Sunday Currently : 31

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.  Today will be a day of errands and trying to make up for not doing the work I needed to do yesterday, so I'm feeling slightly stressed out. But not too much. There are still fun things to do, like going up to the Takoma Park Farmers Market, making plans for future weekends with friends, and buying flowers for my new office. And maybe, if we're really lucky, it will finally start thunderstorming like the predictions have said...

That's the thing. I feel like I'm just hovering in anticipation of something. My projects aren't completed, but they're started.... I survived my first full week at my new job, but I haven't yet delved into my new responsibilities... I started to straighten up the house, but I'm still sitting in clutter.... what am I waiting for? I'm not sure. But I would just like these thunderstorms to show up instead of floating away every day without a single drop, and then maybe I'll feel some relief.

reading : My pile of Smithsonian Magazine that has been growing over the past few months. I enjoy this magazine, but I am a terrible procrastinator, even when it involves pleasurable reading. I finished up Orange is the New Black this past week, as well as Amanda Knox's memoir, Waiting to be Heard. I guess you could say that my reading lately has been rather prison-themed!

writing :  A couple of posts for this week, though mostly I am taking it easy this morning and pondering what to pick up at the farmer's market. 

listening :  To the kitties chasing each other around the house. O'Higgins found a tennis ball and has been playing with it all morning, even bringing it into our bedroom early this morning so that he could be near me while he played. Aren't pets the cutest?

thinking :  About all of the work I need to catch up on. Yikes! Maybe I will have a productive afternoon today?

smelling :  Cinnamon from my cereal.

wishing :   For an easy day.... and for my bus to arrive when I need it. :)

hoping :   For improved friendship connections. I've found in the past few years that I am terrible at maintaining friendships separated by distance, even when the friends are dearly important to me. I'm trying to make a more conscious effort to reach out and stay involved, and it feels good to honor my values of connectedness in that way.

wearing :  Shorts and a tank top, as usual.

loving :    Our new habit of making salad and veggie wraps for dinner. Last week we sauteed some zucchini and threw in some other veggies and hummus, and it was amazingly delicious. These will need to become a new staple in our cooking!

wanting :    A tasty iced coffee.... but I'm feeling too lazy to brew some coffee myself, let alone wait for it to become cool. Starbucks run?

needing :   To get back into my gym/running routine. It's a great stress reliever for me, and there are a few 5K opportunities coming up that I would like to participate in, so... I need to get moving.

feeling :   Kind of neutral right now, but I think once I get outside I will perk up a bit.

clicking :   On Facebook this morning, since I was uploading some photos from our honeymoon. Also clicking on an article that the hubs sent me about preserving fruit in alcohol, something that he wants to start doing. We had some delicious preserved peaches soaked in cava while in Barcelona, so I hope we can do something similar!

Linking up with Lauren for the Sunday Currently 

Twitter  *  Bloglovin  *  Google+  *  Instagram *  Tumblr

Last week on The Quixotic Chica:

Sunday Currently / Peachy Keen / To the Lighthouse / Happify

Happify

Back in May, I wrote a post about how to be happy, and shortly after, I was contacted by Happify, a group that specializes in the art and science of being happy. Sounds good, right? Also a little odd. I wasn't sure what to make of it, and I initially brushed it off. Something kept me thinking about it, though, and when I investigated Happify a bit more, it really resonated with me. 

Happify is about empowering people to make meaningful change in their lives through, essentially, mindfulness. It's about clarifying your values and acting with intention.While I already feel pretty happy and try to live mindfully, I thought it might be fun to try out Happify's program and track my progress here on The Quixotic Chica. I started out by completing a brief quiz that identified areas I wanted to work on, and the first track I was assigned to was "Be More Socially Connected." Each week, I am "assigned" activities to complete, each designed to enhance my social connectedness.

As a psychology nerd, I appreciated that Happify is based on psychological research. If I'm curious about the basis of a particular activity, I can click on a "Why It Works" button to learn about the research behind it. Since I've done some positive psychology research before, I'm familiar with a lot of the activities already, and it's cool to know that these sorts of "regimens" are truly effective for challenges like depression and anxiety. Essentially, this is a way of living authentically and bringing more mindfulness to one's daily experiences. It's not a quick fix or a cheap gimmick. Rather, this is about potentially shifting the way we view ourselves and our day-to-day occurrences and trying to find the good. I haven't participated in anything like this before, and even though my baseline happiness is pretty steady, we can all use a boost in various areas of our lives. I think it will be fun to try it out and see if I notice any changes in my well-being.

I will be tracking my activities over at Happify, and there will be brief entries about my experiences on my profile page. I will also be posting longer entries here on The Quixotic Chica if there was an experience that seemed especially powerful that I'd like to share with my readers. Let's see where this all goes! :)

Twitter  *  Bloglovin  *  Google+  *  Instagram *  Tumblr

100 Best Novels: To the Lighthouse

Fleeting moments, overlapping circumstances, and dreams that will never be. Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse seamlessly invites its readers into a stream of consciousness that artfully exposes the inner worlds of the Ramsay household and makes you realize that your own experiences are just one set of many.

It's too easy to say that I enjoyed this book. I did, but that doesn't seem like enough. It moved me, and it drew me in in a way that I did not expect. After the confusion of James Joyce's narrative approach, I wasn't sure that another stream of consciousness novel would be the right choice for me, but somehow Virginia Woolf perfectly constructed a story of intertwining lives and shared their perspectives in a way that wasn't just accessible, but natural. 

This novel is about so many things. In one sense, it's about the quixotic nature of dreams and hopes and how many of the characters will never achieve what they most want. Even when a dream is realized, time has passed, and the way we perceive and interact with the world has changed. A childhood wish to go an an excursion to the lighthouse nearby is viewed with different eyes years later. Nothing is permanent and ever-enduring, not even our dreams. While there's something distinctly sad about that realization, I think Woolf also makes the point that it is inevitable and perhaps simply part of the essence of things. Maybe no one perspective in time is right. Maybe it's the plurality and plasticity of our views that gives objects, dreams, and hopes meaning. 

My favorite passage described the decay that falls upon the Ramsay house in between their summer together and their reunion ten years later. In that time, there are family tragedies and unexpected turns, and their summer home by the lighthouse is neglected. Woolf does a marvelous job describing how the house peels and sinks over time, paralleling the hurt and losses that the Ramsays experience in their lives. When the hired help begin the arduous task of repairing the house and making it presentable for the Ramsays' return, they hum and haw about how the house couldn't have been expected to stay the same. Though they fix it up nicely, it can't be the same as before. There is no going back.

Overall, this novel made me reflect on the plurality of experience and of how we must keep carrying ourselves forward. Like the laps of an ocean wave, we must keep moving, and we cannot recreate the past. Time washes pieces of our life away, and while there might be a yearning for what has been lost, we will drift along anyhow. We must keep moving. 

Twitter  *  Bloglovin  *  Google+  *  Instagram *  Tumblr

100 Best Novels

1. "Ulysses," James Joyce

2. "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce

4. "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov

5. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley

6. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner

7. "Catch-22," Joseph Heller

8. "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler

9. "Sons and Lovers," D. H. Lawrence

10. "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck

11. "Under the Volcano," Malcolm Lowry

12. "The Way of All Flesh," Samuel Butler

13. "1984," George Orwell

14. "I, Claudius," Robert Graves

15. "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf

16. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser

17. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Carson McCullers

18. "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut

19. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison

20. "Native Son," Richard Wright

21. "Henderson the Rain King," Saul Bellow

22. "Appointment in Samarra," John O' Hara

23. "U.S.A." (trilogy), John Dos Passos

24. "Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson

25. "A Passage to India," E. M. Forster

26. "The Wings of the Dove," Henry James

27. "The Ambassadors," Henry James

28. "Tender Is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. "The Studs Lonigan Trilogy," James T. Farrell

30. "The Good Soldier," Ford Madox Ford

31. "Animal Farm," George Orwell

32. "The Golden Bowl," Henry James

33. "Sister Carrie," Theodore Dreiser

34. "A Handful of Dust," Evelyn Waugh

35. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner

36. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren

37. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder

38. "Howards End," E. M. Forster

39. "Go Tell It on the Mountain," James Baldwin

40. "The Heart of the Matter," Graham Greene

41. "Lord of the Flies," William Golding

42. "Deliverance," James Dickey

43. "A Dance to the Music of Time" (series), Anthony Powell

44. "Point Counter Point," Aldous Huxley

45. "The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway

46. "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad

47. "Nostromo," Joseph Conrad

48. "The Rainbow," D. H. Lawrence

49. "Women in Love," D. H. Lawrence

50. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller

51. "The Naked and the Dead," Norman Mailer

52. "Portnoy's Complaint," Philip Roth

53. "Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov

54. "Light in August," William Faulkner

55. "On the Road," Jack Kerouac

56. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett

57. "Parade's End," Ford Madox Ford

58. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton

59. "Zuleika Dobson," Max Beerbohm

60. "The Moviegoer," Walker Percy

61. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," Willa Cather

62. "From Here to Eternity," James Jones

63. "The Wapshot Chronicles," John Cheever

64. "The Catcher in the Rye," J. D. Salinger

65. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess

66. "Of Human Bondage," W. Somerset Maugham

67. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad

68. "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis

69. "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton

70. "The Alexandria Quartet," Lawrence Durrell

71. "A High Wind in Jamaica," Richard Hughes

72. "A House for Ms. Biswas," V. S. Naipaul

73. "The Day of the Locust," Nathaniel West

74. "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway

75. "Scoop," Evelyn Waugh

76. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," Muriel Spark

77. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce

78. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling

79. "A Room With a View," E. M. Forster

80. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh

81. "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow

82. "Angle of Repose," Wallace Stegner

83. "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul

84. "The Death of the Heart," Elizabeth Bowen

85. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad

86. "Ragtime," E. L. Doctorow

87. "The Old Wives' Tale," Arnold Bennett

88. "The Call of the Wild," Jack London

89. "Loving," Henry Green

90. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie

91. "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell

92. "Ironweed," William Kennedy

93. "The Magus," John Fowles

94. "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys

95. "Under the Net," Iris Murdoch

96. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron

97. "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles

98. "The Postman Always Rings Twice," James M. Cain

99. "The Ginger Man," J. P. Donleavy

100. "The Magnificent Ambersons," Booth Tarkington

Peachy Keen

I have to admit that when a fellow DC blogger was sharing her peach-picking adventures on Twitter and Instagram, I swooned a little bit over the idea of fresh-picked fruit and all of the tasty treats you could make with them. Unfortunately, without a car or any plans to actually go pick some fruit myself, I decided that I could save the farm adventures for another day and satisfy myself with just baking a pie.

I've made pies before, but they've all been apple pies, and really it's been my mother who's done most of the work (though my job of cinnamon-sprinkler was undoubtedly very important). I wasn't entirely sure if I would be successful baking a peach pie, but hey, it was worth trying, right?

I basically followed this recipe, though I would add that I would probably use a bit more egg glaze than I did this time around, since I think it would make the pie crust a bit... crustier. And I would sprinkle sugar on top because I forgot about my plan to do that until after the pie was done baking. Oops! Regardless, though, it turned out really well. It even looked a bit pretty! Result: I can bake a pretty good peach pie.

Has anyone else tried their hand at pie-baking this summer? What else should I try out?

 

Twitter  *  Bloglovin  *  Google+  *  Instagram *  Tumblr

Sunday Currently : 30

Happy Sunday! I woke up this morning feeling exuberant. There is something so wonderful about waking up to see sunshine pouring through the windows and feeling a cool breeze work its way through the room. That, coupled with the ridiculous dream I was having wherein I was sad that our littlest cat would never stand on an Olympic podium (what??!!), made me immediately laugh and smile. Oh, how I love mornings like that.

reading : Orange is the New Black. The hubs and I watched the first season on Netflix and listened to Piper Kerman's story on The Moth, so this was the natural next step. I am really liking it so far, and it's interesting to hear the stories of women who have been, and might still be, imprisoned. 

writing :  Not too much. I have posts scheduled for this week, though I should probably finish up a few more ideas for next week. I'm trying to wrap up a Barcelona recap post, but it's hard to sort through all of our photos! This may end up being a Barcelona series...

listening :  To the hubs make coffee and prepare eggs in the kitchen. I love that he cooks! I am a lucky lady. :)

thinking :  About plans for today. I want to spend it outside, and I might go watch the hubs play in a soccer game later this morning. I would also like to stop by the farmer's market and get some pudding...

smelling :  The perfect day outside. This feels like early fall, which is my favorite time of year. The cool breeze that isn't too cold, the chirping birds... this is all making me feel super happy this morning. 

wishing :   For nothing. This moment is perfect. 

hoping :    That we get a few more days like this in the coming weeks and that I am able to enjoy them. 

wearing :    Mesh shorts and a t-shirt-- what else? This is my Sunday morning go-to.

loving :   Peaceful moments like this one. Waking up in a really good mood enhances the good in everything that follows. 

wanting :   Some bacon (the fake kind since I don't eat meat), though sadly, I don't think we have any. Wouldn't that go perfectly with eggs and coffee?

needing :   To start getting ready for the day in a little bit so I can head out into the world and enjoy the beautiful weather. 

feeling :  Excited to decorate my new office! I started my clinical placement on Thursday, and while I'm a little nervous about my new role, I know that this site was the right choice for me, and I am so excited to be there and getting settled.    

clicking :   On the New York Times, as usual. I love the Education section and enjoyed these perspectives on college: recruiting low-income students, a student's first year at Harvard, and a student's first year at Yale. 

Linking up with Lauren for the Sunday Currently 

Twitter  *  Bloglovin  *  Google+  *  Instagram *  Tumblr

Last week on The Quixotic Chica:
Sunday Currently / Growth / Six / Vendetta