Christine is an Avenger of Sexiness. Her Superpower is helping Hot Mamas grow their Confidence by rediscovering their Beauty. She lives in the Heights in Houston, Texas, works as a boudoir photographer, and writes about running a Business of Awesome. In her spare time, she loves to knit, especially when she travels. She & her husband Mike have a food blog at Spoon & Knife.
Kudos to Solonor for the delightful Bloggers Night Before Christmas! Absolutely wonderful!
My kitchen counter is clean! No more fragrance oil bottles all over the place! It no longer looks like a meth lab! (Yeah, brown bottles of all sorts of sizes all over the counter is an amusing site.) It’s a holiday miracle!
It’s 43 degrees outside now. 24 hours ago it was about 75 degrees. Quite a change, but I prefer the cold! It helps with the holiday spirit!
While today is full of housework and wrapping gifts before I head over to my parent’s house tonight, I am looking forward to trying out the yummy recipes in Fondue It! that the man in brown just brought to my door! Many thanks to Heather for sending such a savory treat!
My housework has been touched with the holiday spirit thanks to Christmas CDs I got in the mail earlier from Leia and Carla! Then there is the “special” one that EJ made and gave me last weekend – but I can’t listen to that one with Jason home!
Tonight I will go to my parent’s house (8 blocks from my apartment) for dinner and to open our family Christmas gifts. Tomorrow morning we will get up and open the gifts that Santa has left for all of us (Jason doesn’t really believe in Santa any more, but Santa has visited every year of my life and he isn’t stopping now!), and then we will go to church. A nice brunch, some time to play with our gifts, and then dinner to wrap up the day. That’s our family tradition – what is yours? Do you open your gifts on Christmas Eve by the light of the Christmas tree? Or do you get all of them on Christmas morning? Anything else that you must do that make the holidays truly special for you?
I watched “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” finally on Sunday and it was … ok. It wasn’t bad because the scenery and the filming was great. Nicolas Cage’s fake Italian accent was at first getting on my nerves, but I got used to it after awhile.
There was a speech in the middle of the film that caught my attention though, where the father is talking to the daughter about whether or not she loves the local Greek boy she is engaged to or if she loves Capt. Corelli. I just had to write it down, and here it is:
When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots become so entwined together that it becomes inconceivable that you should ever part. Because, this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No. Don’t blush. I’m telling you some truths. That is just being in love, which any of us can convince ourselves that we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away. It doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it is.
So I was complaining earlier today about how hot & muggy it was. I mean – it’s two days before Christmas and it was in the 70’s! That’s just insane and it makes the holiday spirit hard to get in to and hard to keep.
But now the HUGE storm has come through, the temps are in the 50’s, and parts of town had hail! I mean, if you can’t have snow … isn’t hail the closest substitute? We didn’t have any here, and while there are reports of tornado-like winds on the west side of town, it’s all clear here in my area.
Typical Houston. If you don’t like the weather, just wait. It will change. Now I think I’ll light some candles and put on my new Peanut’s Christmas CD and enjoy the Christmas chill!
As I mentioned yesterday, EJ gave me a ton of helpful information on websites that would work with my cell phone and allow me to download free ringtones and screensavers for it. Here are all of the links I’ve found so far:
:: PCSPix.com allows you to upload files that you can then download to your phone.
:: MyPhoneFiles.com allows you to store your digital photos on their site so you can display them on your phone.
Samsung Electronics is the home page for my cell phone.
:: Ifni Free MIDI Music Files offers a ton of MIDI files to use for your cell phone ringtones. Yes, I surfed Midi files yesterday – I would have never imagined I would be doing that!
:: DS Effects has cool applets, scripts and midlets for your phone.
:: MIDlet Games wireless Java Games and Software.
:: MicroJava has more games and software.
:: Spruce has a Magic 8-ball midlet that can now help me with my decision making!
:: Jams has more Jave applications for your phone.
:: Java Games offers Clix, that super addictive game that I could play for hours on the PC.
:: Other game links for the phone.
:: Midlet is a huge resource of games & applications.
:: REQwireless has a kick ass web browser for your phone! It’s shareware, but it allows you to view all sites – whether they are WAP-enabled or not! It also resizes images on sites on the fly so that you can view them on your phone without having it be cut off. It’s so cool! (Now if I could just figure out how to fill out a form while using it…)
And if all those weren’t cool enough, I just now found this one!
:: Kablog! (Yeah, having “blog” in there caught my attention!) “KABLOG is a tool for mobile phones and PDAs that allows you to post new blog entries to Movable Type. (It may also work with other blog services supporting an XMLRPC interface similar to Movable Type’s, but this has not been tested.)” I can only imagine how long it would take for me to type out an MT post on my phone, but it can be done! (Now I just need to go here to get the files.) Note: Kablog is available for Palm devices too, just in case you have one of those!
Stripped page tutorial coming later today! So far I know that Kristine has one up for me – anyone else? Come on … you know you want to strip!