Completely different from the last time I took this test about eight years ago. I think I was an INFP then.

Completely unsurprising.

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Very Low
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Very Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

I copied this from lovely Barb the librarian, so my list was a little sad compared to hers.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (The entire thing!) -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 5

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Maybe half?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 2
Total so far: 7

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X

Total: 3
Total so far: 10

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

Total: 3
Total so far: 13

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 4
Total so far: 17

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

Total: 2
Total so far: 19

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 2
Total so far: 21

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

Total: 1
Total so far: 22

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistr
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X

Total: 2
Total so far: 24

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Overall Total: 28

Things I should be writing about:

• Obviously, number one would be my dad's cancer.
  
• Going to Norway in August and trying to decide how long I can stay, and how long Nick can stay. These are not necessarily one and the same.
  
• The term almost being over and the stresses of school.
  
• The realization that I'm almost done with school (in August).
  
• Wondering what on earth I will do with my life next.
  
• Trying to decide if I should walk or not - do you really do that almost a decade after your freshman year?
  
• My desire to garden and my vague attempts at doing so.
  
• My annual infatuation with salads.
  

That is all. Proceed.

Did you know that Tamsin North...

1. Translates to the number 7 in numerology
2. Has the Arctic Lemming as their Power Animal
3. Shares their name with a guesstimated 0 Americans?

See more at http://www.isthisyour.name

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The real reason Nick won't let me have a kitty:

To counterbalance all of the emoness of my last few posts, I give you the endlessly essential, timelessly trivial 25 random facts about me:

1. I had to wait until I was invited to do one of these. Inviting myself just felt rude or presumptuous.
2. One of the best lessons I've ever learned was taught to me by my mother's example: There are no age limits to things that make you happy. Which is why I have favourite cartoons on Playhouse Disney and often prefer children's books to those written for adults.
3. Being from two countries means that I think of myself as having a Norwegian mind and an English heart.
4. My Google Reader browser is filled with blogs about design, photography, interiors and crafts. Even though I'm too busy to get creative on my own these days, it inspires me to see what other people are doing.
5. Speaking of blogs, I usually check mine about 500 times after I post something to see if anyone has left a comment yet. if they haven't, I'm usually thrown into the depths of despair and discouragement until someone saves me with a few kind words. I place way too much of my own self-worth on who reads my blog :)
6. I've lived with 35 different roommates and can name all of them (if I think really hard).
7. The only bone I have ever broken was my nose, and I was on the operating table when it happened.
8. The above fact can probably be attributed to my lifelong love of milk, which I drink in huge quantities every day.
9. As I approach 29 years of age, I still have a hard time accepting that I'm probably not going to become a household name.
10. I have a great love of house linens: Table cloths, napkins, towels, sheets and aprons all make my little heart sing. Table linens are my favourite.
11. I have a secret dream of moving to a country where I don't speak the language or know the culture and seeing how well I could assimilate in a given amount of time.
12. I have one scar on my body caused by a chicken, and one caused by an egg. Which came first?
13. Sometimes I get really sick of being "the girl from Norway."
14. I have a deep fascination with the domestic arts, but am too lazy and self-indulgent to really have the kind of home I'd like to.
15. I just wrote "elf-indulgent" on the line above, and it is still making me giggle. :)
16. The more popular something is, the more I resist it... then I usually cave and end up liking it weeks, months and years after everyone else. I'm so untrendy! (Hence doing this post now, instead of months ago like everyone else)
17. I genuinely believe that people would be much happier if they let me tell them what to do.
18. Coming from a small family, and then gaining a large family through marriage has brought me an entirely unexpectedly large amount of happiness.
19. In my opinion, kittens are the greatest gift to humanity.
20. I have a strange desire to go and live in England in the 1980s - as an adult this time.
21. The mountains where I live are so beautiful that I stop and notice them every day.
22. Having said that, I hope that one day we will live somewhere close to the sea, and not in the desert.
23. A good colour combination can really make my day.
24. If I'm stressed out, nothing soothes me like organizing something according to size, colour, numerical or alphabetical order. No, I'm not obsessive-compulsive, I just like things a certain way :)
25. I didn't realize until I got engaged that it's possible to be happy every single day of your life. My husband showed me that. :)


Yeah... I'm not tagging anyone.

*Disclaimer: This post is basically me thinking out loud in an extremely drawn-out and rambling manner, and is in no way meant as a reflection of you, your writing or your contribution to society as a whole.

It seems my last post came off a little more emo than intended. No, I have not taken to dying my hair black and wearing skinny jeans (Thanks, Caren! :) ), nor am I undergoing some great tragedy. I have, however, been thinking about my blogging habits.
It's a bit of a paradox to me because while I admire the openness and honesty that a lot of the bloggers have, at the same time I struggle with the self-obsessed whiner blogs filled with page after page of angsty navel-gazing. I realize, of course, that a person's blog is their space to fill with whatever it is they want to, it just baffles me when people choose to display so much negativity on their "permanent record". What on earth does that contribute to society? And, if it's not meant for society, why are they posting it on the internet? It might just be that I'm not brave enough to put myself out there like that, or it might be that I think that some things belong to me and my private sphere.
Let me clarify that I'm not talking about the occasional "I'm having a bad day and here's why" post, or those amazing moments of clarity and honesty that people occasionally share. Those touch and amaze me and make me wish I could do that too.

