The Wonders of Christmas

Anyone who's spent more than a couple minutes with me knows that my phone is a horrible piece of crap. So much so that the manufacturer has stopped making it. If it loses full service for longer than a few seconds, it stops trying to connect to the service. I can't call people when I want to. I can't text. Heaven forbid I got in a dangerous situation and had to use my phone.

But my fantastic mom bought me a new phone for Christmas! She even let me open it a few days early so I could use it at work and be safer driving home. She is great :) of course this replaced any other gifts she would have got me, but that's perfectly fine with me.

Now that I actually have service almost everywhere all the time, I can go back to being productive and reading at work and editing there, too. I anticipate better reading times and many more updates. Not to mention photos and videos I can upload here to make my life a tad more interesting.

New life!

Sunday, September 21

Oh my gosh, it has been so long! It's been months!!

I've finally gotten back to schedule with my reading and my work and school and my new job and all of it. Last month was pure catch-up and now I've got time this week to get ahead. Hopefully, my posts will be more regular. I'm hoping to be more reliable with my schedule.

I'm about a third of the way through with Serena and once I finish that book in the next couple days, I'm going to continue reading Virus and that will end my September books and I'll be back to reading my books on schedule. In fact, if I read at least 60 pages a day (about an hour), I should be ahead in my October books and I can get to the ones I've missed in previous months.

Since I can't work for a few more days because of my poor toe, I've decided to spend it between TheReadingCorner and the 20 something video games I have yet to finish. I'm already doing better than I anticipated. I should have at least two videos out tomorrow and another three out by the end of the month.

The Maze Runner has been a popular book for a few months, mostly because of the movie (which I liked a lot. It even made Val run to the nearest book store the minute we got out of the theater), and it means I've been pretty far down the wait list at the library. If Valerie can finish reading it by the time I get it from the library, I'd prefer to have them skip on to the next person so they don't have to wait for me to read my copy. But she doesn't read like I do and it takes her a bit longer. But seeing as how I'm 45 out of 210 holds, I can't imagine I'm going to be able to get that video out for a long time. I have already recorded the movie review side of it and it'll be a little bit of a complicated video, but it won't be that hard.

So I'm planning on getting back on a regular blog and video schedule which will be so nice! I won't have all that guilt weighing on me all the time.

100 Questions Tag!!

As I explain in the video, this has been requested by my friends and family. So here you go, me answering 100 fairly random questions about myself.

So I haven't uploaded the Twilight Tag to my youtube channel yet, but when I do, I promise I'll replace this sentence with that link.

Tuesday, May 20

Surprisingly, not a lot has happened in the last few days, but I've been crazy productive.

Sunday, my mom had some old volleyball friends over. They hadn't seen us in over ten years and I didn't recognize them at all, but we got along well enough. Because we were having company, I had to clean out my three rooms (bedroom, study, and bathroom). I got through most everything and sent it down for the garage sale. The upstairs has never looked this clean and organized.

Yesterday, I finally finished reading Blue Bloods! It's been over a year and I finally got it off my list! I know it doesn't sound like much, but it was a pretty big deal for me. I've been trying to get through it since about February of last year. Since I have to return some movies at the end of the week, I had to record the video this morning in the little gap I had before a meeting. While I was moving the video to my laptop so I could edit it later, I noticed that I hadn't finished the A Soul to Take video. I got that done once I got home, though. So all that's left for videos is the book haul and the Blue Bloods one.

The Book of Disquiet and Evermore are the only books I have left. It shouldn't take me that long to finish them, but I've been saying that for a while and I still haven't done it. Maybe I'll spend the whole morning tomorrow reading and editing those last two videos.

Here's a link to my youtube channel with the new A Soul to Take review:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RainaEvink

Saturday, May 17

It's been a week since I've written anything and I'm sorry! I made a video response, but I wasn't able to attach it for some reason and I've had to wait until I had enough free time to get through a whole post in one go.

Valerie, my FoodFoolery friend, and I have finished our discussions and she's moving in at the end of the month. Incidentally, we had been planning a yard sale for that weekend and we have to kind of mush everything together and try to get it all done that Friday. It'll make our video making schedule much easier. Plus, we don't have to drive across town to hang out.

I finally received Blue Bloods and The Book of Disquiet from the library today. When I went to remark my place in the books, I found the notes I'd been missing from The Book of Disquiet!! The first time I borrowed the book about year ago, I accidentally left my notes on a notecard at the back of the book. No one took them out and now I finally have the things I'd forgotten! Apparently, the last times I'd ordered the book, I'd gotten the other copy the library had, but the notes were there all along! (also, there's a book sale down at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds the last weekend of the month, which sucks 'cause that's the weekend for our yard sale and I can only spare an hour or two in the morning of that Friday, which may not be enough time)

Because I've got all three books to read at the same time, I'm reverting back to the style of reading I employed when I was trying to read The Cloud Atlas, The Book of Disquiet, and some other book I can't remember right now. So an hour of reading turns into about 20 minutes of reading for all three books. I hope it won't take very long if I'm reading an hour a day.

For the yard sale, I sacrificed 55 books today. Most of them were non-fiction books that I wasn't really interested in or that I had multiples of, but I was still sad to see them go. Hopefully, it means more money for the stuff that's really important like extra cash for my family reunion.

I have to get back to reading, but there's a new book haul coming out tomorrow!

Saturday, May 10

The last few days have been crazy, but wonderful. My superhero best friend went into labor with my beautiful godson on Wednesday and then I got food poisoning on Thursday.

Wednesday, in the middle of me winning Monopoly on Game Night, I got the call I've been waiting for for weeks. Kevin and I drove down to the hospital, but I had to leave around 2 in the morning to go home to sleep. At 7:14 May 8, Odin Vincent was born happy and healthy. After I woke up, I reheated some ribs for a quick breakfast and within half an hour, I was throwing up. I felt sick all day, but surprisingly, after a big bowl of late night ice cream, I felt much better. I visited Sonia and Odin in the hospital yesterday and they're both doing great. I can't wait until he's old enough to read with.

Speaking of reading, I'm almost done with Evermore and I'm about to start on Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen. The video for A Soul to Take is still on my list. I promise I'll get to it soon and post the video for Evermore soon, too. FoodFoolery is kind of on a standstill right now. We're having some scheduling issues and we're pretty far behind.

And now my cat's throwing up a hairball on my newly washed clothes. Time to get back to cleaning.