What Ten Years of Alan Ladd Will Do to Your House

Today is my tenth Alan-iversary!  TENTH!!!!  Wow.

When you have been obsessing over the same actor for ten years, you tend to end up with a lot of stuff about them, all over your house.  At least, that's how it works if you're me :-D  One of these days, I'll do a post with all my John Wayne artwork and signs and posters too.  But today, it's Alan Ladd Day.  I'll give you a bit of a tour of where he shows up in my house.

You can kind of see these posters when you first come in the front door, if you know to look up the staircase to the hallway wall upstairs.  Guy Williams as Zorro, John Wayne on a horse, and Alan Ladd smiling at someone just off-screen.  Oddly enough, all three guys in these posters seem to be looking at something over by my laundry room.  Hmm.

Sorry about how glare-y these photos are.  I snapped them quickly today, and it was pretty sunny.

In our master bedroom, I have a wall that has a couple of half-sized bookcases that contain my unread books (or try to, anyway), and I have a gallery wall above that.  Five of the 11 pictures on it are Alan.  I'll share some closeups down below.

Actually, it's seven out of thirteen, because I have a smaller photo stuck into the frame of each of the bigger photos.  My best friend send me this swoony shot of a very young Alan Ladd.  The smaller photo is just a postcard I bought on RedBubble.

This is a really bad photo because of the reflection -- so sorry!  This is my favorite photo of Alan -- he's smiling his genuine smile in it, not his "I'm supposed to smile now" smile.  I bought it on eBay, and it's a vintage print of a promo photo.  The insert is a little photo of Alan with a horse that I think Eva-Joy sent me a while back.

This is a trio of postcards that were sent to Alan's fan club members at various stages in his career.  They're not actually signed, they just have his signature printed on them, but they ARE authentic fan club cards, so that's pretty cool.

Along another wall in our bedroom, I have a small table that's a combination sewing and writing table.  I have a few photos hung there, and for about ten years, I've been sticking postcards and inspirational writing quotations and such all around those photos.  Kind of an inspiration board for all my writing in general.

It includes a trio of postcards there that I also got from RedBubble when I was writing my first draft of my Hamlet retelling, which I haven't published yet, but do hope to revise and release eventually.  Anyway, I have Joseph Cotten, Alan Ladd, and Victoria Lake all done by the same artist because they're my Horatio, Hamlet, and Ophelia.  It's set in the 1940s, and these are based on their looks from the 1940s, so they're basically perfect!

Down in the living room, I have pictures from two of my favorite Alan Ladd westerns.  (My whole living room has a western movie theme -- I'm sure that comes as a great shock.)  These are from Branded (1950) and Shane (1953), respectively.  They're hanging right above our TV set.

Of course, the living room also contains my collection of Alan Ladd DVDs and Blu-Rays, but those are scattered all over my movie shelves and I simply ran out of time to collect them all up for a photo.

Over in the kitchen, you'll find my two Alan Ladd mugs.  One, you'll notice, has the same artwork as one of my postcards -- again, it's from RedBubble.  The other has a promo image from This Gun for Hire (1942), and I got it on Etsy ten years ago.  One of the first Alan Ladd-related things I bought!

Finally, in the library, you'll find a couple of movie-tie-in books for two of Alan's movies, Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and The Proud Rebel (1958).   I'd love to have the movie tie-in for The Great Gatsby (1949), but those tend to run like $250 each, so... that's out of my league, heh.  Maybe I'll find a deal on one some day.

This concludes our tour of the random Alan Ladd memorabilia that has collected around my house over the past ten years.  I hope you enjoyed it :-)  And, if not, well, the tickets didn't cost much, anyway...

A Little Kitchen Project

I made a coffee bar in my kitchen!  When my mom started living with us part-time last fall, I bought a Keurig because that makes it really easy for her to get her first cup of coffee even if she wakes up long before me.  But the Keurig and its coffee pod storage took up a lot of space on my counter -- space I couldn't use for anything else anymore.  Not only that, but reaching coffee mugs in the cabinets was tricky for my mom, since she has Parkinson's and that affects her balance and movements.

So, I decided to make a coffee bar to make coffee and mugs more accessible for my mom, and also for any guests.  Now that she lives here part of the time, we get a lot more guests because her friends from near and far like to come out and spend some time with her.  I figure it's nice to not make guests wonder how your coffee maker works, where you keep your coffee grounds, if you have creamer, and so on.  Everyone can figure out a Keurig pretty quickly, especially an ultra-simple one like mine.