Which brings me back to yesterdays post: I guess that what I was saying is that I wish I could write as openly and honestly as some of you do. Warts and all. I wish I was brave enough to tell you about some of the experiences I have had, so that perhaps you could gain from them too. I wish I wasn't afraid of the risk of someone thinking less of me for being who I really am.

Sorry for the lack of coherence in this post. It's a mish-mash of about 23 conflicting thoughts that all converged on my brain at once, not all of which were expressed with great clarity.

I often think about writing something about exactly what I think and how I feel about the things that are happening in my life. Then I think about how scary it would be to let people respond to that (or even scarier, to read it and then not respond to it) and I don't write anything at all.

I know, I know, this has been on everyone's minds for the past six months. I am sure you have hardly slept! In light of this (and some degree of confusion that I've noticed regarding my current educational status), I have taken the liberty of interviewing myself on your behalf:

So, didn't you start school like nine years ago? How can you still be working on a four year degree?
Yes, it's true. My very first semester at BYU was Winter 2000. There isn't really a short answer to why I'm not done yet, but let me do my best:
I had about a year left when Nick and I got engaged at the beginning of 2005, and was planning to be done by Christmas of 2005. However, I quickly discovered that planning a wedding spanning two continents was not easy, and ended up not taking classes spring and summer as planned, which put me a semester behind. Then we discovered that I couldn't enroll for Fall semester in 2005 while I applied for permanent residency, which put me another semester behind. Rubbish.

Wait a minute, I thought you already graduated? Haven't I seen pictures of you in a cap and gown?
Yup, that's right. I actually did the whole commencement ceremony thing the week before we got married in August 2005. My parents had already planned to come out for my graduation when it was still scheduled for 2005, so I was going to walk in August and graduate in December. Seeing as they were already going to be there that August, I decided to walk anyway, having absolutely no idea that I wouldn't actually graduate until four entire years later.

So, why the three year break?
Well, for the first year I couldn't work or go to school while my residency application was being processed. My student visa was about to expire, and I couldn't apply for a new one and and permanent residency application at the same time, so I spent a year being an Orem housewife. Then, when that year was up, Nick was in grad school and we just couldn't pony up the cash for both of us to be in school, so I worked for a year as an Americorps Vista volunteer which, although they didn't pay much, was awesome. After my year of service was up, Fall semester had already started, and it was too late to reapply for Winter. Which they make you do if you've been gone for a long time. So I applied for Fall 2008 and went back.

How does college feel now after a three year break?
I'm actually really enjoying it. Having been gone for so long, I know what kind of atrophy your brain goes through when you don't challenge it every day, and so it's been nice to dust off the old gray matter again. Also, to be perfectly honest, I was pretty burned out as far as school was concerned when I left, and wasn't really enjoying the whole learning experience, so now it feels good to be back after a long break and actually feel like I want to learn again.

What's it like being the oldest undergrad ever?
At first I felt really awkward and conspicuous, like everyone could tell that I was super-old, and therefore obviously not very smart for still working on my undergrad. This feeling was probably compounded by the fact that I was taking PS 100, and therefore reminded weekly that most of the people in my class were born in 1990 or later, and didn't even know what Chernobyl was. That was horrifying. Then I noticed that most of my classes had at least one student 20 or 30 years older than me, and that definitely took the edge off. Although I still sometimes feel like they're old enough to be awesome for going back to school, and I'm just old enough to be dumb for still being there. And then of course, there has been the occasional awesome moment when someone has very sweetly assumed I was 22, which naturally warms the soul.

And are you going to finish this time? Huh? Huh? Are ya? When?
Abso-freakin-lutely. I will have three more classes to finish after this semester, and am planning to take them over Spring and Summer terms, which means I will be ever so very finished in August 2009. Only four years late.

How can you even live with yourself? I do OK. It only seems reasonable that there would be a take home lesson or two in all of this, including the fact that I am just slow, people! It took me a decade to finally learn how to drive, and six years of knowing Nick to finally go on a date with him. It only makes sense that a four year degree would take me twice as long (and then some). However, I think the main thing I have learned is that I can't plan everything, no matter how much I would like to. There are so many things in my life (and I'm sure in yours too) that haven't worked out the way I planned and wanted them to, but that I wouldn't change in retrospect. Heavens, I could have been married to a pro-wrestler and had a degree in theatre!
The past nine years have taught me a lot about about how much I value my faith. Although I have a lot of my own strength and stubbornness that keeps me going in difficult times, I know that the strength that has carried me through those difficulties has not been my own. I've had more than one small miracle in my life, and know that so many of my prayers have been answered. I've learned a lot about trusting in the Lord's timing for my life, and knowing that His plans for me are always so much better than anything I could come up with one my own.