5 books I read over and over

I was looking at all of the books in my bookcase the other day and I realized that there are five books that I always come back to. Books that I've read multiple times and will continue to read over and over again. Would you like to know what they are?

In no particular order, here they are:

{1} Jane Eyre: by Charlotte Bronte

The first time I read Jane Eyre I thought it was boring and couldn't read past her living at the school as an orphan. Which is ridiculous because that's the very beginning of the book and it's a short section. Eventually my younger sister read it all the way through and was in love with it. So of course, I had to try it out again.

I love this part... "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?... And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you."

(Also, just reading that has my mind singing the song from the broadway that uses that exact same line in the lyrics.)

{2} Life of Pi: by Yann Martel

When I was younger, the cousins would draw names for Christmas gifts. One year, the cousin whose name I had drawn had this book on her list. I bought it for her and was immediately curious about it. Eventually I read it and instantly fell in love.

The book has these little nuggets of goodness throughout the book.

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

That line! It gets me every time.

Some people have a hard time getting into this book. It's slow at first and they can never make it to the ship sinking. Which is a bummer because after that is where it really gets good!

People also have a problem with the ending of this book. I love the idea that it carries though. "The world isn't just the way it is... we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?"

It's the idea of creating a story in order to live through or with a moment. To remember things just a little different so you can still enjoy the memory. 

If you've seen the movie, Big Fish, the dad does this same thing with elaborating the stories and weaving in all sorts of tall tales. It's his way of becoming immortal through his stories, even though his life was more plain and ordinary.

{3} Cyrano de Bergerac: by Edmond Rostand

I have a special place in my heart for this little play. The movers packed this book with the cover bent and I nearly had a fit when I unpacked it. 

I was introduced to this book in high school. It was one of the books we studied in class. It's a play about a man with an abnormally large nose who is very witty and eloquent with words and also handy with a sword. He's in love with Roxana but she sees him as just a good friend. Christian is a new soldier and is very handsome and has caught the attention of Roxana but he gets tongue tied very easily and Roxana wants poetry and eloquence. So Cyrano helps Christian win over Roxana by telling him what to say and writing the letters for him. "You plus I equals one hero of the storybooks,"

Now it doesn't end there of course, but this book has little lines sprinkled throughout that make me laugh out loud sometimes! Cyrano is so witty and clever. "Call it a sort of lie, if you like, but a lie is a sort of myth, and a myth is sort of truth. No reason why Roxana should be disillusioned. Let's start a fruitful collaboration."

{4} The Fountainhead: by Ayn Rand

My last year in junior high, my English teacher gave us a list of books to read for the college bound student. Well, I love reading and I was obviously college bound so I would thumb through the list and underline titles that sounded interesting. Most of the time I had no idea what the book was even about. That's how I discovered The Fountainhead. It's kind of a catchy title and when I found out it was about an architect, I was sold. (I was interested in architecture at the time as well.)

Roark is an architect who battles conventional standards. He is a modern architect and in my mind I envision his style to be similar to Frank Lloyd Wright.

This paragraph defines Roarks ideas about architecture.

 The book is all about individualism instead of collectivism. Which is everything Ayn Rand is about. The book is a little bit of a hefty read as far as length goes. But I love her development of characters and her writing. 

{5} The Screwtape Letters: by C.S. Lewis

I can't rave enough about this book. I don't even remember how I came across it, but it's high up there on my list. And C.S. Lewis is pure genius.

It's about a devil named Screwtape who writes letters to his nephew devil, Wormwood, about how to go about tempting the human he's been assigned. He gives his nephew advice about how the humans work, what areas they are weak in and how to use that to an advantage. 

As you read, you have to flip things around a little to gain the full perspective. When he says, "the Enemy" he's referring to "God."

This is a hefty book, not in length but in quality. You almost have to read one letter a day and just soak it in until you can move on.

Really, the book is amazing and well worth anyone's time. I think I end up relating every church lesson back to this book. 

So there you have it, five more books to potentially add to your reading list!

Enjoy.

Something About Trees

The other day I was thinking about my Utah mountains and I realized that I have yet to miss them. That's a little odd considering I love them and missed them all the time when I was up in Rexburg. But I looked around and I think I know why I'm okay out here.

Trees. Big, tall trees.

The mountains back at Utah cradle you in a way. You feel secure being surrounded by them. Like they're a comfort blanket.