Long, long ago, when our first baby was less than a year old, we bought a huge old dry sink at the Salvation Army.  It was a perfect changing table for many years.  Once my kids outgrew diapers, it became a combination extra kitchen storage space below, and a catch-all for my stuff above.  In the past few years, it's transformed into a sort of strategic planning zone where I could keep my bullet journal, stickers, letters that need to be answered, and random things I needed to deal with in the immediate future.

In other words, it had become a giant mess:

I knew it could be ideal as a coffee bar.  It's a little lower than my counters, so my mom can easily reach everything there.  It's not huge, so she should be able to stand in one place and access everything.  It was originally a dry sink, so it's easy to clean and not a stranger to moisture.  All I had to do was clean it all off, rehome everything that I had been storing on top of it, and pick up a few small accessories!

Yeah, it took me about two weeks to do all that.  But, it's finished at last!

I already had the cute sign that says "Coffee and friends make the perfect blend."  I picked up a rubber mat to go under my Keurig and make cleaning up spills easier.  I bought a mug tree online.  I picked up a couple of new mugs at the thrift store so that Mom and guests could have some drinkware choices.  And I used a gift card that I won in a giveaway to buy a cute little mug-shaped basket to hold flavored coffee creamers.  So, now I have a coffee bar!  

I also ordered a mini table-top trash can, but that has been delayed in shipping, so I'll have to change this up a bit once that arrives.  Still, I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I hope it makes mornings easier for my mom when she's staying here and more fun for our future guests.

A Liebster Award

Eva did not tag me with the Liebster Award on her blog, Caffeinated Fangirl.  She didn't tag anyone, she just invited people to participate if they wanted to.  I haven't done one of these for a long time, and I really like her questions, so... thank you for the non-tag, Eva!  And, here we go!

Rules

• Thank the blogger who gave you the award. 
• List eleven random facts about yourself. 
• Answer the eleven questions given to you. 
• Tag eleven other bloggers. 
• Ask them eleven questions.
• Notify your nominees once you have uploaded your post.

Eleven Random Facts About Me:

1. I've ridden an elephant and a camel.
   
   
2. I own 182 candles.
   
   
3. My favorite fruit is pears.  Or apricots.  Unless I can get a fresh-off-the-tree peach.
   
   
4. I was in 4-H for 7 years.
   
   
5. I love peppermint mochas and will drink them any time of year.
   
   
6. I write a monthly column on Old West history for the newspaper the Prairie Times.
   
   
7. Orange is my least-favorite color.
   
   
8. I prefer Coca-cola to alcohol of any sort.
   
   
9. I've broken my right forearm twice, thirty years apart, both times while roller skating.
   
   
10. Brownies are my favorite dessert, over any pie or cake or other confection.
    
    
11. I like to reread The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery every New Year's Day.

Eva's Questions:

Describe your favorite notebook. 

I just bought a new notebook at Walmart the other day that has Saguaro cacti, a peachy-gold-pink sunset, and the words "Give yourself space to dream" in shiny gold letters.  It's my new favorite :-)

Last five star read? 

Song of the Valley by Britt Howard.  Modern day cowboys, you say?  Yes, please!  You can read my review here.

Last one star read? 

Summer by Edith Wharton.  I almost never give one-star ratings because if I'm disliking a book that much, I tend to just not finish it.  And I almost never review books I DNF (Did Not Finish).  But man, that one, I just kept hoping it was going to have a really good twist right at the end and have things work out in a good way... but nope, didn't happen, and I was really disappointed.

Instrumental or vocal movie soundtracks? 

Both!  I love both.  And I love movie soundtracks so much, I review them :-)  Here's the list of the ones I've got posted here so far.

Movie musicals or Broadway musicals? 

Well, the only thing I've ever seen on Broadway was Hamlet, and it wasn't a musical, but I've seen lots and lots of movie musicals, so I'll go with movie musicals.

Favorite animated movie? 

Robin Hood (1973).  Everything about it is absolutely perfect.  I was super disappointed that the only Robin Hood merch we found at Disney World back in March wasn't even at Disney World, it was at the big souvenir shop in Disney Springs.  And it was just one small enamel pin.  I was vexed.  And saddened.  Because a movie that wonderful deserves ALL the merch!  I did pick up a cute mug from the BoxLunch store at our mall this weekend, though.

Top three favorite fictional characters of all time? 

