A Bit of History / Fall On Your Knees

Hello people! This is my second post to my blog, and I figured that I would post a bit of background information about myself. I am 20 years old and I was born and raised in North Bay, Ontario, Canada. I love it here, though I would also like to leave someday just to see what the outside world is like. I have never really lived anywhere else, though I did spend some of my summers in Chisholm, a rural farming area with a fairly high concentration of Mennonites and Quakers. I also spent a few summers on Manitoulin Island, which is on Lake Huron.

I come from a mixed family. I have my mom, who was remarried when I was 7, so I also have a step-dad, Cliff. Cliff has two daughters, Jess and Hil, and Jess has an almost three year old son, Noah. I have my dad, who has also been remarried, then divorced again, and he is now with another woman with whom he had a son, my two year old half-brother, Thomas. My mom and dad had another child aside from myself, my full-brother, Chad. With so much blending, and marrying, and remarrying, just imagine the family chaos!

Speaking of marriage, I am getting married on September 20th, 2008 to the love of my life, Karl. If you check my profile, you should see a picture of us together. That picture was taken almost exactly two years ago, shortly after we started dating when we were 18 and in High School. High school seems like ages ago...

I went to college and graduated from a program called Office Administration. I want to go back for one more year so I can be a medical transcriber, but I won't be going back until September of 2008 (it's going to be a crazy month!). In the meantime, I work as a Customer Service Representative for an American cell phone company, Sprint. In layman's terms: I answer phone calls from the company's customers who have all kinds of crazy questions. For example, here is an *almost* direct quote from a call I had a few days ago:

Customer: "Hello, I needs you to track my phone calls on (date) during (hours). I needs to know what cellular towers my phones was working on sos I can prove to the police that I did not commit a crime they is blaming me of... And don't tell me y'all can't do it, 'cause I knows you can; I seen it on CSI!"

Needless to say, there are some really good days, some really bad days, and some days that make you laugh so hard that you almost pee your pants!

For now, that's pretty much all I'll tell about myself. When some more interesting things arrise, I'll post them.

Also, I just wanted to let you all know (you all being the millions of people who just so happen to be reading my blog) that I am starting a new book: Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, a Canadian author. It's her debut novel, and so far I'm only about 10 pages in, but I am already hooked. So hooked, in fact, that I am going to head to bed to read now!

I'll post my thoughts on this book in a few days when I've finished it!

My First Official Blog! / Review of White Oleander

Yes! This is my first entry in my blog! I just started this blog on a whim, mainly because I needed to register so I could comment on someone else's blog that I really wanted to comment on.
As for right now, I'll probably just use this blog to ramble on about things that are going on around me, what I'm doing with my life, and most likely about books I've read and movies I've seen recently.

My first official blog is going to be about a book I've just completed, White Oleander by Janet Fitch. First of all, I'd like to start out by saying that I did not set out to get this book purposefully; instead, it found me. I have a friend who works for a small township, so she ends up working at the dump/recycling area for the township. Every once in a while, people stop by and drop off boxes and boxes of books that they just want to throw out. When I heard about this, I asked her to start keeping some books for me. One day, she stopped by with a box of books, one of them being White Oleander. I didn't give it much thought at first, so for a few weeks, it just sat around. Then, when I was out of choice reading material, I saw it sitting on my bookshelf and picked it up. Four days later, I was finished, after nights of not being able to put it down until 5:30am.

Needless to say, this book was amazing! It's a ficticious tale of a teenaged girl's adventure in the world of the American foster care system. The entire story is narrated from her point of view. Though I'm not going to get into very much detail (for fear of ruining this great work for anyone hoping to read it), I will give a brief synopsis:

The story starts with Astrid (the main character) describing her life with her mother. After a quick turn of out-of-the-ordinary events, Ingrid (her mother) ends up with a life sentence to prison, so Astrid enters the world of foster homes.

Her homes range from living in a converted trailer, to a run down house, to a beautiful masion lurking with a daily struggle for life, and many more. Each foster home comes with a story of its own, each story a unique adventure.

Because Astrid changes homes so often, the characters and settings in the book change frequently as well, making it hard to put the book down because you're always wondering what's going to happen next.

This book was a great read. Although it is a work of fiction, the story was written so well that you could believe it was actually happening to someone.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who craves a good story.

Next on my list: Watch the Motion Picture based on the novel.