Colors.

This is a fun test I found on another site: Color Career Counselor. When it gets to the part where it asks for all your information, just scroll down and hit "No Thanks" and you can get your results. Here's an article that describes the test.

I have to say my results were dead on for my personality:

Best Occupational Category

You're a CREATOR

Keywords

Nonconforming, Impulsive, Expressive, Romantic, Intuitive, Sensitive, and Emotional

These original types place a high value on aesthetic qualities and have a great need for self-expression. They enjoy working independently, being creative, using their imagination, and constantly learning something new. Fields of interest are art, drama, music, and writing or places where they can express, assemble, or implement creative ideas.

CREATOR OCCUPATIONS
Suggested careers are Advertising Executive, Architect, Web Designer, Creative Director, Public Relations, Fine or Commercial Artist, Interior Decorator, Lawyer, Librarian, Musician, Reporter, Art Teacher, Broadcaster, Technical Writer, English Teacher, Architect, Photographer, Medical Illustrator, Corporate Trainer, Author, Editor, Landscape Architect, Exhibit Builder, and Package Designer.

CREATOR WORKPLACES
Consider workplaces where you can create and improve beauty and aesthetic qualities. Unstructured, flexible organizations that allow self-expression work best with your free-spirited nature.

Suggested Creator workplaces are advertising, public relations, and interior decorating firms; artistic studios, theaters and concert halls; institutions that teach crafts, universities, music, and dance schools. Other workplaces to consider are art institutes, museums, libraries, and galleries.

2nd Best Occupational Category

You're an ORGANIZER

Keywords:

Self-Control, Practical, Self-Contained, Orderly, Systematic, Precise, and Accurate

More book stuff.

I was going to run some errands this morning, but as the snow is falling again and accumulating far beyond what the weather people said it would, I guess I'll stay home and not risk the chaos out there.

Kim asked what I've been reading, so here's a rough list of things...

I read a mystery called The White Garden by Stephanie Barron, who writes a pretty good mystery series about Jane Austen that I used to read. This is a stand-alone novel about what may have really happened after Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and waded into the river in 1941. It was pretty good (I have found Barron to be a consistently "pretty good" writer) and it got me interested in Virginia Woolf and her friend/lover Vita-Sackville-West, and also the gardens at Sissinghurst, Vita's home, as I mentioned before.

So I had a copy of Mrs. Dalloway from the the thrift store around here, and I picked that up. I was an English major in college, and yet I never read any Virginia Woolf, not even "A Room of Her Own," which I think is supposed to be mandatory for English majors with a women's studies emphasis!

I had tried to read Mrs. Dalloway once or twice before and never gotten past the first page or two before getting distracted, but I must have just been in the perfect frame of mind, because I floated right through it and thought it was terrific.

Vita Sackville-West also intrigued me from her characterization in The White Garden, so I ordered one of her novels from Paperback Swap and read it: All Passion Spent. Sackville-West was nowhere near the kind of writer that Woolf was, but it was still an excellent story of an elderly woman whose husband dies and who astounds her children and grandchildren by taking charge of her life for the very first time. It was a quick, good read. There aren't many of Sackville-West's books in print any more, but I'd like to find a few more to sample.

Vita Sackville-West had a very long and interesting marriage to a man named Harold Nicholson, who worked for the diplomatic service in Great Britain. They fell in love and married right before the first World War, but their marriage was severely strained several years later when Vita had her first affair with another woman. This story is told in their son Nigel Nicholson's book Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold spent almost forty more years together after this crisis, but never shared a bed again, she sleeping with other women and the occasional man, he sleeping with other men. And yet they were devoted to each other and to their homes and gardens. It's a pretty interesting story, to say the least.

