our fabulous StirCrazy machine. (Check out this link to watch it in action on YouTube. It's the best ever! Skip to about 1:06, thats when the good stuff happens. Also, I didn't watch the clip with sound so I have no idea what they are saying.)

Okay I promise I am getting to my point. Here it is. CORALINE IS THE CREEPIEST MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!

Within the first ten minutes David and I had rated the movie as a 10.5 on the creepy scale. Don't ask me why we kept watching, I suppose it was because we were so determined to have a relaxing movie night. This movie was el-creepo! A later conversation with our neighbors resulted in them telling us that they watched it in the theatre with a bunch of screaming/crying children.

I would have been that screaming/crying child. Yikes.

At least it wasn't as bad as Faith Like Potatoes.

School Already?

Well... Here we go again! Yesterday was my 17th "first day" of school. (Not including preschool or the first day of spring semester.) I can hardly believe it.
This is my fourth year at college and I will be graduating this Spring. Most of the other seniors I know (or have known through the years) can't wait to get out of college and get started with their "real lives." But I don't feel the same way. I have absolutely loved my college experience. Utah State has been the most incredible place and I truly feel at home here. I am not anxious to leave this blessed campus. Every day as I walk around campus I feel such gratitude for living in such an amazing place. When I walk across the Quad beneath the ever present A atop Old Main Tower, looking out over Logan and seeing the beautiful mountains... a warm feeling starts bubbling up in my heart and I can barely stop myself from skipping across the quad.I fell in love with Utah State, and Logan, when I was a Junior in High School. I attended Utah Business Week here and felt so at home I couldn't believe it. I loved everything about the campus. I loved the buildings, I loved the people I met, I loved the atmosphere. I think that is when I decided that I wanted to attend USU. Up until that point I had always thought that I would go to BYU. My parents had both gone there and I knew that it was a good school. However, when I went to tour BYU as a senior... I remembered the feeling that I had at Utah State, and BYU just didn't compare. (No offense to BYU, I think it's a great school.) My family moved to Morgan my senior year, which made my choice to go to USU a much easier one (instead of the 4 hours or so from Logan to Ephraim, it was only a little over an hour to drive from Logan to Morgan.) Little did I know that my future husband had already made the choice to attend USU instead of BYU.
My Utah State experience has been the best I could have ever imagined and I am sure that you can imagine I get a little sad when thinking about leaving this wonderful place. David has been filling out Applications for Grad school, and we are seriously considering three schools. Utah State, Oklahoma and Oregon. I used to want to go away for Grad school so I could Student Teach in a different environment than Cache County. Although I still think that this would be the best for my teaching experience... the thought of leaving Logan makes my heart hurt. But, even if we stay here... things just wont be the same as if I were going to school.

David and I often take it upon ourselves to convince every person that we meet to go to school at USU. It is such a wonderful place. We really are Aggies through and through. Who else would have the Block A as their cake topper?




Sorry for the rambling post! I guess here is the moral of the story in a nutshell:

• School started yesterday, and I am not super overjoyed at the thought that this is my senior year.
• I love Utah State.
• I am already procrastinating doing my homework (which at this point consists of printing off my syllabi and organizing my notebooks.)
  

Haha! Hope you are doing well!

100 Books.

I have already posted about my love of books. So this shouldn't come as a shock to any of you. But I have been looking for a list of books to read (you know, the lists of famous "Classic" books that everyone should read in his/her life. (ps. why are all the "Classics" written by white European authors, mainly boys?) My uncle posted this one his facebook, and I liked it because it has some other books on it as well. I needed a place to keep the list when I need it to look for more books so I thought I would copy him and make a post of it. The Xs are the book I have already read. The Os are the ones that I want to read the most! (If you have any other suggestions of good books, please comment and let me know. I just finished my most recent book series (The Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card), and am looking for more books!

The BBC produced this list and said that the average person has read six of these books. (Thanks to High School English requirements I am sure.) I have read 17.5, yay for me!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x (This is a little X because I read most of the series, but I got stuck and just couldn't finish. Blah. I loved the Hobbit though!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte O
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 5.5

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (SO sad, but such a good book.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X (LOVED this book)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger O
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 3

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 X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 1

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen O (Just watched Lake House and HAVE to read this!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (I don't know how this is different from the Chronicles of Narnia.)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 3

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 (Tried to read this and hated it.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 0

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Se
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafo
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

Total: 1

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

Total: 0

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
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

Total: 1

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker O
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 X
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

Total: 1

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 X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X

Total: 2