So when I started this blog, everyone told me I could cross off #1. on my Cupcake List immediately...but what I have discovered is that Starting My Own Blog is going to be more ongoing than #21 (Make flossing a daily habit)!! I confess to often being frustrated with blogging overall...trying to make the different elements of the blog work has had me banging my head against the desk more than once. "It's never as easy as it looks" has become my motto about blogging in general.
HOWEVER...last night my spectacular fantabulous husband (who, btw, is appalled that I told anyone that he watches Family Guy) helped me add a Library Thing list, a Flickr badge, and a link for Operation Nice AND The Happiness Project! He gets all the praise and my eternal devotion. And now I have a clue how to do these things and hold out hope that perhaps I can figure out how to add a RSS feed all on my own.
Not only have I now made this amazing progress in keeping my blog layout interesting, I received my very first non-friend/family comment! Emily Bouchard at Blended-Families.com left me such a nice sentiment! So she gets my eternal thanks for visiting as well. And suddenly I am inspired to continue once again.
As part of the book I mentioned previously, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (see Happiness Project badge to the left! Ta-Da!), I realized that sometimes the "process" towards increasing our happiness (or completing our Cupcake List) isn't exactly warm & fuzzy.
For example, preparing to run a marathon would be very exhausting, but the actual running of the race and the satisfaction upon its completion would bring a great deal of happiness! An example of my own that is much closer to my heart (since I have no plans to run a marathon---ever) would be #2. Catch up on my reading. Since I have been mickey-mousing around in the months since October, I now have to read SIX books per month from my list to get the first 40 completed by October 8th of this year. So. In an effort to get my behind in gear, I picked up Mansfield Park by Jane Austen on Sunday. After plowing through half of the 430 pages, I can say definitively that this is not going to be my favorite of Jane's novels.
The first problem is that I own the movie version of the novel, which I have loved for years. I (erroneously) assumed that since the movie versions of Persuasion and Sense & Sensibility tracked the novels quite closely, that the other stories would be the same. Not so!!! Which has me all thrown off. But I am enjoying comparing the two versions, and know that even if the reading of it is a bit of work, I will be very pleased when I can check it off of my list and talk intelligently about the storyline.
Perhaps I will have to join the Jane Austen Society so I can debate the merits with like-minded readers! It is honestly amazing that a woman who authored only six books in her lifetime has been the inspiration behind so many spin-off stories. All 6 movies are wonderful and make the novels accessible to the masses, which I fully condone. And then there are the fun movies and novels: The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane, Lost in Austen, and a few more that I haven't even seen! I'm waiting on someone to make Pride and Prejudice and Zombies into a movie and then my life will officially be complete. (hee hee!) Happy St. Patrick's Day!
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