Princess Skye has announced the Princess Challenge for May! In her own words the "task this month is to find a little bit of beauty in every day. You can write about it, take photos, draw or record these beautiful things in a blog or journal. They can be anything from a little flower growing through the pavement to an act of great kindness that you witnessed. Each day, for a whole month, find something beautiful in the world around you."  So this is my little bit of beauty for today. It's the courtyard at my local library. I've loved this view for a long time and while I was visiting today I happened to have my camera with me, so I took this shot.

Happy May Day everyone!

I hope you all had a pleasent April, and that the weather for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere is being suitably spring-like and you are not still dealing with snow and temperatures in the 30's and 40's. Here in Ohio things are warming up very fast; trees are all blossoming like mad, birds are nesting all over the place and babies and pregnant women seem to have popped up absolutely everywhere!

As it is the beginning of May Princess Skye should very soon have the page with everyone's fairytales up on Princess Portal as well as announce the next Princess Challenge. I'm very excited to see what she'll pick for this month's challenge and I hope it will be as fun as this first one. I had a great time writing my fairytale, and it was awesome to finally get something written after so long, to write something so short and to end up with something I truly thought was enchanting and beautiful at the end of it. I was so inspired in fact that I'm currently working on two new fairytales. The first I think I will call The Crystal Hart or The Glass Hart and is the story of a prince who is transformed into a crystal unicorn and banished from his kingdom, only to be rescued by a young girl. The second is currently unnamed and is about a girl named Beth who is abandoned by her parents ala Hansel and Gretel, only to be found and sheltered by a wolf. However, her protector is no ordinary wolf and every full moon he changes into a young man... 

May looks to be a very busy month for me! This weekend we are having our family portrait taken, and we are going to celebrate my mother's birthday. Then on Monday it will be Princess Day; I plan to have a long, lovely bubble bath in the morning, then take my mother to The Glass Slipper, a little tea shop in Powell that I've been wanting to try for ages, and then maybe get my first professional manicure! I don't really have any other plans set in stone, but I'll try and think up some other enjoyable activities. Maybe I'll draft my family into playing silly games like Pictionary, Memory, and that game where you stick a word on everyone's forehead and then they all try to guess what person/animal/thing ect. they are! (We played that for the first time at Easter and I adored it.) Then on the 6th my  grandparents are coming to stay with us for a week. Then comes mother's day, which we'll celebrate with both my mother and my grandma, and then on the 25th it's my parents' anniversary!

There is one major downside to this month: While it seems that pretty much everyone else in America will be happilly planning what to spend their tax rebate on, I, as usual, have been jipped completely by the government. Since I am older than 17, they stopped calling me a "dependent" and are not going to pay the rebate to my parents, but since legally I am not off on my own and my parents still claim me as a dependent on their taxes, I don't get a rebate of my own, meaning I get absolutely nothing!!! Not to mention I STILL haven't gotten my state tax return, never mind the fact that I finished my taxes a week before my brother did and he's had his money for over two weeks! Everytime I think about the rebate or hear it talked about day after day on CNN at work I get so angry at the government. (I think I'll turn to a different subject now, before I get really mad and start ranting...) 

This last month I have discovered a lot of awesome new music. First, the Birthday Massacre! The first taste of them I got was their song "The Dream" which I still love, and though I haven't heard a whole lot of their stuff (probably only five songs so far) I've really liked everything I've heard. Then Gackt, who I finally got to hear after years of wanting to but never being able to able to download anything due to my crappy dial-up. (God save RoadRunner!) Princess Skye recommended the French singer Emilie Simon, and rightly so, she has a beautiful voice and her songs are all lovely, with a definate touch of electronica. And last, but certainly not least Ruslana, a talented Ukranian singer who I just discovered a few weeks ago and have been rocking out to almost constantly ever since. I adore the video for her song "Dyka Energia/Wild Energy"!

Also, for many years my brothers and I have dreamed of going on "A Grand Adventure", driving and exploring all over the U.S. or perhaps Europe together, as a way to indulge our secret inner gypsies and thumb our noses at settling down to responsible, boring, workaholic adulthood. I just recently read the book Lois on the Loose by Lois Pryce, which is all about her adventures traveling alone on a motorcycle from the uppermost edges of Alaska all the way to the farthest tip of South America. It was a fun read, and it's made me itch maddenly to take off on my own journey... *sigh* I must be patient though, since right now I don't have the means, money or know-how (especially since I don't even know how to drive lol) to make such a voyage. She has just finished writing a second book about her travels through Africa, and when it comes out in the US I'm going to have to snag a copy!

Have a lovely day!

-Olivia

I find I've been neglecting this diary lately, which is a shame. So, to make up for it I thought I'd share some old pictures of my relatives and ancestors with you. 

I finally got cable internet after years of dial-up and it's just lovely. At last, I can finally load videos and music and go to fancy websites. My internet was acting up before and I hadn't been able to send attachments in my emails or submit anything to my DeviantArt account in an age because of it, but now I can again, and in half the time it would have taken before. Never again shall I suffer dial-up unless I have no choice. As if in celebration of this, the weather's been lovely this week. The grass is growing ridiculously green and the skies have been clear and blue. On the way to work everyday I hear the endless chorus of whistles and chirps and kaws of birds in the trees.  

