purekatherine

Here I am, on a Wednesday, wondering all day at my new job what I should write about later in this month of consistent blogging, feeling really bummed because I can’t come up with anything that I feel strongly enough about to warrant a post. Then I get home and check my email.

There, sitting in my suddenly full inbox is the first week of prompts from Doniree’s new program Please + Thank You Writing Prompts. I’ll be signing up for those later this summer. If I time it right, I think I’ll sign up for it 6 months into this one!

So what are you waiting for? If you happen to be reading this before midnight on Wednesday, you can actually snag the blog prompts for half the price! GO!

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Last week while watching The Oscars, I decided that I need to watch more movies. I love movies. I used to want to make movies! But I don’t watch enough of them. Not new ones at least.

So I decided that I would make a list of movies I need to see. It started with a lot of the nominees and winners. I thought maybe I would make it a 30 before 30 list because I haven’t been very good about keeping up with the one I had been trying to do with actual activities and stuff. Then I thought that 30 was too few.

I have just under 18 months to do this, but I’ve decided that it will be 100. 100 movies that I haven’t seen before I’m 30.

I asked a few people and I put a call out on Twitter for suggestions, but my list still isn’t full.

Movie
1 127 Hours
2 2001: A Space Odessy
3 A Place in the Sun
4 A Separation
5 Amadeus
6 Amelie
7 American Graffiti
8 An Education
9 Annie Hall
10 Begginings
11 Blade Runner
12 Bonnie and Clyde
13 Braveheart
14 Breakfast At Tiffany’s
15 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
16 Casablanca
17 Close Encounters of the Third Kind
18 Cool Hand Luke
19 Dances with Wolves
20 Duck Soup
21 East of Eden
22 Easy Rider
23 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
24 Fast Times at Ridgemont High
25 Field of Dreams
26 Giant
27 Gone with the Wind
28 Howl’s Moving Castle
29 Hugo
30 It’s kind of a Funny Story
31 Mash
32 Meet Me in St. Louis
33 Midnight Cowboy
34 Midnight in Paris March 3, 2012
35 Mirable on 34th Street
36 Noon
37 Paprika
38 Peter Pan
39 Ponyo
40 Rain Man
41 Repo! The Genetic Opera
42 Risky Business
43 Sandlot
44 Singin’ In The Rain
45 Sophie’s Choice
46 Spartacus
47 Spirited Away
48 Swing Time
49 Taxi Driver
50 The Artist
51 The Big Chill
52 The Bodyguard
53 The Color Purple
54 The Deer Hunter
55 The Descendants
56 The English Patient
57 The Iron Lady
58 The Lake House
59 The Magnificent Seven
60 The Natural
61 The Sting
62 The Way We Were
63 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
64 Tootsie
65 Undefeated
66 Winter’s Bone
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86 New Movies in 2012
87 New Movies in 2012
88 New Movies in 2012
89 New Movies in 2012
90 New Movies in 2012
91 New Movies in 2012
92 New Movies in 2012
93 New Movies in 2012
94 New Movies in 2012
95 New Movies in 2012
96 New Movies in 2012
97 New Movies in 2012
98 New Movies in 2012
99 New Movies in 2012
100 New Movies in 2012

If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

Also, if you’re thinking this is going to be super easy, I mean I want to sit down and just watch these movies. Not be blogging or playing on my phone or anything at the same time. Just watching. This is why some movies on this list I’ve already seen. Since I don’t usually sit down like that for a movie, 5 movies a month might be a little difficult.

I guess it’s a good thing that I’m about to have a regular routine!

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There are some big changes happening lately. A lot of them that I don’t want to get into much detail on because there’s still a whole lot of stuff to figure out before it all falls into place.

But in just a few weeks I will not only be living with my mother, but my brother, sister-in-law and niece. Everyone involved has mixed feelings about this arrangement and no one would be surprised to read something like that here.