1. Sergeant Saunders from Combat! (1962-67)
2. Sherlock Holmes from the canon by A. Conan Doyle
3. Wolverine from the X-Men comics and movies

What’s your go-to snack? 

A spoonful of peanut butter with a handful of chocolate chips.

What’s your favorite thing about where you live? (House, state, country…) 

Well, Tir Asleen is the first house we've ever owned, and I love it because it is all ours.  And it is beautiful.  It has a wood-burning fireplace, a library, plenty of space for guests, and almost a third of an acre (which is a huge lot around here) with nearly 20 trees.  I love it.

Top three favorite scents? 

Amber, cinnamon, and lavender.  Maybe not all in one candle, though -- that would be weird.

Do you own any LEGOs?

Personally?  Yes, maybe ten sets.  Most are from my childhood, but some are sets I've bought in the last few years.  Our family, though... owns hundreds of thousands of Legos.  And I am not exaggerating.

The library is also known as the Lego Room...

I am going to be rebellious and not tag anyone, since I wasn't tagged for this myself.  If you want to answer Eva's questions, go right ahead!  Just be sure to credit her post, not this one.

All Finished with My Winter To-Do List for 2020/21

February is over at last.  Whew.

Although spring has not yet sprung, I've finished everything on my winter to-do list that I'm reasonably going to finish, so I'm going to wrap it up and begin afresh.  Let's see how I did...

~ Finish writing a short story  Check! I released my new short story "Run, Run" in January as an e-book here for Kindle and here for Nook.  It's free!  (In the US, anyway -- it should be free for Nook everywhere, but the Kindle version may cost you a small amount in other countries.)  "Run, Run" retells the story of The Gingerbread Man, and is a sequel to my book One Bad Apple.  I've included a recipe for 1800s-style gingerbread in the e-book as well, in case you get as hungry reading it as I got while writing it.

~ Finish the first draft of my Beauty and the Beast retelling  Fail.  I'm not quite half done with this first draft, I think.  It's already at 30K, so this is going to be another longer book, which is fun!  But I have a lot to write yet.  I absolutely love these characters, though, so I'm not complaining about having lots of time to spend with them!

I still don't have at title for it, though.  It'll come.

~ Finish re-reading The Lord of the Rings  Fail.  That's okay, too.  This is my ninth time reading it, and I'm really in no hurry.  I've been enjoying Heidi's read-along of it a lot!

(This and the following book pictures are from my Instagram account.)

~ Read 3 Christmas books  Check!  In fact, I read six!!!  I think that's the most Christmas books I've ever read in one season as an adult.  I read:

• Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories by L. M. Montgomery 
• A House to Let by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and Adelaide Anne Proctor
• Yuletide: A Jane Austen-Inspired Collection of Stories edited by Christina Boyd
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (reviewed previously here)
• Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie
• Holiday by Gaslight by Mimi Matthews

~ Read 6 other books off my TBR shelves  Check!  I read ten.  It was a great winter for reading!  I read:

• Code Red at the Super Mall by Eric Wilson
• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
• Jewel of Persia by Roseanna M. White
• For the Sake of the Game edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger
• The Lone Ranger by Elizabeth Rudnick
• Further Chronicles of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
• Faces to the Sun edited by S. J. Lasko
• In League with Sherlock Holmes edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger
• Black Orchids by Rex Stout

~ Read 3 books from the library  Check!  I read:

• We are the Ship by Kadir Nelson
• Black Heroes of the Wild West by James Otis Smith
• The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby

~ Read at least 1 book each month about/by someone who is not white Check!  I read four:

• We are the Ship by Kadir Nelson
• Black Heroes of the Wild West by James Otis Smith
• The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

~ Host a pirate-themed blog party in February  Aye, aye!  We had so much fun.  Go here for the wrap-up post with links to all the different posts people contributed.

~ Watch 3 Christmas movies  Check!  I watched:

• Holiday Affair (1949)
• The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)
• A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
• White Christmas (1954)

~ Watch 4 movies off my TBW shelves  Check!  I watched seven*:

• Call of the Wild (2020)
• The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)
• Calcutta (1946)
• Much Ado About Nothing (2012)
• Virginia City (1940)
• Sleeping Beauty (1959)
• Against All Flags (1952)

*I had watched two of those before (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and Sleeping Beauty), but so long ago that I didn't really remember them, so I kept them on my TBW shelves until I had a chance to watch them again and decide if I liked them enough to keep them or not.

~ Go see Wonder Woman: 1984 (2020)  Check!  It was okay -- you can read my thoughts here.

