Books Read in 2011

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Love Wins by Rob Bell

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling

Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark
Cross Country by James Patterson
Smells Like Dog by Suzanne Selfors
Skin by Ted Dekker
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

I know I'm missing some! Time to research my year....

Brazilian Blowout, Baby

UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom to see my hair air dried on 06/08/11, three weeks and one day after getting the Brazilian Blowout. (It looks close to how my hair did before the BB, after blow drying only.)
--
After a couple of years of research, I have finally gotten my much-desired, long-awaited Brazilian Blowout, thanks to an amazing Groupon deal!

Here's some back information. It's pretty confusing if you just Google "Brazilian Blowout" to decipher exactly what that means. It has kind of become a generic term when it shouldn't be, the way people use "Band-Aid" to describe any old bandage. That's a specific brand made by a specific company, and one is not always like the other.

That being said, I specifically got the Brazilian Blowout from the Brazilian Blowout brand. There are treatments, such as the "Brazilian Keratin Treatment" and others, that might be called a BB in layman's terms, but they aren't the same thing. For these other treatments, you can't wash your hair for 1 to 3 days, get it wet, put it up, put it behind your ears, or anything that could create a bend in your hair. These are also the ones that tend to have high levels of formaldehyde and other -aldehydes that are carcinogens and harmful. They specifically are straighteners, but the BB is a smoother that also straightens some. After getting the actual BB, you can go home and wash your hair, put it up, do whatever you want to with it and it's not a problem. Thank God! I can't imagine going THREE DAYS without washing my hair. Ick.

If I didn't cover something in this blog you'd like to know more about, leave a comment for me and I'll address it if I can.

So, at last, below are a bunch of different before and after pictures of my hair before and after getting the treatment. Let me know if you have any questions, and I plan to do an update in a couple of weeks!

Before the BB (blow dried and flat ironed, about 22 minutes)
Don't let this deceive you. Sure, I could get it looking pretty good, but it was a huge struggle and very time consuming. I used a lot of product and shine spray to get it to this point.

Before the BB (air dried, took a long time) #1

Before the BB (air dried, took a long time) #2

Before the BB (just blow dried, 16 minutes)

After the BB (just blow dried by the stylist, with BB serum) #1

After the BB (just blow dried by the stylist, with BB serum) #2

After the BB (just blow dried by me, with no product, 7 minutes) #1

After the BB (just blow dried by me, with no product, 7 minutes) #3

After the BB (just blow dried by me, with no product, 7 minutes) #3
As you can see, this looks just as good as it used to after only a few minutes blow drying, zero product, and no flat iron. I'm sure I'll keep using a smoothing product just for an extra boost, but I don't have to anymore!

After the BB (air dried)

2010/2011 New Year's Resolutions

I failed. It's true. My 2010 New Year's resolution was to read 25 books in 12 months, but I only made it to 17. Should've shot lower, I know! But I was being ambitious. So, I'm going to shoot for 15 this year, and I think I'll actually be able to reach that again. We shall see.

I also want to blog about every book I read this year. Clearly, I only blogged about a few in 2010, which cheated me out of the purpose of this blog -- to express my opinions about the books I read by writing them out.

Other than that, my 2011 New Year's resolution is to wake up earlier. I'm not and have never been a morning person, so once I started freelancing full time, I took full advantage of it :) My plan now, though, is to be more productive in 2011 than in 2010, and that will certainly require me rising before the Today Show ends. I'm shooting for 7:30 a.m. Monday through Friday (and if it happens to be 8, I won't beat myself up!).

Onward.

Same Kind of Different As Me

Whoa, I can't believe I haven't blogged about this book yet! I've been so consumed by settling in to our new life in L.A. that I pretty much forgot about my blog for a while.

Anywho, I'll keep this one short and sweet: Buy this book, read it, then pass it on.

The basic premise of Same Kind of Different As Me is that it is a non-fiction account of how a wealthy art dealer and homeless man enslaved in the South during the mid-1900s enter into each others lives and change each other. Or at least that's what you think it's going to be about. And in many ways it is. But it is also a story of the courage and strength of the woman who brings these men together, and her story is what I still dwell on after finishing this book nearly three months ago. I don't want to say too much about her role in the book because it came as a surprise to me, and I think it should for you, too. But it's one of those books God's Spirit just flows right from and truly has the power to change perspectives.

WARNING: This isn't a feel-good kinda book, but it's not a downer either. That said, I loaned it to my cousin Deanna on our big, family week-long vacation to Longboat Key this summer and needless to say, she let me know it wasn't beach-reading material, haha. I guess I would stick to reading this one at home during your regular day-to-day life.

So Far, (Not) So Good

Well, I've missed a full day of blogging about our travels, so let's play a little catch up.

Sunday, we arrived in Baton Rouge and stayed with the Francis family, which was ridiculously awesome! We finally got to meet Theo in person, who really is one of the most adorable children on the planet. Theo and Gilligan made friends, and I think were each a little sad to see the other go. After a delicious dinner at an (appropriately) French cafe, we played a bad news game of Cranium, which the guys won (shocker), then followed it all up with the famous chocolate-chip cookies Ryan and Elliott are known for whipping up together.