I am a total Anglophile, and books that take place around the First World War through the Second World War are always interesting to me. Someone on the Paperback Swap forums (have I mentioned how much I love that site?!) brought up an author named E.F. Benson, who was a prolific writer, but who is most famous today for six novels he wrote about a woman named Emmeline Lucas (called "Lucia" by her friends) who rules the small town she lives in with an iron fist. The first Lucia book (Queen Lucia) was written in 1920, and you wouldn't think a 90-year-old book could be so wickedly funny, but it is. I've read the first three books and have the second three on order...I don't even know how to describe them except to say that if you find British sitcoms funny, you will probably find these books funny. Nobody is better at poking fun at people's pretensions than the British.

I finally got 84, Charing Cross Road from my Paperback Swap wish list...I had seen part of the movie on TV a month or so ago, so I knew how it ended, but I still enjoyed the book. It's a very quick read, a little story told in letters between a New York writer named Helene Hanff and the used bookstore in England where she orders books. The letters span a 20-year period. It made me very nostalgic for a time when you could stick a couple of bucks in an envelope and get antique books from London!

Somehow I got interested in reading Shirley Jackson, and I can't remember how. Many people had to read her short story "The Lottery" in junior high or high school--it's her most famous work by far. I heard somewhere about her last book We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and requested it for Christmas, and read it all on Christmas evening, which was a creepy way to end a holiday. It is one of the oddest books I have ever read, but it sticks with you--the story of two sisters who live in a big house with their deranged uncle, as told by the younger sister Merricat. Read it, it's good.

Then a couple weeks ago I picked up Jackson's other novel, The Haunting of Hill House, which was also very good. For people who are jaded by years of violent horror films, this book might not make much of an impact, but if you are an imaginative sort of person who doesn't even like to sit through scary movie previews, you'll get quite a few pleasurable spine chills from the story. It, too, has stuck with me...Jackson had a real talent for setting a scene and adding details that made it come to life and feel very real to the reader.

Shirley Jackson spent her early career writing the kind of domestic humor that a lot of women writers were stuck writing in the late 40s and through the 60s--stories about absent-minded husbands and adorable but cantankerous children. I found her best-known of this type of book, Life Among the Savages, and read it a few days ago. After reading her dark, spooky fiction, this light-hearted story of her four children and her family's move to an old house in Vermont hardly seems like it could be written by the same person at first glance, but I could see in it some of her same careful prose and even a few dark bits peeping out here and there.

I am really eager to get Jackson's biography--it's on my wish list at Paperback Swap--and find out more about her. She died in her mid-forties, from too much food, alcohol and pills--certainly the flip side of the light-hearted wife and mom she portrayed in her humor books, and more in keeping with the haunted women in her short stories and novels.

So that's a bit of what I've been reading the past few weeks. And I just keep finding more and more and more...!

Book stuff.

This is the year I turn forty, and even though it doesn't happen until October, I am already wrestling with it hard.

One of the many anxieties that has crossed my mind related to turning forty is silly, but very much a part of the "time running out" feeling I've been wrestling with, and that is--so many books to read, so little time. Which is a cliche, but like most cliches, all too true!

I've always been a voracious reader, but I hopped and skipped along, reading this and that, or not reading anything new for a few weeks here or there...and I often bemoaned the fact that I had "nothing to read." Lately, I've been feeling more and more breathless, looking at the stacks of books to be read, and finding new books to add to the stacks almost every day. I've gone from famine to feast, especially since I joined Paperback Swap and started trading for books I never would have found otherwise.

I watched a BBC miniseries of "Bleak House" this week on Netflix, and decided to read the book, which I was pretty sure I had tucked away on a shelf upstairs. I dug around and found A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, which I've read; and David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, which I haven't gotten to yet, but no Bleak House.

Providentially, Borders sent me a coupon in this morning's e-mail, so I printed it off and took myself to Borders, where I did find a copy of Bleak House and heaved it down off the top shelf. Let's just say this is a daunting-looking book. Even in paperback, it weighs a ton. It's 800-some pages long--and tiny type! I have a feeling this book may take me through my fortieth birthday and beyond.

