honeyandsuch

Hmm... What to say? Well, I'm kinda a country girl. (At least by NJ standards!) I love being outside, hiking, wandering around the woods or trudging through a creek bed, etc. I don't mind getting dirty. (It makes a warm shower even better!)

I am obsessed with all things honey/honey bee related. And once I am living in a place where it is possible, I totally want to start keeping bees.

I'm also a Young Living distributor. It is a company that makes top grade essential oil. (In the US, oils are regulated by the perfume industry, not the FDA. Other oils can be diluted with chemicals and still called pure. This stuff is actually pure. And it is tested for quality by an outside source.) And you can say whatever you want, but I've seen it do amazing stuff. My friend, who doesn't do well with antibiotics, had a staff infection return and thieves oil blend got rid of it. Another friend was using sleeping pills for years and they no longer worked. Now, she puts some lavender on her pillow at night and sleeps better than she has in years. My mom has arthritis and it is the only thing that helps with the pain. The list goes on. (And I just realized that it looks like I'm trying to sell the stuff. Pay no attention, I just get really excited about it. lol)

I love history. The Romans, the Renaissance, the Dark Ages (Ewww! Plague!) the Industrial Revolution and Suffragette Movement. I love the flappers in the twenties. The starkness of the thirties. The New Deal. The "more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette" fifties. The hippies and the yuppies and the yippies. JFK. LBJ. MLK, Jr. The Space Race. The Disco Years. (Okay, maybe not the disco years.) Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, The Goonies, Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids! Grundge and the Clinton fiasco. The first African-American president!

Umm. I like plants. I have a little herb garden and some cacti and succulents. And I try my very best not to kill them. I also like to cook (I'm pretty good), go to antique stores and rummage sales and do all sorts of crafty things. Other than that, I don't know.

I love so many different kinds of music. I attribute it to growing up riding in the car with so many different people. My grandma, mom, dad, and four older sisters. Add to that the fact that I work with the elderly at an assisted living center. So I've listened to about century's worth of music.

Probably more, if you consider the fact that my parents also listen to a ton of classical music. Including Gregorian chants. The only sort of out of the park genre would be opera. No one in my family enjoys it but me.

I also love records. Ever since I was a kid and had my own little record player. (And, being little, I was quite upset to learn my sesame place record wouldn't play after I drew on it with crayons! lol) So I love going to record shops or finding that one great record at a thrift store.

Rap, Electronic, and Dance would probably be the genres that I really don't like.

10 Things I Hate About You, Labyrinth, The Last Unicorn, Comic Book Movies, especially Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. The Virgin Suicides, Stranger Than Fiction, Amalie, V for Vendetta, Garden State. Any Disney. Just about anything you will find on TCM. (Especially Harvey and excluding It's a Wonderful Life.)

Mad Men is, hands down, my favourite. Numbers. Dexter (It is wonderfully twisted). Psych. Monk. Grey's Anatomy. Scrubs. The Office. All CSI except NCSI. (Los Vegas is the best.) Criminal Minds. 24. (You get sooo sucked in. What would the world do without Jack Bauer?)

I love all crafts. I knit. My mom taught me how to knit and taught myself how to purl. Now I need to figure out how to read a pattern. I make candles and soap and lip balm and perfume and catnip toys (with organic catnip. It is one of the plants I managed not to kill. And my cat helps herself to it all the time. I'll walk in to see the leaves all chewed up.) I sew eye pillows, normal pillows, wrap around ice/heat packs. I do cross stich and all sorts of fun things with cigar boxes. Sometimes I sketch with charcoal. I make all sorts of jewelry. Beaded and otherwise. And I fiddle with stained glass. I am trying to save up to get all the tools so I can make a little workshop at home. All of these things I do to some degree. I am definitely better at some more than others.

This is probably the most difficult to answer. I love books. This may be a bit of an understatement. I think I'm obsessed with books. If is see and interesting book and the price is right, I can't resist. (And sometimes even when the price is wrong!) While I have several (full) bookcases and there is not a room in the house that doesn't have, I'd say, at least five books in it. So picking favourite titles would be hard. Favourite authors would be a bit easier.

They would include Jodi Picoult (I have her every book, including a few signed copies.), Edward Gorey (gotta love The Gashlycrumb Tinies), Sylvia Plath, The Grimms Brothers, Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, JK Rowling...

Right now, I'm trying to go through the classics, Alice in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, etc. Some to be reread, some to be read for the first time.

I also really like anthologies. A great one was Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales. America's Best Nonrequired Reading series is awesome. I also would like to get into The Best American Short Stories series.

I don't really know how to put my preferences, genre wise. (Other than anthologies.) Mostly fiction. I love anything to do with fairy tales. I also love mythology. (My father was a latin teacher. Greek and Roman myths were my bedtime stories. Something I would highly recommend other parents use.) I suppose I like fantasy, historical fiction, and books that have a twist. And I love books with great imagery and really lush details. Non-fiction would include the PostSecret books and Found.

A few particular titles I would like to add would be The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, The Sound of the Waves by Yukio Mishima, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. I wouldn't say they are favourites exactly. But they are notable ones that come to mind at the moment. If you asked me tomorrow, it would be a entirely different list.