Something else exiciting

but not nearly as exciting as deciding to spend the rest of your life with someone named Jeremy Javers (Ahhhhhhhh!).

No, just kidding. No regrets at all.

I FINALLY finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The guy is a Nobel Prize winner and the writing is beautiful ... but it's not exactly a page turner. I read a few pages before bed almost every night and it took about four months for me to finish it. I had to read a couple page turners and listen to some audiobook mysteries to keep me going for the duration of Hundred Years. It is a marvelous story and a great study in magical realism, where the most absurd and phantasmagorical happenings are told with such a natural tone of voice. It is really interesting how he mixes reality and unreality in a way where you aren't really sure what really happened. Eventually you don't care anymore. I kind of reminded me of Toni Morrison novels. It also really reminded me of Latin American and South American stories and myths from my cultural anthropology studies. Marquez grew up in Colombia and spent a lot of time living in Mexico so it makes sense that he would be exposed to those hybrized indigenous-Spanish stories. I wonder if Marquez knows Shakira.

Good News

I guess this is as good a place as any to get the word out ... Jeremy and I are engaged! Pretty exciting stuff, folks.

Here are those before and after pics I promised

Here is a photo looking down the hallway before. The hallway is that dark mysterious area in the middle of the photo:




Here is the cheerier hallway looking down the other wall:




Here's a sample of the dining room/entry before:





And finally, the same dining room/entry now. This photo is looking 180 degrees around from the before picture, but now we have the table up against the window you see in the above photo and it's messy and I don't want to clean it off for a picture.

little o' this, little o' that

Okay, everyone needs to check out Erin's comment on my previous post. The T-rus is back in black. I am pretty tempted to have yet another Taurus in my life. Seriously though, if you watch the clip you will see that even the reporter discussing all the new features of the car is less than excited about it. He's trying, but he just can't get pumped up. Or maybe he's just hungover. It was the Detroit Auto Show after all.

Something lucky happened to me tonight. I made a phone call while I was on a stroll in town. I thought I put the phone back in my vest pocket. Apparently, I was mistaken. After my stroll I drove to the grocery store. When I got home, I realized my phone was missing. I had a moment of hopelessness because I couldn't even call myself to see if someone had found my phone. Does anyone remember the time I lost my car key while running in a violent thunderstorm? Flashes of that experience came to mind! I decided to retrace my steps and started at the grocery store. I asked a fruit stocker guy if he had seen my phone. He said no, but offered to call it for me. Very, very luckily a lady answered and said she had found it on the sidewalk near a school I walked by. Coincidently, she was on her way to the grocery store where I was. We met up and I got my phone back. It is missing the back cover, but it still works great. Kick-ass.

I promised y'all photos of the home improvement project. Well, I took my camera home over the weekend, but not my battery charger and of course the battery was dead. Hey, I can't be lucky all the time. I will attempt some photos again next weekend. It looks great. We put the finishing touches on - some new lights, new light switch and outlet covers and new vent covers. It looks all sparkly and new! I had to spray paint all the vent covers to match the light switch and outlet covers. The spray paint color that matched the best was called ICE CREAM. Mmmm ... my mind kept wandering to this scene where I spray the paint into my mouth and it tastes like ice cream. Rest assured, I was not stupid enough to try it.