The Book Thief.

Best book I've ever read, hands down. I'm not sure how else to start this post. It was fantastic. I stumbled across an online book review, and knew I had to find this book. I've read my fair share of disturbing plot lines & horrific stories. I was a psych major for my first year & a half of college, and even then it stayed my minor- so I'm used to a fair degree. I found myself gripping this book and turning page after page, barely gasping for air to finish this heart-wrenching, gut churning story. I'll give a little synopsis without any spoilers (you can find the same info on the back of the book-but in much, much better writing :) A little girl named Liesel & her brother are being given to a foster family by her own mother-she can't afford to keep them. On the way to Himmel Street her brother dies. The book thief is born. She steals her very first book that night, as he is buried in a hole of dirt next to the train station. Her life on Himmel Street is torturous at first. She's haunted by her mother leaving & her brother dying. The war is going on & Hitler is in full force. She finds comfort in her quiet but loving foster father, while her foster mother loathes them both. Eventually a Jew travels to live with them, hiding in their basement. The relationship they develop is undescribable. It is such a touching & heartwarming story, although a time of severe hardships and losses. The book theif eventually realizes that words are so powerful-they can change a person, a life, a world. Words are so precious to her because she cannot read. Once she learns, she becomes obsessed with them. The book is written from Death's point of view, as if Death were a character. At the end of the book, I was crying so hard I could barely see. I find myself wanting to visit Germany & find 33 Himmel street. You'll have to read the rest of the book to see what happens. Markus is an exceptional writer. The way the book is written is brillant. I highly recommend it if you enjoy that time period in history (Nazi Germany, concentration camps, the Jewish struggle, war, etc.)I'm afraid to read another book after this one-for fear of disappointment. This marks my third book on our list so I am slowly making my way! Speaking of said list, yesterday we went on a crazy cleaning spree and I tackled round one of cleaning out our closet. I HATE doing this. Not only do I hate dealing with laundry & organizing clothing, I am really bad at getting rid of things. I tend to convince myself that I will someday wear every item in my closet. Even if it's been sitting there for years, I hate it, & it doesn't fit me. So yesterday I went through everything ::sigh:: and got rid of a huge garbage bag full of stuff (think those large heavy duty black garbage bags) yay! Afterwards it felt great. We are donating everything to the Lupus Foundation because they so conveniently placed a bag on our front porch & asked for it to be filled. Sometimes God is sooooo humorous :) But it was perfect. So I filled the bag yesterday & tonight Jay is going to go through the rest of his stuff and add to it. It's nice because they will take any household items as well, so I am going to try and go through that stuff in time to send it off with the clothing. That means I get to tackle our hutch next....which is completely packed with crap. We don't have much storage, and instead of getting rid of more "things" ...we stuffed them into the house. I can't wait to cleanse our house of unneccesary crap. Ok, sorry about the boring post! sometimes life is just boring like that =)

April showers bring May flowers :)

What a great day for a caribou run, reading, blogging, editing & updating websites! (thanks to everyone who has voted on our poll!) I love rainy Sundays...it allows me to get so much done. I also have a bunch of cleaning to get done, but time for the fun stuff first =) My wedding went fantastic last night and I got some great pictures. I'll get some sneak peeks up on my photog. blog shortly. Listening to the rain on the roof makes me sleepy and really want a nap...hmmm....zzzzz. Crap my washer is beeping, gotta switch the loads. I'll be back later for a better re-cap of our weekend...until then, enjoy the rain!

Bad genes.

So I was looking through some summer pictures this afternoon, getting excited for everything we have planned this year & I came across this picture. Someone please look at me & feel sorry for me. The girl can't tan. It's like finding a cow with stripes. I would like to note that this picture was taken right after we returned from our honeymoon in MEXICO. As in like 5 days later. Oh and did I mention this was taken after a day on the boat? in the sun? So sad. I'm the fair skinned, blonde haired irish girl that burns and gets tan for a day before it goes back to beautiful white. ughhh. Everyone else in my family tans fantasticly it's so not fair. So tell me this-is it because I don't spend time in the sun often enough? because my sister can be outside for 3.7 minutes and she looks like a bronze goddess, and anyone who knows my Mom knows that she is always tan. I spend a lot of time on the weekends outdoors and eventually I will get a little sun-kissed, but mostly it's made up of freckles. I don't get it, but I think I got the bad pick of the gene pool!!!! Oh and I miss my long blonde hair!
ON a better note, my husband is smokin! yep, he's alllll mine. As you can see, he get's brown. I like to blame that on the fact that he is outside every single day coaching for work, and not because his skin is jealous-worthy. (OK so I'm green with envy). I will try to get tan this summer, mark my words.

