The House next door

To expand on my last post about the strange atmosphere, I figured I'd post some pics of the house next door to help explain it's creepiness.

It's much more majestic than I captured in these photos. These were taken from my window instead of from outside.
I took a picture of the windows on the side up close because they freak me out. The blinds on the lower windows are always askew, but not always in the same way. In the late afternoon, the sun shines in the left window of the bottom picture and kind of turns the interior of the house that is visible to me a weird shade of orange.
No one lives in this house, thought it's not up for sale. Occasionally, a lady comes to sweep the driveway and I suppose she cleans inside as well. Other people come to keep up with the landscaping.
Also, cars come into the garage, which is to the right hand side of the windows in the bottom picture. The cars blare music for a few hours and then they leave. I've never actually seen who drives the cars and they are always different.
My husband and I have long conversations about the possibility that (if vampires existed) vampires would live here.

Strange Atmosphere

Yesterday was an eerie day. I sat next to my bedroom window reading a book. Gusts of wind shook the trees outside forcefully and then the air would go still. Not a leaf would flutter. The house next door is visible through that window. It's a an old late 1800 Victorian house that is creepy in itself. The addition of the wind in the trees added to the strange atmosphere. It probably didn't help that I'm reading a book involving vampires, demons, and witches. And I suspect if vampires actually existed, they would live in the unoccupied house next door. The air yesterday afternoon seemed charged. I guess it was, as it ended up charging the tornado producing storms that came through in the late evening. 

Movies

There are quite a few movies I can watch over and over again.
The Princess Bride. Some nights, I fall asleep watching this movie. It's such a classic.
Finding Nemo. It never gets old.
Into the Wild. When I'm in the mood to be inspired, I'll watch it.
O, Brother Where Art Thou.
Down Periscope
The Departed. Sometimes I think I could just ogle Leonardo DiCaprio in his only attractive role.
Titanic. No, I don't ogle him in this movie, but I find myself watching the whole thing when it airs on TNT.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy. My favorite part is the tree herders. They are so big and slow and creaky. It's majestic to me.
The Chronicles of Riddick. This movie is the only reason why I like Vin Diesel. He has yet to play a role as fitting for him as this one. No one else could have done it.
Seven. I love the movie, but I think I also love to hear Brad Pitt yell "What's in the box?!"
Primal Fear. Edward Norton is amazing. I'll go ahead and add American History X and Fight Club as well.
Slingblade. I love everything about this movie.
Avatar. When I first saw it, I hated it. Every time I watch it, it grows on me a little more. I kind of like the main actor. I like the way everything looks like a coral reef at night.
That's all I can think of for now.
Oh wait, how can I forget The Fifth Element?!

Favorite TV shows and why

I recently finished watching Being Human on Syfy (the American version) and I loved it. It was a refreshing different sort of vampire/supernatural show. It made me laugh and hooked me in. I love the addition of a ghost as a character, too.
I love True Blood, despite the fact that it appears to be going downhill. I read the books and I love the whole take on vampires being out in the open.
River Monsters is one of my favorite shows. It's the mixture of a regular fishing show and a mythical beast hunter show. Jeremy Wade is a superb fisherman who takes a really scientific approach to the legends he hears of river monsters and the best way to attempt to catch them. He has a lot of respect for fish and he always releases them once he's examined them. The most recent episode I watched, he was trying to catch a giant stingray and kept losing his bait to piranhas. But he was still excited when he caught a fish, no matter what fish it was. I admire him.
Tosh.0 is another favorite. I can laugh from the start of each episode all the way until the end.
Family Guy. I was attempting to fall asleep last night and it was playing in the background. I laughed myself to sleep.
I'm trying to get into some more shows. I've started watching Game of Thrones on HBO and I think I may watch Lost if Netflix fixes the streaming for that show. I watched the first season of the cancelled Happy Town on ABC and thought it had the potential to be a really great show, but they didn't have the ratings to keep it going. I continue to watch The Vampire Diaries, even though the amount of drama each hour is borderline ridiculous. Same thing with Pretty Little Liars. I don't understand why plots have to twist 20 times in 60 minutes for a show to be considered good.

10 words

cruise a thesaurus and pick out 10 words you like the sound of:
1. Smidgen
2. Insidious
3. Sanguine
4. Phantasmagorical
5. Ethereal
6. Maelstrom
7. Oblivion
8. Mythical
9. Vampiric
10. Zombie

Cravings

The thing I crave the most: a cigarette. I've been smoking for about 8 years regularly.
Next on the list is coffee. I really like the cold monster java energy drinks, but any coffee related drink will suffice.
And I crave salad. My favorite thing to do when this happens is go to Ruby Tuesday's and do the salad bar. I love their salad bar.

Picture of something that makes me happy

This picture has a lot of different things that make me happy. I love to fish in saltwater on the flats in Tampa, FL with my husband. I also love to be out in the sun. I love taking beautiful pictures. I love my husband, who is in the picture. And I love the way the sun looks sometimes when I'm out on the water.

Memory

I love to travel down memory lane. Just the other day, my husband and I were exchanging our memories from the beginning of our relationship up until the time we got married. Those are some of my most precious memories.  I do have good memories from my childhood, especially traveling with my grandmother and going to theme parks and ski resorts with my dad. I don't think I can pick just one sweet memory to share. They all mean so much to me. But since my 5 year anniversary is coming up this Friday, it seems appropriate to share a memory pertaining to that. Once my husband and I picked the place we were going to be married, which was Cypress Gardens, SC, we decided to spend a day exploring the place. We went through their reptile center and their butterfly garden and took a canoe trip around the area.  We found out The Patriot and The Notebook both had scenes filmed there and one of the props from The Patriot was still in the water. We went to see the gazebos we were to be married in. It was just an amazing day exploring the area on a perfect spring day when all the flowers were blooming and the birds were chirping.