It comes in handy with one of my projects that I’m hoping to post about more in just a day or two, but it will also be a little tricky to figure out how to go from two people in one house to four adults and a toddler.

We shall see how we all come out of this. More updates about the other changes as they solidify a bit.

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Seriously, napping is not something I’m good at, at all.

Last October my store had a relay, in which we moved a lot of the sections in the store to other parts of the store. This required a week of 5AM shifts, so I was getting home by 1:30PM, having worked a full 8 hour shift.

There was NO reason to not nap.

Until I realized that when I nap, I don’t really nap. I sleep.

This means that when I lay down for a nap at 3:20 in the afternoon, like I did today, I don’t get up until 8:15, no matter what I wanted to get done after an hour nap.

I probably should stop trying to nap because it’s bad. I set alarms and just ignore them completely. As I write this, it’s 11PM and I’m starting to realize that I’ll be able to go to bed by midnight if I wanted to. Apparently I’m an even bigger fan of sleeping today than I thought.

I’m glad that I’ll be able to sleep, as you might’ve picked up earlier, I’m rather amazing at it, but I don’t like that 5 hours that I could’ve been doing much more productive things.

I guess it’s not something to lose any sleep over. (Yes I did that.) I’ll just have to get up tomorrow to do stuff!

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So remember when I was all excited because I moved more stuff into my nightstand/dresser drawers and I actually organized them? (Of course you do, it was my last post, yesterday.)

Well right after I did that, I ended up cashing in my piggy bank with a Coinstar machine and in order to avoid the stupid 9.8% fee that they charge for getting cash from the machine, I decided to go with a gift card to Amazon. I already had some things in mind that I wanted to get from the site, so this is just 360 degrees of win.

One of the things that I wanted to buy was another one of these hangers.

I’ve got one already and I actually have two skirts hanging from either side, and I actually need more. Except that when I was talking to Ashley about it, I realized that I don’t really wear all of the skirts on that hanger. So I went through them, and I’m selling or giving away a bunch of them and now I have room for the rest!

But while I was checking out that hanger, I found one that I definitely did want to buy.

While the pictures there are a little deceiving, it does save a decent amount of space, especially when I put all of my summer sun dresses on one and move it to the far end of the closet that I can’t reach. The other one (it comes in a pack of two) has more event-type dresses on it and that fits nicely into the same corner.

This hanger is going to make it much easier for me to talk myself out of selling the couple of dresses that are a smidge too big for me. You know, just in case. I mean, if they’re not taking up any extra room, why should I bother getting rid of them? I might need them in the future!*

For the rest of the stuff though, seeing the extra space in the closet is actually really encouraging. It makes me want to follow Treavor and Ashley’s lead and live much more minimally. That’s a topic for another post though, I think this one has jumped around enough.

*It’s only been like 2 weeks since I wrote this, and yesterday I busted a seam in one of the smaller skirts I have, I guess It’s not so bad to hold onto those dresses now.

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I started organizing my clothes a couple weeks ago and I feel a little silly saying this, but it’s true, it was awesome.

Really, awesome. I’m trying to keep up with one of my goals from my 12 changes project (though I’m doing this one early) and folding laundry as soon as it comes out of the dryer.

I realized about a month ago that one reason I don’t like to fold my clothes is that I don’t really have set places that I put everything. That’s a little odd though, since I also had two small dressers that I use as nightstands, which were mostly empty until recently.

For a while I didn’t want to put anything in the drawers because I wasn’t really finished with the DIY painting and staining that I did on the dressers. Mostly I just didn’t have drawer pulls. Well, that’s just silly. Even though I didn’t have them, I had tied some ribbon through the holes to make one big loop and they were perfectly functional, what’s holding me back?

Pretty much just that I’m lazy. Almost all of my 12 changes goals have to do with being lazy, and well, stopping that trend. So I’m being good with the laundry!

