November 20, 2012 11:46 pm

FLDS Escape Books

I was so busy reading Stolen Innocence that I didn’t realize what time it was and now I only have 15 minutes to publish this!

It’s the true story of a girl escaping from the FLDS movement led by Warren Jeffs – she was part of the suit brought against him that’s mentioned in the top portion of that Wikipedia article.

I read the book Escape by Carolyn Jessop a while back which follows a similar plot. Both women’s books are really great reads – the culture they grew up in is so different from mine (ours) and it’s fascinating to me. Stolen Innocence delved a bit more into the day-to-day cultural differences, but it had a timeline that was a little more difficult to follow than Escape. (Characters appear and disapper, suddenly the author is six months pregnant, etc.) Escape was riveting and the timeline made more sense to me, but then again they are different types of stories… one is strictly an account of the author’s escape from the FLDS community, and the other talks about the author’s childhood and her arranged marriage at age 14 and her subsequent rebellion and escape.

Anyway, if you like memoirs (especially religious memoirs) and tales of triumph over adversity, I’d recommend them both.

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November 19, 2012 9:40 pm

Ex Astris, Scientia

Ever since we moved into this place, I’ve been struggling with what to do about the giant wall behind our television. It’s either been blank, or it’s been a hodgepodge of unrelated things that are spaced awkwardly. Thumbs-down.

Then today, I stumbled across Caravan and was instantly hooked – I liked their chalk artwork best, and when I saw the “Ex Astris, Scientia” Constellation Print, I immediately thought of the horrible wall behind the TV and placed an order.

The cool thing about Caravan is that most of their stuff (if not all of it) is print-it-yourself. They have instructions on how to request 36″x48″ prints on a large-format B&W printer for something like $7, which I managed to do with Staples’s online copy center thing without too much trouble. I have my fingers crossed that Staples prints it correctly; I had to request that they fit it to the paper because the preview didn’t indicate that it would do that automatically.

I’m not sure yet how I’ll hang it up; right now I’m thinking something like this, hung from clear push pins. Regardless, I’m excited to finally have SOMETHING interesting on that wall!

(In case it isn’t obvious, I wasn’t compensated in any way for posting about this – I just really liked this print and it was inexpensive for being so huge!)

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November 18, 2012 8:41 pm

Books, Avengers, Decluttering

We spent the morning at Daniel’s mom’s house organizing little-kid books. They were all in storage and she wanted them out for Wesley to be able to read, so we went through a bunch of boxes and got them all out and on the shelves. We found the first book Daniel learned to read (“Tip” – a “see Spot run” type of book about a dog), the book Half Magic (which is great and if you have not read it, I would heartily recommend it), and a bunch of those cloth-bound books you make yourself in grade school.

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Last night, we watched Moonrise Kingdom (I liked it, I think – not as much as The Life Aquatic or the Darjeeling Limited, but it was good) and tonight we’ve rented The Avengers. I keep seeing all this stuff on Tumblr for the Avengers so I feel like I get the gist of the movie already, but it’s kind of annoying to see all these things and not be able to understand them, hence renting it for this evening.

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I’ve been noticing that a lot of the rooms I pin on Pinterest are entirely devoid of media. Like, surely these people own a DVD or two? Or have a record collection? I’ve since come to the conclusion that it’s really hard to get that nice, minimalistic aesthetic while owning physical media.

I would LOVE if all the DVDs I owned were saved digitally somewhere so I could just browse through them like MP3s or Netflix and pick one to watch rather than having to physically open a DVD case and insert it into our Xbox. Alas.

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