2 Peas Blogger Challenge...

What is your favorite fall activity? what fall traditions do you have?

My favorite fall activity is picking out pumpkins. Not necessarily the act of carving pumpkins, but of picking them out at the pumpkin patch. I love to be in the outdoors with the air crisp and clean smelling and all of the gorgeous colors of fall surrounding me. I love the excitement that I see in my daughter and her adorable penchant for choosing the "charlie brown christmas tree" of pumpkins so to speak.

Traditions...mainly picking out pumpkins, decorating for halloween, and carving pumpkins. Not really anything super different. Heck, maybe my family needs some new traditions. LOL

2 Peas Blogger Challenge...

Blog about the things you're scared of.. no matter how trivial.. no matter how big.. what kinds of things are you scared of??
Blog about it.

Since I love a good list. here it is....


1. Being like my mother
2. bugs, even butterflies touching me..as long as they don't touch me, I am fine.
3. not accomplishing anything with my life
4. my dh or dd getting hurt or dieing
5. not having control of my emotions
6. drowning
7. getting to retirement and having no money
8. screwing up my kid like my mother has screwed me up
9. not having a good relationship with my daughter
10. my husband or myself losing our job/jobs
11. house burning down or getting broken into
12. losing all my pictures/scrapbooks/my hard drive crashing
13. getting fatter than I already am
14. never being accepted by my brother or sister
15. not having friends


Ok, that is all I can think of...

Today's Inspiration

The following are layouts by suzdoyle on 2peas:

The History of Love....Nicole Krauss

The History of Love....Nicole Krauss....you inspire me.


Once upon a time there was a girl. When she was young, she felt like there was no where that she belonged. When she got older, the feeling would go away for a time, but 90% of the time she felt like somehow she was on the outside looking in. She always wondered how everyone else seemed to have it so...together, that they always seemed to know the right thing to do and seemed to say the right things and seemed to fit like pieces in a puzzle. She dreamed that someday she would meet someone/someones that she would fit with like pieces in a puzzle. Like perfectly fitting pieces in a puzzle. Someone/Someones that would understand her. But she never seemed to find that person...and even at 31 years old, even when she was married and had a beautiful child, she never seemed to fit in...and she wondered...does anyone feel like they fit in? those people who seemed to have it all together? did they feel like they were on the outside looking in? was everyone like a pea in a land of corn?

Anyway, as strange as the above post was, read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.

Thoughts...

I am terrible about blogging....

Narcissism describes the character trait of self love.
I have been thinking about this, I don't think that word accurately describes my mother, character trait of self absorbtion would be more accurate however, she certainly loves herself more than she ever loved me. ***note....the author is not nearly as emotionally as disturbed as she sounds, it is just a fact of life to her***
Anyway, I have been going through amazon.com and adding to my wishlist just for fun. My mother has been on my mind, I would like to understand her. So I put on my wishlist books about Munchausen's syndrome and malingering and factious disorders. Big difference here...hypochondriacts really believe they are sick, Muchausen's they know they are not sick and pretend to be sick to get attention. I certianly beleive that my mother has Munchausen's and to tell you honestly it makes me very leary of myself and my own motivations. Plus I can't tell you how much it has affected me in my business and personal life, whenever someone around me tells me that they are sick...I think that they are lying or exagerating unless there is actual physical undeniable proof. It makes it hard with your husband when he wants a little sympathy for feeling sick and you can't give it to him. I am just completely unable. Christian has to bring up to me that I am being this way and even then, I have to pretend to have any sympathy for him. He will say, I am feeling sick and I say, I am sorry you feel that way and honestly I can't even fool him. At least he is understanding about it though.

This is the affect that Brenda Vanderpool has had on my life. Not to mention the affect that she has had on the numerous people around her and my half brother and sister. I wish there was some way to show her the havoc she has wreaked and on all the people she has affected. You know like Scrooge. Wouldn't that be nice?

It also make me think about things like, oh dear God what if I turn out like her! or what have I done that may have affected people adversely and negatively for the rest of their lives. UGH!!! These are some really heavy thoughts.

Multiple Randomness coming...

