Visual Inspiration

I haven't had anything really awesome to say lately. It's not that my life is free from drama - on the contrary, but that's for another blog post when my blood isn't boiling and I can write something more than just an expletive - but rather I'm just not feeling inspired by anything. And don't worry, my one or two readers, I'm well aware that my blog posts are suffering. But with the lack of words on paper comes a different kind of inspiration. Rather than coming up with something witty, lately I've been taking some kick-ass pictures (at least I think they are!) Maybe it's Boston, or maybe I'm developing an eye for things, but check out these recent photos I took.





I took both these photos of the Boston sunset on Friday at the 4th of July celebration at the Charles River.



This is the burial ground in Boston Common. I love the way the light comes through the trees and the old, crumbly headstones. There is something so serene about this site.

My hope is that sometime soon I'll have something worth mentioning on here. In the meantime, I hope this trend of photo taking continues.

The Classics

Shout out to Martha for posting something so relevant and important. I'm going to make it a mission to read every single one of these "classics" as well as others that aren't on this list. I've included some of my top literary classics below that weren't on this list (which really makes me scratch my head.)

• "Dante's Inferno" Dante Alighieri- Read this in h.s. and STILL one of the most memorable books I've ever read.
• "The Odyssey" Homer
  
• "The Scarlett Letter" Nathaniel Hawthorne
• "Frankenstein" Mary Shelley
  

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (as with most books, 1000 times better than the movie)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (one of my all time faves – it’s such a seedy read!)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (how did this make it into the top 50?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I REALLY tried to get through this… and couldn’t. It was that terrible for me.)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray – (another of my all-time faves!)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Boston --> Texas --> Boston

June has been an incredibly busy month and it's no surprise that it's quickly coming to a close. The first week of June brought Devon to Boston (shout out for being the first guest!) and we spent the entire trip walking around in the sweltering heat doing the tourist tour of Boston. Here's a photo of us after our duck tour.

I have to throw this shot of us cleaned up at Brian's party because the duck tour at the end of a 95-degree day doesn't do us justice.


The day after Devon left Stephen and I boarded a plane and got our butts down to Texas. Sure, the temperatures were hotter, but Texas has air conditioning! We went for the annual tube trip with all of our friends and I brought Becky and JP along for the ride. There aren't many photos of the tube trip because I don't have a fancy camera that can go in the water, but here are some gems:

We were locked out of our condo thanks to someone (Stephen!) passed out inside.
Becky and me making the most of being locked out of our condo.
JP passed out on the car ride home. Priceless.
Stephen dining on crack noodles - aka "Blazing Masala Noodles" from Masala Wok. This dish is addictive!

The week after we got back, two of our friends from Texas, Bucky and Dusty (yes, I realize those are SUCH Texas names!) came to visit, and we spent the weekend eating seafood, BBQ and playing flip cup at Ashley's Awesome place in the North End. I won't show all the damage we caused, but here's a good photo of the group of us:So it looks like our visits are done for another week or so now. And we're just about done with the downstairs unit, so our tenants will have a nice apartment to move into next week.

Moroch, You Make Me Proud

I'm prefacing this post by declaring that I'm going to start a second blog. When I originally started this blog I wanted to talk about interesting trends, topics and ideas taking place in my industry, but then I opted to focus on getting through grad school and keeping my parents and friends informed of my MIA status. Besides, there weren't that many interesting things I was coming across in PR and Advertising. But now that's changing, and so I'm going to run a second blog focusing on interesting stories and finds related to my industry. I'll let everyone know when it's up and running so you can see what I live on a daily basis.

In the meantime, I wanted to call out a spot that my old agency back in Dallas, MOROCH, just did for the Travel Channel to promote the new show "Great Weekends" with Samantha Brown. They won the TC campaign just before I left the agency, and I had the privilege to see the great work that was going to break for "Bizarre Foods" with Andrew Zimmern, and knew it was going to be special. Well, when I visited last week I got the same pleasure to see the new SPOT and it's awesome. Special thanks to Adrants for letting me know the spot has launched.

BIENVENIDOS A TEJAS!!!

That's "Welcome to Texas" for you non-natives!

Yep, that's right, I'm back in Texas for the weekend and I couldn't be happier. I flew in on Wednesday evening and had dinner with Laurel, then spent all day Thursday hanging with my former Morochians. Today I'm dining on some Bone Daddy's BBQ for lunch then heading to Austin for our tube trip.

It should be GREAT times and I'll post pictures when I get back home.

Adios!

Volleyball, Take 2

I got some good news/ bad news/goodnews regarding summer volleyball. I'll start with the good.

Good news:
I got onto an independent league - yay!!! I'm playing volleyball this summer, after spending my hard-earned cash on lessons and getting my feet wet with the team I played with this spring. I wasn't sure it was going to happen, so I'm glad I get to hone my skills.

Bad news:
Because there were only 3 girls on the waiting list and not enough men, I didn't get onto the intermediate league I wanted to play on. I got put on the intermediate/advanced team.

Ouch! Talk about a fright fest! Playing with "advanced" people - that's a little scary. I've had to pull my PR "everything-is-good-despite-the-bleak-outlook" mantra on myself and say that this is a good opportunity to play at a higher level and improve my performance exponentially. Which is what will happen... I'm going to be a volleyball all-star!

I already feel better. :)

Good news:
My former teammate from lessons, A, and I are playing on the same advanced team! She was one of the other two girls who signed up for our indie play and got put on the advanced team too, so we've got a buddy system going. And we're planning on playing in open play on Tuesday nights, and with another league that does open play on the weekends. So my volleyball calendar card is super full this summer, and who could ask for more?

So wish me luck on my quest to be an all-star. Naturally, I'll keep you posted on my progression.

My Secret Love Affair

Shhh!!! Don't tell Stephen, but I have a new love in my life! He goes by the name of Home... Home Depot.

Yep, you read right. Home Depot is the new love of my life. And I'm sure I'm not the only closet - or out-of-the-closet - lover of HD. Every time I go, I see people just like me lovingly gazing at all that HD offers.

I've been to HD two or three times this week, walking up and down the aisles, pricing needed items for upcoming projects or dreaming about what I would do with an unlimited budget. And it never gets old. I'm frequenting HD so much that I'm becoming a regular face, the sales people knowing who I am and what I'm looking for. One guy even knows my Texas history and teased me about it today.

And it doesn't stop there. My love doesn't hold back, and makes me feel like I can do anything. Yesterday, I walked out of the store almost certain I'm going to be an electrician when we're done installing and updating the outlets in our home. Do you have any idea how cool that is? I've learned how to update our switch boxes, install new outlets, wire the outlet plugs, install ceiling fans and fish wire through the walls. Thank you, HD, for making me feel empowered!

At this rate, and with this kind of empowerment given to me by my love, HD may replace Target as the place I take my weekly me-time trips.