Archive for June, 2008

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Safe But Smoky

June 30, 2008

No real update on the fires. We’re all safe, though, thanks for the prayers and happy thoughts.

Well, given that I have not much to blog about today, here’s a book MEME:

Instructions:

  • Bold all the books you have read
  • Underline those you loved &/or have read more than once
  • Italicize books on your To Be Read list (books you own just haven’t read yet)
  • Add an asterisk to those you started but didn’t/couldn’t finish

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Complete Works of Shakespeare (actually, I haven’t finished, but I don’t like the implications of “can’t” finish that go with the asterisk.)
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes (I read it in Spanish. Does that count?)
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Dune – Frank Herbert
Emma – Jane Austen *
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Germinal – Emile Zola
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman * (read the first book, thought it was ok, couldn’t get into the second)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke *
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Middlesex: A Novel – Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
My Antonia – Willa Cather
Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
Northanger Abby – Jane Austen
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
On The Road – Jack Kerouac

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The Bible (in progress, much like Shakespeare)
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
The Iliad – Homer
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Wasn’t the whole Chronicles on this list a short while ago?)
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
The Odyssey – Homer
The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame * (did I finish this one? I don’t remember.)
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Ulysses – James Joyce
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down – Richard Adams
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West – Gregory Maguire
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

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Burning Up

June 27, 2008

My state is on fire.

Photobucket

And I don’t mean it’s hot. That’s the smoke as seen from a satellite photo taken a day or so ago.

It’s really bad. There’s a constant smell of smoke in the air. I haven’t seen blue sky since getting home from my weekend away. The nearby hills, normally nice and pretty on the not-too-distant horizon, are ghosts, mere outlines of hills barely distinguishable from the smoke in the air.

As of Wednesday, there were 1032 fires burning. Only 232 of them were contained.

I just pray we get some rain soon. Can we borrow some of the water the Mid-West has? I suspect we need it more than they do at this point.

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Thursday 13 #45 ~ Ill

June 26, 2008

I was going to do a normal, happy TT this week, and then I saw this post of Wendy’s. (Scroll to the bottom for the kitty part.) And I couldn’t ignore it.

So… take some time to think about the dumb things that people do. And if you feel like it, sign the petition (link in #1) or donate to the good causes that balance the bad.

Thursday Thirteen: 13 Things That Make Me Sick

1. The wanton destruction of animal habitat, even if the animals in question are feral cats. (Petition here. I signed it.)

2. Eggplant. (Seriously. Every time I have eaten it, I’ve thrown up.)

3. Calves being kept in boxes to make veal.

4. Cooking lobster by boiling them alive.

5. The thought that anyone – woman, child, man… doesn’t matter – “asked” to be raped by their actions or inaction.

6. Trying to read/knit/etc in the car. This drives me nuts, as there’s not much else to do on long car trips, and so I waste the time by doing nothing.

7. The fur trade.

8. The slave trade.

9. Ignorance and illiteracy.

10. The belief that only men/the wealthy/one particular race/etc are worthy of being educated, able to own property, able to make their own decisions, etc.

11. The thought of eating bugs.

12. The Anita Blake, vampire hunter, series, past a certain point. (Heh. This was left on here from last week’s TT, but it was too appropriate to this list as well. I just had to leave it on, though I did like the early books a lot. Maybe the later books are able to get to me more because I did like the early ones? Hmmm.)

13. The blatant disregard of the world around us, and the attitude that we are the superior being on the planet and therefore can trash it if we want to.

~*~

Happy Thursday!

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Guilt

June 25, 2008

I have been sadly lacking when it comes to knitting.

Mangotini Sock

These poor socks have been in progress for nearly a whole year, and I’m STILL NOT DONE with them. It’s not that I don’t like the pattern. I love the pattern. These socks fit me the best of any I have knit myself. (I know this because of how well the first one fits. The little bitty cables make the fit perfect without being uncomfortably stretchy. I can’t wait to wear them.

And the pattern isn’t hard, nor is it boring. It has enough interest to keep me happy and not-bored, but is simple enough that I can easily memorize it.

So why has it been sitting unfinished for so long? (I started them during the Summer Of Socks 2007. It is now the Summer of Socks 2008.)

Well, first I got caught up in Christmas knitting. Then birthday knitting. Most recently, I decided not to risk losing my knitting needles on the airplane. (As in having TSA decide to confiscate them. The joy of using 2 circular needles is knowing you won’t accidentally drop one.)

I think my Biggest Summer Goal (at least as regards crafts) must be to finish these socks. ASAP.

I might be able to wear them by Thanksgiving.

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Non-Reading Tuesday

June 24, 2008

Actually, not much of an anything Tuesday.

I didn’t read at all over the weekend. (Not even on the plane. I was busy with other things, like working on the sunglasses case I showed you in the last post.) So I am not posting about books.

I also have not been knitting over the weekend. (See above about reading.)

I spent the weekend hanging out with S, trying to beat the heat and just enjoy being together. We saw a couple of movies, went to the beach, and just had fun. But it means no book update.

Suzy Mac
Mom, I’ve hijacked your computer. Now, where are the tuna treats?

