Kind of thinking about Aida when I drew this. :)
Friday, July 29, 2016
Thursday, July 21, 2016
more photography: nauvoo edition
Hello, dear readers. :) I want to share some more photography today from my amazing trip. I didn't get pictures from New Mexico since I was backpacking and didn't take a camera (a fact for which I am now cursing myself!) But I did get some pictures of Nauvoo, where we went afterwards, so I'm sharing some of those. (I also decided to take another tentative step into the world of becoming Hip and Cool or Whatever the Kids Are Calling It These Days TM, and I got an Instagram. My username is anna_marie919, so as Philippa Gordon would say-"What are your handles?" In other words, leave your usernames in the comments if you want me to follow you! I've tried to find a few people I know on there, but I haven't been able to find everyone. And as a side note: don't you just love it when old slang terms come back? I smile every time I hear someone say "handles" now.)
Before the pictures, I want to try to give a little explanation about Nauvoo for my friends of other faiths, since it's a really important place in the history of my church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka the LDS church, aka Mormons). If you don't care about that part, go ahead and scroll down; I won't be offended. :) I'll try not to ramble, but I do want to attempt to explain part of why this trip was so special for me. The difficulty with explaining is that the history and significance of Nauvoo is very much interconnected with our beliefs and faith in God, the facts of which aren't necessarily common knowledge. I want to explain enough that you're not confused, but not so much that this next paragraph becomes a hopeless fog. Sometimes I feel awkward and inarticulate writing about my faith, since it's so important to me-I'm afraid I'll mess it up. So thank you for being patient with me, and please ask me questions in the comments if you have any! I'm a little nervous that I won't explain it well, so go ahead and ask if something doesn't make sense or isn't clear, or if you're just curious about something. :) Here we go!
In the early 1800s, most members of the church lived in Missouri. However, there was a lot of persecution against members. After events came to a head with Governer Boggs' extermination order and the Haun's Mill Massacre, the church members tried to relocate to several different places in Missouri. They were driven out each time, and eventually Nauvoo, Illinois became the new gathering place for the church members. It was originally 800 acres of swampland, swarming with malaria-carrying mosquitoes which resulted in many deaths. However, members of the church drained the swamp and built a beautiful, prosperous city! One of the most important things there is the Nauvoo temple. (A quick word of explanation on temples-an integral part of our faith is the belief that the features of the original church as we read about it in the Bible are still essential parts of the true church today. Some of these features are prophets (like Abraham and Moses), the gift of the Holy Spirit (like in John 14:26), temples (like the temple of Solomon), and all the rest! :) The temple is an extremely sacred place for us to worship God-ask me in the comments if you have more questions.) Anyway, prejudice and persecution continued even during this period of relative peace, and eventually Joseph Smith, the church's prophet, was murdered alongside his brother Hiram by a mob. Not long after this tragedy, persecution from anti-Mormon groups continued to intensify. Despite the fact that it was still winter, the LDS population of Nauvoo was uprooted and forced to leave their homes. Under the direction of Brigham Young, the new prophet, they began the long journey westward and out of the country as it existed at the time in what is sometimes called the "Mormon Exodus". There's more, but I think this covers it pretty well.
Now, on to the pictures!
Some kind family friends who routinely helps with the Nauvoo pageant allowed us to stay in their home while we were there. It was such a lovely old house with lots of personality and "scope for the imagination".