I’d originally started being good by folding all of my tank tops and putting them in the top drawer of the dresser. That was great. It worked really well to organize them and they fit perfectly in the drawer. Then I needed to get one from the middle of the stack while I was in a hurry. That didn’t work so well toward my over all goal of keeping my room much more picked up than I normally do.

That’s why I’m loving the change that I made last week to my clothes organization.

ROLLING!

The folding in half doesn’t work, and they don’t have enough bulk for the tutorials I’ve seen about folding and filing like paperwork in the drawer, so I decided to roll them. That’s how I pack clothes for a trip, why wouldn’t I do it at home too?

Guess what, the reason that I do that in a suitcase is also valid in a drawer at home. It takes up less space! I now have so much more room for tank tops that I think I’m going to treat myself to some of the colors that I’m lacking!

After that drawer I moved onto t-shirts. What I thought was a stack of solid color tees that I had gotten a few summers ago from New York and Company turned out to be all of my Threadless Tees and Goodwill graphic tees. I’d made that stack a few months ago, so I’ve been living peacefully without these shirts for that long. Some of them I’ve decided to go ahead and give back to Goodwill because it has been so long that I’ve survived without them. Others I actually jumped for joy upon seeing again. They’re all now rolled and in another drawer.

I also grabbed all of the t-shirts that I had hanging in my closet (remember that whole not having consistency in where I was putting stuff?) and rolled them right on up.

Now I have like items all in their own places, AND extra space. It’s pretty amazing. Do you impress yourself with some of your new ways of organizing? What are they? I want more help!

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Last September I tried to blog every day. I don’t think I quite made it, but I liked the challenge of making myself sit down regularly to free up some space in my head.

I’ve noticed a lot of build up lately, so I’ve decided that I’m going to try to blog every day in March!

A few people on Twitter said that they may join me, so yay! Then Frank posted about a 30 day blog challenge that he’s going to do this month. It was perfect timing. Now on the days that I don’t have something specific that I already want to talk about, I’ll be using the prompts there!

Anyone else want to join me? Let me know so I can try to keep up!

(This isn’t my post for today, I was going to post about this yesterday but my blog was down when I tried. Another post coming in an hour!)

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I started running again last week. I hadn’t run in a while, so it wasn’t the best run, but I did it. I realized something while I was out there. I don’t like running.

I want to like it. I really do, especially since I signed up for my first 5K last night and I’m definitely running that with Kelly in April. I mean, the girl suggested a mid-run cocktail!

I just can’t seem to get into it. It’s pretty lame of me. I live in California, where I technically have running weather all the time (right Tara?). So I shouldn’t use the excuse that I don’t like to run in the “cold” to justify that I can consistently go 3 weeks into the Couch to 5K program, but I never seem to get any further than that.

But like I said, I want to like running. I mean, Nicole always seems to be having fun with it. Nicole is talented enough that when she talks about the running, I definitely want to do it too. This evil genius has almost got me convinced to spend my birthday in Alaska this year doing just that. How do you do that Nicole? Tell me your secrets!

I ran again last night and it wasn’t so bad, but I have no idea why. It’s been more than a full week since I last ran, so I don’t think that it’s my body getting used to it. I’m not doing so well with the drinking water thing, so I’m not better hydrated (though I did stop at a park drinking fountain mid-run), I really don’t know what is making the difference.

The only thing that I know is that I liked the way it felt to walk the next day. Like I could feel my legs actually working. It wasn’t as much as a good night of Lindy Hop, but it was still there.

I would love to actually be in better shape, and for now it’s looking like this relatively free running thing is all that I can handle financially. Help me out and get me hooked before I have money to spend on something that I wouldn’t need!

So tell me, running-type people, what’s the deal? Why is it fun? Can you make it fun for me? Is it that feeling afterward? Am I going to feel that tomorrow?

Also, then join me and let’s do a Color Run together! Or maybe five!

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You know how these go. purekatherine[at]gmail will get you the password if I’m comfortable with that.

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