It is 2010 and I was looking at my blog. . . and in August it will be 5 years since I started this blog!! That blows me away, how fast the time went!!

After reading another friend's post recently and stopping to consider everything I feel like maybe that I have been way too personal. I might even have shared way too much personal information for just the random person who stumbles across it. I guess I feel like it is okay, but I am going to have to control myself a lot more. I have decided that if I really want my friend's to know what's going on with me in detail or want to get some stress out, I will use email just to those specific people. There are probably a lot more people who read this blog than I think even though no one really writes comments, I got to tighten my reigns. I do this and I am good at it everywhere I go with people, but when it comes to writing and putting stuff over the internet. . . I let it all hang out sometimes. :(
Have to save it for email.

So, yeah for 2010!! I am ready for a better and brighter year than the last!!

• I am hoping that we save some more money this year than we did last year.
• I am hoping sometime this year to take a little trip with the family to visit some good old friends that I haven't really seen in a good long while.
• And to reconnect better with some other friends.
• To find some time and read some really good books that I find or have wanted to read and then to talk about them.

As far as this year, reading books there are a couple that really struck me and that I will remember.

1. Sashenka - don't ask me who the author was, I forgot. This was a story about a woman from an old aristocrat family in the former U.S.S.R. that grew up and came to age during the Lenin Revolution and joining it and ended up being married to a very high officer in the government during the height of communism. She had two kids, was rich, her husband and her were good friends with Stalian, etc. She was the editor of a woman's magazine for good Communist women and was very high up in the country. However, she didn't know anything else that was going on and was blind to the cruelty and horror of the communist regime because she lived a life of privelige and was protected. That is until she met another man, a writer from France and fell in love with him during this wild short lived affair. This was more than an affair of course it helped her to see all the injustice and horrible things that were happening in her country and by the government that she so strongly believed in when she first joined the cause. She was killed of course, and so the second half of the story is her granddaughter being hired by her aunt (that she didn't know at the time) to research and find out what happened to her aunt's mother (her granddaughter). It is a very intense, chilling, but fascinating story. . . it made my stomach turn at times it was so vivid. I thought this book was very interesting and tragic, but very well written and thought provoking.

2. The Commoner - was a story about the an Emperess of Japan. This was a very quiet story, but nonetheless deep with feeling and emotion that you could feel and sense through the quietness. This story made me feel kind of lonely and sad, but at the same time it was beautiful. For some reason, it did a good job of portraying how I felt (or a lot of foreigners) feel in Japan. . . mainly the sense of quietness. Anyway, it was a story about a young woman who found herself in love with the future emperor of Japan in the 1930s sometime right before the war I believe. Well, once the woman married the future emperor her life as a civilian was over; she had no contact with the world outside of the palace and royalty that she lived in, no contact with her family. She was expected to be the symbol of Japanese and produce offspring (mainly a son) to be the future emperor. Well, she was the first so called "common" woman to marry into Japan's royal family and soon found out how hard and suffocating this was to do. She got so depressed that she didn't speak to anyone including her husband, the emperor for 15 years. This story was very sad and made you really feel how lonely this woman was, but it was very well written and I am glad I read it.

3. The Reader - this book and movie stirred up a lot of controversy. I don't know I didn't really agree or approve of what happened or took place, but found it very moving. I admit that I cried at the end of this story. Even though I don't agree with the relationship that took place, I felt very sad for the man about what happened to him and how much the relationship hurt him. The man loved that woman despite everything that happened and how much that hurt him, but to say it was all because the woman took advantage of him and started it at the beginning. . . to me that part gets blurry. He had a choice too and both the characters had big inner struggles going on, but it was horribly sad!