MixMyGranola Giveaway on goodLife {eats}

goodLife {eats} is sponsoring a MixMyGranola giveaway. You should check it out. I had a great time picking out my all-time favorite granola mix. Check out goodLife {eats}, too. It's a great blog with a lot of interesting ideas.

YOYO Lip Gloss

YOYO Lip Gloss is running a promotion where they give you a free sample for mentioning a fact about them in your blog.  So, YOYO Lip Gloss is really cool.  And that's a fact.

Fall is here. Sort of. Even though I miss the summer nights, I think fall is my favorite season in Oxford. With the arrival of fall comes football and great running weather. I'm still in the run-up to full-on half-marathon training. Did 6 miles yesterday for the first time since DoubleDecker in April. It went pretty well. A lot better than the 5-miler went last week. My jazz class finished up last week; I really enjoyed teaching it.


Finished:
White Teeth

I'm thirty!  Had a great weekend, celebrating my birthday.  Got to go to the Civil Rights Museum with the Ole Miss Summer Academy.  We ate at the Bigfoot Lodge while the Travel Channel was there.  I can't believe the Travel Channel comes to Memphis and decides to film at the Bigfoot Lodge.  I mean, it's a Canadian restaurant.  Really.

Greg got to try his new bike out today when we went to Big Bad Breakfast.  The gears slipped twice - we will be having a conversation with the bike store for sure.  

I have speckled butter beans on the stove and my oats soaking for our bread.  Today is going to be busy.  We've got to clean up our house 'cause Emmy will be up here next week.  Yay!  

Finished:

Things Fall Apart

What I learned about this weekend:

Industrial agricultural processes

Wow. I had forgotten about this blog. I'm still sludging through great literature. Slowly. Oh so slowly.
Things are really busy right now. I'm working on my PhD (mostly at night), teaching a dance class (and taking dance classes whenever I can), and training for a half-marathon. Greg's insanely busy, too, juggling work, grad school, and his music and disc golf. Sometimes I get the impression that we're hurrying up to do all the time-intensive but inexpensive things we want to do while we're still young.
Someday soon we'll have more time (and more money, I hope). But it's nice to be young, and in love, and busy. I'm really big into inertia. Keep me busy and I want to go, go, go. Once I sit still, though, it's easy for me to become an unresponsive blob. Life is good. Too good to waste. So we're out there getting it while we can.
I hope you do the same!

What I learned about today:
Seventh-Day Adventists
Solar Eclipses

Tilting at Windmills

For a couple years now I have been lugging around a tattered copy of a list of books that I think I should read. The list was created by combining other lists and eliminating repetition: Time's 100, National Book Award Fiction winners, Man Booker Prize winners, PEN/Faulkner Award winners, National Medal for Arts & Letters winners, Howells Medal winners, an authors' Top Ten list, and Pulitzer Prize winners for Fiction or Novel. Currently, there are 295 books on this list. I have read a pathetically small number of these books. I am hoping that by broadcasting my goals, I will be shamed into reading more of them - hopefully at a reasonably good clip. I certainly don't believe this list includes every important piece of fiction ever written. Nor do I think that every inclusion is important. I just think that a well-read person has got to start somewhere. This is where I start.

Books that I have read are struck through. Hopefully as I make progress on this seemingly sysiphean task, I will have such amazing insight that I will have to share my revelations and wisdom through a blog update. Here's hoping.

Oh, you probably want the list. And I'll give it you.