In the early 1800s, most members of the church lived in Missouri. However, there was a lot of persecution against members. After events came to a head with Governer Boggs' extermination order and the Haun's Mill Massacre, the church members tried to relocate to several different places in Missouri. They were driven out each time, and eventually Nauvoo, Illinois became the new gathering place for the church members. It was originally 800 acres of swampland, swarming with malaria-carrying mosquitoes which resulted in many deaths. However, members of the church drained the swamp and built a beautiful, prosperous city! One of the most important things there is the Nauvoo temple. (A quick word of explanation on temples-an integral part of our faith is the belief that the features of the original church as we read about it in the Bible are still essential parts of the true church today. Some of these features are prophets (like Abraham and Moses), the gift of the Holy Spirit (like in John 14:26), temples (like the temple of Solomon), and all the rest! :) The temple is an extremely sacred place for us to worship God-ask me in the comments if you have more questions.) Anyway, prejudice and persecution continued even during this period of relative peace, and eventually Joseph Smith, the church's prophet, was murdered alongside his brother Hiram by a mob. Not long after this tragedy, persecution from anti-Mormon groups continued to intensify. Despite the fact that it was still winter, the LDS population of Nauvoo was uprooted and forced to leave their homes. Under the direction of Brigham Young, the new prophet, they began the long journey westward and out of the country as it existed at the time in what is sometimes called the "Mormon Exodus". There's more, but I think this covers it pretty well.
Now, on to the pictures!
Some kind family friends who routinely helps with the Nauvoo pageant allowed us to stay in their home while we were there. It was such a lovely old house with lots of personality and "scope for the imagination".
Old radiator
Experimenting with framing techniques
We got to visit the Trail of Hope, which is the path the church members followed out of Nauvoo to cross the Mississippi. It is lined with quotes from the people who left, taken from their journals, letters, etc.
(The Mormon Battalion was a group of LDS men who were enlisted by the government to fight in the Mexican-American war early on in the journey west. For more information, check out this link.)
Near the Trail of Hope.
The Mighty Mississippi!
At Carthage, where Joseph and Hiram Smith were murdered, there are these displays with quotes on them. I liked these two especially.
The beautiful Nauvoo temple!
Trying to take artsy photos is HARD.
Thursday, July 14, 2016
tag! you're it!
Greetings and salutations, everyone! :) This is a post written many moons ago, but only now am I getting around to posting it (shame on me): the long-awaited post for the Liebster Tag Award Thingy, which Rae very kindly tagged me in ages ago. I like this kind of thing because the questions are unique and let you know a little about the person who asked them! This should be fun-here we go!
First, the Rules of the Game:
1.) Link back to the person who tagged you. (see above for that, but here's the link again just in case. :) Go check out Rae's blog-its name is based on a quote from The Sound of Music, so you can know just from that that it's going to be great.)
2.) Answer the eleven questions.
3.) Tag 11 bloggers, and let them know you tagged them. (do I even know eleven bloggers? Oh Help and Bother . . . we shall see when we get to the end of this post if I've been able to come up with eleven!)
4.) Ask your tagged bloggers eleven questions.
So here we go, with Rae's lovely questions and a few photographs by me! I'm trying to become a little better at photography and to practice my compositions, so any tips are appreciated. I know several readers of this blog are photographers, so I'd love to hear all your best tricks for getting nice photos. :)
1.) What are your favourite books? (I know it's hard to choose a favourite so you can list as many "favourites" as you have. :)
AAAAAH! As soon as I saw this, I knew it would be difficult. I have lots of favorites, and I'm sure I can't list all of them because I'll forget some and then feel terrible for leaving them out. Thus the following list is more of a listing of the first things that came to my mind when I thought about books I like. Here we go, in no particular order! Pretty much everything by C.S. Lewis, L.M. Montgomery, Lloyd Alexandar, Elizabeth George Speare, Louisa May Alcott (as you can probably tell from the blog title), JRR Tolkien, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. And of course the Jane Austen the Great and Powerful is also one of my dearly beloved authors (oh dear; this is turning into an author listing instead of a book listing!). Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne), Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling), North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell), A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens), Rose Daughter (Robin McKinley), Beauty (Robin McKinley), The Scarlet Pimpernel (Emmuska Orczy), Peter Pan (JM Barrie), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Kate Douglas Wiggin), A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle), A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett), The Two Princesses of Bamarre (Gail Carson Levine), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne), Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbit), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), Matilda (Roald Dahl), The Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum), The Goose Girl (Shannon Hale). . .well, I'd better stop now before this list becomes the entire post! Haha :) but I will always be happy to ramble about books for ever and ever. If you want some book talk, I'm your girl!
2.) What type of music do you like best?
