Tunes

Favourite things are really easy to write about.  Hey look, music!  Bands!  Yeahhh!  Here are a few of my favourites:

The Decemberists are probably my favourite band.  A lot of my favourite songs are by bands that aren't The Decemberists, but I think they probably have the highest percentage of songs that I really like and one of the lowest of songs I don't like.  My favourite of their albums are The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love, and I really can't choose between the two because they're such completely different things that it isn't even fair to compare them.

The Weepies are also really great.  Like the Decemberists, they have a very high percentage of songs that I like.  For some reason I tend to listen to them when I'm sad, even though there music isn't necessarily sad, but that just seems to be the way it works out.  I guess it's fitting, though, given their name!  I especially love their first full album, Say I am You, and their mos recent one, Be My Thrill.


Ingrid Michaelson has a very very beautiful voice and I absolutely love her music and there's really not much more to say about her than that.


Great Lake Swimmers have been amongst my favourites for a long, long time.  They came to Halifax last fall and I didn't get to see them because they sold out too fast and I was pretty much devastated.  They are super-duper mellow and their music is really good for quiet sleepy cold winter indoor days.


The Trews are a fairly local band, although they've made a name for themselves at least in Canada.  They were on Radio Free Roscoe once if any of you ever watched that show :P  They're the kind of band that just reminds me of friends and home and happy times and I always get really nostalgic if I listen to them too much.


Hey Ocean! are my new favourite band.  They're from Vancouver and I just saw them play in Halifax on Canada Day.  The lead singer's voice is amazing and their songs are just so catchy and I love their lyrics.  Plus they looked like they were having so much fun on stage that it was hard not to like them.

Top Reads

So our topic for this week is books that we like.  I was trying to find a good compromise between just making a list and actually writing something, so I'm going to make a list and write explanations for the things that I feel like need it, but leave other things to speak for themselves.  Hopefully that makes sense.  So here's a list, in no particular order:

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.


Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling.


The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis.

Discworld series, Terry Pratchett.


The Princess Bride, William Goldman.  This is my absolute favourite movie, and the book is even better.

The Gypsy Sings, Debra E. Talbert.  This is one of my very favourite books.  It's very short, less than a hundred pages, and it has beautiful accompanying artwork.  It's divided into three sections: "Gypsies," which is a series of letters between a woman and her muse; "Pirates," which is a story about dreams; and "Magic" which is a series of (very) short stories about love.  It's a beautiful book and a I tend to re-read it when I want to feel inspired and re-connect with my creative side.

This Cake is for the Party, Sarah Selecky.  I mentioned this book in the post I did a while back with photos, but it's really good.  It's a book of short stories and I don't really know how to describe them but they're all just so so good.  Every single one of them.


Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach.  This is a book about a seagull who spends all his time learning to fly better rather than scrabbling around on the shore like all the other seagulls.  It's a lovely story and I find it very motivational.

Anyway, those are a few of my favourite books.  There are lots of others, but these are some of the main ones.  I'm looking forward to seeing what kinds of things the rest of you read! :)

The things I love

(Ack! I'm so sorry guys, my internet has been wonky since Thursday. On Friday I was able to actually get to blogger and start this post, and then the internet cut back out again.)

I love sitting inside wrapped in a blanket and drinking tea while it's raining outside.

I love making something beautiful out of what someone else might have considered trash (these were made out of magazine pages)I love that time of year when the flower blossoms are just starting to come out, and there's just a hint of hope that the world won't be frozen forever.
Two words: rainbow toe-socks. While they clash with everything, the point isn't for them to be seen; the point is that I know I'm wearing something bright and energetic and it is my own little secret.

As a knitter and a baker, I love the look of well done knitting and the smell of yeast.

As I get closer to my college graduation, I've really started to love being silly. I've been so focused on growing up and trying to appear older than I am that I forgot that it's good to laugh and enjoy myself.

I love a good to-do list. I don't always love doing the items on it, but there's something fulfilling about feeling like everything I need to do is mapped out and organized - though life is rarely so clean cut and easily defined. Maybe that's why I like it.

I love the very beginning of a trip, when it is full of possibilities and I'm looking forward to it. And I look forward to my return home, when I've had a chance to recharge but suddenly find myself appreciating my surroundings much more after a little time away.

On that note, I'm about to go to the city for spring break! Woohoo! This does mean I won't be able to be active in our discussion of what we want our theme for next week to be, and part of why this entry is so short. The other reason is that my internet has been wonky for the last 24 hours, and is still a bit patchy.

See all of you next week!

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

I absolutely love fresh bread.  I have a bread machine, which is probably the most wonderful invention ever (other than, you know, the wheel, and electricity, and all those actually important ones).  I love being able to set it up the night before so that I can wake up to the delicious aroma of it in the morning and eat a warm and delicious breakfast that finished baking 5 minutes before I woke up.  I love the texture and the flavour and just everything.

Warm summer rain is just the best.  It rains a lot here, and most of the time it's cold and awful, but in the summer, when it's a nice warm rainfall I love to be outside in it.  The harder it falls the better.  I like to see all the people with their umbrellas, and hear the sound of the rain, and I don't know, something about a good rain storm just makes the whole world feel fresh and new and beautiful.  Two years ago my friends and I were camping and we ended up doing the hike out of our site in the middle of a tropical storm, and it was just the most wonderful thing.  I also especially love going to the beach in the rain.

I'm also a huge fan of used books.  I like to see what pages past owners have dog-eared, and what places they may have chosen to underline or annotate.  I like the smell of them, and I like to wonder if anyone else laughed or cried over that same book in the same pages that I did, and why they decided to get rid of it and why they had bought it in the first place.  I especially love used book stores, and most especially one nearby that has books absolutely floor to ceiling and boxes sitting haphazardly in the aisles because they just have so. many. books. and I always just want to know where they all came from and whether or not they were loved.

Another thing I love is discovering new music.  I do this thing sometimes where I just go to the library, browse the CD section, and pick out a few to listen to based entirely on band name, album title, cover art, and song titles.  If something catches my eye, even if it's a genre I don't usually listen to, I'll bring it home and give it a try.  I've discovered some really good music this way, and it's always such a thrill to hear a really good song for the first time ever and have it be all special and surprising and wonderful.

I think the last favourite thing I'm going to mention is blankets.  I love blankets.  I grew up in a big old house that was really hard to keep warm, so I was used to just using blankets all the time - curled up on the couch reading, sitting at the computer, whatever.  There's something about blankets that's just far cuddlier and more comforting than a sweater could ever be.  I have a variety of blankets of various weights and snuggliness that don't even go on my bed at night, they're just around, and I grab whenever I sit down anywhere that isn't the table or the floor.  Blankets are just great.