4 podcasts I think you should listen to.

I have a very on-again/off-again relationship with podcasts. I have been introduced to quite a few over the years, but eventually I stop listening to them (or really, any at all). In the past couple months, however, I have come back to podcasts, and I might be here to stay.

There are a few that I listen to occasionally, one I was introduced to today, and one that I actually listen to every week. Let me share them with you now :) (As a note, I've linked the Google Play page for each podcast. I discovered that you can listen to and subscribe to many podcasts through Google Play, and I find this amazingly convenient. I'm a fan!)

Dear Hank and John - I have been a fan of the Green brothers for a few years now, and every so often I listen to their podcast. I find their relationship so cool, how they just like and appreciate each other so much, and how they can be business partners and do so many cool things together!

Poddy Break with Tim Hawkins - Tim Hawkins is my favourite comedian. I've seen all of his dvds multiple times, and I've even been to a couple of his live shows. He is just hilarious, and I love this weekly look into his weirdo brain, often featuring guests.

Christy Wright's Business Boutique - I was just introduced to this one today, and I think it will quickly become a regular listen. I have many dreams of working from home, running my own creative business, and this might actually inspire me to get my tail into gear! Christy Wright is a successful entrepreneur, and in this podcast she shares what you need to do to actually start your own business in today's age with social media. I love that she is specifically talking to women, and that she brings her faith into it as well.

What Should I Listen to Next? - This is my favourite podcast, can you imagine why? Anne Bogel (aka Modern Mrs Darcy) is what I want to be when I grow up, just talking to people about books all day. Each week in the podcast, Anne has a new guest, and they (the guest) talks about 3 books they loved, one book they hated, and what they're reading lately, and with all that information in hand Anne will recommend them new books to read next. I have to listen to this podcast with Goodreads open in another tab, because I get so many amazing book recommendations. If you are a book lover at all, I highly recommend this podcast.

Those are 4 podcasts that I regularly listen to. Now I just need to find some good podcasts about knitting and I'm set. What are your favourite podcasts?

1/365

I have been very blessed to be married to a very creative man. We have many conversations about our creative dreams and projects we would like to do. For awhile now Christopher has wanted to do a poster-a-day project, where he designs a poster everyday. He works as a graphic designer, but he misses designing just for fun. I decided to start my own project alongside him, partly to support him, and partly because I would like to challenge myself. So I said that I would write everyday that he designed a poster.

However, I didn't realize that he wanted to do it for a whole year! But I already committed, so here we go.

Day one of writing every day.

For a year.

It might not be a blog post everyday, as I'm also counting things like writing letters and doing writing prompts for short stories, maybe even writing poetry. But I will try to post here as much as possible. I'm kind of excited to see what might happen as I grow over this challenge. And I really hope that both Chris and I will stick it out the whole year, that would be pretty big for us. We are very similar and we tend to lose stream on things after awhile. Hopefully this will be the one that sticks, wish us luck!

12 Geeky Pins That Will Have You Reaching For Your Craft Supplies.

I have a new obsession.

It's looking up geeky crafts on Pinterest.

I have no delusion that I'll end up making all of them, but there's just something I love about the combination of my geek loves and my passion for making things. Really, crafty geeks are the best kind of people you could ever hope to meet.

Clockwise from top left: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Chris and I are massive Avatar the Last Airbender fans, and I'm desperate to have my own Airbender gear. When I showed Chris these knitted Link gauntlets, he asked me why he didn't already have them. We're eventually redoing our bedroom this fall, and I think this Triforce pillow would look really nice on our bed.

Clockwise from top left: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Doctor Who is basically my life now. Yes, I'm one of those crazy people you see all over the internet. Making things like this is basically why I learned how to crochet. And that bookshelf is so amazing I don't even know what to do with myself.

Clockwise from top left: [1] [2] [3] [4]

I actually have yet to finish playing through Portal, much to Chris' chagrin, but I was having a lot of fun when I did play it, and I love this crocheted companion cube. Stitch is one of my most favourite Disney characters, and I love this little crocheted guy! Ditto with Totoro being one of my favourite Studio Ghibli characters. And my love for the tv show Chuck is all-consuming, and I want to learn how to cross-stitch so I can have this in my house. I think it would also translate fairly well to crochet.