I love showtunes, instrumental music, and classical music (and in this case by classical music, I mean the umbrella term for "old" music! ;) to be more specific, I especially music from the Romantic period.) I also really like music from movie soundtracks-I've been listening to the North and South soundtrack quite a bit because it's absolutely gorgeous. And choral music. Oh, and I don't know what genre this is, but I like quite a lot of music by Sara Barielles and Mindy Gledhill. . . whatever that style is.
3.) Do you like Jane Austen? How many of her books have you read and which is your favourite?
I love Jane Austen! But I actually haven't read all of her books yet (although I've read my favorites multiple times, if that counts!). I'm actually reading Mansfield Park right now, and I want to finish Northanger Abbey before the end of the summer, but I've read all of her other well-known works. As for Lady Susan and Love & Friendship, I'd like to read those too someday. As for picking a favorite, that's so hard! I love all of them in different ways. I guess my favorite today is good old Pride and Prejudice, but if you ask me again next week, I might have a different answer! :)
4.) Do you have a favorite actor/actress? Who?
I'm not sure about this one. Maybe Emma Thompson? She's in a lot of movie I like-Sense and Sensibility, Much Ado About Nothing, Saving Mr. Banks.
5.) What's your favorite flower?
I love bright-colored flowers, so probably either black-eyed Susans, daylilies, sunflowers, or poppies.
6.) How many books have you read in the last week? Is there one in particular you want to share?
Actually, last week was a bit different in terms of reading for me because of SEMINARY GRADUATION! I believe I've talked about this a bit in previous posts, but my church has a class before school every morning for high-school-age teens where we come in early and study a different book of scripture each year. We call it seminary, and this year we focused on the Old Testament. Our assigned readings didn't encompass the entire book, but I set a personal goal to finish the whole Old Testament within the school year. I got a little behind right at the end, so I spent all of my time reading that to finish in time. (I did finish it by graduation, and I'm so so glad I did. It was a challenge to read it so quickly, but so rewarding!) I guess that only counts as one, but it was a very long (although amazing) "one".
7.) If you could choose between meeting your favourite actor/actress and acting in your favourite movie, which would it be?
Acting in the movie, no contest! Of course, for me to do that I'd have to first determine a favorite, which would be a very difficult process . . .
8.) Do you play any instruments? What?
I play the piano and trumpet!
9.) What hobbies do you enjoy?
Drawing is one of my favorite things, as you can probably tell. I also love reading, making music in any way, spending time with my family, riding my bike, working in our garden, and learning all kinds of new things!
10.) If you could make any book into a movie, what book would it be and do you have any ideas for the cast?
I would actually love to see a short film made out of The Gift of the Magi. It's such a beautiful little Christmas story and it deserves a lovely movie to do justice to it. I'm not sure who I would want as the cast, though, since I'm not very skilled at this type of thing.
11.) Who's your favourite literary hero?
This is another terribly hard question. I guess I'll go with Gilbert Blythe:) I love that he's Anne's equal and perfect match-he always works hard and aims for the best, and he pushes Anne to do the same. He tries to do the right thing, and although he's not perfect, he's not ashamed to apologize and start over when he's in the wrong. Also, I love that he's well-read and can throw literary references and quotes back and forth with Anne. That's a must for any husband, in my opinion :)
And now for my questions:
1.) Tell us four names (if you don't know the answer to any, just tell the ones you do know): one that your parents would have given you if you were the opposite gender, one they considered once they knew your gender, one you would choose if you got to choose your own name, and one you would NOT like to have.
2.) If you were to adapt one of your favorite stories, what story would it be and how would you tell it? (movie, musical, webseries, play, book, etc?)
3.) Tell us four of your favorite words.
4.) What is a life lesson you have learned in the past year?
5.) Who is your favorite secondary character in a book you've read recently?
6.) What are five of the books on your TBR list right now?
7.) Tell us one talent/skill you have, and one you'd like to develop.
8.) What's the best joke you've heard recently? (Awful puns are highly acceptable!)
9.) Share a quote from the book you're currently reading.
10.) What song is stuck in your head right now? (Or just share one that's been bouncing around recently if you don't have one right now.)
