Can I really do this?

It started with a friend who decided she was going to watch one movie a day for a whole year. And not only watch it but "review" it. She got the idea from watching "Julie & Julia" but who can really commit to cooking all the way through Julia Child's cookbook?!? Nobody with kids and you'll note that Julie didn't have kids. So she decided on movies. One a day - some she has seen, some she has not. It got me thinking, could I? Could I be disciplined enough to do something - ANYTHING! - for 365 days? No breaks, no excuses? My first ambitious thought was to workout. I mean how great would that be to workout every single day for a year! And then reality smacked me upside the head. What if I got the flu? Traveling? Can't do the workout for a year and besides you might get sick of reading day after day something like, "Thought I was going to die today but only ended up puking." HA! So after throwing around ideas with said friend above the idea for songs became the winner. (Confession: It was her brilliant idea, I can really take no credit.)

So for the next 365 days I am going to choose a song and write about it. Hopefully you'll get two things out of this experiment of mine. 1) A laugh, inspiration, or challenge from the song of the day and 2) exposure to music that maybe you haven't given a chance before. Btw, that's my hope as well - to be exposed to some music I haven't given a chance before so send me YOUR favorite songs and I'll add them to the mix! With 365 days in front of me I can promise you I will hear your song(s)!

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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