Clockwise from top left: [1] [2] [3] [4]

I have never done string art before but I am loving these so much that I'm going to make one for every room in my house! (I'm sure all of these will be familiar to you except for the pineapple - that's from the tv show Psych. It's so good, you should watch it now.)

I'm really itching to try string art, so that might happen sooner than later. What are some of your favourite geeky things? Do you have any geeky art in your home?

To see more of my geeky craftiness pins, check out my Pinterest board here!

My triumphant(ish) return to blogging.

A while back I was thinking a lot about this blog, and blogging in general. In the past 2 years, I have written less than 10 posts, which makes me really sad. I think I've figured out what the reason for that is.

It seems that over the past few years, blogging has turned from something you do for fun into something that you have to run like a business. It feels like it's about taking the best pictures, writing the most click-baity titles, integrating with Pinterest and Facebook, being active on Twitter and Instagram, tracking SEO stats, and dozens of other things that just go over my head. It seems like every other blog these days is solely about blogging, for goodness sakes.

I got overwhelmed by that, and I felt like that was what a blog had to be. I felt like I had to do that, but the thing is, I don't want to do that. I don't want to optimize everything for Google and Pinterest. I wish I cared about that, but I really don't.

I just want this to be about writing. I miss sharing my thoughts here, logging my mail and creative endeavours, and documenting my life.

So I let go of that comparison. My blog isn't going to be the most professional thing that you have ever seen, and maybe my formatting will be a little wonky, and maybe my posts will be too long and rambly, and maybe my pictures will be a little too dark. And that's okay. This is about my life behind the yellow door, and it's good the way it is.

Expect to see more of me around here in the future. You'll know it's me because it won't be polished. But it'll be me.

Red Rising || Pierce Brown

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the colour-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. He spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Inspired by a longing for justice, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

Red Rising is unlike anything I have read before. It does feel heavily like a mix of The Hunger Games, Ender's Game, and Braveheart, with some Greek and Roman mythology thrown in, and the result is something completely unique.

Good things:

• The cast of characters was fantastic. I felt like they were all well developed, with depth to each of them, even the side characters. There were some characters that I expected to behave in a certain way, and they didn't, which I found very refreshing.
• The world that Brown created is amazing. He just drops you into this totally different time and place, and it was so well crafted. It was totally believable. 
• I found the plot really compelling. The twists and turns kept me turning the pages.

Not so good things:

• Toward the end of the book things played out a little too conveniently. I wasn't sure if I could let my guard down or not; it felt like something bad should be around the corner because that's usually what happens when things seem to be working out for the main characters, and that totally threw me off.
• It wasn't too much for me, but this books is often quite brutal and bloody. There is a heavy battle element to this book, which is where that comes in, so I just want to point that out for people who don't handle things like that well. I would definitely recommend this for more mature readers.

A tip for readers: I suggest keeping a list of who all of the characters are as you encounter them, just their name, the house they're associated with, how they relate to Darrow. There is a large cast of characters and sometimes it was hard to keep track of them, especially people that we hadn't seen for a good chunk of the book. Luckily, book 2 does have a list of the cast, but that would have helped me out a lot in this one. 

Overall thoughts:

Red Rising was such an intense ride. I have book 2 sitting on my shelf, and book 3 was published in January, so I am really looking forward to seeing where things go for Darrow! 

The Graceling Realm || series review

This year I made a resolution to write a review for every book I read. As you can tell, I am doing pretty well at that (/sarcasm). But it's not too late in the year that I can't get caught up! So here we go!

The first book I finished in 2016 was Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore. It's the final book in the Graceling Realm trilogy, so I'm just going to review the series (as evidenced by the title of this post).

The Graceling Realm trilogy is a YA fantasy series. The books of this series feature a different main character, but they all tie in together. Bitterblue is the direct sequel to Graceling, and features characters from Graceling and Fire. Fire is a companion prequel to Graceling, but I wouldn't read it first because it would have spoilers for Graceling.