In the past few months I've been finding all sorts of new topics and new authors, with an emphasis on early 20th-century fiction and history. I've read bits of Dorothy Parker and Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf and Vita-Sackville-West. I've read about Bohemians in England and the Lost Generation and the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle. Every topic and every author washes up against each other and overlaps and there's always more threads to follow and more people to find out about. It's a little overwhelming.

I've also changed my method of reading lately. I'm using bookmarks! I've always been a dog-earer and a plopping-open-face-down reader, but after ruining a couple of perfectly good books by plopping them face-down onto unseen table and counter stains, I decided to invest in a couple of tassled bookmarks. They have an added bonus in that you can play with the tassel while you read.

Maybe it's just a winter kind of feeling, and once the sun comes back out and there's more to do outside, I'll lose this urgency that is making me feel like I should have a book in front of me at all times. But right now, I feel like a squirrel stashing nuts--except it's books and they take up way more room.

Snow on snow on snow.

Well, we are just having a lovely day here...the snow is still coming down, although much more lightly, and I think we have four or five inches of snow. Todd is sledding on our backyard hill with some of the neighbors, and I am inside babysitting my wheat bread (which is baking right now and smells so good I want to lick the oven door) and intermittently reading one of the creepiest books I've ever read (The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson.)

The snow is very exciting. It's supposedly the most snow this area has gotten in ten years, and we've certainly not seen anything like it in our seven years here.

I tried to run out and make a snowman while my dough was rising, but the snow's too powdery and fluffy. Maybe tomorrow after it settles a bit.

I did take a couple of pictures in the garden and backyard:


Our neighbor Ray came over with his two youngest and you never saw two happier kids. Sledding is so much fun! When my bread gets done baking, I'm going to go out and take a turn myself.

We just have to be careful not to go sliding right on into the creek at the bottom of the hill!

It is bitterly cold out there, and the wind's blowing hard. I wasn't sure what to wear on my feet out there, since I have no tall snow boots, and then I remembered a hazy memory of various moms putting bread bags on their kids' feet when I was in grade school, to keep their feet dry. So that's what I did:


It worked great, too. My feet were by far the warmest, driest part of me!

Lovely roast chicken for dinner, and then Thai chicken soup tomorrow. Life is good. Hope everybody stays safe and warm!

Spicy!

Whipping a small portion of my life into shape is just about one of the most satisfying things I can think of. Even if all else is chaos, at least I can look at one tiny bit of it that I've managed to control.

This week, I took control of my spices. I whipped 'em right into shape.

I wish I had a "before" picture, but I can sum it up pretty well, I think. One drawer full of big and small McCormick-type bottles and a few packets. One cupboard with a completely overflowing wire basket full of little plastic tubs from the bulk food store. And the other odds and ends stuck in front of my flour and sugar canisters in another cupboard, where I had to whisk them from side to side depending on which canister I needed. I had every size and shape of spice bottle/bag/tub you can think of, and every time I cooked something, I spent 2-3 minutes rummaging through everything in search of whatever I needed.

So I took my problem to a "foodie" forum, and someone suggested Alton Brown's system. I haven't watched his show in ages, but basically he puts everything in little tins and then sticks them to strips of velcro inside his cupboard doors.

And voila!



The bottom cupboard door (first picture) has all my culinary spices. The top cupboard door (second picture) has my baking spices and various spice mixtures. Since I had a little extra room, I went ahead and velcro'ed my extract bottles and my toothpick box, too. Since the flours, sugar, brown sugar, etc are in that cupboard, it's nice to have all the baking stuff together.

I had one or two bottles that had more spice than would fit in the tins, but I just put those back into my original spice drawer, along with things like the popcorn salt and the Mrs. Dash and that kind of thing. So everything has a place, and order has been restored. Now to tackle the bathroom...