~ Try making cookies with my new patterned rolling pin  Check!  As you can see, it has a very ME design:

~ Help my daughter make a playground for her hamster  Check!  You can see him playing in it here:

~ Repaint the main floor bathroom  Check!  Very happy with the results.  Especially this border I put up:

~ Get back to regularly reading the blogs I love Check!  I've been keeping up reasonably well, I think, and I love spending a couple afternoons every week just reading and reading and reading them.  I'd rather be reading them every day like I used to, but right now, this is what works for my life, so I'll try to keep it up :-) 

I'll figure out a new set of goals in a day or two, for the spring!  Meanwhile, happy Friday to you.

I DID IT!!!

I really, truly cleaned up and organized my crafting/sewing corner!!!  Look!

We moved into Tir Asleen 4 years ago next month, and this area of our master bedroom has always been a giant mess.  It's where I shoved boxes I didn't need to unpack right away.  Then it became where I just dumped things I didn't have time or inclination to deal with right away.  I would occasionally clean it up a little bit, but I never got it thoroughly organized, not even when we added first the shelving unit, then later the book case.  If I wanted to sew, I'd have to shove piles of stuff to one side, or pile them on top of other piles... it was awful.  I wish I'd taken a "before" photo to show you how bad it was.

But now, it's tidy!  Okay, comparatively, anyway.  As tidy as they're liable to get considering this is me we're talking about.  At least I can sew with impunity now!  My next project will be a bigger cooking apron for Sam, as he's far outgrown the one I made him when he was 3 (he's 7 now, so no wonder!).  He's chosen the fabric, so now I need to go ahead and make it.  Soon, I think!

By the way, the top shelf of that book case is nothing but journals.  It is now completely full, and I just started my 40th journal this week.  I've been keeping a regular journal since I was 14, so for 21 years now, and although I don't always write every day anymore, I do write there at least once a week, usually every 2 or 3 days.  Anyway, just felt like mentioning that :-)

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

Charity nominated me for this blog award :-)  Thank you, Charity!  I find you very inspiring too!  Especially when I have a Femnista deadline looming....

The Rules: 

• Post the award on your blog 
• Thank your nominator because they’re awesome 
• List 7 facts about yourself 
• Nominate 15 other blogs for their awesomeness 
• Post the rules so people know them

Seven Facts About Hamlette:

1.  I was first published when I was seven years old.  I submitted a poem called "The Ant" to Highlights for Kids and they published it!

2.  My favorite Star Wars character is Han Solo.

3.  Strawberries are my favorite fruit.

4.  I own 10 different adaptations of Hamlet on DVD, including an opera and a Chinese retelling.  (I haven't watched the Chinese retelling or one of the others yet, though.)

5.  I've never had a haircut.  I get 4-6 inches trimmed off every six months or so, but I can't remember a time when it wasn't long, usually reaching my waist.

6.  I've visited John Wayne's birthplace in Winterset, IA.

7.  I have lived in seven different states:  Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Virginia.  And I've lived in each of them for at least three years apiece.

I know it says nominate 15 other blogs, but I'm not going to.  I follow 55 blogs right now, and to choose 15 from them that are the most inspiring to me would be much too difficult for a busy Wednesday.  If you'd like to be nominated, let me know in the comments and I'll nominate you "officially."

Cleaning My House as an Advent Exercise

I hate cleaning.  It feels so pointless, because everything gets dirty again in about twenty minutes anyway.  I sweep the floor, and it needs to be swept again.  I wash the dishes, and we use them again and need to wash them again.  Someone scatters toys on the floor as soon as I've left the room.

But it needs to be done, because otherwise we'd be living in chaos and filth.  So I sweep the floors, unload and reload the dishwasher, wipe off the table and counters, sort and wash and dry and fold the laundry.  Because if I don't, we won't be able to find anything, eat anything, wear anything, do anything.

This year, thanks to the family reunion in Williamsburg over Thanksgiving, my house is making me quote the fish in The Cat in the Hat a lot:  "This mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we cannot clean it up, there is no way at all."  I've barely got any Christmas decorations up yet because first I have to clean the places where they go!  In fact, everything is such a disaster that I have been inspired to weed out a lot of our things, to sort them into boxes for giving to the thrift store or selling at our next yard sale.  I've started packing away toys and books the kids have outgrown too.