Some series stats:


In this world, there are people known as Gracelings, people that have with an extreme skill, or "grace". They are born with different coloured eyes, which is how they are able to be identified. Katsa, our main character in the first book, is graced with killing. Being the niece of a brutish king, she is forced to be his personal assassin, even though she loathes every minute of it. She is part of a secret council that goes performs tasks that seek justice against the crown. One day a prince named Po comes to the council and asks them to find his missing grandfather, believed to be kidnapped by one of the neighbouring kingdoms, and our story takes off from there.

Fire takes place many years before Graceling, and it tells the story of a girl named Fire, the last human monster living in a wild country. Monsters in this world are brightly coloured versions of regular animals, and they also possess the ability to control minds. Fire has this ability but she is very reluctant to use it, as she doesn't want to force her will onto innocent people. However, Prince Brigan needs her help to uncover a plot against the king, and convinces her to come to King City to become a part of his investigation.

The final book in the series, Bitterblue, takes place a decade after the events of Graceling. The young Queen Bitterblue has ascended the throne of Monsea, and she must unravel the mysteries surrounding the reign of the previous king, who was a tyrannical ruler.

Good things about this series:

• The world building in this series is amazing. It really felt like a proper fantasy world, with many rich elements woven together. 
• The characters were very strong, and for the most part they showed good development over the course of their respective stories. Strong female protagonists are always good.
• The romances in these books feature slow-burning, "will-they-or-won't-they" relationships, which I quite enjoy. 

Not so nice things about the series:

• My main complaint about this series is the very casual attitude toward sex that Cashore depicts. It's nothing at all for people to have sex outside of marriage, with multiple partners, and we also see several homosexual relationships and an implied bi-sexual character. The middle book, Fire, is the worst one for this. One of the male side characters sleeps with nearly every female character introduced in this book. All of the women just accept this as how he is, and they have no qualms about the situation at all. There is also a very convenient plant that serves as a "morning after" device, and the only negative depiction of a sexual encounter at all in this series is that a female character gets pregnant because she didn't have any of this plant on hand. [I realize that others might not share the same opinion on this topic, these are just my personal moral convictions.]
• Bitterblue suffered from some pacing issues; it felt like at times the story was just spinning it's wheels because Cashore was trying to build more mystery, but really it just felt the same things kept happening over and over. It could have been a good 100 pages less and not suffered at all. 

Overall conclusion:

I think that Kristin Cashore is an excellent writer, and if you want to get into fantasy but are intimidated by it, this would be a good place to start. 

If you are bothered by the sexual elements I mentioned, just skip Fire altogether. It does have elements that are fascinating regarding the world, but you won't miss anything at all if you read Graceling and Bitterblue as a duology.

Between Shades of Gray || Ruta Septeys

Title: Between Shades of Gray

Author: Ruta Sepetys

Length: 344 pages

Publication date: March 22, 2011

Genre: YA historical fiction

Rating: 5/5

When I finished reading Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, I made a comment to my husband that my heart was not okay. He asked why I felt like that, and I had to think about it for a moment. I think it's because the effect this story had on me reaches farther than just a fictional story.

I find myself constantly reaching for stories set in WWII, and most of them take place in Nazi Germany. This one was a first for me. This book is from the point of view from Lina, a 15 year old girl living in Lithuania in 1941, which is when Stalin was in power of the Soviet Union. Lina's family ends up getting deported for "crimes" against the Union, and they are put on trains headed to labour camps in Siberia. This is a story of their survival amidst the most deplorable and loathsome conditions, and them holding on to hope of being able to go home soon.

Sometimes I try to figure out why I like to read these kinds of stories so often. Of course, they are based on real life occurrences, and to read about the evil ways these people were treated makes me sick. It breaks my heart to think about how people are able to convince themselves that certain groups are not even human anymore and treat them worse than animals. (Reminds me of our society's attitude toward abortion, but this isn't about that.) It's just horrible to think about, and yet to see how Lina's family and their group of people banded together was so incredibly beautiful. In the midst of inhuman conditions, they showed each other such kindness. They banded together and became a fortress among themselves, and it was so beautiful.

This book was incredible, just incredible, and I want everyone to read it now. I could go on and on, but I want to you experience it for yourself. I borrowed this from this library and I'm going to be buying a copy for myself, this is something I can see myself reading again and again.