Picure of myself

Shuffle

I don't own an Ipod, but these are the first 10 songs on shuffle via my smartphone.

1. Dead Poetic -Burgundy
2. Sublime- What I Got
3. Slightly Stoopid- Circle House Blues
4. Mindless Self Indulgence- Bite Your Rhymes
5. Tomorrows Bad Seeds- Rhyme and Reason
6. Jon Reep- Goodyear/Uncle William (stand up comedy)
7. Rebelution- Bright Side of Life
8. Tool- Aenima
9. Stevie Ray Vaughn- Voodoo Child
10. Jack Johnson- Bob Marley/Sublime Medley

Picture of me and my family

I usually assume most people mean immediate family. Unfortunately, I have a limited supply of pictures with my family as a whole. But in my household, it's just me and my husband. No pets, no children.

5 favorite books

Atlas Shrugged. I read it with an open mind and it changed the way I saw the world. I was leaning fairly left at the time but didn't ask myself why or if it made any sense.  The book made me realize that there are more than two political views.  I realized after reading it that it made the most sense to me and I was only leaning liberal because of the religious views of the conservative party.  I learned that just because you don't lean right doesn't mean you lean left. This world is not a world of opposites. I always thought I was less of a good person for honestly not caring about certain things in the world that a lot of people care about, especially the left.  Ayn Rand helped me realize that it's perfectly okay not to care. It's okay to believe in the ideal of personal responsibility.
The Bell Jar. I read this book when I was in high school. I've always been kind of a wallflower and I look at the world in a weird way. I don't always function normally in social situations and tend to have less fun in certain social situations. I identified with the main character in this book in the beginning. Because of her struggle, I learned from her mistakes. I think it broadened my mind a little.
The Harry Potter series. To this day, I still don't care much for the first 2 or 3 books in the series. I think it's because Harry is young and doesn't have the conflicts that he has later in his journey. I love these books because he grows in them. I think it takes a lot of talent to build such an amazing series and have the plot and the characters grow up and mature throughout. 
1984. I first read this book in school and didn't enjoy it. I think most high school students don't understand the world enough to really get what this book is about and what it's trying to say. Once you are in the real world and face problems like politics, the economy, etc, you realize the dangers of certain philosophical and political beliefs. I think Orwell is a fantastic writer who conveyed the dangers of certain social and political ideals perfectly in a fiction setting.
The Giver. I read this book in 5th grade, I believe. I loved it then and love it even more as an adult. There are so many struggles, so many problems in a perfect utopian society. There is just something about books of this nature like The Giver, Utopia, Anthem, 1984, Animal Farm, etc that speak to me. And they are all best read once one reaches adulthood. They are beautiful and powerful novels even to a teenager or child, but one doesn't really understand them until later in life.

Poem to the person I love.

I'm not the best at poems and certainly not the best when I don't take my time, but I threw something together that says pretty much what I want it to, just not very eloquently at all.

I love you.

Love poems often sound terribly insincere.

Words used to describe love

never seem to be clear.

Oceans, flowers, sunsets, a heart-

breezes and butterflies,

emptiness when we're apart.

None of these actually say anything.

They don't tell you how much I love you

or how you impact my being.

You're my best friend and my soulmate.

I love you because of who you are,

because of each and every trait.

You always make me laugh,

motivate me, teach me.

You're my other half.

I admire your intelligence,

your strength, your sarcasm,

even your occasional arrogance.

I love the way you think,

how we operate as a team 

and we're always in sync.

Perhaps you'd prefer a touchy-feely rhyme

And you really do make feel that way

all of the time.

It's just hard to really capture it

in words without minimizing the meaning.

I find it to be unfit.

You're always on my mind, in my brain.

You're the reason I do anything

from the detailed to the plain.

I love you.

"Bucket" List

Things I want to do in my lifetime:
Go to Hawaii and see lava trails and black sand beaches with my husband.
Go to Belgium with my husband.
Go to Africa and take a safari with my husband.
Ride all the world's record breaking roller coasters.... ok, most of these include my husband.
Write a novel. (except maybe this one)
Publish said novel.
Have a 50th wedding anniversary.
Drive a car really fast (preferably on a track.)
Ride on the back of a motorcycle without trembling.
Have professional model photos taken of me.
Own a house.
Own a Mercedes.
Ride on a donkey.
Live in Alaska for exactly one year.
See the northern lights.
Attempt to learn to surf.
Snorkel.
Not have kids.
Hike the Appalachian Trail. (Maybe not the whole thing...)
Learn as much as humanly possible.
Learn to speak a Latin based language and one other that is not Latin based.
Teach a high school English class.
Own a bookstore.
Visit monasteries in Belgium.
See the pyramids of Egypt.
Build an old fashioned English pub bar in my home.
Build a bomb shelter.
Hunt with a recurve bow.
Shoot a powerful gun.
Make awesome memories with my husband every day.
Meet a celebrity I respect.
Study psychology.
Write an epic poem.
Own a huge Savannah Monitor.
Catch a tarpon in the flats of Tampa Bay, FL.

I'm sure there's more I can think up.