miss peregrine's home for peculiar children

I hope everyone had a fun, relaxing, restful holiday!  I do have another Christmas post coming up, but finding enough time to process all the images has been hard to come by, as you can imagine.  And then of course there's New Year's!  I'm totally excited, because this year we'll be spending that particular holiday with Marc and Leanne (you will remember them from Halloween).  It's sure to be an awesome time, and a post about that will be sure to follow!


I thought I'd do a little interim post about one of the gifts that I received this year, from my brother. It's about this book:

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs.  I watched the book trailer a few weeks ago, and immediately fell in book love.  So you can imagine how excited I was to get reading.  I managed to drag it out to the evening of December 26th, and there's part of me that wishes I had dragged it out a bit longer -- because now that it's over, I'm sort of in withdrawal. But let me tell you, it is pretty much everything I love in a book.  The combination of actual old photographs (which sometimes border on the grotesque, so be warned) and a compelling story make for a really interesting reading experience.  It was also kind of refreshing to read a book that isn't a classic.  Don't get me wrong, I love the classics, but sometimes you just need a bit of contemporary punch now and then.

I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, so I won't go into much detail on the plot.  This isn't so much a review as a "I'm so excited about this story, and I want everyone else to be excited about it too" sort of post.  But if you like stories of budding romance (not Twilight-esque budding romance, which is silly), intrigue, adventure, and anything with vintage flair, then you'll like this one.  I'm probably going to wait a few weeks and then read it again, just to see if I pick up anything the second time around that I missed in the first go.  I'm so, so, so excited that there's going to be a sequel...I just don't know if I'll be able to wait that long!

deck the halls!

Decorating around the house for Christmas this year has brought up some bittersweet thoughts for me.  Since I'll be married and in my very own apartment by Christmas 2012, this is sort of my "last" Christmas here.  I know, I know...I'll be coming by on Christmas Eve to celebrate with my family (we no longer celebrate on Christmas morning) for years to come, but I probably won't be here when my mom drags all of our Christmas decorations up from the basement and turns our autumnal living room/dining room into a winter wonderland.  And I probably won't be decorating the Christmas tree with my mom either, after which we always ask my dad "How does it look?", to which he always responds, "It's beautiful!", and then we glow with pride.  I'm excited to decorate the apartment I'll be sharing with Luke, to have our own tree, to watch Christmas specials together on our own couch.  But there is a part of me that will be sorry to leave these traditions behind.  So even though I'm excited for Christmas, I know that this is the last one of its kind for me.  So I want to treasure it even more for that.


One of the traditions that I'm definitely going to carry on with Luke, and with our future children, is buying a new ornament for each of us every year.  That means that each of us have (or will have, in the case of my younger brother) twenty-one ornaments from Hallmark.  It's so fun to pick your ornament each fall, and see the way our tastes have changed over the years.  I went from Precious Moments-esque angels, to goofy Santas (one of which is pictured below), the lovely bird ornaments.  My older brother, collected fishing Santas, Snoopy ornaments, and even has a Muhammed Ali ornament (which, I'm afraid, always gets relegated to the back of the tree because it doesn't go with my mom's decor).  And may I also add that the annual advent calendar is always something to look forward to?

first snow fall...sort of

I feel like every time I write a post these days, I'm apologizing for being absent.  But November, and now December, have sort of taken me by the throat and won't let go.  To add to all the other insanity that's been happening, I found out today that my my grandpa is having surgery tonight (he may be in surgery right now, for all I know), and that he might have cancer.  Again.  And I spent most of my day editing scene change charts, and sticking tabs in for all the lighting and sound cues in my stage manager's script.


And, to top it all off, I am freezing cold. 


The snow did start falling a few days ago though.  I thought it might actually stick around, but it appears I was wrong.  Which is too bad, because we have a few roses still clinging to life on our rose bush, and I wanted to get some shots of the snow on them -- but every time I went to go take the pictures, the snow had already melted!  


I'm not a huge fan of snow, but I'm less of a fan of green Christmases.  Now that it's December, I feel like I have license to watch every single Christmas special in existence, and that the sky owes me enough snow to hide all the nasty, soggy grass.

(you can click on the pictures to view larger!)

P.S. I picked and purchased my wedding gown on Saturday.  I wish I could tell you guys about it because I'm super excited, but Luke reads the blog, and I don't want to blow the surprise!  But I can tell you that I tried on about ten dresses, and pretty much knew right away that it was the one.  Part of me knew because I absolutely did not want to take it off.  And my parents completely surprised me by offering to buy the dress!  I can't wait to be able to share pictures with you -- less than a year to go!