Lists

I like lists. Life lists. To-do lists (well, I don't like to-do lists, but I do like crossing things out.)

On Twitter this morning, Leslie tweeted a link to an NPR list of the 100 best YA books. Of course, I haven't been able to get this out of my head all day. I love young adult fiction, how many have I read?

Upon counting them up, the answer is: woefully few. I think I need to head over to the library ASAP...

Check out the list yourself. How many have you read?

Thanks so much to Leslie for this great idea! This is one to-do list I wouldn't mind crossing off.

1.

Camp Mighty and Alt Summit

Last month (I really can't believe it's been so long already), I had the privilege of attending Camp Mighty. It was an amazing weekend, much different from what I had expected, yet I am very much glad that I went.

Unfortunately, I am glacially slow at processing these sorts of things, which is a bit of a liability in the blogging world. But the bottom line is that it reinforced my interest in blogging and bloggers, and I am approaching the goals I have set for myself this year with renewed gusto. I will likely do a post with all of the photos I took, but to be honest, they are all on my iPhone, which seems to make me a bit backward when compared to all of the other bloggers running around with their fancy Nikons and Canons. I just have to remind myself that I can only move so fast, and that given all of the other responsibilities in my life currently, I'm doing just fine.

So, without further ado, the five goals I've chosen to focus on this year are:

1. Teach a class on champagne (more on this soon!)
2. Learn how to code (this is in progress via Codecademy)
3. Create a gallery wall of picture frames
4. Start a foundation for the research of pediatric migraines
5. Publish a best-selling book.

Ambitious, yes, but what's the point of having a goals if they're not?

One other thing that was on my Life List was to attend AltSummit. Like someday. I wanted to be enough of a "real" blogger that someday attending AltSummit was just something I needed to do. Well, perhaps sometimes you just need a swift kick in the pants, because the folks at AltSummit read my Life List and saw that this was on it and they, with the help of Bing (#thanksbing), they gave me a ticket to AltSummit. Which is fantastic and slightly terrifying all at the same time. So with that, I now have an enormous incentive to get things in gear. Here's hoping I don't get laughed out of the conference!

House Hunters International

Confession: I've been watching way too much TV. Specifically: House Hunters International. Yes, I know it's all fake, but something about vicariously watching people choose a place to live as part of the larger life adventure on which they are embarking. I especially love the segment at the end of each episode where they show the family a few months or so after they have settled into their new home. You can see how they've redecorated and how they've dealt with that one part of the house they couldn't stand. Perhaps most importantly, the family often shares a few thoughts about how they are adjusting to the new culture, which is the part I find most interesting.

So naturally, I was fascinated by this promotion for Disney World's new Fantasyland. It features  Belle and the Beast on House Hunters International, searching for a new castle. What a clever idea! The spoof is spot-on--narrated by the same person as the rest of the series, the same over-enthusiastic, bubbly commentary on the house selection-process from the home-searcher, and same overly-specific requirements ("I need space for a library," says Belle).

While I'm not sure that the audiences for Disney World and House Hunters International overlap too much, I still think this was a brilliant way to market this addition to the theme park. This ad is brilliant--just perfectly clever. I love it.

What do you think?



 

A dizzying array of photos

While searching Pinterest for images to associate with my goals on the new Go Mighty site, I came across two fantastic Tumblr sites whose collection of images was just fantastic. I really just wanted to tack each photo to my wall and stare at it forever (or just add **every photo** to a Pinterest board, but that's getting extreme). Instead, I'll link them here so I can share the wealth.

Viva Amore

The Fullerview

Life Hacks

I love this list of 99 life hacks to make your life easier (via Good). I used to read the Ladies' Home Journals and Good Housekeeping magazines my mom had lying around the house when i was growing up. They were full of tips like this--genius ways to do the things you do every day more easily. Now wouldn't it be great if there were some sort of real-life pop-up video to remind you of one of these genius things in the moment you need it?

Talk like a pirate day

Dear CTA--

Your tweet:












made my day.

Happy National Talk Like a Pirate Day to you too, Matey.

Love,
C

Buying All The Things

Sometimes I read a blog post that just totally hits the nail on the head. A post I want to email to all of my friends and say “See! This is what I mean. This blogger just articulated what I was trying to say much better than I did. Now do you understand?”

Such was the case when I read “You Don’t Need All The Things (But Sometimes Things Help)” on A Practical Wedding. APW, if you’re one of the ten people who haven’t stumbled across it yet, is a community of sane people who craft beautiful essays musing on all sorts of valuable topics—marriage-related and otherwise.

The post suggested that yes, we live in a society where we are constantly told we need to buy this thing or that thing, and yes, it can be nice to consciously decide to live simply and avoid buying everything. But sometimes, buying a particular object helps relieve a relationship stressor and make the whole thing go much more smoothly. The author’s object was The Dishwasher, but mine was The Dresser.  

The apartment K and I share has three tiny bedrooms. We moved a garment rack and our dressers into the middle bedroom to turn it into a walk-in closet. I have an enormous six-foot long Ikea dresser that I absolutely love. Its long, wide wood top, becomes a magnet for all of our larger events where we dump all of the clothes after they come out of the dryer. K’s dresser has three drawers that are huge and deep and utterly inconvenient for storing clothes. Because his dresser is poorly designed and I hate folding clothes and just throw them on top of the mountain/avalanche on my dresser, the situation in that room has gotten out of control. Every morning, I end up searching for fifteen minutes in this massive pile of clothes because I can’t find anything. It was slowly (but certainly) chipping away at my sanity. I declared that we should buy a new dresser. One with lots of drawers for K to put his clothes away. We’d squeeze his old dresser into a corner of our bedroom and use it to hold sheets and towels. This dresser would make every morning more relaxed as I would finally be able to find the clothes I was looking for without causing the whole pile to topple over. It would make every evening better as all of the sheets were neatly folded and easier to find, and it would make our relationship better as I stopped cursing at K for not putting his clothes away.

Yes, getting all the way out to Ikea was a giant pain, and no, we still haven’t put together the 8-million piece dresser, but at least we’ve taken one step closer to implementing a solution. The APW article helped legitimate my decision to buy K a dresser, driving home the point that sometimes spending a little bit of money to address a problem can make an enormous and unquantifiable improvement in the situation.

What do you think of this idea? Have you ever bought something to address a nagging issue? What was the outcome?