Brother!

And now, it is time for a post dedicated to my amazing brother.

                                       

Jordan is a year and a half younger than me and we have so much fun together. We went to the same college, so I was able to spend a lot of time playing disc golf, going to church, and watching movies with him. We had fun cooking dinner together occasionally and I was able to hear his band play, and attend his art shows.  He is now living in New Mexico working for a graphic design firm, and I would confidently put him up against any of the best typographers or designers within several hundred miles. He is awesome. Below are a few of my favorite things he has designed. 

Link to his website: www.JordanTBell.com

I am going to visit him in July, and I am so excited to get the grand tour of the city and see his apartment. Love you brother! And yes... I realize the font on this blog is terrible. Haha!

Sisters!

I have a little sister named Kathryn. She is the best. She is on the high school dance team, drives my old car, sings ridiculously catchy songs all the time, and can't go from one part of the house to the other without doing a Grand Jeté or pirouetting.  We like to share clothes, we wish we could share shoes, and basically we just have fun together.

This collage pretty much sums up our friendship:

I love you sister!

So many pages...

Remember in my previous post (click here for the post) when I said one of my goals was to read straight through all seven Harry Potter books? Well, this won't come as a surprise to those of you who know what a crazy obsessed reader I am, but I did it! Yep- I read straight through all the Harry Potter books and it was amazing.

I started started reading the first book during the third week of July, and I finished the last book sometime during September (I also read The Lost Symbol sometime in there). I didn't keep track of the exact day I started and finished them, but that is ok because I wasn't aiming for any type of time limit.

Here are the stats:

1. The Lost Symbol- 509 pages
2. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone- 309 pages
3. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets- 341 pages
4. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban-435 pages
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire-734 pages
6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix- 870 pages
7. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince- 652 pages
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- 759 pages

Altogether, I read 4,609 pages in about 9 weeks, for an average of 74 pages a day.I am a huge nerd so of course it was super fun, and now I am really sad that it is over. Oh well. Guess I will have to read them again ;)

It's Alive!

I thought I would do a quick update on my aquarium for anyone who wants to see my pictures or who is wondering if I already gave up. No- I did not give up! All of the work has finally paid off and now I am getting to enjoy the tank. I have two Ocellaris Clownfish, and two Scarlet Skunk Cleaner Shrimp.

This is one of my shrimp. His name is Jacques.

This is the other one. His name is Butters. 

The shrimp are super interesting and funny. They mainly stay upside down on the rocks, waiting for a tiny piece of food to pass by. But every now and then, they will play around in the sand or jump around in the water. 

These are my fish, Merry and Pippin. They are super cute and fun to watch, and they always follow each other around and seem like they are good friends. 

Here is one of my corals, a pink Xenia. It has already grown a ton since I got it and is pretty neat. Since corals are more like animals than plants, they can open and close and move around in pretty ways. I plan on getting another pretty fish and a coral sometime soon.

*WARNING: The following paragraph may cause extreme boredom for anyone who is not a marine aquarium enthusiast and does not keep fish.* All my water parameters are great, and I am doing weekly 10% water changes. My skimmer is starting to pick more stuff out of the water, but the skimmate isn't dark yet at all. Parts of my sand are covered in diatoms, which is really obnoxious since my sand isn't pretty and white anymore. But hopefully it will start going away soon. I'm also getting some hot pink Coralline algae all over my rocks which I take as a good sign. 

The Tank

So... Remember in my last post when I said I wanted to take up a new hobby? Well, I have. When we went to Dallas to pick up my brother from the airport, we visited my aunt and uncle. My Uncle, David, has a nano-reef aquarium and it made me think, "hmm...It would definitely be fun and entertaining to start up a saltwater aquarium". I knew it would be a lot of hard work and a lot of learning, but I decided to take the challenge. After several days of research and looking for good deals, I ordered an aquarium. Then I ordered 45 pounds of sand, a protein skimmer, and a hydrometer.

