Beauty and the Beast and Knitted Hats

I'm thinking:

It was rather funny this morning. I wrote something up for my journaling page and then went to preview it and see how it would look formatted on the blog and it turns out I had been writing on my other blog. I hadn't been on that blog in a while and it made me laugh because it felt like I was going back in time somehow. Slipping back into last year. It's funny how that can happen sometimes. You open a book, or a blog that you frequented almost every day in years before, and it feels like you are simply stepping back in time.

I'm reading:

So, it's January. I want to start keeping better track of the books I read in the next few months (hopefully all year, but we'll see how I do). I just finished reading my second book for the month (reading book number three and four at the same time right now). Beauty is the book I just finished (it was a Christmas present) and I have to say, it was one of the best retellings of fairytales that I've ever read. You never can tell with retellings of fairytales. Some turn out to be rather good, others not so good. The trick is, I think, keeping the strain of the original fairytale and not losing the essence of the story. Sometimes the author gets so caught up in creating their own idea of the character that they lose who that character really was, because it is all there to begin with. Even though fairytales are often written without an over abundance of words, there is still a strain of a character that needs to be caught onto if the retelling is going to succeed. I think Beauty was so well done because it felt like it was simply adding more to the story in descriptions and such, but never straying for long from the story's real beginning. Not to mention that the Beast actually seemed rather frightening to begin with, which I liked quite a lot. Nomally he isn't, and he's supposed to be. Beauty and the Beast is probably my favorite fairytale, actually. I just love it so much. After finishing Beauty I went and found my CD from the Broadway musical, and listened to some of the songs from that. I shall probably be obsessed with Beauty and the Beast for a little while now.

I'm wearing:

I rather look like a ragamuffin today. A tear in the knee of my jeans (put there by myself, thank you very much), a shirt that really was a dress but I wear it as a shirt because it's much too short to wear as a dress, and a ruffled shirt beneath that. Ah well, it's home I stay today, so I can enjoy looking like a ragamuffin and dance about the room in bare feet.

I'm listening to:

Songs from Les Miserables on youtube. I want to buy the soundtrack eventually. I'm just not getting tired of all these songs. They are perfect. Really, really perfect.

I'm creating:

I've almost finished knitting a slouchy hat with my Christmas yarn. I'm excited about it because the colour will just match the red scarf I have and the red mittens my grandparents brought back from Canada for me. So now I have a full set. Or almost. I just have to finish knitting this hat.

On the topic of creating I really need to start working on my NaNoWriMo story again. I haven't made much progress since November ended and I would still like to finish it. So there's another project waiting for me.

A few plans for the rest of the week:

Did I mention I ordered a Latin book? That's what I'm most excited about this week. I read the introduction yesterday and I'm going to start on chapter one today. Yes.