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 Hi and welcome to me own little corner of the 'Net! My name is Jessica and I've been running this place for a little over a year now. My life has changed quite a bit since I started this page and the page has changed with me. I assure you it will change again sometime soon!:)
I'm not a leprechaun anymore on my page **sighs** Ah well now we're delving more into my Celtic mind!:) Throughout this page you will find links to my many Celtic based pages and more information about stuff like that. Hope you like them as much as this page!
And yes I did make this background! Spiffy huh? And the title banner up there and any other graphics you see on here (like the guestbook buttons). I did not make the Celtic lines in the center of this page. Those are all Karen Nicholas's! She's great. Check out the link below (says "Celtic Web Art") and go see her awesome pages of Celtic art!
You should have known the music was going to change on this page again! This time my music is a little more upbeat. If you couldn't tell from the title, yes it is a song from the Backstreet Boys!!!! Everybody is one of my favorite songs. My friend Mailynn (I talk about her later) and I went to one of their concerts on July 25th and it was a lot of fun dancing to this song live! The Backstreet Boys are just great and amazing. No one can ever top them!
Speaking of the Backstreet Boys, Mailynn (Ann) and I (Ciara) have created our own Backstreet Boys pages together. It's pretty darned cool I think! Right now of course lots of it doesn't work because we're working on moving things to subdirectories and then renaming links and stuff...by Friday we should have it all under control. So do you think you can handle the Backstreet Boys Experience? Go to our pages and find out! And yes as usual I am responsible for all the graphics on the pages. Especially the one with their name on the first page you'll see when you click on the link! That is a cool picture. I spelled "Backstreet Boys" but the Boys' faces are on each letter. You have to see it to really get it but it's pretty spiffy! Enjoy and don't forget to email us! Yeah I changed a lot about this page. Took off a bunch of stuff. I needed to change it! (And plus I was running out of space in the editor oh no!) It's still the same spiffy page it's been though! So have fun delving into my fun-filled mind!  Do you like tortillas? Like shredded cheese? Hungry for something but don't know what to eat? I have the perfect thing for you! Check it out! I live in a city called Cincinnati in Ohio. Well actually I live in a suburb right outside it but close enough. I just celebrated (and I mean celebrated) my 15th birthday this past February 2nd. I go to a school in St. Bernard called Roger Bacon. It's a rather small school compared to the all-girl or all-boy schools in the area (we're co-ed) but it's a very good school and the students do well. I won a scholarship to this high school and was placed with about 25 other students in the Advanced Freshman courses, which has been a lot of fun except for all the work we've had to do. I recently turned in a 9 page (not including title page, bibliography, and outline) term paper on Arthur C. Clarke which took about two weeks altogether to do and that was the hardest work I have ever done on anything school-related! I guess I can say it was a good experience though. At least I know how to do a good research paper now! If only I would get a really good grade…here's hoping!
Aside from school, I do many things. One of those is Irish dancing. Many of you may have seen or heard of Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. What I do is pretty much that but a more traditional version. In other words, the original dance that inspired both of the shows. Different than the dancers in those shows, we are not allowed to move our arms at all except maybe sometimes to put our hands on our hips but that's only during really showy performances. When you compete you keep the arms rigid at the sides with your shoulders thrown back and your chin straight in the air. You're supposed to stare straight ahead, nowhere else, and most of all SMILE! The smiling thing is pretty hard sometimes to do because you're so darn serious and you're concentrating so hard sometimes you forget. Then you kind of relax because you know what you're doing and start to have a good time, so you start to smile really big. Judges like that. Interested in this yet? Well if you're already interested in Irish dance then I suggest you visit my page on this fun subject, called Oscail an Dorus. Once you get there you'll see what the title means. It's really cool. This page is also very popular, as you can tell if you check the counter at the bottom. Over 12,000 people have visited it! That's a lot. Also check out the Official Riverdance and Lord of the Dance homepages.
