Several years ago I heard My Number on a Louisville NPR station. I was instantly enamored with Tegan and Sara, and I immediately downloaded everything I could find on Napster when I got home. They remain on a very short list of singers/songs that really touch me. I like their old stuff best, but the above tune reminds me of a special person. I wonder where she is now.
First day of NaBloPoMo (that’s posting every day in November), and I almost forgot to start. This has been a busy Saturday, but so boring you probably ought to leave now. I did make a lot of progress pulling out roots from the old bushes and planting bulbs. I’m already excited about spring flowers! I planted black tulips because, hey, it sounded kind of weird. I also planted more normal flowers.
This morning we had pictures taken with David’s family. We were not thrilled to have to be looking awake and in Carmel at nine on a Saturday morning. I even put on a little makeup, since he seems to think that’s a big deal, but he didn’t notice! I knew he wouldn’t. Nicole did!
Wow, this is really boring. Would you believe some people do this every day of the year?
It’s also International Volunteer Managers Day. Just be glad I didn’t blog about that.
(Mark Twain)
I think my Halloween costume will be a hobo who has lost all her money in her 401(k). Suze Orman gives me hope; she says we’ll have a healthy economy again around 2015. I already lost an offer on the house thanks to the economic mess. Guys in my office are giving blow-by-blow accounts of the market’s happenings, buying and selling from their desks. I’m sitting tight and getting further from retirement every moment (lost over a third of my plan so far this year), but trusting the idea that since I have twenty years or more to wait it out, it’ll be good in the end. Right?
I wanted to use this quote as my philosophy on money, but the Mark Twain one is honestly closer to the truth.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
Cree Indian Proverb
I guess I still have room for growth if I only value the important stuff after my retirement and savings are funded.
Looked for a few weeks, picked one tonight!
2008 Bianchi Axis
Bianchi likes that “celeste” color but I’m not a huge fan. It’s seafoam green. My bike has black bar tape instead, which is fortunate. I pick it up tomorrow after the second set of brakes is installed. I was torn between that and a Specialized TriCross Sport, but the Bianchi is a bit better bike and was a better deal, too. Also rode a Surly CrossCheck but it just didn’t feel good to me.
PQ just got a new bike too!
My realtor said someone called to make an offer on my house! They’re having their third showing tomorrow.
My lost dryer sheets are back! They just changed clothes. Now they’re called Simplicity, but they’re still cheap, sold where I get other groceries, biodegradable, and not tested on animals. Now I don’t have to ration that same box I’ve been using for months. I found them in unscented and lavender.
I recently installed Office 2007 on my new computer, which is running XP. The background color in Excel (and I guess all Office programs) is a medium dull gray, which would be fine, except there’s not enough contrast with the light blue gridlines in the worksheet for me to see any of them. I played around with the Excel displays and help and other than changing borders and such (which I’m not always using… I’m just dealing with a blank worksheet), I’m not finding a way to apply more contrast. There are three color schemes I can choose but they all have the same problem. Maybe I need to change my Windows theme? I’m noticing the same gray in this edit box. Hmmm.
Cool things in recycling: I was at one of the local bike shops this weekend getting cheap holiday-sale socks, and they are collecting otherwise non-recyclable energy/granola bar wrappers as part of a program that makes the wrappers into bags. In Indy, drop your wrappers at BGI North and they’ll send them in!
More phone camera downloads.
Last week I rode around town a bit after work, ending up at the new Keep Indianapolis Beautiful green building. The three wind turbines (as seen in the shadows) were spinning wildly, making for an odd park bench experience. A guy on a bike asked me for a smoke, and I resisted the DQ across the street.
Harrison lounges at the vet. He’s no longer limping nor sneezing, and he was neutered last week! After a testicle location complication, all is now well and as soon as the hormones are gone I can try bonding him with Vegas. Or Arliss. Or how did I end up with so many white rabbits? Joey looks tiny now by comparison.
Pippen approves of fresh greens in reusable shopping bags.
David on a Tyvek mission. This was part of the porch prep–blowing all the paint dust created by the wire grinder with an air compressor. No official decision yet made on painting the pimple. My votes outnumber his, but he seems to think his voters are stronger. I didn’t think this was an electoral college, but I may be able to filibuster with strategic planting.
The house as purchased, with unruly yews and seafoam-green interior to the porch (it could not be removed from the inside brick and the whole thing had to get painted, sorry folks)
The house yesterday, with primer (I kept calling it Powder)
The house today, with two paint colors applied. Trim work has not been done yet, which will be white where you still see the gray primer.
So do we paint that thingy sticking out from the front of the bricks? I think it’s a block put in where a drain used to be, and I won’t tell you who thinks it should match the trim and who thinks it should be brown like the bricks around it. What is your vote?
