So that NaBloPo thing

This is my third year running of National Blog Posting Month, where I commit to blogging everyday during the entire 30 days of November.  My first year, I didn’t really set myself any schedules or patterns, however my second year I came up with a set theme for each day and found that helped mightily when I was scratching my head at 9pm, wondering what the heck to write about.  Here is my current idea for a schedule, of course always subject to change.

Mondays – Links (or cool things I find on the interwebs)

Tuesdays – Food Show!

Wednesdays – Things I wear

Thursdays – Guest Posts

Fridays – Nugget o’ Thought (or probably something else brief, cause hey, it’s friday!)

Saturday – Book Reviews

Sunday – Photo Sunday

So hopefully that will help me keep this month ticking by and of course I will be looking for people to write those Thursday posts for me, so let me know if you are interested!

Happy Birthday Jonathan!

My favorite younger brother

Today marks a very special occurrence, the celebration of the 26th anniversary of Jonathan’s birthday, or in other words a celebration of Jonathan’s ability to stay alive for 26 years and counting.  As you have probably picked up on this blog, Jonathan has always been one of my favorite people, whether it was playing pretend on a Big Wheels growing up or making cheese during Christmas vacations, or all the many crazy family adventures we have had, I have always found him to be hilarious and generally wonderful company.  Two years ago, I wrote up a post about my 10 favorite things about Jonathan and so I thought this year I would make a list of things I know that Jonathan likes

1. Jonathan likes to throw things and he also inspired my first animated gif

Click on the picture to see it action

2. Jonathan likes dogs

Jonathan brought his friend's dog Google home for a very memorable Christmas vacation and I think we all fell in love with the perfect search engine 🙂

Click on this adorable picture to see a video of Jonathan and his new puppy Mathilde being awesome!

3. Jonathan likes to make things

Jonathan made his own pair of wool sweater mittens this past Christmas

Jonathan is also very good at making amazingly gorgeous stone cairns

When Jonathan comes home, he likes to go to the hardware store and buy things to make into other things, like this candle-powered fountain

4. Jonathan likes to be creative

Jonathan introduced our family to the idea of group paintings and was the primary instigator in too our first family self-portrait

5. Jonathan likes to think hard

Jonathan studies Physics and thinks about things that I can't even understand the definitions of

6. Jonathan likes to be outside

Baby Jonathan during a trip to the Boundary Waters during high school

7. Jonathan likes to take trips with friends

Many moons ago, Jonathan and a bunch of his friends took a bike trip to Hell, Michigan and thankfully David recorded video and it is still alive on the web today.  This, my friends, is a must see!

8. Jonathan likes his family

And we like him!

9. Jonathan likes to do things differently

I think Jonathan's beard is another outlet for his own inner drummer

No explanation necessary

Golfer or Hipster, neither, just Jonathan's perfect combination of both.

10. Jonathan likes jumping

Tim took this awesome picture of Jonathan during our family trip to the Boundary Waters

Tim also took this picture of Jonathan leaping over the Bahai Temple in Evanston

some draft posts and thoughts

Wow, 26 days, impressive, even for me and my general hit or miss blogging schedule (and by that I mainly mean miss).  Well, this will hopefully get the obligatory catch-up blog out of the way, so I can get into a more regular schedule just in time for NaBloPoMo.  Which if you are unfamiliar with this term, is the month in which some people attempt to write 50,000 word novels and others with slightly lower ambitions attempt to post on their blogs every day.  I have been doing this successfully for two years running and you can go see the 2009 and 2010 attempts.

So here are a list of partially written blog posts I have accumulated and few updates of the more general sort:

• Draft post titled: Massive update and plans for the future – in which I attempted to give a synopsis of my parents’ awesome 2 week long visit at the beginning of October and our house plans to disband and move into apartments come December.  Never got further than 2 paragraphs, chance of completion: low
• Draft post titled: Some thoughts on the book  The Help – in which I wrote up some thoughts that came up both while reading the book and after completion.  This one actually got mostly written and I will probably polish it up a bit more before saving it for NaBloPoMo fodder
• Draft post titled: More October birthdays – in which I contemplate how it feels to turn 28 and how my expectations for birthdays have changed over the years.  I even drew a nifty graph for this on, chance of completion: medium
• Two nights ago I went to sleep cold (we keep our house at 60 degrees because it is horribly insulated and we are all very poor cheap) and tossed and turned for close to an hour trying to get warm, until finally I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed my spare blanket and shivered myself to sleep.  Only, of course to wake up again later in the night, cold, but this time to tired to go hunt down my third spare blanket.  Now I have to admit I was kind of worried that my brief 2 months in Seattle had turned me into a pansy – I mean my down comforter has gotten me through 4 Chicago winters, with nary an extra blanket needed!  But the good news is, that our house doesn’t actually have any heat on!  Yes, that is actually good news, so instead of the 60 degrees I thought my room was, it was probably in the upper 40s, low 50s.  Thankfully we also possess space heaters, which will keep me from totally freezing until we get more heating oil delivered early next week.
• Seattle has turned out to have a much better autumn than I anticipated – leaves have changed colors, repeated days of crisp blue sky weather, etc.

And in conclusion, you all should watch this brilliant video of people doing absolutely crazy awesome things of which I have zero interest in imitating: http://youtu.be/yKWoPlL2B8I

Birthday season!

Well if you throw in Alex’s birthday from last week and the two recent birthdays of friends Clayton and Bryan and David’s birthday today and my mom and I’s birthdays next week, there has been a lot of cake.  I made my traditional Chocolate Wacky Cake with Instant Fudge Frosting and Raspberries for David’s birthday.  While it was good, I think the combination of new cake recipe (I left my good one back in Evanston), using a mixer instead of the food processor and using fresh raspberries instead of raspberry sauce, meant that it tasted just a little bit different.  But by far the best part of the evening has been playing round after round of David’s birthday pressent from Alex and I – Dominion.  While I know I dragged my feet quite a bit on this game and have kind of refused several invitations from my brothers to play it, I ended up finding it really fun!  Maybe it helped that it was almost entirely a group of newbies to the game, or what exactly it was, but now I like it.

And the exciting part is that my parents left on their epic Empire Builder train trip from Chicago to Seattle today and are probably currently making their way through the Twin Cities of Minnesota.  They arrive on Sunday and will be here for 2 weeks, which I am super excited about.  Now all I have to do is clean my room, check about bus tickets, pump the tires on my mom’s loaner bike, go to the library and possibly go bike shopping.  But seeing as it has somehow advanced past midnight, I should probably get to bed.

Have a good weekend, ya’ll.