"Oh c'mon Will, just take off your shirt and tell us!"

One last one...

...odds are, you'll cry, but I always remember how BLESSED I am when I watch it.

Woops!

I forgot Chris.

Well no, I didn't forget him, I just forgot a picture of him.
So here ya go:

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm very excited to lie in bed all tomorrow and watch the Thanksgiving episodes of Friends.

Tomorrow I'll have to post a list of what I'm thankful for...but for now I just have to mention that I found out yet another friend of mine is engaged (and one is actually getting married this weekend on her break since it's the only time she and her fiance would be home for a while). ...While I'm very happy for them, am I crazy for not being engaged at 22?? Should I really find it easy to think of at least 10 of my friends who are married? ...and more who are engaged?

Anyway...enjoy this in the meantime:

What can I say...I have a handbag addiction...

...so I will post this... :)


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Featured
New Giveaway! Add this to your list…A Beso Handbag
By Andrea ⋅ November 17, 2009 ⋅ Email This Post Email This Post ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment
Filed Under beso handbags, giveaway, holiday, johanna penagos, shopping
LAST DAY TO ENTER TO WIN!!!
Grace $74.00- Beso Handbag

Grace $74.00- Beso Handbags

We are pleased to bring back a favorite designer for our first Holiday Countdown Giveaway Event! This event is about making your holiday shopping easy. We not only search through hundreds of designers to find the best gems, we are also giving them away each week!

WEEK ONE opens with Beso Handbags designed by Johanna Penagos out of California. We love Johanna, because her handbags are feminine and yet very practical. Casual and fashionable. And we love her even more because she is GIVING AWAY Grace, a very popular piece from her current collection, to one lucky LDB reader!

Grace is a large-size purse with a great modern shape. She features two shoulder straps and a flap with a magnetic snap closure. This bag measures 15.5 ” at the widest point, 9.5 ” tall and 5 ” deep. Her exterior is constructed of the very soft, yet durable, “coffee corduroy”. Her lining is sewn in the brand new “autumn berry”. Grace’s interior features two open pockets, perfect for your cell phone or small essentials. There is also a zipper pocket. The Grace bag is constructed with extra support in the bottom to help hold her shape. A large red flower pin adorns Grace for the holidays, but the pin is removable and can also be worn on your favorite coat. Grace is a beso handbags best seller and a customer favorite, returning for the fall/winter season.

So, your mom, daughter, sister, best friend or maybe YOU could be the new owner of Grace by simply commenting below with your answer to this question:

“What is your favorite gift you were ever given?”

You must answer this question to be entered to win, but you may collect ADDITIONAL ENTRIES by:

- Tweeting this post (1 entry)

- Adding this post to your Facebook page (1 entry)

- Blogging about this contest (3 entries)

- Linking to this post on any blog or social network (1 entry)

- Become a fan on Facebook (Already a fan? Refer your friends) (1 entry)

Please come back here and tell us what you did. We’ll announce the winner on Monday night (11/23) at 10pm PST.

Good luck! …And happy shopping!

grace-beso-handbag-2

grace-beso-handbag-3
By Andrea Pohlot

http://littledesignerbook.com/index.php/new-giveaway-add-this-to-your-lista-beso-handbag/

From Post Secret...

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
:)

Holiday Traditions I Miss...

1. Going to see A Christmas Carol at the Goodman Theatre.


2. Celebrating birthdays, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day in Disney World.





3. Waking up at 4 on Christmas, watching A Christmas Story until 7 A.M. when I can finally wake everyone else up, and then not being allowed to vacuum or set the table, because I'm "doing it wrong."

A Holiday tradition I'm VERY excited for this year? Having the entire family at HOME and together (Chris, my mom, my dad, and me) for the first time in FOUR years. :)

Should I feel guilty...

...that I could not be more excited for the weekend, to take a couple days to go to Chicago, and for Thanksgiving and Christmas being just around the corner?

A little taste of wonderful snow at home in Chicago...



...and a little something interesting from the author of Eat, Pray, Love (a phenomenal book if you haven't read it):


SOME THOUGHTS ON WRITING


Sometimes people ask me for help or suggestions about how to write, or how to get published. Keeping in mind that this is all very ephemeral and personal, I will try to explain here everything that I believe about writing. I hope it is useful. It's all I know.



