This weekend involved:

driving to Michigan for a wedding
listening to books on tape
eating fast food

hanging out with good friends
reminiscing about college days
dancing and eating wedding cake

seeing our puppy who missed us
trying to get over being sick
making progress in a new book

A perfect combination

CINNAMON

AND

COFFEE

I love the idea that Naturally Nina posted about yesterday.  You can make your coffee a completely new experience by adding coffee to it.  It's so simple, but so awesome!  The full directions can be found here.

Book review: Gather Together in My Name

I finished reading Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou.  It is the second part of her autobiography, following I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which I read when I was in high school.  The part of her autobiography was really interesting because she ended up dong a bunch of things that I had no idea she had done.  I absolutely LOVE Maya Angelou so I tend to enjoy everything she writes.

In this book she is raising her son while trying to make a living.  Sh holds a bunch of different jobs all of which she seems to get completely by chance.  She keeps getting involved with men and then having to move because something goes wrong.   She gets a job as a creole cook even though she has no idea how to cook creole.  While working as a waitress, she meets two lesbian prostitutes and then ends up becoming their madam and then leaving town because they are angry with her.

She tries to join the army, but at the last minute is turned away because when she was a teenager she studied dance at a school that was supposedly communist, even though she had no idea.  After that she has a brief stint as a dance partner for a tap dancer, who ends up going back to his previous dance partner.  Then she meets another man, who tells her that he is a man with a gambling problem in an unhappy marriage.  He convinces her that he is going to leave his wife and marry her, but that he has to pay off some of his gambling debt first.  She agrees to help him pay off his debt by working as a prostitute for a month or so.  She eventually figures out that he isn't who he said he is and is instead a pimp with several other prostitutes working for him.

The book ends when she is trying to figure out what to do next to support her and her son.  She briefly considers giving up because she is so frustrated by everything that's happened to her, but realizes in the end that she has too much promise to not use it.

This book was definitely interesting because of everything that happens to her in it (and believe me, I haven't covered it all!) but it wasn't one of my favorites.  I thought that she was really struggling to find herself and her morals during this period of her life.  It was worth reading, but I would read either I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or A Song Flung Up to Heaven because I think they are much better books.

Oh my goodness

Image from here

Have you seen this adorable cottage?  I saw it on Tranquility du Jour, which directed me to The New York Times article that was written about it.  While

I was originally drawn to the idea of the cottage.  Its beauty.  Its charm.  I actually enjoyed reading the article more than looking at the pictures of the cottage.  Sure it's cute, but Sandra Foster, the woman who renovated it, had some wonderful things to say.



She talked about the time she spent homeless while she was growing up.

“If you don’t have a home, you don’t have a sense of place, you don’t have a life, you don’t have a soul,” she said.

She tells the wonderfully, simple story of how she and her husband met and fell in love.

“I was a gardener, he was a gardener,” she said. “There is a plant called nepeta. I had trouble growing it. He grew it like gangbusters. I was fascinated by this very handsome man who could grow something I couldn’t grow like there was no tomorrow.” 

She then explained how she and her husband took on too much when they were trying to renovate a huge, old farmhouse.

Image from here

“The only thing holding me together was Todd’s love, and his love of food and feeding me, and his love of flowers. Every single day I come here, there are flowers. A whole path of rose petals leading to a bath full of rose petals and candles. He’s a magical man, despite his flaws.”

After they realized that renovating the farmhouse was putting too much stress on them, they bought the land they currently live on that has a trailer and the cottage that she has been renovating on her own.  I'm not exactly sure why I liked the article so much, except that she seemed really willing to be honest and open about the things she's been through and the things that are important in life.  I really liked that.

An organized linen closet or why I love my husband

While Andrew's been at home job searching, he's also been taking care of the house, which has been absolutely wonderful.  He is constantly organizing something, which means that I'm always finding things more organized than before.

For example, the other day I went to the linen closet to get a towel.  I really don't like our linen closet because it's been disorganized since we moved into our house.  It wouldn't take that long to organize, but it never makes it to the top of my list, mostly because it disappears once I close the closet door again.  So I was overjoyed to find that Andrew had completely reorganized the linen closet one day last week.  I know it's a little thing, but it makes me so happy.

It's been really nice to have him doing some of the things that we've been meaning to do at home, but haven't gotten around to.  It gives him something to do during the day other than just job search and it helps him remember that he's still contributing to the household even thought he's not working.  It's things like this that remind me why I love him.

Um, did you see Oprah today???

She has a half-sister that she never knew about.  It turns out that her mom gave up a baby for adoption but never told Oprah or the rest of her family.  How crazy is that?  Can you even begin to imagine finding out that you were related to Oprah!?!

I just felt like sharing.

This weekend involved:

• hanging out with Andrew
• watching way too many episodes of Weeds (I might be am obsessed...)
• taking a nap for several hours
• going to the gym (That's four times this week!!!)
• starting to knit a baby blanket
• going to the congregational meeting at church
• figuring out how to use my Mom's new Cricut
• mailing Cricut cutouts to my sister
• watching football that I don't really care about now that the Colts are out of the running:(
• playing with Schmoo during the football