What I can give you is a glimpse at my TBR (aka To Be Read) pile… Here are some books currently topping the list of “must reads”:

  • SISTER OF THE DEAD by Barb and JC Hendee (Dhampir series)
  • POISON STUDY re-read, in preparation for MAGIC STUDY by Maria V. Snyder
  • GLASS HOUSES by Rachel Caine (of Weather Warden fame)
  • HEAT STROKE by Rachel Caine (in the Weather Warden series)
  • GOOD OMENS by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman (gotta love boys who buy me books…)
  • DARK MOON DEFENDER by Sharon Shinn (12 Houses series)

… and I think that’s plenty to be going on with. That will take me all of July, at the rate I’ve been reading lately.

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In Which Monday is Random

June 23, 2008
  1. I had a lovely trip over the weekend; thanks all for the happy thoughts, prayers, and blowing up into the sky to keep my airplane aloft.
  2. The Summer of Socks has started! What with my 2-hour delay on my return flight, I might have been able to finish the Mangotini Socks had I brought them with me. But as I didn’t want to risk losing my Addi Turbos (that one’s being knit on 2 circs) I didn’t bring my sock in progress.
  3. Instead I brought a new project:
    Sunglasses Case 01
    I figured it would be less of a loss to lose a yarn needle than a pair of Addis.
  4. I love my state, even when it tries to bake me alive when I go on vacation.
  5. Or burn out various friends.
  6. Lastly for today’s Random Monday, cats are cute:
    Suzy Sleeping
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Post-Free Weekend

June 20, 2008

Just a heads up that there will be no post (other than this Public Service Notice) today, and nothing else until Monday. I am on a trip to visit my guy, and will be avoiding most everything else all weekend. I will be putting my life into the hands of some airline pilots, though, so I’d appreciate happy thoughts and prayers if you’re so inclined. It’s not so much that flying scares me, I just dislike giving up all control like that.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Musical Suzy 2
Mom, come home soon. You need to feed me. I don’t care that there will be food in the dish downstairs, it’s not the same as my dish upstairs. Besides, who will I pester in the morning if you’re not there?

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Thursday 13 #44 ~ Book Relief

June 19, 2008

One of the suggestions for my Birthday Blog Bash (I asked for TT theme suggestions) was to list 13 books I wished I’d written, or 13 I was glad I hadn’t. Last week I listed the ones I wish I’d written. This week I’ll do 13 I’m glad aren’t mine…

Thursday Thirteen: 13 Books I’m Glad I Didn’t Write

1. The Clan of the Cave Bear series. I know they’re popular, but I can’t stand them.

2. The Lord of the Rings. Love the story. But I can’t imagine writing in Tolkien’s style.

3. Bored of the Rings. Not my type of parody.

4. Great Expectations. Probably the only class book I didn’t finish reading… my class tag team read this one.

5. Moby Dick. I don’t care that it’s a classic.

6. Some of the later Pern books. Pretty much anything in the timeline after “All the Weyrs” I am lukewarm about, at best.

7. The Golden Key. Great premise, but I didn’t like the execution.

8. The Elements of Style. I just don’t want to obsess that much over grammar, thanks.

9. The Series of Unfortunate Events. I haven’t read the whole lot of them, but from what I’ve seen, the author talks down to kids. Not cool.

10. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I sooo dislike what I read of this writing style.

11. The Dragonlance series. I liked the way it started, but not the way it turned out. Nor do I like the way that other authors have gone with it, and that’s always a chance you take when you start an open world like that.

12. The Anita Blake, vampire hunter, series, past a certain point. Just… ick.

13. The Harry Potter series. Not my writing style, nor I can’t imagine trying to follow that series up with anything… Talk about pressure!

~*~

Happy Thursday!

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Flying High

June 18, 2008

Hot Air Balloons 1

Thank you all for your well wishes yesterday. Our combined mental powers must be quite incredible, because all of the planes needed to get S back home landed safely. :)

Hot Air Balloons 2

Don’t you love hot air balloons? I do. They look so pretty. I’ve always thought it would be peaceful to ride in one. However, I’m not sure sure anymore. I think it would depend who I was riding in it with. If I went with my mom, it would definitely not be peaceful. She would not enjoy herself, as she doesn’t like heights, and that would make me nervous.

Hot Air Balloons 3

But they’re still beautiful to watch. (This was what I saw at the start of my commute. Lovely way to start the day.)

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It’s A Mystery

June 17, 2008

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

-Ronald Reagan

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Today’s book from the reading pile is THE HIPPOPOTAMUS POOL by Elizabeth Peters. I was lent this book by a friend, and am finding it amusing. The basic premise is that the main characters (Amelia Peabody and her husband Emerson) are archaeologists who do work in Egypt (it’s a historical-ish series) and always run into mysteries and trouble.

This particular book starts with a mysterious stranger who shows up with news of a supposedly undisturbed royal tomb and asks the Emersons to guard it. So far, I’m about half-way through and am enjoying it. However, I’m not sure that I like the characters enough to read an entire series about them, so I probably won’t be reading the entire bunch. I might read another at some point, but not immediately afterwards.

~*~

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.

- William Gibson

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And in other news, my guy (who we’ll start calling S, for convenience sake) is on his flight home to the States from overseas where he has spent the last couple years teaching English. Happy thoughts are much appreciated. I know, the plane will stay in the air without any help from me, but still…  *sigh*