Refractions and Reflections

After completing my graduate degree coursework in September 2013, I decided to use 2014 to catch up on my reading for fun (instead of primarily for assignments)!! One of my year-long goals was to read at least one book per two weeks. I am now in the midst of my twenty-sixth, so...CHECKMATE! ;) I even caught up on a few classics I'd never had time for. Overall, I'm very satisfied with my year of reading. Here are the books I read this year: 1) The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson 2) A Better Atonement by Tony Jones 3) The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky 4) The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger 5) Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories 6) Anna Karenina  by Leo Tolstoy 7) Wicked by Gregory Maguire 8) Something Other Than God  by Jennifer Fulwiler 9) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens 10) Three Lives by Gertrude Stein 11) The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett 12) Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen 13) Southern Living: Easy Gardening (Spring 2010) 14)...

---1--- Another bloghop I participate in is the Friend Connect Bloghop on Tuesdays. Through it this week, I stumbled onto another bloghop and visited some of the posts and found a recipe for some amazing almond butter that I then successfully made! I got to use my little tiny food processor for the first time (my mom got me several small appliances for Christmas last year)! It took some doing, but it came out great.   Since I can't remember where I found the recipe, I will just share the recipe with you.   Ingredients: 1 cup almonds (unsalted) 1 cup cashews (unsalted) 1/2 cup shredded coconut 3 tsp guava or sugar dash of salt   Directions: Preheat oven to 300 F. Spread almonds, cashews, and coconut over nonstick baking sheet. Roast for 15 minutes. Add ingredients to food processor and pulse. This part will take a good 20 minutes, and you will have to break up the mixture frequently with a spoon or something. (At first it will...

A few years ago I left a bookstore with Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City . An entrancing read, it made me want to read more of his works, and I soon ordered Thunderstruck on paperbackswap.com . I never got around to reading it, though, and so I finally started it yesterday. It segues nicely into the next story post I wanted to write - more from my friend Millie - about work ethic and innovation in entrepreneurship. Larson's habit is to weave two dissimilar lives together in a sort of double biography that no one would ever think to thrust together. For example, in Devil in the White City he tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the phenomenal structures of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, as intertwined with the tale of another inhabitant of Chicago at the same time, serial killer H. H. Holmes. Thunderstruck mingles the paths of Guglielmo Marconi, discoverer of wireless telegraphy (the precursor to radio and telephone technology)...