11.) What do you want your life to be like when you're a little old lady?
And here are my tag-ees (I am sure there's got to be a better term for that, and I am equally sure that I will fail to think of it until long after this post has been up for so long that there's no longer any point in changing it. Bother.) Drumroll, please:
Nina, Olivia, Momo, and Lydia. I honestly can't think of any more. Aaaah! I need more bloggy friends, so it would seem. Well, that's all, folks! Thank you so much for the tag, Rae-it was a lot of fun! :)
First, the Rules of the Game:
1.) Link back to the person who tagged you. (see above for that, but here's the link again just in case. :) Go check out Rae's blog-its name is based on a quote from The Sound of Music, so you can know just from that that it's going to be great.)
2.) Answer the eleven questions.
3.) Tag 11 bloggers, and let them know you tagged them. (do I even know eleven bloggers? Oh Help and Bother . . . we shall see when we get to the end of this post if I've been able to come up with eleven!)
4.) Ask your tagged bloggers eleven questions.
So here we go, with Rae's lovely questions and a few photographs by me! I'm trying to become a little better at photography and to practice my compositions, so any tips are appreciated. I know several readers of this blog are photographers, so I'd love to hear all your best tricks for getting nice photos. :)
1.) What are your favourite books? (I know it's hard to choose a favourite so you can list as many "favourites" as you have. :)
AAAAAH! As soon as I saw this, I knew it would be difficult. I have lots of favorites, and I'm sure I can't list all of them because I'll forget some and then feel terrible for leaving them out. Thus the following list is more of a listing of the first things that came to my mind when I thought about books I like. Here we go, in no particular order! Pretty much everything by C.S. Lewis, L.M. Montgomery, Lloyd Alexandar, Elizabeth George Speare, Louisa May Alcott (as you can probably tell from the blog title), JRR Tolkien, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. And of course the Jane Austen the Great and Powerful is also one of my dearly beloved authors (oh dear; this is turning into an author listing instead of a book listing!). Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne), Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling), North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell), A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens), Rose Daughter (Robin McKinley), Beauty (Robin McKinley), The Scarlet Pimpernel (Emmuska Orczy), Peter Pan (JM Barrie), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Kate Douglas Wiggin), A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle), A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett), The Two Princesses of Bamarre (Gail Carson Levine), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne), Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbit), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), Matilda (Roald Dahl), The Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum), The Goose Girl (Shannon Hale). . .well, I'd better stop now before this list becomes the entire post! Haha :) but I will always be happy to ramble about books for ever and ever. If you want some book talk, I'm your girl!
2.) What type of music do you like best?
I love showtunes, instrumental music, and classical music (and in this case by classical music, I mean the umbrella term for "old" music! ;) to be more specific, I especially music from the Romantic period.) I also really like music from movie soundtracks-I've been listening to the North and South soundtrack quite a bit because it's absolutely gorgeous. And choral music. Oh, and I don't know what genre this is, but I like quite a lot of music by Sara Barielles and Mindy Gledhill. . . whatever that style is.
3.) Do you like Jane Austen? How many of her books have you read and which is your favourite?
I love Jane Austen! But I actually haven't read all of her books yet (although I've read my favorites multiple times, if that counts!). I'm actually reading Mansfield Park right now, and I want to finish Northanger Abbey before the end of the summer, but I've read all of her other well-known works. As for Lady Susan and Love & Friendship, I'd like to read those too someday. As for picking a favorite, that's so hard! I love all of them in different ways. I guess my favorite today is good old Pride and Prejudice, but if you ask me again next week, I might have a different answer! :)
(picture of Emma because sadly, I don't have a pretty copy of p&p to take a picture with)
I'm not sure about this one. Maybe Emma Thompson? She's in a lot of movie I like-Sense and Sensibility, Much Ado About Nothing, Saving Mr. Banks.
5.) What's your favorite flower?
I love bright-colored flowers, so probably either black-eyed Susans, daylilies, sunflowers, or poppies.
6.) How many books have you read in the last week? Is there one in particular you want to share?