Speaking of my Irish dancing, on June 28th I had my first competition (which is called a feis). I won a 2nd in the jig and the first in slip jig. Pretty good for the first feis huh? On the lovely subject of Irish, I also play the Irish tin whistle. It's something I got into after listening to a couple Celtic CDs I've had for a couple of years. I've always liked it and the more Celtic CDs I bought the more I heard it. And the more I heard it the more I really liked it. Soon I was dying to have one of these lovely little instruments so that I might learn it. I already play the flute and that really helped once I got one since the fingerings are almost identical. I was always thinking that the things probably cost a lot of money and that I would be able to afford one. But when I went to the local Celtic Festival last fall I was very surprised and delighted when I saw a whistle at one of the stands costing only $8. So of course, after a little counsel with my friend, I bought it. It was a very good investment too, because since then I've received 6 new whistles as presents from friends and I've bought many tin whistle song books. I've also learned how to play the whistle delightfully well, for someone who's just started anyway. I caught on pretty fast and hopefully I'll be as good as Paddy Moloney or someone like that. Hey, a girl can dream can't she?
Another instrument I play is the flute. A regular flute not an Irish wooden flute!:) I've played flute for 5 years and have been in and out of school bands and in and out of practice (I'm currently in-between with practice now!) Read more about the flute and what I think about it by visiting my page called The Many Faces of Flute.
Have you ever heard of The Chieftains, Capercaillie, Clannad, Altan, Bill Whelan, or Christy Moore? Do you like them? Then you're a fan of Celtic music, just like me! I happen to like it so much that I've got 50 Celtic CDs and counting. In order to share this wonderful music with everyone else in the world I've constructed a page full of wonderful music just for you! It's called Celtic Music and is filled with exactly what it's name implies. I have gotten much positive feedback from this page, but why don't you check it out yourself? You may discover something wonderful you've never heard before! If you go to the page and you really like one of the songs, send me an email if you want to know the name of the CD it's off of. I'll gladly let you know and recommend you some others I liked as well! Another page you'd like is the Celtic Heartbeat Home Page. There is so much Celtic here it's awesome! All about your favorite artists and their releases, performances, and a lot more than that!
There is another little leprechaun page you should check out. It's all about Shammy the Leprechaun (me) with a bunch of pictures of my friends and me! It's called Merry Shammy's Home. So if you want to see what I look like go on ahead and check out this page! You'll like it. It's very simple but it's cute.
And one more page I highly recommend. I usually don't enjoy going on a page of just links but this page has more Celtic links than you could ever imagine! It's chock full of them! It's called Celtic Crossroads and has some very good links to pages there. If you have any links to submit email them in and they'll get stuck up there!
Oh my god where did my friends list go? Could I be ruthless enough to take it off the internet? Heck no! I just moved it and made it twice as long as it was before! Click here to read my infamous list of friends and meet all my buddies who are the reasons I get up in the morning! Earlier I mentioned that I like singing. One of my favorite singing subjects is The Phantom of the Opera. If you haven't heard this captivating and beautiful music I urge you to. It is wonderful! I can't even begin to describe it. I saw it twice December 1996 at the Aronoff Center in Downtown Cincinnati and I want to see it again! I'm watching the show list to see when it comes back. I hope sometime soon!
I haven't mentioned how much I love the show The X-Files! Well I love it a lot! It's my very favorite show on tv and I watch it every week, mostly taping it since I can't stay up late Sunday night. I wish they'd move it back to Friday. I used to look forward to that every weekend so much! Ah well. At least I get to see it off of my tape! Which, I must mention, is becoming quite worn out from being used to much! I might have to get a new one soon. I'm currently working on my very own X-Files page, which is coming along nicely, but you guys can't see it till it's done! :) Give me a couple more weeks and I'll have it up for you. Until then enjoy all the conspiracies as they get more twisted and darker than ever….
