Here are a bunch of pictures I keep saying I will post but haven't yet. The first bunch is from when my friend Jackie came to look at graduate schools in Chicago.

Left: Here we are at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago where my sister attempts to strike me down in front of a reproduction of Hammurabi's Code.

Right: Everybody loves the Bean. I don't get it. It's a hunk of reflective metal in the middle of Millennium Park that is really called “Cloud Gate.” It's shiny and huge and odd shaped and doesn't look anything like a cloud. Maybe if I was from Seattle I'd find it more interesting.

Below: They were having this Prop 8 protest at Daley Plaza while Jackie was visiting as well. I don't know if I had ever seen protesters of a protest before, but there were people on both sides of the street, police all around and a lot of heated opinions.


Left: Here we are with our good friend Sue who lives at the Field Museum. We got to know Sue pretty well, like that she is 67 million years old, is 13 feet tall, had a bone disease and might not have actually been female. This also isn’t really Sue’s head--the real one is displayed on the second floor but was too heavy to put on the skeleton.

Right: This is just a cute picture of me. I never like pictures of me, so I want to show off this one, at least until I stop liking it.

The next set of pictures is from my road trip to Washington, DC. We got a later start than I had hoped, so it was dark by the time we got to all of the pretty stuff in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Pretty much all I saw was this...


(the back of the trailer loaded with all my stuff) and this...


(way too many tollbooths) and this...

(it being a holiday weekend, the police were out in force). Not very exciting, I know.

Then the next day we unloaded and my roommate’s boyfriend (fiance as of last week) helped put all my furniture together. Go Kevin!


The final set of pictures is from New Years.

Left: This is my new haircut that only the stylist will ever get to look this good. I can’t figure out how she did it, and I was watching her and she was explaining what she was doing to me the entire time. I just don’t get it.

Right: Celeste, Corinna and I went up to Maryland to see our old roommate Kit who is serving a mission in Baltimore. Kit was singing with a bunch of missionaries for the Festival of Lights at the Washington DC LDS Temple, and since that is only about half an hour from where we live, we snuck up and saw her. We dragged Kevin with us as well so he could take pictures.

Look at the pretty lights. Look at those pretty girls. Sometimes I’d just like to capture a moment in time and never let it go--this was one of those moments. What a way to start the New Year off right.



So now I am caught up. Hopefully I will be able to buy a new camera next month so I can take my own pictures and not fall so far behind again. While this was fun, editing, uploading and captioning all these pictures takes way too long.

I can't find my camera anywhere. I have looked all over my house, my parents' house, my car, the public library. I just have no idea where I put it. I especially regret not having in this week because my friend came to visit to look at law schools in Chicago. Because I'll be moving in two weeks, we spent a lot of time doing things I have never done before. I wish I could have taken pictures of things like...

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago--I minored in the development of Western Civilization and found this museum absolutely fascinating. There were artifacts from Mesopotamia, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt. I just loved seeing all of these things that I spent years studying.

Hyde Park Bookstores--Between a branch of Powell's Books, O'Gara and Wilson Booksellers and 57th Street Books, I was in heaven. Really. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I love that musty old book smell mixed with the smell of freshly printed books. There is just something about seeing a second edition Lord of the Rings shelved next to one sporting Elijah Wood's face that gets me excited. Don't bother with the romantic dinner and sparkly jewelry, just take me to a used bookstore.

Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park--I had grown up living around the corner from a Frank Lloyd Wright home and have visited the Fabyan Villa and Japanese Gardens in Batavia and the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield on many occasions. I even wrote a report on Frank Lloyd Wright for my modern American history class and my art history class in college. But before today I had never seen the FLW home and studio.

Of course I also took Jackie to some of my favorite city haunts like Andy's Jazz Club, Giordano's Pizza and the Field Museum. I think we did more in four days that humanly possible. In fact, the blisters on my feet tell me we did more in four days than Kathryn-ly possible. But I loved every minute of it and can't wait to do more. I hope to see a couple more things before I head out to D.C., and I plan on coming back for the Printer's Row Book Fair in June. Or maybe I'll try to make the ALA conference in July. Oh, or the Taste of Chicago over the 4th...There are just so many reasons to come back for a visit!

I was browsing a Borders in downtown Chicago when what do I see but this:



People in Chicago are ga-ga for Oprah Winfrey, and while I'm far from her biggest fan (maybe I'll post about that later), I can't help but running into her name just about everywhere. And this was one time I was glad to see it.