Actually, last week was a bit different in terms of reading for me because of SEMINARY GRADUATION! I believe I've talked about this a bit in previous posts, but my church has a class before school every morning for high-school-age teens where we come in early and study a different book of scripture each year. We call it seminary, and this year we focused on the Old Testament. Our assigned readings didn't encompass the entire book, but I set a personal goal to finish the whole Old Testament within the school year. I got a little behind right at the end, so I spent all of my time reading that to finish in time. (I did finish it by graduation, and I'm so so glad I did. It was a challenge to read it so quickly, but so rewarding!) I guess that only counts as one, but it was a very long (although amazing) "one".
7.) If you could choose between meeting your favourite actor/actress and acting in your favourite movie, which would it be?
Acting in the movie, no contest! Of course, for me to do that I'd have to first determine a favorite, which would be a very difficult process . . .
8.) Do you play any instruments? What?
I play the piano and trumpet!
The trumpet is not exactly of a shape to lend itself to artsy pictures, and I already used a piano photo . . . so this will have to do.
9.) What hobbies do you enjoy?
Drawing is one of my favorite things, as you can probably tell. I also love reading, making music in any way, spending time with my family, riding my bike, working in our garden, and learning all kinds of new things!
10.) If you could make any book into a movie, what book would it be and do you have any ideas for the cast?
I would actually love to see a short film made out of The Gift of the Magi. It's such a beautiful little Christmas story and it deserves a lovely movie to do justice to it. I'm not sure who I would want as the cast, though, since I'm not very skilled at this type of thing.
11.) Who's your favourite literary hero?
This is another terribly hard question. I guess I'll go with Gilbert Blythe:) I love that he's Anne's equal and perfect match-he always works hard and aims for the best, and he pushes Anne to do the same. He tries to do the right thing, and although he's not perfect, he's not ashamed to apologize and start over when he's in the wrong. Also, I love that he's well-read and can throw literary references and quotes back and forth with Anne. That's a must for any husband, in my opinion :)
And now for my questions:
1.) Tell us four names (if you don't know the answer to any, just tell the ones you do know): one that your parents would have given you if you were the opposite gender, one they considered once they knew your gender, one you would choose if you got to choose your own name, and one you would NOT like to have.
2.) If you were to adapt one of your favorite stories, what story would it be and how would you tell it? (movie, musical, webseries, play, book, etc?)
3.) Tell us four of your favorite words.
4.) What is a life lesson you have learned in the past year?
5.) Who is your favorite secondary character in a book you've read recently?
6.) What are five of the books on your TBR list right now?
7.) Tell us one talent/skill you have, and one you'd like to develop.
8.) What's the best joke you've heard recently? (Awful puns are highly acceptable!)
9.) Share a quote from the book you're currently reading.
10.) What song is stuck in your head right now? (Or just share one that's been bouncing around recently if you don't have one right now.)
11.) What do you want your life to be like when you're a little old lady?
And here are my tag-ees (I am sure there's got to be a better term for that, and I am equally sure that I will fail to think of it until long after this post has been up for so long that there's no longer any point in changing it. Bother.) Drumroll, please:
Nina, Olivia, Momo, and Lydia. I honestly can't think of any more. Aaaah! I need more bloggy friends, so it would seem. Well, that's all, folks! Thank you so much for the tag, Rae-it was a lot of fun! :)
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
family crests
*this is a queued post*
The week this is posted, I'll be on a backpacking trip in the New Mexico desert at Philmont! My whole family will be out there (or should I say we ARE out there, since that will be the situation at the time you read this? Although, of course, you could be reading this is the even more distant future, where both the writing of his post and my time in New Mexico will be in the past tense . . . Who knows. This aside has gone on far too long, in any case.)
All this is to introduce the actual content of these posts! Part of what we do at Philmont includes making a "family banner". For ours, we decided to research and use the family crests of my parents' families. However, the only photos we could find were pretty low quality. So I decided to create digital versions in Inkscape in vector format so we could use them! I thought it would be fun to share them on here.
The motto on this one is Latin. It essentially translates to "united force is stronger".
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