The Listas

2009 Wrap Up

If you feel the picture is a little bit skee-wampus (or small, for that matter), just click on it to enlarge and read all about our goings on for 2009. 'Tis the season, Happy New Year and all!

If New Years in any reflection on how awesome the coming year is gonna be then I'm in for a hum dinger. Seriously people. (make sure you read to the bottom, that's the best part) New Years Eve was spent with friends. The boys barbecued a goat *literally*. It wasn't my favorite but I got to play Speed Scrabble with a good friend of mine. I never get to play anymore. Diego would totally be willing but I'm not so sure he'd be any good at it. Anyway. No pictures of the charred goat. The next morning, we went shooting with Uncle Richard and the Lazona Ward. This is me with my cousin Brittany doing our Charlie's Angels pose.

Here's Diego with a shotgun and a death stare.

This is a Colt Junior. Pops says it's the assassins gun of choice. It only shoots 22s but if you put it in behind the ear, the bullet will bounce around inside the head cause it can't penetrate the skull.

Then there was this guy named Chris. He was way nice but a little shady with his information. He said he works for a consulting company. Upon further pressing, he gave up that he works for the government, he's a chief weapons instructor and that they consult on all things foreign and domestic. Doesn't matter. I got to shoot a Mac-11 9mm semi-automatic machine gun. How cool is that?! Here's the video. You can totally hear me saying, "I'm gonna obliterate those rocks!"

And if all this wasn't cool enough, later that evening we checked into a 4-star Scottsdale resort and we didn't take any pictures of that either...

High School Reading

For some reason I've felt like reading. And since I didn't do much of it in high school (or college, for that matter) I've decided to do it now. I found this list online. Feel free to comment or add/subtract from the list. I'm kinda glad I'm reading these now. I mean, I like the books I've read so far but I can also imagine being very irritated by them when I was younger. I've stricken through the ones I've just read. I haven't decided if I'm gonna re-read anything that I actually read previously (or that we read in class). Hmm. It's a pretty long list. Wonder how long it's gonna take me. Maybe I should rule some of these out. Any help out there to narrow it down?

Beowulf

Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart

Agee, James A Death in the Family

Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice

Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain

Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot

Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March

Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre

Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert The Stranger

Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop

Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales

Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard

Chopin, Kate The Awakening

Christiie, Agatha Murder on the Orient Express

Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness

Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans

Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage

Dante Inferno

de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote

Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe

Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment

Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy

Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers

Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss

Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man

Emerson, Ralph Waldo Selected Essays

Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying

Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury

Fielding, Henry Tom Jones

Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby

Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary

Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier

Forester, C.S. Horatio Hornblower

Frankle, Viktor Man’s Search for Meaning

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust

Golding, William Lord of the Flies

Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter

Heller, Joseph Catch 22

Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms

Homer The Iliad Homer The Odyssey

Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God

Huxley, Aldous Brave New World

Ibsen, Henrik A Doll's House

James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady

James, Henry The Turn of the Screw

Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis

Keller, Helen Story of My Life

Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior

Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird

Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt

London, Jack The Call of the Wild

Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain

Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude

Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener

Melville, Herman Moby Dick

Miller, Arthur The Crucible

Miller, Arthur Death of a Salesman

Morrison, Toni Beloved

O'Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find

O'Neill, Eugene Long Day's Journey into Night

Orwell, George Animal Farm

Orwell, George 1984

Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago

Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar

Poe, Edgar Allan Selected Tales

Proust, Marcel Swann's Way

Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49

Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front

Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac

Roth, Henry Call It Sleep

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye

Shakespeare, William Hamlet

Shakespeare, William Macbeth

Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet

Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion

Shelley, Mary Frankenstein

Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Sophocles Antigone

Sophocles Oedipus Rex

Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck, John The Pearl

Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island

Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom's Cabin

Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels

Thackeray, William Vanity Fair

Thoreau, Henry David Walden

Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace

Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons

Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire Candide

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five

Walker, Alice The Color Purple

Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth

Welty, Eudora Collected Stories

Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass

Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray

Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie

Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse

Wright, Richard Native Son

Merry Christmas to All

I like to hand-make my "I love everyone" Christmas treats. Two years ago it was the box of chocolates, last year it was dipped pretzels (no pictures, boo) and this year it's this...

