Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 125

shelves

Does everyone spend time over New Years organizing? Is this what happens when we get stuff for Christmas or is it just an itch that happens because you are at home more, and having to stare at all the unorganized stuff?

I spent some hours taking books off shelves to be donated to libraries and now I have some new possibly interesting statistics on the books taking up shelf space in my office. I have:

2 shelves of nonfiction, 1 shelf of children's, 1 adult (last year I had no nonfiction for ad...

ungoals

I am a little obsessive about setting goals for myself, usually ones that require immense effort. Then I write them down, which makes it impossible to forget about them. This is a VERY bad habit acquired at a young age. I can't even write down vague goals, which would at least make the achievement of them a gray area. Last year, it was the 20:00 5k which I just barely missed achieving. I have already written down a couple of triathlon goals for this year, among them swimming a 500 in und...

timeless

Although I should probably say "watchless."

About three months ago, my heart rate monitor watch broke. It is my third one and I just didn't bother to buy a new one. I guess I thought this was the only way to force myself to do those workouts without monitoring all the "data" that I normally get. People are always saying that you should just go out and exercise for fun, using your own sense of your body as a guide. Whether I did that or not, I don't know. But I stopped thinking about a num...

Books Read in December 2009

Can't forget these:

Eyes Like Stars by Lisa Mantchev
Realms of Fantasy February 2010
Dreamdark: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor
Clarice Bean Spells Trouble by Lauren Child
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
Canticle by Ken Scholes
Fantasy and Science Fiction December 2009
Asimov's August 2009
Cybele's Secret by Juliet Marillier
Njal's Saga
The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark
The Girl Who Could Fly by Virginia Forester
Ice by Sarah Beth Durst
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld ...

Favorite Books of 2009:

One of the joys of reading is finding authors that I LOVE and who have many books to read.

Anything by:
Sharon Shinn (I would start with Summers at Auburn Castle or The Shape Changer's Wife)
Elizabeth Wein
Jeff Kinney (the Wimpy Kid books are some of the few that actually touch my funny bone)
Jo Walton (who else could do Victorian dragons and pull it off?)
Ruth Downie
K.J. Parker (I sometimes find myself scratching my head and wondering if her books are fantasy by any stretch, but it doesn't matte...

09 highlights

In triathlon:

2nd place overall Provo Tri (June)
3rd place AG Utah Half (August--5:05)
Honorable Mention in USAT top athletes AG (score 81 again)
Finished 50 miler every step with my husband
1st place Olympic Relay Jordanelle Triathlon with 15 (August)
4th overall in both Orem Rec triathlons this year (Nov 1:00 faster)
5k in 20:10 on a treadmilll at 0 incline
learning how many A races I can do in a year, and how to hold back on a non A-race
getting a print outlet for triathlon writing

In writing:

The Pr...

Julie and Julia

Since 12 is so into cooking (we had an Alton Brown Christmas this year), I thought when I was out looking for movies, that this would be the one for him. He did, in fact, like it a lot more than I think other 12 year old boys would have, since it is about two middle-aged women, well, cooking.

For me, it was a good time for self-reflection as I watched Julie Powell obsess over something that was, in some sense, completely unimportant, emotionally collapse over it, and nearly destroy her marr...

December presents week #4

Forgot to post these.

15:
Harry Potter in Latin
Tamar by Mal Peet

14:
Thirsty by M.T. Anderson

12:
Powerless by Matthew Cody

10:
Beyond Spiderwick 1, 2, 3 by Holly Black

7:
Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel

killing your darlings

I just deleted a sentence from a novel I've been working on. A reader had written "this is a perfect sentence" over the line and I kept trying to figure out a way to preserve it while trimming around it, but I never did. I guess this is what they mean when they say you have to kill your darlings. I am still hoping I might find some place else for it in the novel, but I know the likelihood is small.

RIP, perfect sentence.

The sentence was:
"She licked her own wounds."

Doesn't sound like much o...

most embarrassing part 2--#1

These are embarrassing moments from my supposedly adult life.

When I went to visit grad schools during my "senior" year of college, I had pretty much already made up my mind that I wanted to go to Princeton. But they didn't know that and what they also didn't know was that, in fact, I did not get accepted at any of the other grad schools that I had applied to. Yale was a no. Stanford was a waiting list. This made no sense of to me since at the time Princeton had the #1 German program in th...