Just a quick picture for those who might be sick of winter...it's in the 60's here today, so I'm not sick of winter yet. I secretly wish it would snow about a foot!

But I was browsing through some photos from when we were in the OBX in October and I had not seen this one before. I thought it came out quite nicely.

Boring.

My friend Cheryl and I were just chuckling over how we didn't seem to have anything to chat about, because our lives are boring right now. And it's true, my life is pretty boring at the moment.

When I was younger, I used to think it was terrible to have a boring life. Now I realize that there are a lot of non-boring yet dreadful things that could be happening, so it's better to revel in the boringness while you can.

A few things from my boring life right now...


I finally got a nice white fridge for my kitchen, replacing the stainless steel abomination that came with the house. It was impossible to clean, and had black sides, which really sucked up the light in this north-facing kitchen. We took advantage of end-of-the-year sales plus Todd's dad's Sears employee discount and got a great deal on this one. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning when the guys arrived with it last week. It's so beautiful!

I have experienced lots and lots of serendipitous moments in my life, and I got to experience another one last weekend when we were visiting my brother's family and stopped at an old grist mill in Dayton, VA. The mill had a small gift shop, and the gift shop sold handmade rag rugs.

I had been looking for a long runner type of rug to put in the kitchen along that stove/counter/sink side where I seem to do 99% of my daily walking. The store had a 9' runner in the perfect colors. An elderly Old Order Mennonite lady weaves the rugs on a loom in her home, and she had made this long rug as a custom order, as all her other rugs are much smaller. The order had fallen through and so she put it in the shop to see if it would sell. And it did! Serendipity!


I'm so pleased to have a handmade rug instead of the typical Chinese thing from Target or somewhere. And for a lot cheaper, too, which is always a bonus.

I have finally, after years of hesitation, journeyed into the world of yeast breadmaking. I found a great recipe for wheat bread on Allrecipes, and I've started baking two loaves every other week. We eat one the first week and pull the other one out of the freezer for the second week. I had been getting more and more unhappy with the wheat bread from the store, and this is so much better, and I'm sure better for us...although slathering it with a thick layer of apple butter is probably not doing us a whole lot of good. Apple butter's good for the soul, though.

I'm starting to scrapbook again after more than a year's hiatus. I pulled down my 2002 album a few weeks ao to look for some phoos, and I was struck by how many of the pictures and the things I'd written about I'd simply forgotten over seven years' time. It really brought home to me, again, the reason I'd started scrapbooking.

And lately, especially since losing my grandpa and grandma last year, I've started to think more about keeping track of the people who are important to you. So I am working on last year's photos, and taking a vow to take more photos this year, and not just of the cute little kids in my life, but of all the grown-ups, too!

I'm working in the dining room, so I have tubs of supplies stacked there...not my ideal working situation, but it's what I've got to work with right now, so I'm making the best of it.

Speaking of people who are important to me, here's what we did last weekend at my brother's house...

Marissa and I faced off in Wii boxing (she kicked my butt):

Natalie Wii hula-hooped:


Tracy cooked us a terrific dinner:


Marissa got tickled:


Jeremy and Natalie got birthday cards and presents (their birthdays are a week apart):


...and we had a nice visit with their friends Mike and Jen and their little boys. A nice quick trip.

So maybe it's not so boring around here after all.

And like I said before, boring is just fine compared with what some people are living through. Like people in Haiti, for instance. I have been promoting Mennonite Central Committee on my Facebook page, and I'm going to do it here, too. These people do so much practical good in the world, you just wouldn't believe it, and they are amassing a major effort to provide relief to Haiti. You can read about what the MCC relief workers who were there when the earthquake hit are dealing with...it's such a devastating thing. I'm sure you've all donated already, but if you haven't or if you have a few spare bucks, think about MCC. They're already looking and planning toward the long-term in Haiti.

Winter sky.

I heard this quote on The Writer's Almanac this morning and liked it:

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing." -William James.

