Happy New Year

At this moment my girls are watching (or enthralled with is really a better description) Alice in Wonderland. Luckily it's the Disney cartoon - the other versions of it just freak me out. All I can think is that Lewis Carroll must have been on an acid trip or something when he wrote that. For some reason that story has always creeped me out.

Speaking of stories, my break is almost over, and all I've been doing for the last two weeks is reading. It's been very nice, but of course, like every school vacation I feel like I've gotten nothing done. I re-read the Twilight series - excellent, I highly recommend it - and I've been reading a lot of fanfiction. Other than that, I've still got a stack of books I need to get to. I need to re-read the first two books in the Eragon series (by Christopher Paolini) before I can get to the third book I haven't read yet. It's been so long I can't remember what happened at the beginning of the series. And then I've got a couple of professional/teaching books that I need to get to soon. Luckily there were no classes offered this semester that I needed for my graduate program so I've got the spring and probably the summer off. That should help me catch up on my reading.

The other main thing I've been doing on vacation is taking full advantage of my Freecycle group. If you haven't heard about Freecycle, check it out with my link (on the right). It's a great way to find things you might need, or more in my case, get rid of a bunch of stuff you don't! Basically it's an easy way to exchange just about any household items - and it's all free. The main idea behind it is that one man's trash is another's treasure and we need to keep things out of the landfills as much as possible. I have gotten rid of a LOT of stuff this week alone! I would recommend checking it out if there's a local group for your area.