My grandparents are coming to stay next month and so we are fixing my brother's bedroom for them to sleep in. Papa and the boys are supposed to paint it tomorrow, and I am busilly trying to beat my own room in shape for their arrival.

When I'm not at work, online doing school or attempting the aforementioned "beating into shape" of my room, I have been working on my fairy tale for Fatalfille's Princess Challenge (which still, frustratingly enough, does not yet have anything even resembling a name.) and making tiny little fairytale-themed scenes out of 32-count matchboxes, which is proving to be easy to do, ridiculously fun and a good use of all that trim and ribbon remnants I have sitting around. So far I have made ones of Rapunzel, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Puss in Boots, and Sleeping Beauty, but unfortunately, whenever I try to take pictures of them with my camera they come out all fuzzy. :(

It is now getting rather late and I need to go to sleep soon so I can get school done tomorrow, so I will end this here for now. Until the next time!

-Olivia

Fatalfille has posted a Princess Challenge on her website, Princess Portal. The challenge is to write a fairy tale featuring yourself as the main character and have it finished by the end of the month, when everyone will share their stories. I've been wanting an excuse to make a fairytale based off my life for awhile, and the moment I read the challenge I was giddy with excitement. I went to bed going over all the possible ideas I could choose from and ended up going with one of my favorite fairy tale types, the "cottage in the woods" sort of story. Since then I've been halving my time between online classes and working on my story. It's coming along very well so far, though I have yet to find a name for it that I like. When I'm done I'll post the finished piece up here for you all, so keep a look out for that. ^^

Also, in case any of you are interested in joining the Challenge yourselves, here's a link http://princessportal.com/archives/484#comments

-Olivia 

         Sorry it's been so long since I wrote last. Not a whole lot's been going on with me. All the fun stuff that's happened has been been kind of spread apart, with really dull periods in between. The weather has been doing... interesting things lately. First there was our blizzard, which was pretty nuts! I've never been in a blizzard before, particularly since I spent most of my childhood in Washington, which rarely gets any real snow at all, so this was an experience. (I actually had to walk to work and back in it, since my employers couldn't get through to me to tell me I didn't need to be there that day. I ended up getting free pizza though, so it was not a wasted effort.) I had Sunday off and my father had Monday off and he got off early on Friday so we practically had a four day weekend, which we spent hanging around the house watching hours of Ballykissangel. I spent most of the time sewing various things and doing laundry, my father wrote and worked on his calligraphy and my mother and little sister made us all sugar cookies. They were so yummy! We didn't make any for christmas this year, even though it's kind of a tradition for us, so this made up for it. It was pretty cool to just have some time to sit around and do nothing, kind of a little vacation.

         I After our blizzard things got really warm and sunny, although we still had enormous piles of snow sitting around. Now all the snow has finally melted and it's been overcast and kind of nippy for the last couple days. It rained all day yesterday and most of this morning and it's supposed to keep raining for the next couple days or so.

         I think I'm starting to get a cold. For the last couple days I've had a sore throat and difficulty breathing, yesterday morning my voice started to die, and today it's worse and I keep getting these deep, painful coughs in little fits on and off. Things were ok all through work today, but as soon as I got home I got that wierd, spaced-out feeling I sometimes have during a cold, and am feeling seriously tired. (I just hope my voice won't go, I hate it when I have to greet people or answer the phone and my voice sounds like a chain smoker's, it's so embaressing....) Now I'm torn between finishing up this entry, having a glass of milk and a few chocolates and going to bed or resisting the urge to sleep and doing my chores. Guess which one sounds more tempting right now?

Happy late St. Patrick's day!

Hello again! Sorry it's been awhile since my last post, my computer died on me again last week and since I no longer have coverage from CompUsa, cannot afford the cost of fruitless repairs, and no one in all christendom seems to have a clue what's wrong with it, I decided to get in debt and buy another one. So here I am.

Yesterday my brothers and I went out on a little adventure downtown together. First we went to go see the Spiderwick Chronicles, which we all quite enjoyed. I was impressed that even though they changed things, they were changes I could understand, since they were taking 5 books and making 1 movie out of them. (One thing I thought was odd was that in the books it is the Elves, not the Sylph who are holding Arthur Spiderwick. I wonder if they were trying to avoid looking like other recent fantasy movies, but I was disappointed, since I'd been looking forward to seeing the Elves on the big screen and thought the switch rather unneccessary.) Overall it was very entertaining, and I felt that the family conflict was handled well, and the spirit of the books preserved nicely. Anyone who likes a well made fantasy or adventure should go see it. ^^

After the movie, we dropped by the new comic shop in town, and then a used CD/movie/videogames store. Having worked up quite an appetite we decided to have lunch at a little chinese restaurant, (the not overly-creatively named) China Wok. They have the most delicious looking entries, and we all adore their wanton soup. While we were eating I decided to play around with my camera and we ended up with

Hello, all! 

    Since I got my digital camera I've been meaning to post an entry here about my bedroom. Now, after several days, I've put together the best pictures of my room and am finally sharing them with you. I've been working on my bedroom for almost a year now, and although it's not quite finished, I'm very happy with it, and I hope you'll all enjoy seeing it.

Well, while we were out in Columbus yesterday we saw Enchanted at last, and I picked up Emma vol. 6 and a lovely pair of rococo picture frames from Borders. I'll try and post pictures of them soon, but for now I need to get ready to go to work. I hope you enjoyed a little peek at  my boudior and have a nice day!

-Olivia