To make a long story short, I assembled the aquarium which took a lot of time and muscle (which I have very little of), mixed my saltwater, rinsed my sand, bought my live rocks, and put it all in the tank. 30 gallons of water, 30 pounds of sand, and 12 pounds of rock later...

I have spent the last two weeks learning about the nitrogen cycle, salinity, specific gravity...etc. After a week of cycling my tank (you have to let saltwater tanks "cycle" for several weeks before actually purchasing fish in order to grow healthy levels of bacteria), algae was growing out of control. After checking with Uncle David, I bought some snails to help clean up the tank.  

My tank has now been cycling for two weeks. The snails have done a great job cleaning up the algae, and all my water parameters seem to be a-ok. Just today, I decided I needed more rock in my tank in order to give my future corals more surface on which to grow and give my future fish more hiding spaces. So here is my tank as it stands this evening. 

Stay tuned for more updates on my tank! I'll be adding new creatures soon-ish.

The List

I love making lists. Absolutely. Not only do they help you get things accomplished and stay organized, but they can give you a life driven by purpose and commitment. Whether it is a list of my favorite movies (coming soon),  people to pray for, or the places I want to travel to during my life, a list gives me a goals to accomplish. I want to end up an old lady who can look back over my life with joy and not have to regret all of the things I never did.

So- after finally finishing my undergraduate degree, my graduate degree, and the CPA exam, I am free to find a new purpose and additional goals for my life (see my previous post). I'm one of those people who, if I'm not careful, can watch 8 episodes of LOST in one sitting... that is a lot of time wasted that could have been spent doing something a little better. Not to belittle LOST though because it is amazing. Like, oh-my-goodness amazing. Nonetheless, I would rather have something to fill up my evenings than watching TV. Sooo.... to all of the people who have asked me, "What are you going to do with all of your free time now that you are done with school and your certification?", I have made a list! *cue triumphant trumpet sound*

                                        ~The List~

• Read straight through all seven Harry Potter books- Since they began being published in 1998 and continued until 2007, it was difficult to read them in a continuous and flowing manner. 
• Learn a new skill (or several)- I am considering learning a language, learning to decorate cakes, making stained glass, taking piano lessons, taking Taekwondo lessons... Hopefully I will do several of these things!
• Start exercising on a regular basis
• Start a Bible study- Ideally, I would like to read through the whole Bible in a year and journal about it. 
• Find joy and contentment with where I am- This is definitely the most difficult for me.

So there you have it. I will do updates as often as possible about my progress through this list, and some updates will be fairly soon since I have already started on several of these items!

Peace and blessings. 

Freedom

For those of you who know me, you are well aware that I have tried to keep a blog or two in the past. Has it worked? Absolutely not. However, with all of my new-found freedom, I am going to try to be serious about blogging.  I LOVE reading my friends' blogs, and while I'm not naive enough to think boatloads of people are going to read mine, I would like to give friends and family the opportunity to keep up-to-date with my daily happenings, shenanigans, triumphs, and failures.

I would like to dedicate this first post to my new freedom. Let me explain: For the past 23 years of my life, I have always had some type of school, homework, or studying looming overhead. But for the first time ever, I can proudly state that I am DONE! Even after I was done in graduate school, I knew I still had to study for the CPA exam. (For those of you who don't know, it is a very difficult, four-part test that takes most people anywhere from several months to several years to successfully pass all four parts.) Starting last July, I have sacrificed my weeknights, Saturday mornings, Sunday afternoons, and oftentimes my happiness to studying for this exam. On Monday, more than a year after I started this long process of studying and testing, I received my last score... from the section I was positive I had failed. When I saw the score and read the magical words, "Passed All Sections of the CPA Exam", I was breathless- I was free!

As soon as I turn in some paper work and the fair state of Texas gets my license in order, I will be Kristin Bell, CPA! Free to watch TV in the evenings, do crafts, read a book, cook dinner, or be with friends. And I'm not going to lie, when I got in my car after work that day, I echoed the great words of Mel Gibson in Braveheart... "FREEEEDOOOOOOOM!"