A Summer of 7-11!

Since December, I've been the secretary of the Young Women's organization of my church.  We decided to try to challenge the girls (and ourselves) to read the whole Book of Mormon during their summer break- that is, reading about 7 pages a day for 11 weeks.  (starting yesterday)  I'm calling it the "7-11 Summer Scripture Challenge".

I remember when I was in seminary (in High School) and they always had "March Madness", where they would challenge you to read the entire Book of Mormon in 1 month.  (which I am ashamed to say, I never attempted)  I think this seems a lot more manageable (particularly since the girls have no homework now).

If you want to follow along (it's not too late to catch up!), here's the schedule I made and printed out for everyone to use as a bookmark.  I just finished reading the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price again, so I'm glad to have a new scripture reading goal.

Each Sunday, during opening exercises, we are having "Scripture Spotlight" time where if any of the girls (or leaders, I suppose) have any scriptures that particularly stuck out to them or that they really liked, they can share them with each other.  I have decided to do this as I read on my other blog, if any of you care to follow along.

PS I cheated and started reading last week, so I would be able to tell the girls about my experience so far, when we issued the challenge yesterday.

New Year's Resolutions and House Progress

It's been more difficult than usual to post anything because my computer has been in use by The Frog all week. We are still living upstairs and he has come down with an ear infection, conjunctivitis (goopy eyes), and a cold (sore throat, cough, runny nose), so I've been letting him watch movies nearly all day, in hopes of helping him relax. For all you who have Netflix out there, I stumbled upon a clayamation called Pingu that The Frog thinks is hilarious. (I don't really get it.) In fact, this morning he was drinking some milk while watching it and he actually laughed so hard that milk squirted out of his nose and all over my computer! I had never heard of that actually happening (in real life) before!

Well, it's that time again. Time to make New Year's Resolutions. I have a few, but I think the biggest one is that Jay and I are going to learn Japanese together. I have committed to spend 30 minutes every day (except Sunday) studying it. Right now I'm memorizing Hiragana. Jay found an awesome website that is basically digital flashcards for pretty much anything you could possibly want to memorize. I especially like it for this because you can hear what the sounds are supposed to sound like. I'm going to start working on the Katakana next week, and after that I'll do the 2000 most common words. Jay and I both have a Japanese textbook and work book that we are going to try to go through, in addition to memorizing these flashcards, so we can learn actual grammar. We might be crazy to think we can learn a language without knowing anyone who can speak it to us, but I'm really excited to try! I have been wanting to do something like this with Jay since we got married, but he never had any interest until he started wanting to play imported Japanese video games. :) He's going at it a bit more whole-heartedly-- planning to spend 2 hours a day studying, and he's even switched his computer and phone to be in Japanese, as well as his email, etc. He's going to try and read a Japanese comic strip for kids, as well.

I also want to keep my Hungarian going, so I'm going to try to learn 5 Hungarian words a day. (using the same site) I think that picking something to work on memorizing has helped my memory in general, and that's been exciting for me as well. I feel like my memory has really gone downhill since high school, because I haven't had to blatantly memorize large lists of "stuff" (useless or not) since then. Perhaps there was some value to it after all? Maybe next year I'll try to memorize all the countries, or go through all the SAT words or something, just to keep my mind working in that way. :) With my iPhone organizing my life, I have little need to remember many things these days.

Some other goals I have are:

-start exercising again (weekdays) either 30 min of ballet or walking with the stroller (when it warms up again)

-grow out my hair (this might sound like an easy one, but I frequently get strong urges to chop off my hair)

-I helped a neighbor HS kid with his calculus homework the other day and I think I might like to do one math problem every day. I seriously had sooo much fun thinking about related rates again. I still haven't picked which book I will go through though. (I have waaaay to many math textbooks. It's not even funny) I think calculus would be a really fun review, but it might be good for me to do something I was never as good at, like number theory or abstract algebra.

-I am going to be better about labeling my photos as I import them and also RATING the goods ones, so I don't have to sift through them all the time. All you with iPhoto out there know what I'm talking about.

-I also want to get completely caught up on The Frog's photo albums and Start one for Peach. I meet with some girls in my neighborhood once a month to do that, and I'm going to work on it one other night each month.

-I would like to improve my posture, but I'm not really sure how to measure progress with that, or how to consistently work on it. Any ideas?