The house wall was supposed to be a gray but it came out peachy, though this picture at dusk isn’t the clearest. The brown was supposed to be darker and redder. I still like it, though! I took the paint chips out in the sun to decide but still got a surprise.
Foliage to follow, once we remove the rest of the roots.
While deleting old email, I found this article, Caring For Your Introvert. What a great piece!
Most people in my life are not overbearing and respect my need for personal time (or maybe I just hang out with busy people so it all works out). And I’ve gotten better at dealing with the general public since I do so many volunteer shifts. But this is great:
Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts.
It’s a buyer’s market, folks, but I’m a seller so I’m screwed, and you want this house. Check it out here, where you can get dizzy spinning in the yard panoramic video view.
I spent a lot of time and a fair amount of money getting it ready, so let’s have a party before it gets dirty again! All furniture is also for sale if you so desire, though I believe the couches are spoken for. Note: push mowing in 90°F weather is not fun. I did wait until 8 p.m. so I’d kill less ozone (plus it was a little cooler).
Attack offf the Killer ToMAYtoessss: Our tomatoes are taller than we are! This is at a different house, but if you buy the first one, you can have all the tomatoes too.
I swear that is the song my neighbors (not the super nice ones to the west who I think left me perennials on my front porch this morning) are currently karaoke-singing in their backyard! They did apologize to me over the mic as I was getting in and out of the shed to do yardwork; they swore they’d be better singers when they were drunker. David thinks they bought their daughter the new red Mustang. She doesn’t seem old enough to drive. They’re nice enough and we swap who cuts the side yard between us, so I’m not too worried. Their charcoal grill smells good.
I feel like I am cutting down the backyard, and every pile of brush I create unearths old dog poo piles. The dogs are thrilled that their favorite areas will now be accessible again. I suppose that’s better than Casper pooping on the walk like she did this morning.
I have been reading more lately, but my interests in the past few years have been on topics of social justice and animal welfare, not the “classics” so much nor any bestselling novels. On the occasion that I do read fiction, I generally pick something minority-written and often along social justice lines. Must Be Motherhood (who posted the below meme recently and is apparently on blog vacation now) sent me Three Cups of Tea this week, and now that I’ve finished The Working Poor (hooray for the library) as of last night, I can move on to the next book. But I also have PQ‘s Half of Me on the shelf, as well as Dominion and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, both of which I’ve been working on for awhile. So far this year I finished The China Study and Nickel and Dimed, and I keep up with one food magazine. Some months I don’t read much of anything in book form at all. (And yes, I’m too lazy to underline titles and give you links to them at Amazon.)
I read a TON of email and of course I’m usually home late every night, never finding time to sit with a book. I look forward to the times I can do nothing but read, but sometimes I have to carve that time by neglecting something else (replying to email, making phone calls, bonding bunnies, sleeping). Is it a hallmark of American culture to be swamped with stuff to do all the time? It’s not like I watch more than about two hours of TV a week, and that’s while eating dinner.
On to the meme, something from the National Endowment for the Arts, which approximates that most American adults have only read six out of the 100 titles on this list. Looks like I hit 21 of these. That number is pitiful in many ways, but there are so many other things to read. I thought almost all of the books were school assignments, but after reconsidering the list, I think a third of them were just books I chose to read. I don’t even remember many of them too well. Some of my favorite classes (note I was a chemistry major and didn’t have to take any lit) were elective literature courses, Russian lit, Gothic lit, and two semesters of African American lit.
Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (parts, of course)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Several plays, of course
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy several of his short stories, though
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
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
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
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
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath after I found out she went to and then taught at my alma mater
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker my favorite book
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom oh come on
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery one of my favorite quotes: You are responsible forever for that which you have tamed
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
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 but I saw the play when I visited Stratford-on-Avon!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo if David sings this one more time… let’s put it this way: He named a foster rabbit Eponine
Now what do we do with them?
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My keyboard did have to be replaced after the wine incident a couple of nights ago; space bar and enter were casualties. Apparently while connecting and testing the new one, the blog software saved a draft! The zeroes appeared when I plugged in the USB connector, not from typing.
Then there was another wine incident tonight. I knocked over a full glass again, this time while eating dinner, and the glass crashed into an empty glass also on the table, breaking both, and splattering wine on the couch, wall, me… and one side of Casper was also purple. Then she moved around and wiped the wine on two more walls. Geez.
Dinner in our apartment in Rome. Note the wine.
Somehow I asked for this red wine and how much it cost in Italian in a little grocery…
Feel free to suggest a caption for this one.
(a little IRC speak from ages ago)
See y’all in a week or so–I’m on vacation! It takes more time to get READY for vacation than to take one, so let’s hope it’s a good, relaxing one!
I leave you with this, watching TV with my first piggy, Frisky:
