I do have warm arms now,

but not much to post on. (I finished my Shifting Sands Armwarmers and they are toasty =] ) I’ll get something together after I’ve got the first few days of school taken care of.

Until then!

Avoiding the homework.

For my Advanced Placement (AP) English class I had to read three books this summer: Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, and King Lear.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: I love this book! Tis about a young girl in nineteenth century England who is orphaned as a baby. She is sent to live at a boarding school for girls to become learned. When she grows up, she gets work as a governess at a wealthy house run by the mysterious Mr. Rochester. They end up falling in love, but turns out, Mr. Rochester is married to a crazy woman who is locked upstairs. Through all of this, there is eventually a happy ending.
I read through this and got it finished in two weeks.

(Each book is assigned a packet of questions that are separated into nine sections. I try to do one section a day.)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: I also pretty much fell in love with this book. Sure, sure, somebody dies in it, but it is still a great book. Nick Carraway moves from the Midwest to Long Island where he gets involved with his very rich neighbor, Mr. Gatsby. Nick would rather lead a quiet life, but Mr. Gatsby needs him to get to the girl he fell in love with over a decade ago. It leads to a very tangled web of who knows who and what trouble are they going to get in, but it’s all very interesting.
I read through this and got it finished in two weeks, no problem.

King Lear by William Shakespeare: Ugh. This book (play) is one that I do not love. I started in last week and was planning on finishing it this week. Ha, I’m not even going to get close! I got through three sections of it last week, and one this week, out of a grand total of nine. I can read Shakespeare, that’s not my problem. But this play is just turning out so borrring. King Lear divides his kingdom into three parts, one for each daughter. The third daughter ends up not getting her piece and is banished to France, and the last two are conniving, evil women. A side story, Edmund has pretty much destroyed his father and brother in the hopes of inheriting all their wealth. That’s all the farther I’ve gotten..
Maybe it would be better if I could see it acted out?
Anyone have any suggestions?? *sigh* for now I’ll just stick to using my Sparknotes to get through it.

The rest of the reading list for AP English includes Frankenstein, The Glass Menagerie, Opidus Rex (Sophocles), Pride and Prejudice, and Death of a Salesman. I’ll let you know how those go as they come along.

And now I think I must get back to my trudging.. (blogs are a great distraction!)

The Breaking Dawn Post

SPOILERS!!!
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We finally have it! The last installment of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. I, like most Twilighters, sat down to read it the moment I received it and finished it just days after. Now what??

Well, I have to say that I really really enjoyed Breaking Dawn. (I think those of you out there who didn’t are just being stubborn.) It kept me interested throughout the whole book and everything fit together just so. Seriously, when you have three books like Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse, the ending book has to be able to tie up ALL of the loose ends.
I happen to be on the Jacob-team, but I still love Edward. I think that the way things went with Renesme and Jacob was perfect. After all Jacob went through, he deserves someone that great!
Some people say that the whole book was too different and too perfect for them, but I loved it. (I think something exciting could have been added to the “fight scene” with the Volturi, but oh well.) Stephenie Meyer is happy with the way it went, and so am I.

If you want to know how I felt about anything else in the book, just send me a message or leave a comment. I’m really interested to see what everybody else thought!!

Locked out of the house..

While trying to take these pictures >_<

Other than that, things have been going fairly well. Yesterday was our One Year Anniversary (Alucard and mine) and I just want to shout out and “I love you!” to him.

Two days ago, I finished the first of my Shifting Sands armwarmers. I love it! I cast on for the second one right after so that I didn’t run into the “second (sock) syndrome” that comes with making anything thing in pairs.

They are inspired by K’s design here. They’re knit in, yes, you guessed it: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Daffodil. (They same yarn still from the Mrs. Darcy Cardigan.) These are the last two skeins of it, but I just love how it’s turning out with this stitch pattern.

My parents took a day to themselves today, and came back with two little Tibetan purses for my sister and I. They are even wooly!

And I think that my brain just died, so I can’t think of a good ending to this post, but I hope you have a great day, and good luck to those of you in the Ravelympics!

P.S. For those of you interested in Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer, I received it in the mail the day I posted my previous post, and I finished it in three days!! I will be posting exactly what I thought about it in a different post in the near future.

Help!

* still waiting for Breaking Dawn to come in the mail… *

a meme

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

1. What is your first name? Jane
2. What is your favorite food? PIzza
3. What high school did you go to? BOLD
4. What is your favorite color? Blue (currently)
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Elizabeth Zimmermann
6. Favorite drink? Orange Juice
7. Dream vacation? A free vacation
8. Favorite dessert? Oreos and Peanut Butter
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? A mother
10. What do you love most in life? Living
11. One word to describe you. Caring
12. Your Flickr name. mehlhouseblogged

Thanks to Emily at The Dean Street Chronicles for sharing this meme!

second post in one day on a supposed hiatus?

I do believe so..

So, it has been a slightly monumenal day for me as a knitter. I have made two huge discoveries!:

1. The Yarn Harlot – why didn’t I find her little bit of knitting wisdom sooner?? Possibly because it was suggested to me on more than one occasion, and I shrugged it off. Maybe because I even knit one of her patterns (An Unorignal Hat) and failed to find the time to look into the designer like I usually do. Or it could be because sometimes, I’m a fairly ignorant knitter (and end up in all sorts of trouble.)
Anyways, last week when I was looking through the library’s catalog of knitting books, I stumbled upon her book, “The Yarn Harlot: the secret life of a knitter”. I checked it out, along with a few other things. Today, while on my lunchbreak, I started reading said book. Almost couldn’t get myself to stop so that I could return to my work, and I finished it a half hour ago! (That being approximately four hours to read the whole book.)
I told my boyfriend that he should be forever grateful that I do not hide yarn in my piano =]

And now for the second discovery?

2. Twist Collective! – It feels like I’ve been living in a knitterly hole after discovering this one. The Autumn 2008 patterns are simply gorgeous. This is a wonderful invention, this Twist collective. Very polished and super easy to navigate. (The one thing that drives me absolutely crazy when searching for a knitting pattern on the internet is when the website has either a. no organizational skills, or b. no picture of the pattern, just a link. It leads to a verrry long process when you have a slow computer.) Twist has great pictures to go with the great patterns. Thank you Twist Collective!!

I would really, really love to knit Little Birds by Ysolda Teague. I have my eye on a couple of other ones as well, but first I would like to (have to) get through some stash projects first.

So this will be the end of my rant for tonight. I will go to bed completely satisfied with my knitting rendezvous for the day. May you sleep just as contentedly.

Breaking Dawn countdown

So, I tried to post a countdown timer for the release of the book Breaking Dawn, but it was a no go..

Stephenie Meyer is amazing! I, as an aspiring fiction writer, would count her as one of the people that I look up to as an author. I read her first book, Twilight, when it first came out, and I’ve read all three of them several times over.

Basic overview: (I tried to be very basic so as not to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but beware because you might consider it spoiled!!)

Twilight: Bella, a human, meets Edward, a vampire, and they fall in love even though it’s bad for both of them. Bella runs into all sorts of trouble vampire-wise, but still wants to become one.
New Moon: Edward goes away, and Bella become best friends with Jacob Black, who turns out to be a werewolf (the one mortal enemy of the vampire). Bella has to save Edward, and things become harder between her and Jacob when she leaves to go to Edward over staying with Jacob.
Eclipse: A loose army of newborn vampires is raging in Seattle, lead by the vampire that is out to kill Bella. The vampires and the werewolves team up to be able to stop them. Bella realizes that she is in love with both Edward and Jacob, and has to choose between them. She chooses Edward, and Jacob is gutted by it.
Breaking Dawn: * waiting and waiting and waiting for it to get here from BarnesandNoble.com!!! *

So yes, these are one hell of a series, and I love ‘em =]
If you want more info on the books or on Stephenie Meyer, go to her website: www.stepheniemeyer.com – I didn’t even get a chance to mention her separate book, The Host, or the movie of Twilight, that is coming out December 12. Stuffs for another post!