I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take on this work like a holy calling. I became a writer the way other people become monks or nuns. I made a vow to writing, very young. I became Bride-of-Writing. I was writing’s most devotional handmaiden. I built my entire life around writing. I didn’t know how else to do this. I didn’t know anyone who had ever become a writer. I had no, as they say, connections. I had no clues. I just began.



I took a few writing classes when I was at NYU, but, aside from an excellent workshop taught by Helen Schulman, I found that I didn’t really want to be practicing this work in a classroom. I wasn’t convinced that a workshop full of 13 other young writers trying to find their voices was the best place for me to find my voice. So I wrote on my own, as well. I showed my work to friends and family whose opinions I trusted. I was always writing, always showing. After I graduated from NYU, I decided not to pursue an MFA in creative writing. Instead, I created my own post-graduate writing program, which entailed several years spent traveling around the country and world, taking jobs at bars and restaurants and ranches, listening to how people spoke, collecting experiences and writing constantly. My life probably looked disordered to observers (not that anyone was observing it that closely) but my travels were a very deliberate effort to learn as much as I could about life, expressly so that I could write about it.



Back around the age of 19, I had started sending my short stories out for publication. My goal was to publish something (anything, anywhere) before I died. I collected only massive piles of rejection notes for years. I cannot explain exactly why I had the confidence to be sending off my short stories at the age of 19 to, say, The New Yorker, or why it did not destroy me when I was inevitably rejected. I sort of figured I’d be rejected. But I also thought: “Hey – somebody has to write all those stories: why not me?” I didn’t love being rejected, but my expectations were low and my patience was high. (Again – the goal was to get published before death. And I was young and healthy.) It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism. Wasn’t that the point of the creation – to communicate something to the world? So PUT IT OUT THERE. Send your work off to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors, plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again. I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.



As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly love). The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.



I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc. Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.” Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.



Here’s another thing to consider. If you always wanted to write, and now you are A Certain Age, and you never got around to it, and you think it’s too late…do please think again. I watched Julia Glass win the National Book Award for her first novel, “The Three Junes”, which she began writing in her late 30’s. I listened to her give her moving acceptance speech, in which she told how she used to lie awake at night, tormented as she worked on her book, asking herself, “Who do you think you are, trying to write a first novel at your age?” But she wrote it. And as she held up her National Book Award, she said, “This is for all the late-bloomers in the world.” Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something where – if you missed it by age 19 – you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world – at any age. At least try.



There are heaps of books out there on How To Get Published. Often people find the information in these books contradictory. My feeling is -- of COURSE the information is contradictory. Because, frankly, nobody knows anything. Nobody can tell you how to succeed at writing (even if they write a book called “How To Succeed At Writing”) because there is no WAY; there are, instead, many ways. Everyone I know who managed to become a writer did it differently – sometimes radically differently. Try all the ways, I guess. Becoming a published writer is sort of like trying to find a cheap apartment in New York City: it’s impossible. And yet…every single day, somebody manages to find a cheap apartment in New York City. I can’t tell you how to do it. I’m still not even entirely sure how I did it. I can only tell you – through my own example – that it can be done. I once found a cheap apartment in Manhattan. And I also became a writer.



In the end, I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith. I don’t know how else to do it except that way. As the great poet Jack Gilbert said once to young writer, when she asked him for advice about her own poems: “Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say YES.”



Good luck.

Movin on up...

...I forgot to mention that our theme song for our school this year is "Movin on up"...yes, The Jeffersons' theme song. It plays EVERY day at our school.

Also, my principal said the kindergarten team is doing well, but honestly, I am nervous about my class. They are working hard, but some are SO behind already...and even though I have kids coming in early every morning, 30 minutes extra a week is not enough.

In other news, just found out someone who teaches in a nearby school district was fired...
Here's a little comparison to put in perspective where some corps members teach. This man taught in a school district in East Palo Alto, ranked 679 out of 752 school districts in California. Palo Alto on the other hand ranks 23 out of 752...and is literally just around the corner from EPA.

...and though my school district is doing MUCH better than the other, it is ranked 593 out of 752. Not so hot.

Off to do some work...and hope that I can figure out WHAT to do to help my kids...