Camping, outdoors and honeymoons.

I was typing up my great grandmother's history when I discovered a possible reason why I love camping so much. My great grandparents spent the first three months of their marriage living in a tent (because great grandpa hadn't finished building the redwood log cabin- which my grandmother Patricia was born in). My grandmother Patricia wrote, "Mother set up an outdoor kitchen and began canning stuff from the garden on her wood stove. Dad went hunting and fishing and brought home salmon and venison, which she also canned." I find this funny, considering that I've always wanted to honeymoon in a tent or cabin.

The outdoors make you feel alive! Like you could do anything...

I love Red Cliffs- it's always fun!

And so, this discovery of my great grandparents living in a tent got me thinking about how much I love camping. I just love camping. I love hiking. I love walks. I love cabins and lakes and beaches. I love the feeling of soil and dirt, or in the case of the salt flats- salt.

I am terribly fond of laying on the ground, and listening to the Earth.

Camping is super- especially when you get to cuddle to stay warm!

A few months ago one of uncles asked me why I thought I loved the outdoors so much. I responded that I did not know why. But I think now I can safely say, aside from just loving it all on my own, it's a part of my genetics, and it's a family tradition.

Camping with the family- the ultimate in fun!

Hiking in water with booty shorts does not turn out well for those of us with giant thighs...but that's another (awkward) story. 
The outdoors are amazing- they are what inspired me to kick my getting healthy into gear! I want to not only keep up on the hikes, I want to lead the way!

Caving is fun- my favorite part is the bats, my least favorite part is the chance of death

As much as I love the desert red, I love being swallowed up in green!

Although I am afraid of it, I love water

I love typing up my grandmother's histories. I love reading all of the funny little stories. I love discovering that who I am didn't just poof into weirdness. My mother's a kook, my grandma's a kook, my great grandma was a kook, her mother was a kook, and her mother- and her mother joined the crazy Mormon's, or in other words- she was kook. I love the outdoors. I can do anything! I am a strong, kick yo' face in woman. I am an artist. I am Laura, and I didn't just appear into thin air.

I made this for grandma Patsy for Christmas 2009. We love to joke about grandma marrying other men...I wonder how grandpa Chuck feels about it.

This hike was hard for me, but it was amazing!

Dad and Jeremy with some mondo fish

Though dad didn't always go on our mega camping trips to Richardson's Grove, he loved the outdoors- and apparently he loved fishing. I've never been fishing, but I'd love to go. I don't know if I could kill the fish- at the moment I feel that I could. Hear that boys- date idea!

Dad and Josh in the great outdoors

Haha, I guess you can see where I get my exhibitionist tendencies...but that's another blog (I will say this, said blog would include a great-grandma in a nudist colony, and a whole lot of shenanigans). That's my dad on the far left, the bootiest one of the bunch.

Old ladies.

To start I should preface this blog with the line of thought that led me to old ladies.

Love the glasses and everything!

Naturally it started with me thinking of a handsome man. I was thinking of how I usually change something about myself, even just a little, when I like a guy. Like if he likes waterpolo, suddenly I like water polo a whole lot more than before. That's not to say I would start liking something awful like Nickelback or dolphins (I wouldn't be attracted to a fellow who likes those things anyway), but my liking for similar interests does increase. 

Then I was thinking about one of the last guys I was interested in, and how my love for baseball increased greatly. But as I mentioned previously, my increased interests in the hobbies of the men I am attracted to do not suddenly develop- they just...develop further than they might otherwise. 

(I'm sure some of my readers will find this behavior appalling or degrading, but then say, "Pssshh, don't even try to pretend you don't, or haven't, done this!" And furthermore, the good news/Epiphany- I realized I hadn't done this with the new attractive man. I like him and I feel no need to change or adapt. Gotta love a good pipe dream crush you don't have to change for.)

 

From there I started thinking about baseball.

This woman is SO glamorous!