The trees have the same effect to me. They're so tall and loom over you everywhere. You can never see very far without a wall of trees blocking the view. (Unless your driving on the Causeway or in New Orleans... that's a whole different ball game.) But I like it. It feels cozy.

(Views from my balcony)

There's a couple trees here that always catch my attention.

The first are Crepe Myrtle trees. They are literally everywhere. They don't have one solid trunk, but multiple skinny trunks. At the end of the branches shoot out these pink flowers that look like half of a lilac. Most of the ones I see are sparse like this one... and I don't love the look of them.

But if it was an older tree and more filled out, then you get this... Which is pretty cool.

The second are the giant Oak trees that just drip with moss. Really, I can't get enough of these trees! They are my absolute favorite.

I was driving around downtown Covington today initially to find the farmers market. What I found wasn't worth getting out of my car for, so I just kept driving through all these old small neighborhoods. I found the most amazing giant oak tree. Not even kidding you.

This giant amazing oak tree also happens to be growing right in the middle of the road. The photo looks like it's right in the center of the road like a round about, but it's not. It's on the edge right before the intersection. 

Anyways, these trees are everywhere, especially on our drive to church. It's a good thing Scott drives so I can just look out my window. :)

One last picture. This is right by my apartment! (Ignore the yoga pose, sorry!) I love this area though!

Beginnings of life in Covington

After a not so bad 26 hour drive across the United States, we finally arrived in Covington, Louisiana. Our new home. We split up the drive between 3 days. The first day we made it to Amarillo, TX which was a 13 hour drive. Day 2 we drove to Shreveport, LA which took us 8 hours. And the last day was 5 hours to Covington. (It definitely helps when you make the first day as long as you can. The days after seem easy in comparison!)

I did pretty good on the drive as far as my emotions went. But the hour before we got to Covington, I started getting anxiety, which I mostly expressed in the form of being a "keep your eyes on the road!" sort of backseat driver to Nate. 

I really like Covington. I like the size of it. It's smaller, but still big enough to where you have all the major stores you want. The main thing we don't have is a Costco, but I found out today that there's one across Lake Pontchartrain in Metairie. But there's also a Sam's Club 15 minutes away as well. Our apartment is off of the main road that runs through town but it's tucked back in the trees away from the main road. 

The humidity hasn't been terrible. But when the sun is out on full blast... gahhhh it's bad. If it's overcast, I don't mind it as much. It feels good on my dry Utah skin right now. The lady showing us around a furniture store gave us some advice about the humidity. She told us to "get a drink. Get a few drinks and after that you won't even care." Obviously she didn't know that we don't drink and the only thing we'd be having is water, which I'm pretty sure I would still care about the humidity after drinking water, so.... wasted advice. 

I like our apartment right now as much as I can, seeing that we have a cheap air mattress as our only furniture. Yes, that baby serves as a bed, couch, and seat... stupid thing. We have what we brought in our car. Which was basically vacation essentials for 2 weeks, along with cleaning supplies that our movers wouldn't transport. Oh and my 2 little house plants. They survived the drive! We have no cooking ware. No pots, pans, silverware, baking dishes, cooking utensils... the works. We bought paper goods to use, cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and microwave dinners. It's a blast. 

We bought a hibiscus plant for our little patio and finally some chairs to go out there last night. (We finally have something to sit on other then the floor!) The hibiscus plant is doing pretty well and we already have a couple of blooms! 

This is the view from our apartment patio. I secretly love it. I love that there are no buildings behind us. I just stand out there at night and listen to all of the noises from whatever bugs/creatures/animals are out there. They really are quite loud. Also, no crocodile has been spotted yet. I'm on the lookout. 

Gateway Chalk Art Festival 2014

Chalk art festival number four happened for me this past weekend and I think it was my favorite image that I've done so far. It was also my last chalk art festival before Scott and I will be moving. 

 

There were three of us that worked on the image together as a team. Last year we did a Michael Jackson image but it rained and ruined our work, so we never fully finished it.
But we wanted to do something with a lot of color, something interesting that wouldn't be everywhere else. (Frozen movie characters were immediately thrown off the list of options. Way too popular.)
This was the oil painting I found that we decided to do. 

 Normally I like to prepare for the festivals by sketching out the image on paper using the grid and then when the time gets closer, rough sketching the full size we're going to do on sidewalk. But this was the first time that I never sketched out on paper, on sidewalk or anything before the festival. So I was not feeling great about it. Combine with the absurd amount of things going on in mine and Scott's life the past couple months... means I was at times regretting even signing up for the festival. I just didn't feel like I had enough time for everything and I was getting stressed out! 

