First Christmas.

First Christmas is a success!  I was able to finish the gifts I needed to on time and now I've got a little spread before the next celebration.  My brother thought his katamari was very cool, and my mother loved her funny new slippers!  I'm so excited!  Plus, I made out like a bandit, which is no mean feat in its self.  Now, I've got to finish the hot pads for my father and grandmother, I've got to find the soap I made and pack it off to Uncle, and I've got to make the boyfriend some of those funny slippers, and then I can work on a gift for myself!  I'm so excited to start on my hat!  Also, I'm crazy, because I offered to make a friend of mine one for Christmas, but I'm going to give myself some lee way on that one. 

Equally exciting, I got the first five books on my 100 book list for Christmas!  I started 1984, by George Orwell, this evening and I'm tearing through it.  I'm so happy to be reading for fun again!  Wee!

Okay.

I took my last final this morning!  Ahhhhhhh!  I have no idea what to do with myself at this point, it must be time to finish some projects.  Like the Christmas gifts I've left stewing for a week, or, dare I say it, clean the kitchen that has been amassing dishes for the same amount of time?  Finals week, it's hard, and long, and full of no time for anything else.  Woo hoo!

Finals.

I wrapped up my Fall Semester's classes last Thursday on December 9.  I am now franticlly studying for finals.  I really let myself go this semester.  I spent more energy on silly things than I did on my work.  I split my focus.  It was icky.  Today, I took it back.  I spent all day studying; starting at 9:30am.  I just took a break and watched the new episode of Bones over dinner.  Man-o-man, do I empathize with that episode.  On the upside, I haven't finished what I set out to do, but I did get a lot done and I will finish a few more things before crawling into bed tonight.

I haven't finished making my Christmas Presents.  I haven't started reading.  I have gotten back on track, will power wise, to do both those things. 

We all swim upstream sometimes.

Lets get started!

I found a random book list online with 100 titles.  My plan is to start reading around Christmas and make it through all 100.  It's not a hard goal, but it is a beginning.
Here's the list:

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. Animal Farm by George Orwell
11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
15. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
19. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
20. Ulysses by James Joyce
21. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
22. Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
23. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
24. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
25. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
26. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
30. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
33. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
34. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
35. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
36. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
38. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
39. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
40. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
41. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. The Stranger by Albert Camus
45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
47. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
48. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
50. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
51. Watership Down by Richard Adams
52. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
53. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
54. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
55. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
56. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
57. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
58. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
59. Dune by Frank Herbert
60. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
61. Dracula by Bram Stoker
62. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
63. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
64. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
65. The Stand by Stephen King
66. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
67. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
68. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
69. Middlemarch by George Eliot
70. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
71. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
72. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
73. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
74. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
75. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
76. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
77. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
78. The Trial by Franz Kafka
79. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
80. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
81. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
82. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
83. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
85. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
86. Persuasion by Jane Austen
87. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
88. The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer
89. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
90. Emma by Jane Austen
91. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
92. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
93. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
94. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
95. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
96. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
97. Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
98. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
99. Beloved by Toni Morrison
100. Atonement by Ian McEwan 

 I would like to then start another list that I found of 1001 books broken into historical periods.  I figure 100 is much more achievable than 1001 and I don't want to get burnt out right away.  I am also excited because a lot of these books I would not have strictly picked out for myself, some I have read already and loved, and others I've never heard off.  I don't plan on loving every one of these books, but I do plan on learning a lot and having a great adventure!

Wish me luck!  

Christmas Frenzy.

This Christmas I'm making as many gifts as I can.  I'm starting with my family and very close friends.  With the exception of my brother, father, and grandmother, I'm also only making things that people actually asked for (nice change).  Here's my to-do list:

• Mother, a rectangular or triangular shawl, or a pair of crocheted mukluks (she doesn't have any slippers)
• Father, a monogrammed microwaveable hot pack
• Grandmother, a monogrammed microwaveable hot pack (same as Father)
• Brother, crocheted katamari (super adorable!)
• Uncle, home made soap and crocheted soap bag for scrubbing
• Boyfriend, a pair of felted slippers (or maybe a cool hat)
• Me, a fair isle hat (my first attempt)
• Family Friends, premixed jar recipes; for example, hot chocolate (just add milk and heat) or soup (just add water)

This is a daunting list.  I have never made all of my Christmas presents before, but I'm off to a good start.  I've got my patterns picked out and I've already finished a few things.  Namely, the soap and soap scrubby for my Uncle.  I've also finished the crochet part of my brothers katamari, I now have to put the pieces together.  On top of that I've got the yarn picked out for my honey's slippers (although, I do need to go back and get some green for detail) black is his favorite field color.

I just got my mother's list and I am thrilled to discover that she wants a pair of slippers since I was already on my way to making a pair for my boyfriend.  Thank goodness!  I'm going to have to stop myself from being overly tempted to make her a pretty shawl.  I'd love to make it for her, but it would be the most time consuming gift on my list so I'm going to have to finish everything else first (that's my thought anyway).

Alright!  That's my first must finish list and I'm already on my way!

• Uncle; Check!

Step One: Hypothesis.

This is my personal attempt to complete some experiments I've been considering lately.  I'd like to finish some things.  For example, a book list, and then read all the books on that list.  Hopefully, this will serve as a means of reminding myself what I've started and that I do in fact need to finish.  That said, this is the beginning.