 My first real job was at a small baseball park doing concessions. Sometimes when it was slow we could go out at watch some of the game. Then there are all of those amazing baseball movie that make everyone love baseball, like Sandlot, Field of Dreams, A League of Their Own, and Angels in the Outfield.

 Then I thought, what really planted a liking for baseball in me was watching it so much as a kid. But I wasn't watching it at home, or school, or anywhere you might think. I was watching it with Dorthy Martin- the widow down the street.

 I loved hanging out with Dorthy. It started with routine cookie raids with some kids in the neighborhood, but soon in became regular visits, and even a sleepover one time (my friend and I slept in the guest room- and my friend peed the bed, I felt real bad for Mrs. Martin).

 When I visited with Mrs. Martin we would watch a lot fo baseball. She said she didn't love baseball that much, but she and her husband used to always watch it, so it became a welcome routine. I would also help her around the house, and I'd play with her cats. Gee whiz, why'd do ya think I love old ladies and cats so much?

 One time I was having lunch at her house and she prayed for the soup- she recited the Lord's prayer- definitely a new experience for little Mormon Laura. I liked it though, I was happy she was religious, and it gave me one of my first experiences that taught me how beautiful other religions are. And how though I believe the Mormon church is the only church with the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, pretty much every other religion has truth, beauty and a portion of the spirit.

RAZZLE DAZZLE! RAZZLE DAZZLE!

 Dorthy also gave me Bon Bon Beaver, one of my favorite stuffed animals of all time, if not my favorite. I wish I still had Bon Bon, but I think he might be in that missing box that also had my treasured boy-band scrapbook and my hopes and dreams to be a ballerina/football player.

I don't condone smoking, but this lady is bad-a**

 Wow, that was more than a preface, that was a blog. So that point- I've basically been an old lady for 18 years...and I'm 24. I love old ladies. They can dress how they please, and do as they please (except maybe some physical things, dang deteriorating health!). I guess that's the awesome thing about being old when you're young. You get to do what you want and act senile, without being limited to a deteriorating body. Unfortunately though, I think my mind may already be deteriorating.

 Maybe that's why I had such a hard time making friends in middle and high school, non of my classmates were old enough...or cool enough. If only my classmates could have been 60-100 year old fashionistas. Then when I did something like fart, everyone would have just said, "Oh don't worry, she's old, " and they'd all get over it.

Old ladies are cool, because the turn the offensive into the cute. Except Betty White- she's just nasty and awful.

 As a freshman in college several people called me Grandma, and do you know what? It NEVER offended me. In fact, I liked it. I wore old lady perfume from the Goodwill. I wore my grandmother's jewelry. I wore my hair up in pins. I wore ridiculous blue eye shadow and coral lipstick. I still do a lot of these things, minus the old perfume and quite as ridiculous eye shadow- and I love it.

OLD LADIES RULE. Therefore, I RULE.

You know I own an old lady wig! The sunglasses and bath robe are just my normal bathrobe and sunglasses.

How fancy are you? Fancy reader...fancy.

I think people pass around this kind of thing, so they can boast about how well read they are. And so, I give you my list.

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

This woman is SO me.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.



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 (Working on it!)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I tried, but I kind of hate it. I'm still going to try again though- I want to love it and I don't give up easily)

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 Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

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

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 - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I read part of this in H.S. and at the time I was too lazy to really read all of it, I intend to read it eventually)

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

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

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

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

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 (I'm going to agree with Truman Capote here, "That's not writing, it's typing."

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 Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

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 (Sooooo boring)

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. 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

This makes me SO excited to read more classics!

Delightful things!

Well it has been a while, but one of my loves is still a love: list making! Today's list, 10 things that are delightful.