It was a bitter cold day here--19 degrees when I left the house at 7 AM--and I feel like I never did get warm today. My feet, especially, have just been freezing all day. I do like the clear sky when it's very cold, though--shades of blue and lavender and gray, with pinks in the early morning and early evening. You can see the lines of the tree branches against the light sky, it's so beautiful.

We have a small hawthorne in the front yard that shot up from a dropped seed several years ago, and it has become what I think of as "the bird tree" with anywhere from three to thirty birds on it at a given moment, all perched with their feathers puffed up like little pincushions. Since the tree is completely naked and the branches are very straight and streamlined, the birds really stand out. I suppose I should scatter some seed for them, but then I'd have sunflowers coming up in the flower beds all summer long.

I didn't take the above picture, I found it on Flickr, but it does look a lot like what I see in the neighborhood every day. Maybe this week I can get a good shot of the bird tree, if I bundle up and sit very still on the front porch!

Frugality.

Why is there an evil genie who compels me, after dropping off an entire carload of crap at the back of the thrift store, to then drive around to the front of the thrift store and go inside and look for more crap? I don't know what his name is, but he is evil!

(I only picked up a couple of books. And a Chinese basket. And two vintage saucers. Hardly anything, really.)

I have been meaning to share these little items ever since Thanksgiving weekend, when Todd and I went to an estate sale in the tiny town of Kensington, Ohio, and I bid on a bunch of box lots.

These were in a small box of sewing odds and ends, and they had an oddly familiar look and shape, but it took me a moment to realize what they were made of. Can you tell?


These little hat-shaped pincushions were made from the lid of a margarine or cottage cheese tub, with a cup cut from an egg carton mounted on top! Covered in fabric, trimmed with braid, and studded with pins.

Now that's frugal.

Happy New Year! (late)

Starting off my blogging new year with a template that my friend Mimi uses sometimes, from A Woman's Daybook:

Outside my window...Sunny, partly blue sky, partly feathery gray clouds.

I am thinking...about all the things on my 2010 "to do" list.

I am thankful for...a warm house, my beautiful nieces and nephews, my sweet husband who spoils me.

From the kitchen...finished off the last of my Christmas ham/cheese/veggie leftover soup for lunch.

I am wearing...black yoga pants, blue long-sleeve tee, slippers.

I am creating...the last of my Christmas journal, and hopefully some scrapbook pages soon. Also have a Valentine craft idea floating around in my mind.

I am going...nowhere today. Feels nice.

I am reading...a Louisa May Alcott biography and a Ross MacDonald mystery.

I am hoping...this free-floating anxious feeling will dissipate soon.

I am hearing...the fan, the washer, and my keyboard keys clacking.

Around the house...washing sheets and towels, tidying up, looking at my study with tiredness, knowing it's time to once again clean and purge.

One of my favorite things...Sheldon Cooper, theoretical physicist, as played by Jim Parsons.

A few plans for the rest of the week...car repairs, errands, knocking more stuff off the "to do" list.

A picture I am sharing...for anyone else who's a little tired of winter browns and grays:

When the party's over.

I'm trying very hard not to give in to that post-Christmas let-down feeling, because it's no good to head into a New Year feeling blue, but January is so grim after sybaritic December. You have to start watching what you spend and eat again, whip your house into shape, make stalwart resolutions that you know you won't keep...oh, it's grim!

Actually, I have a lot of things I'm looking forward to accomplishing and enjoying in 2010, and I hope it will be a good year...but first I've got to get through the next week or two of putting the Christmas stuff away, getting re-organized, making lists and plans. Boring!

Our holiday company left this morning, too, so that contributes to the anti-climactic feeling. The house feels empty without John and Viv in it.

We had a nice Christmas together. On Christmas Eve morning we went up and strolled around Colonial Williamsburg, taking in the holiday decorations. It was COLD.


The decorations were gorgeous...every shop and house puts up different kinds of wreaths and hangings, and it's fun to see what they come up with.