I have read a couple of Oprah's book club books with a mediocre response at best, but this kids book list is actually pretty good. I mean, just this Borders display alone features my favorites Sara Zarr, Nick Hornby (although this isn't his best book) and the amazing Mo Willems. Then I started looking into the book list a little more and found Nancy Farmer, S.E. Hinton, Gary Paulsen, Annette Curtis Klause, Jerry Spinelli, Shannon Hale, John Green, Rachel Cohn, E. Lockhart, and some of my favorite illustrators ever. It's like Oprah took my Amazon reading lists and then chose all of the books off of them to make her own list.

When did Oprah get such good taste in YA reading material? And does this mean all of these offers will be on Oprah? If that is so, I might just watch Oprah for the first time since my friend Anna was on there almost two years ago. Okay, I will admit I also watched Oprah once my freshman year in high school when the Spice Girls were on, but there is no accounting for the actions of a 14 year-old.

I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Totally irreverent and blessedly true to adolescence, I couldn’t put this book down. It helped that it is by a Chicagoan and set in the suburbs where I grew up, and it didn’t hurt that I could relate to Denis Cooverman more than I care to admit, this was a great book.

This is the story of two recent high school graduates—one whose life has been so dull that he has nothing but better things to look forward to and another who believes that with her graduation the best years of her life are behind her. This is a great cross-over book from YA to adult fiction that is more a coming of self book than a story of coming of age. It’s like a hybrid of Catcher in the Rye and Napoleon Dynamite with an amazing graduation soundtrack that every high school senior should have on his/her iPod.

Though I was at home alone while reading most of this book, I kept looking around for someone to share the laugh-out-loud funny parts. There were so many great parts like when Denis apologizes for 15,000 of male stupidity and Rich finally admitting he's gay than figuring out he's not only to give homosexuality one more try.

This book graduates with honors from my summer reading list.

View all my reviews.

will keep me from getting everything done this weekend.

I feel like I am barely keeping my head above water at the moment—literally. I walked out of taking a math test to see it pouring rain. For a minute I thought I was back in Louisiana. I live in the middle of the desert and the only weather we have had this week is rain, snow or hail. What is with that?

On top of my regular homework, tests and projects, I’ve been working on several writing projects that have taken up way more time than I expected. I have a funeral to attend tomorrow afternoon, which in and of itself is hard enough, but my friend is also expecting a baby any day now (she’s been having contractions since Monday) and I’m supposed to watch her 18-month-old son when she goes into active labor. Because the funeral is about three hours away, I just know as soon as I get there my friend will need to push out that basketball, but I also know if I don’t go to the funeral I won’t be there to support people I truly love who are grieving. I just feel pulled in a lot of directions at the moment.

The good news is that midterm grades came out and I’m still doing well. And by doing well I mean not freaking out because I have so many assignments due at the end of the semester that I haven’t even started on and now I really have to do something because I should have been working on them all semester. No, I am ahead in most of my classes, and I’m still enjoying them as well.

Wow, I really sound like a nerd. Maybe because I really am a nerd.

I just finished reading “Al Capone Does My Shirts” by Gennifer Choldenko this week.



I’ve owned this book for about two years now and have never gotten around to reading it. I usually don’t read historical fiction, so other books kept getting in the way. But let me tell you, I regret not reading it sooner. It doesn’t read like a historical book at all, yet it is still historically sound with a lot of fascinating detail. But for a Sicilian girl from Chicago, reading about a boy who lives on the same island as Scarface himself was a lot of fun.

If you ever have the chance to visit Chicago, you have to make a little trip to St. Charles, about 40 miles west of downtown, to the Hideaway. It is this steakhouse/speakeasy that still has the ambiance of the prohibition years and even sports a stylish pair of cement shoes (actually dredged up from the nearby Fox River) on the front porch. It’s also kind of out of the way—okay, it’s really out of the way and can be hard to find—so it’s not a normal tourist destination. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t want to eat at the place Public Enemy No. 1 used to brew bootleg and host some of America’s most famous jazz musicians. Plus, the phone number to the place is 1-888-SCARFACE—I just want to dial that number for the fun of it.

(Note to self: Stop using words like totally, really and actually. If you think they are annoying in speech, think how much more permanent they are in writing.)