 Starting the image was hard. It was hard to figure out how to make an oil painting work with chalk and a sidewalk. We were kicking ourselves in the pants for picking this image at first. But as the hours went by we finally figured out how to make it work.

Meet Amber. She is the messiest chalker I know. :)
 

Meet KaLee. She is a perfectionist and made our image perfect. Amber and I made her do that hard parts that we didn't want to even attempt. (Like the gondalas.... geesh hard.)

 We chalked for 7 hours Friday evening, ending at 9:00 pm. It started to get really windy so we taped a tarp down around our image and called it quits for the night. There is where we ended...

 It ended up only taking us 4 hours to finish the image the next morning. I thought for sure it would take longer but we got rolling along! 

 The image was 8ft tall and 6 ft wide. I have no idea if we won any of the contests. We didn't stay long enough to find out. But that's okay because I never do these for the contests. It's fun being in the environment of all these great chalkers around you, creating beautiful images. You get sucked into your own work and don't realize you've been on the ground as long as you have. I love chalking as a group. My first chalk art I did by myself and it was fun and rewarding, but I couldn't even attempt these larger scale, and more difficult images that we've done as a group. Plus it's just fun to spend so much time with your friends creating something.

Here are some of the other images that were done that I thought were picture worthy!

The End!

Thesis Defeated

Scott sent me this photo yesterday...

YAY!!! He has officially and successfully defended and conquered his thesis for his Masters in Geology! 

I'm a very proud and happy wife.

Yay for freedom and no more school stress!

Woot! Woot!

A Trip To See Our Future

Where: Covington, Louisiana 

Duration: Unknown, somewhere around 3-5 years

Reason: Scott has a job with Chevron!

When: July 22nd, the long drive begins!

 

The flight left Friday evening. We were finally going to see what our next few years of life would look like! By the time we were flying over New Orleans the sun had gone down and all you could see were patches of city lights grouped together. You could see a river running through the city, it's edges lined with lights. As we descended the windows started to get foggy and I knew we were in the right place... humidity.
 

The humidity slaps you across the face over there. It was 10:00 at night when we landed and it was still so hot and wet. I could feel my poor, dry, Utah skin just soaking up the moisture.

 

Our hotel was right on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The view was insane looking out at this huge lake with a road going across looking like it leads to nowhere. It takes a half hour to drive across and all the while you feel like you're driving in the middle of the ocean, you can't see any land going towards Covington! It is also the longest continuous bridge over water.

 

I loved driving around Covington. It made me think of the time I visited my cousin in Georgia when I was young. There are so many trees, big trees. And they line the edges of the roads. I liked the feel of Covington. It's more just a small town, away from the tourists and questionable items that you come across in New Orleans.

We started off our morning looking at the two apartments that we had narrowed our search down to. It took less time then I thought and was an easy choice! You turn off the main road, and the street stops at the apartments where they are back and tucked away in the trees. Scott will have at most an eight minute commute to work and there's a sports medicine office two minutes up the street if I can get hired there!

 

After finding our apartment we wanted to go explore New Orleans a little more. We were told that there was some stuff to see and good places to eat in French Quarters so that's where we headed. We found Bourbon Street. (You can't miss it. The smell is a dead give away along with the never ending rows of bars and loud music.) It's a gross street. I'm okay to never walk down it again. 

There were other streets in the French Quarters that weren't as bad. They were even quaint. We found a jazzy band playing out on a bench in the sun, sweating like crazy as they played. There were voodoo shops and lots of artwork displayed around a park. Past the park you can walk up to the Mississippi River and most likely see some steam boats.

 We decided to head back over to Covington for dinner that night. (We had seen enough of New Orleans for the moment and we did not want to get stuck down at the French Quarters at night.) We ate at Morton's Seafood Restaurant. It sits on the edge of Tchefuncte River. (I have no idea how to actually say that...) 

The food was pretty good. We weren't expecting our seafood platter of soft shell crab, shrimp, oysters, and catfish to all be breaded and deep fried, so that was interesting!

 Our flight back home was early the next morning, so it was just a small little trip. But I'm so glad we were able to go out there and see the area and find a place to live. I'm excited to move and I'm glad we're on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. :)