Something else I really, really enjoy is DUNE. The Dune Chronicles by Frank Herbert are some of the greatest books ever written. I enjoyed the first four books the most, but when it got to God Emperor of DUNE it got a little hairy and hard to get through. The last really good one was DUNE Messiah and of course the ultimate best one was the original DUNE. There are two versions of the movie out. There's the one that was in the movie theaters and then the one that was on tv that the maker was so embarrassed about he had his name changed so you didn't know he had anything to do with it. I have both versions on tape at my house and personally like the one from tv better, which is supposed to be really cheap and messed up in many scenes. I don't think so because unless told where to look and when you don't notice any of the inconsistencies in it and actually it's a lot more enjoyable. It's a little longer than the other version and has more scenes than the former. The one from the movie theaters has a couple other scenes that the other one doesn't have also, but the extra ones are mostly sick scenes with blood and gore and I don't care for those. The original one actually put me to sleep one time when I rented it, but I can always stay awake for the 4-hour tv one. I have a page of DUNE online, kind of a parallel journey through the world. You begin with the Princess Irulan and progress through most of the characters except the ever-lovable and great Thufir Hawat (couldn't fit him in). There are a few DUNE links on one of the pages which I hope to update soon but for now there are only a couple.
Okay, I am what you call a "voracious writer". I read a lot and write a lot. I have written a couple stories and some poetry that I would love to share with you. People have been enjoying them for the time that I have had them online so I hope it stays that way! The page they are posted on is called A Writers' Haven. Please visit it and let me know what you think!
In addition to being a voracious writer, I also read a lot. A whole lot. Here I'd like to list some of my favorite books that I can actually find (there are hundreds more boxed in the basement.) The ones I have up with me are so incredibly **sneeze** excuse me, dusty. Keep in mind, I have so many here I will only include the back cover synopsis for a few. They are in no particular order, well perhaps: as I compiled this I had the ones I wouldn't summarize stacked on my desk in order from top to bottom, smallest to largest. Never could I arrange them in order of how much I liked them; they are all great books!
**** indicates a must-read book
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Moby Dick by Herman Melville...this book really isn't part of my collection, I read it at school for no reason, but figured it'd fit better with these two other reasonably old stories. I must also mention that half of it didn't even sink in or make sense but it is altogether an enjoyable story!
****Dune by Frank Herbert
The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans
****The White Mountains; The City of Gold and Lead; The Pool of Fire - three marvelous books that make up the Tripods Trilogy, by John Christopher
Black Lightning by John Saul
Intensity by Dean Koontz
The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans
****Underfoot in Show Business; 84, Charing Cross Road; The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street; Apple of my Eye; Q's Legacy by Helene Hanff
****The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
MYST - The Book of Atrus by Rand and Robyn Miller with David Wingrove...hey, I really enjoyed the game MYST okay?
****Twopence to Cross the Mersey; Liverpool Miss by Helen Forrester
****The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
****Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart
Webster's Dictionary...am I serious? Of course I am! Hey, it's good for looking up words and even straight reading though when no books are at hand!
 "My love is all I have to give, without you I don't think I could live. I wish I could give the world to you! But love is all I have to give..." I wish the cutie who sings this song would give his world to me! LOL Who am I talking about? None other than the adorable Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell! Brian's a great guy. Aside from having one of the sweetest smiles I have ever seen in my life (besides Heath Ledger and Adrian Paul) he has an amazing and beautiful singing voice. He also plays an acoustic guitar (which is an instrument I LOVE and would give anything to play!) and what's more he plays basketball! If you didn't know I have a real weakness for basketball and played for a few years. I haven't played in a while but I still love it nonetheless! If I could I would love to meet Brian and just talk b-ball (maybe play some haha!) and music. He just seems so sweet! What struck me the most at the concert is Brian is incredibly modest! At one point Nick had his jacket unbottoned all the way showing his shirt underneath, AJ kept taking his off and there was no shirt under (Howie, ditto), and Kevin was pretty much the same but no flashing! j/k But Brian had his jacket buttoned all the way up and never took it off once. I thought that was kinda cool how he could do that when all the other Boys weren't. I thought that was pretty spiffy. Here's another picture (mostly for my enjoyment but for all of you B-rok fans you'll like it too!)  That's about all for my page right now! Please come back again, and maybe there'll be something new! Don't forget to sign the guestbook or email me! I love to hear from you! Thanks for coming to my page and I hope you enjoyed reading about me!
 Email me your comments or questions!
  Click on Rose all you Titanic fans to visit
two pages of Titanic scenes I made! |