What does this have to do with Advent?  Well, Advent is that season in the church year when we Christians anticipate celebrating Christ's birth at Christmas and also look forward to his Second Coming, when the world will end and we'll go to our heavenly home to live with him forever.  It's a good time for personal reflection, for looking at our lives and hearts and seeing what changes need to be made.  What needs cleaning up?  Have we been lax about spending personal time in the Word every day (guilty!) or about praying without ceasing (guilty!).  Have we been impatient (guilty!) or unkind (guilty!) or focused on prep work for Christmas instead of the miracle we'll be celebrating (guilty!)?  We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), but as redeemed, loved children of God, we get to do our very best to live our lives to his glory out of gratitude for his mercy and love toward him and our fellow people.

Tir Asleen hasn't been 100% clean since we moved in here three years ago.  I will never be a perfect person.  But I can clean my house as best I can, and I can focus on God's love and mercy, on the reason for the season.  If I clear some of the clutter out of my home and out of my heart, doing both of those will be a lot easier.

I'm linking up today with the Advent Link-Up Party on Sister, Daughter, Mother, Wife.  Click here to find lots of other great posts about Advent!

Container Garden Update

Just a quick update to show off how my container garden is coming along.  Actually, these photos are from almost 2 weeks ago -- just didn't have a chance to take them off my camera until now.  Click here to see what it looked like in May, if you want to compare.

Everything came up except the pansies, although only a few straggly chives came up, but oh well.  I replaced the pansies with a flower I'd never seen before called purslane.  I picked the purslane up at Walmart on a whim, and it's a short-but-rangy plant with very bright flowers.

The leaves and stems are almost rubbery, so I'm guessing it comes from arid places and handles heat and drought well.  Considering the heat index here is supposed to be over 100 today and for the next 4 days, I'm glad to have something that will survive!

Here's how big my lavender is getting:

And look at my lemon basil!  I used some of it for the first time the other night, with some fish I baked for supper.

Here's that center pot with lantana and calibrachoas.  This is before it got hot last week -- I'm so glad I took pictures when I did, because this may well have been the most glorious the calibrachoas will get.  They've gotten pretty bedraggled the last few days, and I'm sure the continual heat will not improve them.  But the lantana is going strong still!

My dad unexpectedly gave me a really nice camera last month, and I tried out some of the fun features on it for the first time the other day.  Like this one, which lets you turn everything black-and-white except for one color:

Not sure how it happened, it being a new camera and all, but my picture size got switched to square for a while, until I noticed and switched it back.  That's why a bunch of these are square, not rectangular.  I named my new camera Diego because I was reading The Mark of Zorro when my dad gave the camera to me.  It's black, Zorro wears a lot of black, and I really love the name Diego, so it fit nicely.  But don't worry, I'm not abandoning Francis!  I still love my pocket-sized red camera too, and use it more still, to tell the truth.  Diego gets used when I have time to play and experiment a little, or want to take super-good photos.  But Francis is perfect to grab and take along to a museum or playground, or just snap a quick shot of the kids being cute.

Anyway, one more shot of the whole container garden from a different angle:

Some of the nasturtiums have started flowering since I took these, and I just saw my first marigold opening yesterday, all of which add more color and variety.

And, because I was playing with Diego's zoom lens (okay, that sounded wrong), here's a shot I took of one of our little bunny visitors:

We see these almost every day throughout the spring and summer.  This is one of the adults, but on Sunday we saw a teensy baby hop out from under our deck and nibble some clover oh-so-close to our house.  It was so small I could have held it in one hand -- just adorable!  I've read that bunnies like to roll in lavender, so if I can get mine going really well, I'll find somewhere in the yard to plant it so I can share it with them.  And then we'll have lavender-scented wild rabbits!  What's not to love?

I Made Jam! Maybe.

I've never made jam before.  Ever.  I've never canned anything by myself either, though I helped my mom can things when I was a kid.  But this is fridge canning, not "actual" canning, so this kinda doesn't count, I don't think.  But I did make jam.  At least, I hope it's jam.

Okay, let me back up.  Our first spring here at Tir Asleen, we discovered that the tree right in front of our house is magnificent.  It's a cherry-plum tree, which means it produces gorgeous flowers.

And then it produces fruit which are technically plums, but they're the size of cherries.  And very tart.  I like tart things.  So that first spring, I said, "I will make jam from these some day!"  But I had a little baby at the time, and couldn't find the time to even harvest the cherry-plums.

The next spring, which was last spring, we didn't get much rain, and our tree didn't flower a lot.  Didn't produce much fruit either.  So again, no harvesting.  I began to despair of ever enjoying more than the occasional tart morsel from that tree.