As for the house- we are still not completely painted, nor will we be until next week-- hopefully Monday, but I'm learning not to get to excited about the deadlines we keep getting from the contractors. Just about everything has taken longer than expected... ran out of moulding, ran out of carpet pad, carpet gets here and is 1 inch too short, forgot to paint the doors, painted one room the wrong color, kitchen cabinets are in, but lost the pegs for a shelf and the garbage pulls in and out veeerrrry stiffly, etc. Once the carpet is all put back (was supposed to happen today, but now they have to get more pad and the right size carpet and come back tomorrow) we should be able to let The Frog play downstairs again!!! I can't wait!

We probably won't be staying up until midnight tonight, as everyone is somewhat sick. (though, The Frog definitely has the worst of it) But we are getting indian food to celebrate!

Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

I did it!!!

I recently made a goal to go through all the emails in my inbox, give them all the appropriate labels, and then archive them.

You heard me. ALL of them.

ok, not the starred ones.

But guess what! I did it!! It's official!! I used to have over 2,000 emails in my inbox and they are now nicely tucked out of view, and filed away in my virtual filing cabinet that is gmail. What's amazing to me is that I'm only now using 25% of my available space. I don't even know if that's a lot.

How much are you using?

I think the second best part of this filtering process was looking through all my old emails and reliving some fun conversations, remembering the event planned for, and feeling relieved that I'm done with school.

The best part being the uncluttered, purified, cleansed, inbox. This is the new me.

*sigh*

Happy New Year! (finally)

I've had so much to post, but been so busy with family and the like that I'm just now getting around to the now. (I believe this is the second time I've ever posted twice in the same day. For some reason I hate doing this- don't want to scare away my 3 readers by overwhelming them I guess.) I usually think about having New Years' resolutions, but I honestly can't remember a time when I actually wrote them down and did something about them for the entire year. This year will be different! Here are some of the ones I'm most excited about:

-I will include a whole grain in every homemade meal. This goal is inspired by a course I attended at this year's BYU education week called something like "Those Wonderful Grains". I plan to type up my notes and share them on here very soon, but one notable reason for taking this on is that apparently the average adult is carrying around 15 pounds of extra weight in their colon!! Ew. We should be eating at least 50g of fiber daily, and most Americans get 5. This goal may sound intimidating, but really breakfast and lunch will be easy, it's dinner that I'm nervous about. For breakfast, I just plan to experiment by rotating through various grains cooked on the stove like oatmeal- this week we've been eating teff. Lunch, I'll be sure to eat my sandwich on whole wheat bread or whole wheat tortilla. This leads nicely into my next resolve...

-I will perfect the art of bread making (this includes pizza dough). Yeah, this is a bit ambitious, and how is this quantified? Not really sure, so I just decided to make some kind of bread product once a week. Hopefully after 52 pieces, I will at least be more knowledgeable.

-Jay, through inspiration of a good friend, has decided to avoid eating all refined sugar. Meaning that he will not eat anything he knows to contain sugar or corn syrup. Easy for him to say since I'm the one who makes dinner, no? Though I like the idea, I am pursuing a more mild version- I will not purchase anything with sugar or corn syrup, but I'm allowed to eat gifts and anything that we already have around. (including the 5 lb bag of sugar we already own) Honey, real maple syrup and molasses are allowed, but should not be used with the intention of replacing all sugary snacks.

-Not all my resolutions involve food. Probably the one that will be most trying to my will-power is my resolve to stop picking at my skin. I have the worst habit of poking around at things that are nearly invisible and as a result, they become quite inflamed and noticeable. No more!!

-I resolve to read at least 2 books per month- one is my book club book, the other will be of my choice. Haven't yet decided if scriptures can count when I'm desperate.

-I resolve to enjoy the now. Allow myself to be late and not kick myself over it. Enjoy all the times when The Frog takes his sweet time eating when I'm in a hurry, or poops at an inopportune time. Life's too short!

-Organize my craft room. It is the last room in our house to become livable, and I would like it to be my place of preference by the end of the year.

-I will get rid of all items I own and did not use last year. A fresh year needs a fresh start!

-I will listen to a foreign language podcast 3 times a week. Probably I'll start with French.

-I will use up half my yarn before buying any new.

Hopefully this will give me other things to write about besides The Frog. And now, another cute pic :D