Oreo Truffles with ideas a la Bakerella. I also made a gingerbread man with cute little red "buttons" but he was running late for the pictures.
For Diego's work, I made pumpkin muffins with cream cheese frosting and picks that said "Naughty" "Nice" and "Somewhere In-between."

It's all just my way of saying that I care. And for all you wonderful people out there that I care about that I cannot give treats to - this is for you. Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas to Us

Our Christmas was a little bigger than normal this year. In November, we celebrated our official debt-free-ness so we decided we would splurge a little bit and spend what would have gone towards bills in December. We'll start saving again in January. That, coupled with our Christmas money from my family we were able to purchase some things on our wish lists. (Much to my father's dismay, we opened our Christmas presents early. In our defense, they looked like regular Christmas cards that you are supposed to open. I guess next year he's gonna have to put a warning label on them.). Anyway. Here's our loot!

FOR DIEGO:
Blue Man Group Tickets.
This was one of the main reasons we went to Vegas for Thanksgiving. Actually, that whole trip was part of our Christmas money... I had seen them before but he had never seen them. Love their music. Funny too. But for me, it was better the first time.

This next item isn't actually at our house just yet but it will be soon. Diego is from Argentina and having a gas (vs charcoal or wood) grill may seem like he's turning his back on his heritage but it just works for us. We have a charcoal grill now but it takes so much time. This will be so convenient, it causes so much smoke (for our neighbors) and it doubles as an emergency preparedness item. I guess my present to Diego will be putting it together. He very much dislikes putting things together.

FOR SHANNON:
I've been trying to divine a way to organize my food storage and then one blessed day I found this beaut on sale 50% OFF. So I waited to confer with Diego then I snatched it up. We don't quite fill it up but we will. And man, it took FOREVER to put together.

And lastly, this - Nutrimill grain mill. It's kinda funny how our gifts are so practical these day. Not sure it that's good or bad. I could still use a gift certificate for a massage or something but at least I can continue to make fresh bread with fresh ground wheat flour. Thanks, Aunt Judy, for letting me borrow yours for so long. You'll remember that I bought myself a Bosch for Christmas last year. These 2 go perfectly together.

Merry Christmas to us and A Happy Finally Out of Debt New Year!!!

Visual Slants Photography is finally up and running!

I am very pleased to announce the official launch of the Visual Slants Photography website/blog!!! Please check it out, subscribe to it, "fan" it on facebook and most importantly TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS!!! It's all the portrait photography I've been doing over the years (as opposed to the corporate photography that I also do).

CLICK BELOW!

Vegas, baby! My Kinda Thanksgiving

So, in case you were wondering, this is what Vegas looks like at Thanksgiving. What? It looks like Vegas always does? I suppose it does... We stayed at the Johnson B&B (aka the Johnson's house). It's sort of tradition to be in Vegas with the Johnson's for Thanksgiving. I've know them and been coming to their place since their daughter Linn and I were roommates in college and became friends. They are like my second family now. I've known them for like 15 years and I've probably been at their house for Thanksgiving for half of those years - even after college. Anyway. Here's miniature of my favorite attraction in Vegas: The fountains at the Bellagio.

Not the greatest picture but we had just pocketed the "little" camera for this excursion to the Strip. And it's miniature!!! Therefore it's cute!!! Anyway. Diego wanted to see some things he hadn't seen before and I was on a hunt for a few stores I'd seen inside casinos on my many work related trips to Vegas during the Atlanta years. Didn't find any, but we did enjoy some very unique boutique chocolate truffles. Let's see, can I remember what we had, there was at least a dulce de leche one, a balsamic vinegar one, and some toffee with chili and cinnamon. That was YUM, but too expensive to buy a box.
On the way home, Diego wanted to stop and get some pictures along the Joshua Tree Scenic Freeway. He just wanted a picture with a joshua tree, but here's what I got.