Biblecats.com calender image

1. White kidney bean magic!!! I recently learned a beautiful  replacement for butter in cookies! When making chocolate chip cookies, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume this applies to most cookies- replace the butter with pureed white kidney beans!!! My next adventure will involve garbanzo beans! Now I know you're probably saying, NASTY!!! But they're SO yummy!!! I will say this, you can taste the beans in the dough, but once they're baked- the beans are gone! And everyone who had some liked them! Here's my favorite recipe (Mrs. Field recipe):

1 c. butter -1 cup pureed white beans (I used a food processor)
1 c. sugar
1 c. brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. flour
2 1/2 c. oatmeal, ground in blender (this ingredient is a must, and a food processor works great, or you can buy oat flour)
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. soda
12 oz. chocolate chips (go for the milk chocolate Ghirardelli chips!)

Cream butter and sugars together. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix in flour, oatmeal, baking powder and soda. Stir in chips and Hershey bar. Bake 7-10 minutes at 375 degrees.

Yum yum yum- I'm inspired to find other healthier replacements!

2. Students. My students say the funniest things! Whether they're asking me, "Are you married? How old are you? Why are you single?" Or, "Did you make your hair today? Did you know Carson is a girl? He plays with dolls and sings like a girl! (Response from Carson:) I am! I half boy, and half girl," my students are always entertaining me!

I love this video! These are not my students, but I experience this caliber of pure kid genius daily!

3. My Christmas tree! Shelly helped my decorate it, and yes- those are all my ornaments!

Tree. Homemade paper stocking for Brangelina and the kids, my roommates, Shelly, and...me. Shelly's masterfully crafted mistletoe above the front door.

4. RACQUETBALL!!!!

5. CAR DANCING/KARAOKE

6. DANCING!!!

7. GOOD man hair. You know- the kind you wouldn't get your fingers stuck in, but the kind that you'd certainly want to run said fingers through. I'm talking kitten soft forearm and chest cuddle clouds. I'm talking the kind of beard that massages your face like butterfly kisses from a gay Pegasus who bathes in vats of sunshine lotion. "Si, azul...EXACTAMENTE!"

8. This next delightful item is something I've most definitely blogged or mentioned before: Great Lake Swimmers. I LOVE THEM. P.S. Perfect Christmas gift- I've only got Bodies and Minds, I want their other CDs. When I was making breakfast this morning I had my itunes on shuffle and this song came on. I thought to myself, "This music is heaven...it's like drinking in some warm heaven, and if it were summer it would be like drinking in cool heaven." Unfortunately the leads singer seems to have shaved his beautiful beard off for this video. Also, I don't love this video, especially compared to their other videos- but the song still rocks.

9. Feeling in control of my body. So, as I previously blogged about, I went on a sugar fast. Yes I ate fruit, fruit is SUPER vital. Anyway, I didn't have sweets or deserts etc. for three weeks before thanksgiving, with the exception of the Harry Potter party because my friend Anne made delicious home made treats. However, though delicious they may have been, it made me feel awful eating all of that sugar! When Thanksgiving rolled around I for sure had some Egg Nog (I love it!), and some pie- but in contrast to previous years, I had a few pieces (rather than 15 pieces of something terrible like that). Now that the Holiday has passed and I have about three weeks until Christmas break I feel rededicated to eat less, if any, sugar. If something looks terribly wonderful, I will eat it. But if someone says, "Want a Zinger?" I can confidently say, "No thank you," because guess what? I don't like Zingers, and I'm only eating sugar if it's really worth it!

10. My dad's nub. I know it's gone forever, but we love it! The nub is where it's at.

When my dad was born his mother had the German Measles. He had a heart defect since birth and Forrest Gump style leg braces. He was born with his fingers on his right hand fused together, and after many painful surgeries, he ended up with the nub. I'm happy that thanks to the resurrection he wont be stuck with the nub forever, and that his spirit is whole- but that doesn't mean I can't love the nub.

So there you have, 10 delightful things in my delightful life. Isn't it delightful...delightful like a viking riding on the wings of a tempest.