November Recap 2014

If I thought October was bad, it was nothing compared to November! I feel like this should just all be lists of what I did this month, but that’s boring so instead you’re going to get lists AND pictures.

This month I had my annual friendsgiving with over 20 people at the house two days after the event I talk about below. I demand that we all sit in one big table and thus the ridiculous picture to the right.

The Tuesday before that I had a big event at work that a team of three of us spent most of the year planning (shifting it from every other year to every year) Here are two pictures from the event and the flowers I received for it being so successful! and after we finished it successfully I got flowers from the President of the College, right, I then of course proceeded to forget I got them and not water them for almost a week 🙁 I’m slowly trying to bring them back to life as they were so pretty. I’ll give it another couple of days and if they’re not back to normal I’ll have to say goodbye to them.

The left photo is of the outside that I think they did a great job of spotlighting the entrance and the right photo is of a NASA astronaut giving an awesome speech. He’s a distant relative of the founder of the College and he gave an amazing speech. It was well worth the stress of not knowing if he was coming until a couple of weeks before the event.

We also went and saw the Bruins play the St. Louis Blues:

I also made A LOT of progress on my 30×30 list, mostly in the past week, but so far this month I have

• Visit the Somerville Museum 11-09
• Visit and gamble at a casino 11-22
• Finish visiting the entire MFA with Caroline11-23
• See the Boston Symphony Orchestra again 11-28
• Take a hip-hop class/workshop 11-29
• Participate in NaNoWriMo 11-30

AND I’m mostly finished with my Lord of the Rings re-read! That leaves me with just six left for the next three weeks; I’ve got this.

Books and Bookish
Again somehow I managed to read a lot more than I thought I did. I finished five books and most of a sixth: two library books  (Will Grayson, Will Grayson and the final Percy Jackson book, The Blood of Olympus ) a book my sister bought me Christmas before last (Boy Meets Boy) and the first two Tolkien novels:

• The Blood of Olympus – Rick Riordan
• The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson – John Green and David Levithan
• The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien
• Boy Meets Boy – David Levithan

As for other bookish things that happened, I volunteered to help set up the Friends of the Library booksale for my local library, which I usually do if I’m around that weekend and I got a few books (bottom most photo):

• Foundation and Empire – Isaac Asimov
• Music for Chameleons – Truman Capote
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – Haruki Murakami
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke

The wonderful Sarah of Sarah Reads Too Much sent me her copy of Jane Austen Cover to Cover, because she like everyone else knows I’m obsessed with Austen :-D. I ordered a copy of Straight Expectations by Julie Bindel as she will be doing a talk at the college I work for in the next week or so. And finally while I was out looking for books for family for Christmas I picked up Jeannette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? It was the ONLY book I bought AND it was a remainder.

What’s Next?
I didn’t quite get to fewer than five items on my list, I made a big dent and I’m looking forward to my 30×30 list being completed. As much fun as it’s been it’s added a bit of unnecessary busyness to my life. I’m both dreading and excited about the long drive home at the end of the month, my sister and I decided to drive to NC from Boston for some crazy reason, but it’ll be fun. Other than that I’ve got a surprise trip planned for next weekend as an early birthday present (he won’t tell me what it is) and lots of holiday parties and even a small get together for my birthday. I’m definitely looking forward to post New Years (after a friend gets married) and hopefully getting a bit of time to relax.