My November Fabric Challenge

The leaves are changing, it's getting noticeably colder outside, and all of the coffee places have specials on pumpkin spice lattes. It must be fall, and with fall comes November and all sorts of wonderful challenges.

My sister Devynn, has participated in NaNoWriMo for probably the last three or four years (and actually succeeded!) and I have yet to get past 2,000 words. It is inspiring to watch her meet her goals, but I would really like that to be me! This year, I've decided to try something different for November.

This is a photo of all of my beautiful fabric I have stashed away in my closet. Loads of clothes and projects that have only been a figment of my imagination. This November, I mean to change that, and hopefully begin some new good habits.

My November Challenge is to sew up one project per day. The rules are as follows: (1)that the garment must begin that day as a piece of uncut fabric, (2) I will post a photo of finished garment on twitter &/or facebook by the end of the day, and (3) I will allow myself one "catch-up" day per week.

All I have left to do is to think up a catchy hashtag for my challenge. I'm sure I will come up with something my November 1st, but and am certainly open to suggestions!

Here is to a productive November! I hope that yours proves to be productive as well!

Lord of the Silent

Amon-Re is the Lord of the Silent. Who is Amon-Re? He is the Ancient Egyptian god of the Sun, and a beautiful golden artifact found by the amazing Amelia Peabody Emerson in my most recently completed book.

I believe I have mentioned before that I am in love with the Amelia Peabody series written by Elizabeth Peters. I had started this series by listening to the audio books narrated by the fantastic voice talents of Barbara Rosenplat, but I had to switch to reading the books because Audible has a gap!

This post is mostly an update on what's going on in my life, as I have not been very consistent in my blogging (If you happen to have a twitter account, I've been slightly more consistent in getting tweets in...).

As I mentioned above, I just finished reading "Lord of the Silent" by Elizabeth Peters. It was a very enjoyable book, as they all have been thus far. I had the chance to finish this book because I read most of it in airports and in flight. I've recently started this thing while reading in which I write down words I come across that I either do not know the meaning of, or words that I am just curious of the dictionary's definition. In reading this book, I wrote down over 100 words that met the criteria I just mentioned, and I didn't even have my notebook with me for at least half the book! Here are some of the more entertaining words that I have had the chance to look up:

aggrandizement: to make great or great; to make appear great or greater: praise highly

picayune: something trivial, or little value; A Spanish half real peace formally current in the South.

surreptitious: done, made, or acquired by stealth

supercilious: cooly and patronizingly haughty

ungainly: lacking in smoothness or dexterity: clumsy; having an awkward appearance.

I'm happy to report that reading this series will be building up my vocabulary! You are probably curious as to why I was traveling, well, I just got back from a quick trip to Boulder, Colorado for a triathlon that Kambria competed in. It was a fun trip with the sisters; we got to see wonderful lightning storms, do some window shopping, eat bad Thai food, eat great Chinese street food, watch new shows, and see Kambria compete at a pretty large race! Kambria did well, though not as well as she would have liked. The most important part is that she qualified for another big triathlon at the end of the season. If you want to read more about her season, you should go visit her blog. She hasn't written about her Boulder Tri yet, but you can feel free to bug her about it!

I think this will be the end of my brief update. Coming up soon, I will write about my sister Devynn's Etsy store, and her self-taught glassworks business (she's making me an adorable pair of earrings!). You should check up on her store periodically, it's called Fallen Leaves Koi. Check her out on facebook and Twitter!

I will leave you with a picture of my newly acquired stickers. If you didn't know, I collect stickers to put on my sketchbooks (Cassandra does this too). I wanted to find a cool Colorado one, but didn't have the best of luck. These stickers are pretty cool though!

Update!

Long time no talk! Since when did Blogger change everything up? It seems I need to do more than just post an update, I need to learn how to use all the new features!!

Blogger is also trying to get me to update to Google Plus. Anyone else use Google Plus and think that is way better than Blogger? My sister Kambria just started her blog in Google Plus, and I was so disappointed that I couldn't be a "follower." I guess I'm not a religious leader or anything, so maybe followers aren't that important after all. 

I am always fascinated with November. In November you have all the men (well a lot of men) participating in being lazy and not shaving. Then you have all of these other awesome people who commit to writing a blog post everyday, or writing an entire new novel. My sister Devynn is participating in the novel challenge, and I am amazed every time she gives me the update of how many thousand of words she needs to write to catch up! My sister Kambria is posting blogs all month, and I have to say it is amazing what this creative outlet is doing for her! She is a triathlete, so a lot of her posts are very sports-oriented, but she's got some random fun posts in there too. You should go check it out here! Join her circle or +1 her, or whatever it is you do within the realm of Google plus!

In looking at my old posts, it seems I write more in the winter months. Must be all of the cold weather keeping me indoors. I'll be posting a little more often, I don't want the total number of posts for 2012 to be two....

Shadowless Sword and Chocolate

It's been a while since I've posted anything related to Martial Arts, and to relax a few weeks ago, I watched some martial arts films we've had lying around. Lucky for me Devynn is always up for watching some action movies:)

The first one I watched is called : Legend of the Shadowless Sword. It was great! It's a little unique because fist, it's a Korean martial arts film (In case you didn't know, the best and most of the martial arts film come out of Hong Kong). The other awesome thing about this film, is that the plot has very strong female characters. The premise of the story is a woman warrior going and finding the banished prince so he can come back and be king. I wouldn't want to give away any of the plot, but I really enjoyed the movie as a movie and the martial arts was pretty awesome too. Lots of good sword stuff.

The second movie I watched is called Chocolate. This movie comes from the same people who did the movie Ong Bak. I loved this one! It takes place in Thailand, and is a little slow to start, but it was so good! I believe what I heard about the making of this movie, is that the director wanted to produce a movie that showed that a girl could do everything Tony Jaa does. So again, the main character is a woman. This movie is also interesting because the main character is a "special needs" child. It's a great movie, with AMAZING action and I recommend you go watch it!

Be sure to let me know if you do go see either of these, or if you would like to borrow one. And I forbid you to watch either of these movies dubbed in English. It completely ruins the film. Now go watch!

Jingle Bell Run

Today two of my sisters participated in the Jingle Bell Run down in Eugene. I didn't get to go watch them run, but they did very well in their races!

Devynn took first in her age group for the 5k, and Kambria was the first female in for the 8k. Here's a picture of their cool fun run shirts and their prizes!




I ran this race, probably two years ago, and it was a fun race. If I remember right, there's a nature reserve/park you run through which makes it better than just a typical road run. It's also cool to see how far the event has come along. The year I did it, they gave each runner tiny little bells to fasten on them wherever. This year, they had bigger bells and two different types of shirts for the runners. As you can see in the picture, first place got "crowned" with a wire fir tree branch, and some cool prizes like sparking cider and a bucket of candy.

All of fall term I had been meaning to keep up with my running, but I never even got started. Part of the problem is when you are so busy with everything else (like school & your career) you push running aside to get in more time to do homework. I also value my sleep, so running gets further down the priority list.

My plan is to run this winter break so it will be easier to keep up during winter term. If I keep it up all year I'll plan on doing this race next year, I'm sure it will be even better!

Until then, I'll be keeping an eye on goodrace.com for some upcoming races :)