I am exhausted,

but I am waiting up for the eclipse to hit its stride. It's looking like a crescent moon at the moment. This is one of those things that I always feel like I should get really excited for, but don't actually get all that excited for. I mean, I'd kind of like to see it, but the super slow motion and the dull red light generally end up feeling pretty anticlimactic to me. That, and the fact that I still don't have a camera that can get decent shots of it. One of these days I'm going to have to give in and get a DSR.


I have really been doing a lot of snow boot shopping lately, and I am really getting sick of it. The Sorel Tivoli boots came in the mail today, and they are narrow. And I have wide feet. The situation has been improved by the wearing of stockings and the replacement of the (quite thick) Sorel inserts with thinner ones, but I'm still not 100% decided about keeping them. So I've been looking for emergency backups. Here's a possibility, though I'm not sure about wedge heels in snow boots, or in general. Who the crap makes snow boots with heels?



I spent some time this morning/afternoon working with one of my aunts. She shared with me two excerpts from books that she has read. The first is by Melody Beattie, and I didn't catch the originator of the second, though it is often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela. Bold font obviously mine.

"Say thank you until you mean it.
Thank God, life, and the universe for everyone and everything sent your way.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. It turns problems into gifts, failures into successes, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. It can turn an existence into a real life, and disconnected situations into important and beneficial lessons. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Gratitude makes things right.
Gratitude turns negative energy into positive energy. There is no situation or circumstance so small or large that it is not susceptible to gratitude's power. We can start with who we are and what we have today, apply gratitude, then let it work its magic.
Say thank you until you mean it. If you say it long enough, you will believe it."

(Disclaimer: I can't say that I completely agree that one should be thankful for everything, but I do think that in every situation, there is something to be thankful for. And while I don't necessarily think that gratitude will instantly fix every problem, I do believe that it saved my life.)

[Going to check on the eclipse*.]

[It now looks like a very fuzzy crescent with a very faint, greyish-red tinge. This might be due to some thin clouds in the way, but it's hard to tell for sure. It isn't a very clear night out here though.]

Second, not-Nelson-Mandela quote:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us--it is in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."



Another note: Chloe parked the car in a somewhat unwise spot this evening, and got sideswiped. The car? My car. This is the second time in just over a week that someone has hit my car while it wasn't moving. PSA, everybody: don't buy a gd navy blue car. Surprisingly enough, it tends to blend in with the navy blue nighttime. Crazy, right?


Lastly, I really want these boots. I want them so bad. They come in navy blue! How often does that happen? I think possibly I should be banned from looking up boots online for a while.






















*I am ashamed and a little bit horrified to admit that when I say the word "eclipse**," I think of the Twilight series.

**Oh God, I capitalized it.

Notes

I went to a beautiful international lessons and carols concert tonight with Anna, and... well, as I said, it was beautiful. The chorus was amazing. I liked almost all of the arrangements, and most of the carols were new to me. The orchestra was excellent. Each reading was in a different language, with the English translation projected on the wall. During each song, works of art related to the nativity (and often to the culture of the song and/or previous reading) were projected on the wall. I teared up a few times.

(Faith, our cat, is sleeping curled up on top of a sheet-covered milk crate. Her head just tipped off the edge and woke her up. Adorable.)

As we were leaving the concert, I was giving Anna a ride to her car, and someone backed straight into me. I have the worst reactions in these sorts of situations. I just sort of watch, dumbfounded, and maybe say something like "stop!" Eventually Anna said "your horn! Honk!" And then I had to find my horn, which broke a while back and has been relocated. Anyway, there's a small dent in my door, and I have the woman's name/number/insurance information. I haven't told my parents yet--I forgot at first.

I remembered when Anna called me around 10:30 to tell me that as she was leaving the birthday party she attended after the concert,

wait for it,

someone backed straight into her car, and hit her in the exact same spot as the woman at the show hit me.

What are the odds?



Speaking of odds, I spent the bulk of my evening after I came home shopping for snow boots. Originally I was shopping for thin wool socks for Scotland, and I was looking on planetshoes.com because they'd sent me a coupon. I searched "wool" on their site, and ran straight into these:

I want them. I want them so bad. But I have been able to semi-successfully convince myself that they wouldn't look good with jeans. Do not dissuade me. I can't even afford them at all. The best price I found was $122, and that took a lot of doing, and was a temporary sale. No one else had them on sale (reg price $160); hardly anyone had them in my size. It was slightly hellish.

I ended up with these, from footwise.com, with which I am pretty well pleased:

As a ridiculously fabulous added bonus, they were on sale because footwise only had them left in one size--my size. NO ONE else had these in my size except maybe Nordstrom's. Nordstrom's was charging $100. The footwise sale was $49. God loves me, I think. Now let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope they fit and all that.











On an unrelated note, I walked Miley tonight. She insists upon strangling herself. I constantly find myself thinking, "Buy a semi-choke collar! Strangulation theoretically optional."

A Day With Momma

I got to spend the day with my mom today, and it was awesome. We went and loaded her car trunk full of wood from a tree our friends had cut down, then went to the store, the bank, and the Clothes Rack. I am a terrible shopper, but I've acknowledged the fact that I know jack about what looks good on me when I see it on a hanger, so at this point I'll pretty much try on whatever people pick out. My mom and I have the same body type (go figure), and she is not a terrible shopper. I now have three largeish bags of new clothes. Incidentally, today marks the first day of my new life as an indentured servant. Guess who unloaded all that wood by herself?


I didn't end up getting this dress, but I did get the boots, which you can't really see but which are fantastic. I'm glad I took a picture of the dress though, to console myself about not owning it.

I may have been swayed in the "not buying" direction when my mother asked me, "so are you going into a new line of work?"