Let the creative juices flow...

I've been in a right-brain-creative updating phase the past couple of days! First-notice the poll I added to the left sidebar. Please give us your opinion! (it's anonymous) I couldn't sleep last night, so many creative ideas swirling around my head. We've updated our mini "biographies" on the sidebar & I also worked on my photography website-it definetly needed some updating. So check those out! I just felt that we needed some changes for the upcoming season....summer!! I have another wedding coming up this weekend so I'm pretty excited about that. I forgot to share that I found a GREAT assistant named Whitney-SO relieved about that. She's a nice person and reliable=perfect. We are teaming up this summer and shooting weddings together so that will be fun. Jay's headed out of town tomorrow for a softball tournament in wisconsin, so we are having a big date night tonight! I'm working half of the day and then taking off early. Can't wait to start the weekend :)

Happy Earth Day!

Earth day is a perfect opportunity to take a moment and reflect on what you are doing to help the environment-no matter how large or how small! Every little bit helps. We started by recycling when we bought a home & moved in together. Now we are trying our best to be "green" in other aspects of our life-by turning off lights and electronics when not in use (this includes items that are plugged in but not turned on), switching to energy-saving lightbulbs, and re-using plastic bags for groceries or using cloth instead. We've also been shopping at Trader Joe's-an organic grocery store, and we love it! It's fresh, healthy, natural & has good prices. If you have one near your house, check it out! Have a great day everyone and be kind to the earth :)

The Lovely Bones

I just finished another book called The Lovely Bones. I came across it at a friends house and borrowed it without knowing much about it. It's set in 1973, where a young girl named Susie is raped and killed by her neighbor, a serial killer of young women. She watches her family from heaven as they grieve for her, and get so close to solving her murder when it's right in front of them. It's really a sad book, and I didn't like it that much-at parts it's hazy and you can't tell who's point of view they are speaking from. I hesitate to say the plot was unbelievable, because I loved Harry Potter and Twilight-which are not believable at all. This leads me to believe the writing was not the best. It didn't convince me, didn't draw me in to want more. I am easily mesmorized by excellent writing, but this just didn't do it for me. It actually took me awhile to finish the book, I put it down for a few months and then decided I needed to finish. Parts of it were really interesting but overall it was slow. They are making a film adaptation of the book coming out in Decemeber, so maybe that will be better-or at least the story will be more clear. It was entertaining but I think I would only give it 2.5 stars out of 5.

Here we are!

Geez we need a breather! This spring has been so good to us. This past weekend Jay's mom came into town and we had a blast with her. We went out for a yummy dinner at Granite City on Friday night, and then spent the night talking and catching up at home. On Saturday I had my first wedding of the season, and it went really really well. If you want to take a peek at some of the pictures, I posted some sneak peeks for the bride on my photography blog (see the left hand sidebar under Abbey's Photography). It was better than I could have expected! I have another coming up this weekend-busy busy but loving it! It's so nice to have the opportunity to do what I love in my free time, but to also make the extra money to fund what we love to do best: travel! It really opens the door and the opportunities to be able to accomplish things we would never have without it. Another reason we are truly blessed :) Anyways, Jay's brother & his girlfriend came over on Saturday and they grilled out and enjoyed the nice weather. Jay's mom had brought us down some birdfeeders (which happened to be on our 101 list!) so they set three of them up on the porch. We love them, as silly as it sounds! Jay checks every morning to see if he can catch a bird eating out of them. The rest of the weekend went by fast-Sunday we spent the rainy day running errands together. We wandered around a bookstore and picked out some new books and then we got some lunch together. I spent the afternoon reading and Jay watched the game next to me. Yay Twins!!

So we sat down and decided to begin the 101 in 1001 challenge. We thought it was such a cool idea, because usually we make a list of our goals but it's usually open-ended or the goals are too vague. "Lose weight" or "Be healthier," "work out more" etc. We worked hard to make the goals specific, measurable, & reachable although challenging. When we complete an item, we'll try to blog a little something about it and the experience to share with you. I think that's it for now!