At about 11 Monday morning, we got back on I-12, which led us back to I-10. We drove across the 18-mile Basin Bridge, which was all kinds of fun. It wasn't long before we were bidding adieu to Louisiana and entered Texas. The drive through Texas has a really unfair bad rap. All we heard from day one about this I-10 drive was how long, flat, and boring Texas is. We only found the "long" part to be true. From San Antonio on, Texas was anything but flat. Elliott and I quickly got into a debate about whether the land masses we were seeing were in fact hills or mountains. Okay, so they were hills to begin with, but it wasn't long before they undeniably were mountains. And it was beautiful! The most awesome part about being in that terrain was watching (and dodging!) storms from 3,000 feet above sea level. We saw some pretty awesome rain clouds, lightning, and even what we thought was a dust funnel thingy.

I totally skipped over a small hiccup at exit 833 we encountered. Penske will have the last laugh about that one, and that story might come up all in due time :) (This story accounts for the blog post's title. But rather than bore you with the lengthy details, or worse yet, elicit your pity, let's just leave it be for now.)

Anyway, Houston was hellish. We made it through alive and Elliott only got honked at once. We finally settled for the night in a beautiful Holiday Inn Express, which did NOT allow pets. We are firmly against such things, but we had no choice but to sneak Gilligan in. Then we basically cat napped all night long for fear of Gilligan barking, which he did do about three different times throughout the night. NOT FUN. We were able to get him back out this morning by putting him in our computer bag and covering him with a sweater. Once we got to the 2nd floor's stairs from the 4th, he let out this awkward moaning sound from under the sweater, but thankfully, we left without drawing notice. *Sigh.

Tonight we are staying in Deming, New Mexico (the state I always forget exists!). The hotel is considerably cheaper and, better yet, dog friendly. I told G he can bark all he wants tonight :)

Onward.

And So the Adventure Began

I'm breaking my books-only blog rule to write a little bit about the Great Adventure, as it's so been dubbed, on which my husband and I currently are.

Yesterday, we left Gainesville, our home for the past 3 years, to move cross-country to Los Angeles, or more specifically, North Hollywood. This move has been a long-time coming: 2 years this August. It almost doesn't feel real yet that we're on this major road trip, I'm sure in no small part because I'm writing this from my sister's home in Pensacola. Once we get back on I-10 west of her home, a stretch of the road I've never been on, it'll probably hit us a little harder.

But then again, yesterday evening was as real as it got. We ended up having to back up the 22-foot Penske (which Elliott named Lucille, then realized the name didn't fit and switched it to Bonnie, in honor of the second named storm of the season) with an SUV on a trailer attached to the back, down a dirt road that's maybe 200 feet long. (Why, you ask? ONE, SINGLE low-hanging wire on Danielle's property that would have snapped had we kept driving forward.) Backing up was a seemingly endless game of missing mailboxes and not tearing down people's tree branches. We succeeded at the former and failed at the latter. By the end of the ordeal, I was a hot mess, but the Penske was safe at the opening to the dirt road and can now be pulled straight out when it's time to hit the road again in a couple of hours.

Thankfully, my sister had an awesome spaghetti-and-meatball dinner ready for us when we got here, and my niece Adalee was all smiles despite an ear infection. We were ravenous, having only had a McDonald's breakfast hours earlier and a hodgepodge snack of beef jerky (thanks Lanette, Lauren, and co.) and crackers and cheese (thanks, Mom Morgan).

It looks like we'll be driving in rain the rest of the day. Next stop: Baton Rouge, LA, where we'll finally get to meet little Theo and see Ryan and Sarah Francis after 2 (too) long years away.

Four days and counting until we're in our new place!

The Spiderwick Chronicles

If you're in the mood for some good kid-style fun, check out The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Some of the ideas within the book seem a little ripped off and unoriginal, but the adventures the children go on in each book are still undeniably fun.

What's even more undeniably fun is the way I got my hands on these books! In late April, I exhibited with my company, Maupin House, at the International Reading Association conference in Chicago. If you're not familiar with the annual IRA conference, it's a gigantic trade show for educators. They come from all over the world (but primarily the U.S.) for professional development, lectures, interactive sessions and presentations, books and teacher resources, and, of course, a good time!

The big (publishing) dogs are always at IRA -- that is, Scholastic; Little, Brown and Company; Random House; Disney; and Walker; among independent publishers and many others. The big guys always provide pre-pub books, or ARCs as they are more commonly known, which stands for Advance Reading Copy. These are uncorrected versions of books that are planned for press in the upcoming months. It's kind of cool because you get to read something that's not available to anyone else yet -- an insider's perk!

At the end of the conference, many publishers would rather give away they're regular for-sale books than pay to have them shipped back to their warehouse and that's how I got two of the five Spiderwick Chronicles. A co-worker is really into children's lit and owned the rest so she let me borrow the ones I didn't get for free. (When all was said and done, I went home with about thirty free books total, including ARCs and for-sale books the publishers just gave away. SCORE!)

The books are super cute, and I'd have to say the presentation (that is, the cover, binding, paper, etc.) is half the charm. They look darn good on a book shelf. These are ideal books for bedtime reading to a child of second- or third-grade level and are definitely appropriate for fourth and fifth graders to read independently. I say check 'em out!

Next on the reading list: Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent.