The Secret Garden

I love to read! Reading is just such a stress reliever and so relaxing.  It takes you to another place and gets your mind off of life for a bit.  Lately I've read some great books that have made me think and inspired me.  The first is "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

I had read the book for a children's literature class years ago and remember loving it and thinking it was inspiring.  Classic novels are free on the Kindle so I decided to read it again and refresh my memory on why it was so great.  Here are some of my favorite passages:
"Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one.  Two things cannot be in one place.  Where you ten a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow."

"Most of his fright and illness was created by himself."

"There's nowt as good for ill folk as laughin' is."

"Dickon says anything will understand if you're friends with it for sure, but you have to be friends for sure."

"Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world, he said wisely one day.  But people don't know what it is like or how to make it.  Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen."

"The Magic works best when you work, yourself"

"One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts- just mere thoughts- are as powerful as electric batteries- as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.  To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body.  If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over is as long as you live."

Strep, Books, Grad Fest

Strep: Friday we went over to my sister's for dinner and played Wii Mario Kart and watched a movie.  While watching the movie my throat started hurting when I swallowed.  We got home and I had white spots all over the back of my throat.  The student health center is closed on the weekend so I toughed it out.  My sweet sweet honey bunches of oats woke up Saturday morning and ran to the store to get Powerade, and chloralseptic, and cough drops for me.  Love that man.  Poor guy had to sleep on the couch the past couple nights cause I'm so stuffed up and snoring like crazy. 
I went to the health center today and they tested me for mono and strep.  Apparently I have a pretty great immune system and the strep had pretty much ran it's course over the weekend. 

Books: I recently read "The Great Fitness Experiment".  This lady decides that over the span of a year she is going to try out a different fitness program each month.  Really interesting.  Basically the moral of the story is that you have to find out what program works for you. 

I am now reading "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton.  So far I love it.  It's about a little girl who gets put on a boat from England to Australia and nobody knows who she belongs to.  The dock master brings her home and takes her in.  When she is 21 she is told that she was adopted and it totally changes how she thinks about herself.  That's about as far as I've gotten so far and so far so good.

Graduation: Bea and I went and picked up our cap and gowns this past week :)

Three Cups of Tea

I just finished reading the book "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  On night shift Thomas was working with a girl who really likes to read and she mentioned how good this book was.  Thomas is not a big reader at all but she let him borrow it and he started reading it.  I was pretty shocked seeing him really get into this book since I've never seen him read a none textbook.  I figured it must be pretty good so I started reading it one night when Thomas was working and quickly got hooked.

The true story follows a guy named Greg Mortenson.  He is a climber and was trying to climb K2, the second highest mountain on earth, when he gets sick and lost and ends up in a village in Pakistan.  He falls in love with the people and sees a need for a school because the children sit outside in the cold using sticks to write with for their schooling.  He begins trying to find donors to help fund the school.  Basically his charity grows and he is able to see how by educating children in the middle east, he can help stop the spread of fundamentalist Muslims/ the growing Taliban.
This book helped open my eyes to some of the issues going on in the middle east and presents a simple solution.
I've now started reading The Help on my kindle.  Great book so far.  I know a book is good when I want to stay up past my bed time reading it.  

The Power of Rest

Last week I only worked out for like 30 minutes three times a week.  I felt grumpy and had a bad attitude all week.  I realized I NEED to excersie just like I NEED at least 8 hours of sleep.  This week I made a deal with myself.  If I wake up every morning and exercise for an hour then at the end of the week I will allow myself to buy a new Kindle book.  I downloaded the free sample first chapter of The Power of Rest and I'm excited to read the rest of it.  The last book I read was The Hangman's Daughter and it was excellent.  I love Amazon because you can read the first chapter before buying the book and decide if you are really interested or not. 

From the first chapter I learned that there are different kinds of active rest.  Social and spiritual are some of those kinds of rest.  An example of social active rest is having a little talk with a co-worker during lunch or having some cuddle time with your spouse. I think it's very true to say that during your day you need some of this kind of rest.  I'm excited to read the rest of the book :)

Here is a description of this book from Amazon:

Imagine feeling restored . . . refreshed . . . renewed


Too many of us accept sluggishness and fatigue as the inevitable side effects of hectic lives—but Dr. Matthew Edlund shows us there is a better way. After years of clinical research and consultations with hundreds of patients, he realized that many people aren't just sleep-deprived, they're rest-deprived. Our hearts, minds, and central nervous systems are overloaded, and we've long forgotten the feeling of being truly refreshed.

The Power of Rest is the much-needed antidote to our frenetic modern pace. Dr. Edlund has identified four crucial types of active rest—physical, mental, social, and spiritual—to create a groundbreaking 30-day rest makeover program that fits easily into even the busiest schedules. The benefits of making time for active rest have proven extraordinary: by using the body's unique power to restore and renew itself, you can look younger, lose weight more effectively, and experience greater joy in your work and relationships.

We would never expect our bodies to function without food. How can we expect to feel fully fueled and alert without intelligent, directed rest? This step-by-step plan introduces one simple, enjoyable technique each day—many of which can be accomplished in a minute or less and can easily be incorporated into your life. Learn to tap into these powerful techniques that quickly lead you to a healthier, more successful, more relaxed life.

Book Reviews

I love reading books on my Kindle.  I actually prefer it rather than reading a normal book because the lettering seems bigger, it's easier to "turn" pages, and it is lighter.

The last week I have just been craving a good read.  I bought my first book for my Kindle which was "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen

Here is the description from Amazon:

"Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch."

I really liked this book.  It was so interesting to me that the author put actual true stories from the circus into the book. You really get to know and like the main character Jacob and the book moves fast.  I finished this book in a day.  It's a quick read. There were a couple raunchy parts that I wish would have been skipped but overall a great book.
 
The second book I read this week I also read in one day. "Run to Overcome" by Meb Keflezighi who is a running star extrodanaire.  I loved how it talks about the history of his family fleeing Eritriea in Africa and how they came to the United States.  I also love that he always mentions God and how God has had such a huge roll in his life. You can tell that he really is a devoted man who loves his family and values his relationship with God, even through the tough times.  One of my favorite quotes from the book is this: "Winning doesn't always mean getting first place: it means getting the best out of yourself."
 

Amazon's description:
"When Meb Keflezighi won the New York City Marathon in 2009—the first American to do so in 27 years—some critics questioned whether the Eritrean-born runner was “really” an American despite his citizenship status and representing the USA on two Olympic and several World Championship teams. Yet Meb is the living embodiment of the American dream. His family came to the U.S. to escape from a life of poverty and a violent war with Ethiopia; Meb was 12 at the time, spoke no English, and had never raced a mile. Yet he became an A student and a high school state and national champion. And when he stood on the platform as a silver medalist in the 2004 Olympics, Meb knew his hard work and determination had paid off. How could life be any better?


Then it all came crashing down. Meb, a favorite for the Beijing Olympics, fractured his pelvis during the trials and was left literally crawling. His close friend and fellow marathoner suffered a cardiac arrest at the trials and died that same day. Devastated, Meb was about to learn whether his faith in God, the values his parents had taught him, and his belief that he was born to run were enough to see him through.

Run to Overcome tells the inspirational story of a man who discovered the real meaning of victory, and who embodies the American spirit of overcoming the odds. "
 
Another thing I have been reading is this little gem of a magazine. 
 

 I checked the mail the other day and there it was.  My mother-in-law surprised me and subscribed to it for me! I have already planned next weeks dinner menu using all recipes from this months edition.