I thought my cheeks were going to freeze off.


Christmas morning we got up, had breakfast, opened some presents, and then my friend Beverly came up from Virginia Beach to have lunch with us. It was a really relaxing day.


Bev got me a "Slanket," among other things, for Christmas. I had been thinking wistfully about those things earlier in the week, because it's been so cold here, and voila! One for my very own. It's warm, too!


I got Bev a bunch of tropical-themed stuff, among which was "Blue Hawaii" with Elvis, so we watched that after dinner and laughed our heads off. Then after she went home, we played a game and sank into a ham-and-cookie coma.

I hope everybody else had a great Christmas, too.

Ho ho ho!

The Christmas busy-ness hit with a vengeance the past several days, but I have a nice chunk of free time this afternoon to upload the past six days of my Christmas journal:


Todd's parents arrived last night for a Christmas visit, and we're so glad to have them here. Todd's dad seems to be glad to be here, too...

Hee hee.

I baked a couple batches of cookies this morning and we're all just hanging out and relaxing this afternoon, listening to Christmas music. It's great. Once Todd gets home from work this evening, Christmas will officially have begun!

Snow.

I love those little magical Christmas moments that pop up from time to time. It started snowing here tonight around 6:oo and we had to go to Todd's office party at the Newport News golf club. The club is in the Newport News city park...the park does one of those drive-through holiday lights things every year, and to get to the clubhouse, you have to drive through almost the whole light display. Since you're going to a party, they let you drive through for free instead of having to cough up the $10 per car it would normally cost you. So it's a very festive way to go to a party!

The party was nice--great food, good people to talk to, although no one got drunk and made a fool of themselves this year, which I found disappointing. Through the whole party, we could see the snow falling outside the windows.

When we left, we had to walk back along the road to our car. On one stretch, we were walking between these tall thin trees all strung with pink and white lights, and the snow was falling in these huge wet flakes...it was so lovely. Very magical-feeling.

Especially since snow is such a rarity here. This is our seventh winter here, and I can count the snowfalls on one hand. That includes the dustings that melted by the next day. So snow is an event.

Everyone to the north of us is getting buried, but I don't think the snow will stay here long. It's exactly 32 degrees, and the precipitation wavers between very wet snow and very cold rain. Once it warms up tomorrow, the snow will definitely become rain and that will be the end of it. Todd says the freeze line is right between here and Williamsburg, so 15-20 minutes away they are getting piles of snow, and here it's just white and mushy.

Maybe it will stick long enough for me to get some snow pictures tomorrow morning!

Getting ready.

All day today, I kept thinking it was Friday, and then felt a wave of relief every time I realized it was only Thursday. It was like getting an extra day for holiday preparations, all day long.

Mostly what's left for me to do involves cleaning and cooking. Boring! But after shopping for five hours today, I think I may be ready to do something a little more boring. It's starting to get crazy out there. I was in Macy's for over an hour, and I could feel the beginnings of the frenzy! Everybody had a faraway, agitated look in their eyes, counting up what had been bought and what needed to be bought.

I had a bit of a faraway look myself...trying to remember if Todd had anything suitable to wear to the office Christmas party tomorrow night, and trying to find something dressy yet warm for myself to wear, as my wardrobe hasn't yet recovered from my post-surgery purge. I found a nice blouse/sweater thing on the 75% clearance rack and was quite happy. And I got Todd new dress slacks and a festive-looking tie. Now we just have to ascertain that he has dress shoes on a shelf somewhere.

Tonight I wrapped presents and ate a few pieces of holiday chocolate, and found "Christmas in Connecticut" on TCM. Todd is out trying to catch a few more stripers for the freezer. And I still keep thinking it's Friday!

Here are the past two days of my journal. If Todd is reading this, he isn't allowed to look at the journal pages. I mentioned one of your gifts, so don't look, sweetie!