First of all, I absolutely love the song Vincent by Don Mclean. i really love Josh groban's version. Here are the lyrics:

Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue, morning field of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless head on nameless walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.
Like the strangers that you've met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they're not listening still.
Perhaps they never will...


Absolutely fantabulous song!!!


Ok, we got a dog. She is a basset hound and she is absolely gorgeous, but driving us crazy with the entire potty training thing. But, she is going to be a wonderful dog when that is all taken care of.

I have joined weight watchers, I have been on it almost a week and I have lost 2 pounds so far. :)

Well read Book list...

There is a new "meme" running through the lit blog community (see here and here) that involves revealing how many literary "classics" you have read. I did this awhile back with the Modern Library's top 100 English language novels. To further reveal my lack of culture I will use the list provided this time. The ones in bold are the ones I have read:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua — Things Fall Apart
Agee, James — A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane — Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James — Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel — Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul — The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily — Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert — The Stranger
Cather, Willa — Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey — The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton — The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate — The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph — Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore — The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen — The Red Badge of Courage
Dante — Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel — Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel — Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles — A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor — Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick — Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore — An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre — The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George — The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph — Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo — Selected Essays
Faulkner, William — As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William — The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry — Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott — The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave — Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox — The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von — Faust
Golding, William — Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas — Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel — The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph — Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest — A Farewell to Arms
Homer — The Iliad
Homer — The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor — The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale — Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous — Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik — A Doll's House
James, Henry — The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry — The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz — The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong — The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper — To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair — Babbitt
London, Jack — The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas — The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García — One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman — Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman — Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur — The Crucible
Morrison, Toni — Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery — A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene — Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George — Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris — Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia — The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan — Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel — Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas — The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria — All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond — Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry — Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. — The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William — Hamlet
Shakespeare, William — Macbeth
Shakespeare, William — A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William — Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard — Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary — Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon — Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles — Antigone
Sophocles — Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John — The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis — Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher — Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan — Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William — Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David — Walden
Tolstoy, Leo — War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan — Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark — The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire — Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. — Slaughterhouse—Five
Walker, Alice — The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith — The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora — Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt — Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar — The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee — The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia — To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard — Native Son

So, I have been wondering lately ever since my boss pretty much called me an idiot (ok not exactly but if I told the story you would see that is what he did), what really makes a person "smart"?

Here is what webster says about the definition of smart:

smart /smɑrt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[smahrt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, adjective, -er, -est, adverb, noun
–verb (used without object) 1. to be a source of sharp, local, and usually superficial pain, as a wound.
2. to be the cause of a sharp, stinging pain, as an irritating application, a blow, etc.
3. to feel a sharp, stinging pain, as in a wound.
4. to suffer keenly from wounded feelings: She smarted under their criticism.
5. to feel shame or remorse or to suffer in punishment or in return for something.
–verb (used with object) 6. to cause a sharp pain to or in.
–adjective 7. quick or prompt in action, as persons.
8. having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capability: a smart student.
9. shrewd or sharp, as a person in dealing with others or as in business dealings: a smart businessman.
10. clever, witty, or readily effective, as a speaker, speech, rejoinder, etc.
11. dashingly or impressively neat or trim in appearance, as persons, dress, etc.
12. socially elegant; sophisticated or fashionable: the smart crowd.
13. saucy; pert: smart remarks.
14. sharply brisk, vigorous, or active: to walk with smart steps.
15. sharply severe, as a blow, stroke, etc.
16. sharp or keen: a smart pain.
17. Informal. equipped with, using, or containing electronic control devices, as computer systems, microprocessors, or missiles: a smart phone; a smart copier.
18. Computers. intelligent (def. 4).
19. Older Use. considerable; fairly large.
–adverb 20. in a smart manner; smartly.
–noun 21. a sharp local pain, usually superficial, as from a wound, blow, or sting.
22. keen mental suffering, as from wounded feelings, affliction, grievous loss, etc.
23. smarts, Slang. intelligence; common sense: He never had the smarts to use his opportunities.


Well, I know that I fit some of those things, not all for sure, but come on. If I fit one doesn't that mean I am smart? so, what does smart mean?