Seven

1. School started again.

2. Julie Serven and I have started running together on Wednesdays. Of course both of us can't run very far right now, but I am excited to try running with another person regularly. Plus Julie is awesome.

3. We had an awesome girly sleepover last Friday night. We played fun games like Annie's obscure fact game and charades. We ate pizza and brownies and ice cream. The night was finished off with more girl talk and a screening of the classic chick flick Steel Magnolias.

4. I finished The Brothers K by David James Duncan. It was superb. (And I am not just saying that because it is Doug's favorite book and he gave it to me for my birthday) Duncan's wriiting is really good. The plot centers around a family of eight, especially the four older brothers and how they relate to each other and their parents. The youngest, Kincaid, usually is the perspective Duncan writes from. In my creative writing classes last year, I definitely found that writing in the first person was more difficult than the 3rd person (at least for me) so I noticed how well Duncan wrote, especially if he was completely absorbing me in events revolving around one of the older brothers though it was told by Kincaid. Duncan also uses some really creative ways of supplementing the story, such as a school assignment where one of the older brothers writes the biography of their father. This was not only a clever and hilarious story-within-the-story which added a lot of plot detail, but fleshed out the another of the characters by being in his perspective for a short time. Anyway, it's good. Here is an excerpt I loved:

"I could call it 'detachment,' or 'purity of effort,' or 'a refusal to judge by results.' But as I watched from the hedge I felt no need to squeeze it into a formula. I was learning not by words like these, but by the nonsensical songs and babblings and sound effects that accompanied Papa's destinationless pitches out into the night, that there are genuine alternatives to the black-and-white categories into which most of us dump our lives. I was learning not by thinking, but through a father/son osmosis, that winning and losing, success and failure, are like the chalk strike zones I'd watched Papa draw. There was no question that shedball wasn't aimed at the Bigs, or even at the bush. It was just an oddball backyard hobby built upon the shards of Papa's old baseball dreams and accomplishments. But while many ex-ballplayers hoard their shards, sucking on them and staining their lives with them the way Papa had done with his Lucky Strikes, Papa himself had finally crunched his shards underfoot, found a new and pure kind of effort to make, and commenced punching walls, swearing, joking, whistling and living his life as if the past had passed. And in the present he was surviving. Perhaps even thriving. He didn't know. It wasn't his business to know. His business was to simply keep making the effort."

4.

5. It is COLD in Oklahoma.

6. New episodes of LOST start this Wednesday. Yay for DVD Recorders.

7. I applied for membership at Christ the King today!