praying never looked this cute

winning harry potter poem

Amazon customers have spoken, and have chosen Rhiannon D. of Australia as the winner of the Beedle the Bard Ballad Writing Contest, sending her and a friend on a trip for two to London, England and a weekend with The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Rhiannon D., age 16, Australia

When I was six, he was eleven
I learnt how to be brave.

When I was seven, he was twelve
I learnt to misbehave.

When I was eight, he was thirteen
He taught me how to cry.

When I was nine, he was fourteen
He showed me how to try.

When I was twelve, and he fifteen
He taught me to forgive.

When we were fourteen and sixteen
I learnt what it was to live.

When we were fifteen and seventeen
He showed me he could bleed.

But growing up with Harry taught me, mostly, how to read.

cold mountain

today i got asked by a reporter what my favorite book was. i am a book junkie, but this was the first thing that came to mind, so obviously it holds a special place in my heart.

i read cold mountain (charles frazier’s debut novel) when i was in college. a friend very dear to me had told me to read it, that he had thought of me when he read it.

i started, and never put it down.

while the story certainly has its appeal, the real beauty of this book is in the storytelling, something that obviously was missing from the film adaption. it’s hard for me to describe the book as a war story or a love story, though both of those are true.

for me, this book is a testament of how uncertain life can be, and how factors you have no control over can shape who you are and who you must become. in a different story, this couple would have met, courted, fallen in love, gotten married and dealt with life on the farm. this obviously is not the case, as inman is off to war and the couple is apart for most of the novel. the story is a journey back home, and a journey to discover what home is. and if you can ever go back.

there is a passage bookmarked that i open to time and time again. i know without hesitation that it’s page 433.

"She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred."

a couple other great quotes:

"We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical."

"I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter."
"I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you."
"Why not me?"

"He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."

"And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now."

"When Ada disappeared into the trees, it was like a part of the richness of the world had gone with her. He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might have been for a purpose. To clear space for something better."

"One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen."

"[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial."

niki becomes more irish

brian clancy, who i link to over in the list, is a fabulous irish musician that eamon and i went to see religiously when we lived in colorado. i wholeheartedly wish that he would be able to play at our wedding or st. patrick's day party, but he obviously has a lot of commitments for that weekend. so i e-mailed him to see if he could recommend anyone around here. in his letter back, he told me that not only did his new cd come out, but there is a picture of moi on the tray cover.

buying it. now.

playing with the band on st. patty's day in '07.

working for reebok

last saturday i worked the avon walk for breast cancer for reebok, taking photographs. it was very rewarding to see everyone who was walking, plus i got to meet eliza dushku and tiffany ortiz, who is married to big papi. their young son was also there.

here's a picture i took of eliza:

wii fit

guess what came in the mail yesterday?




i am super excited about this! i just started using it yesterday, but i think i will love it.

billy joel x 2

i just have to get to a couple more work days and then...billy joel!

x 2

that's right.

not only am i going to see him twice, i am going two nights in a row.

i had a ticket to go friday night by myself. i had gotten it through the normal sale on ticketmaster, and the seat was not so hot. but when i was at mohegan a couple of weeks ago, i asked if they had anything else available. i ended up getting two seats for saturday night behind the stage, which doesn't matter because the show is in-the-round. i am taking shea, and we should have a great time!

i tried getting rid of my friday night ticket, but haven't found anyone who was interested. but i'm still looking.

digital photography final: literature

for my final project for my photography class, i took pictures that represented different books. i hope to make this an ongoing project, but these are a sample of what i have in mind.

“…Running to him was real…the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free...”
- John L. Parker, Once a Runner

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but that they are...shrunken by age....[for] the old giants have become pigmies while you were looking the other way."
-John Knowles, A Separate Peace

"If music be the food of love, play on..."
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.
One does not love breathing.”
-Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

catching up

i keep getting yelled at to update my blog with more frequency.

i shall try.

so what have i been up to? i had my final critique for my photography class yesterday, and this past weekend i was cooking up a storm for jayde's graduation party and mother's day. last week was kind of a blur, but i did get some stuff done, including going with samantha to look at colors for bridesmaid dresses. also of note was kieran's play, a wnba game and multiple nights of mexican food.

oh, and cheering on the celtics and the sox. they need it.

i still haven't unpacked from greenland. does that make me a bad person?

pictures from greenland

photo of my day

found on flickr

loving this ad campaign

our new ad

i don't like to promote the herald news, but our new ad is on the homepage, so check it out.

jayde blogs now

i threw up a link to jayde's new blog. now you can help me stalk her incessantly.

back in the usa

i have returned.
get excited.

pictures and updates to come.