But this year, we got lots of blossoms, lots of fruit!  So the kids and I picked cherry-plums for a couple of hours one morning, and I would guesstimate we picked about 12 cups of them.  Maybe closer to 14.  We filled a whole gallon Ziploc bag and then started in on another.  And finally, finally my dream of jam could become a reality!

I found this recipe and set off on my jam-making adventure.  It took me two hours of steady work, plus the help of one small mouse who helped me remove stems before cooking, but I turned those cherry-plums above into the seven jars of jam below.

They're still cooling, and then I'll have to put them in the fridge until they're thoroughly cold, but it looks like jam to me!  Woo!

Also, I made Cherry-Plum and Blackberry Cobbler yesterday.  You can find the recipe here on my recipe blog.

Cobbler?  More like Gobbler, the way my kids attacked it.

Playing in Middle Earth

I love playing the piano.  I'm not real great at it, though I used to be fairly good.  Back in high school, when I practiced for an hour every day, and had been taking lessons from my mom for twelve straight years.  Then I went to college and only played things I knew by heart on the piano by the cafeteria while waiting for people to show up for supper or whatever.  After we got married, my mother-in-law stored her piano at our apartment for a few years, but I only played once a week or so.  I had a full-time job working at night, and I didn't want to play late at night during my nights off because we lived in a duplex and I didn't want to bug the neighbors.  Then we moved away and left the piano with Cowboy's sister, who had room for it herself by then.  And I had no piano until we moved to Tir Asleen a little over two years ago.

When we moved here, my mom gave me her piano, which had originally been her mom's.  (And don't feel so sorry for her for giving up her piano -- my dad replaced it with the baby grand he'd been promising her for decades.)  And I was preggers with a giant belly in the way, then had a newborn... and it wasn't until this past spring that I started finding time to play again.  Usually just a few minutes in the morning while the kids finished breakfast after I was done already.  But my goodness, was I rusty!  I played for a couple months that way, then quit over the summer.  This is all The Lone Ranger's fault -- I listened to the soundtrack every morning while making and eating breakfast, which meant I wasn't playing music myself.

But then last week, I found The Lord of the Rings for Easy Piano on Amazon while searching for something else.  I bought it on a whim, got it early this week... and I love it!  I've slowly been playing through it, backwards because the last song is about Gondor and I was all sad right then over "The Departure of Boromir."  And this music is exactly right for my slowly-returning skills.  I can play the songs well enough to recognize them, but I stumble just often enough to make me want to truly practice them.  I'm almost done playing each song once, and then I'll begin at the beginning and work on one song at a time until I'm able to play them all well.

It has several songs from each movie, with most of my favorite themes represented.  I've actually teared up a bit as particular themes I love so much come to life under my own fingers.  So delightful.

So anyway, those are my happy Friday ramblings.  Have a lovely weekend!

The Library is Done!

Today, I hung up the last of the artwork I got framed for my library, which means it's now completely decorated!  Not only that, but I'm done decorating most of our house, other than the kitchen repainting project that I'm in the middle of.  More on that some other time when it's going better, but for right now, pictures of the stuff in my library!

I got these all framed at the local frame shop, and while it was more expensive than I was expecting, the results also surpass my expectations, so yay!

The first three are taken from a calendar I bought from the Etsy shop ImmortalLongings a couple years ago.

Hamlet

Much Ado About Nothing

The Taming of the Shrew

I bought this next one online a couple years ago, intending to frame it and hang it up when I had my own house some day.  We've been in Tir Asleen for over two years now, so it's high time I got this done, don't you think?  Anyway, Richard Burton is one of my favorite Hamlets, and I love this pensive shot.  The framer built a deep frame for this so that the whole magazine can be included instead of just the cover.

And this last is the Playbill from when I went to see Hamlet on Broadway a few years ago.  Yes, that's Jude Law, and yes, he was wonderful.  You can read what I thought of it here.

So, here are a few shots of how these are grouped in the library, along with the quote decal I put up a few months ago.

And yes, there's all kinds of stuff piled on top of all my bookcases.  About the only way I can keep a lot of things away from my kids.  And yes, my house is full of so much light that even on a rainy day, I can't get good pictures of these that don't have all kinds of reflections in them.  Did the best I could.

The two magazines are opposite the wall with the quote on it, and the lone Hamlet is opposite the two comedies.

Anyway, I love my library even more now!  Kind of spent a lot of time today just wandering around and admiring the pictures :-)