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    Stumbled across great advice hidden in my piles of writing conference notes: “You don’t have to be great,   You don’t have to be bad,   ...

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Borrowed Resolutions

While surfing through the blogs today, I came upon the following blog and felt it reflected my own desires to do better this year. Apologies and thanks to the one writer who entered this on his/her blog spot on Tuesday, January 4, 2011:

:) This will be my new year resolution:

1) Time management
learn to manage time. Instead of playing while studying, allocate time for studying (more) and playing (less) separately. Must be punctual for everything. Learn that it's okay to wait for people. :).

2) Learn to be more disciplined.
Must try and adapt healthy lifestyle, sleep before 12am and wake up before 7am.

3) Studies
Must study effectively, not blindly. Live to learn, not learn to live. :)

4) Money
Must learn to manage money better, control expenditure and not give in to luxurious indulgence (like bubble tea, dresses). And save money to buy the things I really need (books!) :)

5) Health
Must do sports at least once a week!
Eat fruits daily!! Eat more vegetable! and take chicken occasionally!!
Stare less at the computer to save my eye sight!

6) Piano
Must learn new classical songs instead of playing pop music randomly by ear.

7) Home
Try and go home as often as possible, whenever I have time.

8) Room
Maintain the cleanliness and tidiness of my home, regardless of what I would rather do for fun.

9) Friends
Try and love my friends more. not hate them. (ops!)

10) Patience
Be more patient in everything I do.
Act more rationally. :)
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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Movie is Not as good as the Book

One member of my REEL BOOK Club went with me to see Water for Elephants tonight. Maybe I'm just a purist, and I don't want to spoil it for any one else, BUT the book was better.
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Saturday, April 23, 2011

Easter Weekend

Quiet weekend. Started out by finishing up the toilet troubles on Friday. Lots of money went in and down that drain. But Saturday was quiet rain and staying in the house, cooking and watching tv, reading and thinking. My son L.J. called from the plane as he was leaving for his mission trip to Ethiopia. I pray for his safety and his family back home in Houston, but it is in God's hands.

Sunday was church services and Easter dinner; the best Easter surprise--Westley, my youngest, came back early from his airsoft games in Colorado Springs. All is well with him. He was happy, full of talk and smiles. It is great when kids come home even from just five miles away at college. It made my day so happy.

God is good. All day long God is good.
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Monday, April 18, 2011

Toilet Trouble

Lost this Monday--spent it all inside mopping up the overflowing water from the downstairs toilet. This started last THursday. Stayed up most of the night grabbing towels, rugs, wash cloths, anything fabric to tide the flow. Spent Friday hanging the wet stuff up, and buying a wax ringy thingy that Byron said I had to have to fix it. Late that afternoon, after he and the boys had to take down the broken Cooler and then put up the new cooler and get it connected, ready to work on the next hot day.
Shall I say that we got everything fixed and working. . .No. Got the cooler down and up. Got the toliet stool disconnected (after all the water removed and turned off), my job. Got too dark and too late, so Josh came over on Saturday afternoon to finish up. (HaHa). All that got finished was cleaning up the toilet overflow again. Clean up again for me. Sunday was suppose to be a day of rest. Tell that to the toliet. If I washed clothes, it flooded. If we used the bedroom bathroom, the bottom one flooded. I had to completely stop using water.
I ran out of towels, rugs, wash cloths, so I was mobbing the tv room at least three times on Monday. i Kept trying to spin dry the wet stuff in time to use them again. Of course, I forgot to watch the washer spin dry enough and had to mop up the excess mess again.
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Sunday, April 17, 2011

A Quote a Day

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
-- Goethe


"Listen for the underlying/hidden cords and make music with them." -- Charlie Parker, Jazz Musican

"If you cannot hear another's dreams,
you are likely to meet him on the battlefield."
---Author Unknown
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The King's Speech - Official Site

The King's Speech - Official Site
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REEL BOOK Club 1st book -The King's Speech

Today, really last night, I finished reading The King's Speech by Mark Logue, a biography of his grandfather Lionel Logue. In February I took two friends on different occasions to see The King's Speech. Yes, it was that good.

From that experience I have decided to start a new book club. Notice the title. No, it is not a misspelling. I love to read, and I love to watch movies.

After the movie won so many Oscars at the Academy Awards show, I had to read the book.
It was good; not as good as the movie, but that's because the screenwriter presented the "truth" with a very different approach, emphasis on certain characters and added dialogue. While the author wrote the story based on the diaries and scrapbook clippings that Logue kept. Both were interestingly different styles.

That's when I discovered my idea of READing a book, WATCHing the movie (or vice versa), and having the group discuss which they preferred and why.
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Thursday, April 14, 2011

Ah-h-h April!

Even though I'm retired now, I know that April and May are the two hardest months of a school year. What with testing, prom, spring sports, Senior skip Day, all the regular holiday breaks, and graduation one week before the rest of the school gets out, it is no wonder that I call last semester the "Wholly Semester," not anything religious about it. Just a bunch of holes in the calendar that we can't seem to fill up with knowledge.

Oh, well that's over for me. My new adventure is turning out to be different than I planned. I have gotten to travel more than I usually do, but the money is tighter than I expected it to be. Probably all the economy woes--gasoline prices, grocery prices, just all the prices. Gosh darn it! These are the "Golden Years"! I feel that it is fool's gold or just "Copper Penny" years.

I need some "retirement survival" tips, and I need them NOW.
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Saturday, April 9, 2011

April Snow

Funny about snow in April, it comes down in beautiful white lace pieces landing on green grass, budding trees, and surprised lovers of Spring. By April everyone expects soft warm gentle showers for the flowers, but that's not what we got in Utah.

Byron and I took off for Salt Lake City yesterday, leaving sunny Colorado behind us. Boy were we surprised to drive through rain, slush, snow, sunshine patches, more rain, hail before clear but gray skies in the mountains. Then of course while we were in the Family History Center it really began to snow, which stopped, until we woke up this morning to see it snowing in steady but strong waves. Oh well, it is what it is.

Byron published his book on the Evers family history last year, and we had to donate one copy to the Family History Center yesterday before he attended a Society of Professional Journalists awards luncheon today on the University of Utah's campus. Thus, our April jount to this state.

Planned to be a fun trip, but that did't quite happen. We are not familiar with the Utah Campus, so of course we got lost and lost and lost. U of U I think may be larger than WSU, and it is laid out with weird street designs. Every one we stopped and asked for help was friendly and tried to be helpful, but even they couldn't explain how to get to the LNCO site. Byron called it LOCO for Language and Communication Building. We were driving all around the stadium and basketball center, but could not find the North side streets that were the only ones leading to the conference site. Byron was two hours late (we started looking at 8:30 and finally stumbled into the right parking lot at 10:30.

But the good points are--1) we are in time for the awards luncheon, and 2) it is in the Student Union building as well as there is a Traditional Social Powwow setting up in the same building. Out of the April snow and campus driving we will enjoy awards and Indian dancing.
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Monday, April 4, 2011

"Everybody ready for some baseball?"

As of Friday, April 1st (no fooling), the Colorado Rockies season is under way. 1st game--they lost; 2nd game--they WON! 3rd game--snowed out!
I didn't make it to any of them, and I can't get over the mountains when they play the Cubbies on April 15-16. BUT, I do have plans to be there on the 29th. Who are we playing then? Who cares; I'm going to see the ROCKIES.
Any way with the Rockies playing in April, that means the National Junior College World Series is coming to town at the end of May. Can't wait for that either. Everyone should come to little, old Grand Junction just to see the best of the Junior College teams play great baseball.
We call it JuCo out here. My favorite team has always been the Trojans from Seminole State College in Seminole, OK. I know, I know. I'm a little prejudiced because my oldest son played for them when they came out here in 1997. That was under the coaching of Lloyd Simmons. Since he retired and went to that great training field in Phoenix, Arizona (no, he did not die) to be a training coach for the major league teams, Seminole has made it back to JuCo only three times. Oh well, my son moved on and doesn't play baseball any more, but he is into coaching his son the fine points of little league Tee-ball.
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Sunday, April 3, 2011

Book Banter

I finished the book, Water for Elephants, just in time to see a trailer for the movie. The book was excitingly good; I hope the movie doesn't change it too much. So then I got the strong idea to start a book club called, The REEL BOOK Club.
Want to join? I am going to invite my friends to read Water for Elephants before April 22. We will make a date to see the movie, and afterward meet for a discussion about the book, the movie and both. Then we will decide on the next book and movie for next month.
While I researching Water for Elephants, I found a list of books made into movies for 2011. Check it out:

Adjustment Bureau

Selected Stories of Philip Dick

Phillip Dick

Adventures of Tintin;

Secret of the Unicorn

Herge

Breaking Dawn

Stephenie Meyer

Cowboys & Aliens

Scott Mitchell Rosenberg

The Eagle

Eagle of the Ninth

Rosemary Sutcliff

Game of Thrones

George R.R. Martin

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

J.K. Rowling

The Help

Kathryn Stockett

I Am Number Four

Pittacus Lore

Limitless

Dark Fields

Alan Glynn

Lincoln Lawyer

Michael Connelly

Mildred Pierce

James Cain

Mr. Popper’s Penguins

Richard Atwater

Red Riding Hood

David Johnson

The Rite

Rite: The making of a Modern Exorcist

Matt Baglio

Something Borrowed

Emily Giffin

Thor

Stan Lee

Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen

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The REEL Book Club--Water for Elephants

Have you ever read a book and then couldn't wait for the movie version?
Well, I did.

I picked up Water for Elephants at the library two weeks ago, finished it in four-five days;
now I just can't wait for the movie to open on April 22.

I've posted it on facebook and told all my friends to read it and we will go watch it.
Then we will discuss what we liked better--the book, the movie or both.
Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Well, any one can join my REEL BOOK Club.
Just read, watch and respond; or any order you want to.
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Westley's Graduation - One Year later

Westley's Graduation - One Year later
Westley gets a hug from his mom the minute after he receives his diploma from Fruita Monument High School, Class of 2010.

He's BACK! Billy Crystal is 2012 Oscar Awards Host

Remember Bohemian Rhapsody Mountain Dew parody Ad

The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.