Why do the Republicans insist on using fear mongering as a campaign tactic?  It seems that they want us to be afraid of our shadows so they can try to convince us that they can protect us.

Why does it remind me of a televangelist’s show?

Read the books. Seriously. They are awesome.

The series is set in Botswana, and the characters are really interesting people. I also LOVE how they phrase things, and how they talk about what is the proper thing to do in Botswana. If I ever go there I’m totally using this as a guide to politeness. Not that that’s an immediate concern at all, but it sounds like an interesting country…you never know. Anywho, I would highly recommend the series (Also, the books are so short! Easy reading!). Thank you to Aunt Marcia for recommending it to me!

I am taking a quick break from the series (I’m about to start book 6) to read Queen Isabella by Alison Weir. It’s a non-fiction book, but if you’ve read Innocent Traitor by the same author you know that she has a talent for making history seem really cool (although that was a historical novel, not a non-fiction book). I just started Queen Isabella over lunch and I already like it. Of course I like learning and I love history, so it’s not surprising that I like this type of book. Yes, I am a big dork. I know it. I embrace it, most of the time.

As an aside, I am so ready to go camping this weekend I can hardly stand it. Is it Friday afternoon yet??

I haven’t posted since the 7th and it’s now the 26th. I haven’t mailed my pay it forward prize yet, even though I’ve had it for over a month (I bought the stuff the week after the contest). I’m a complete slacker, I know it. And I do feel badly. Especially about the PIF prize. I SWEAR I will mail it this week. Gah! Can I use “I can’t find the right sized box” as an excuse? No? Ok, I don’t have an excuse. I just hate the post office. But I don’t even have to go to the post office. I can go to the place we pick up our mail. So no excuse. I just fail.

I have pictures to post (if I can figure out how…Ryan, this means you need to help me!) from our mini-vacation to New York state. We had a great time, and I was in one of my best friend’s wedding. It was a fabulous event. I drove out there on my own last Tuesday/Wednesday, and Ryan and I drove back to MN together, leaving NY on Sunday and getting here about 1:30 yesterday afternoon. We drove through Montreal and Toronto…they weren’t exactly on the way, but they weren’t too far out of the way, and when are we ever going to make it to Montreal or Toronto again? It was really fun. Too bad we didn’t have time to stop and enjoy visiting…although neither of us speak French, so stopping in Montreal could have been interesting. I didn’t even want to get off the highway, for a fear that I wouldn’t be able to get back on it again because I couldn’t read any of the signs.

Anyway, I need to get back to work (it didn’t do itself while I was gone, surprisingly!). But I promise to write more this week. I’ll have a whole ‘nother story after next weekend. We are going on our first camping trip on our own to Scenic State Park in Northern Minnesota. I’m super-excited!

Note-to-self. Get that package mailed tonight!!! And stop slacking!

That sums up my general thoughts about today. It’s a nice sunny morning, and I’m in a good mood. I’ve been debating about whether or not I should talk about some changes that may or may not be happening in my life. On the one hand, nothing is for sure, and so why get people excited about something that might not happen (including myself)? And since this blog isn’t totally anonymous I sometimes worry about what I write…that it will get back to someone I don’t want it to (see my rant a couple weeks ago about payday). But on the other hand, I don’t like censoring myself on here, and I am so excited even about the possibilities that I don’t know what else to talk about right now. So here we go.

I have applied for a couple jobs completely out of my current industry. I know that most people are always keeping their eyes open for opportunities, and smart people are always open to changes. But I have always been a loyal employee wherever I’ve worked. And it feels weird looking for a new job when my current employer doesn’t know that I’m considering leaving if I get the right offer. It’s not at all that I don’t like my boss, or the people in my office. My previous rant notwithstanding, I have really enjoyed working there. But there is no room for me to move up in the organization unless I want to go into sales. And while I don’t mind soft sales or promoting something I believe in, I don’t want to go into insurance sales. (Note: I am not saying that I do not believe in insurance. Everyone should carry insurance. Everyone should carry enough insurance. Not doing so can ruin your life. Seriously. Don’t do it.)

While thinking about that, I’ve been thinking about whether I even want to stay in the industry permanently. Living in Duluth, my options are extremely limited…it’s not like we have insurance companies headquartered here that I could go work for and do something entirely different than what I do now. My options are pretty limited.

So, I had made the decision that I wanted to move on to the next challenge. And I thought of what I would really like to do. And here I have a confession to make. I LOVE HR blogs. I read about 5 or 6 of them regularly, including a few that are well-respected people within the HR industry. I find Human Resources totally fascinating, and I think it is an area in which I would do well. And since HR is much easier to break into than the only other job I could think of that I would really love (teaching college courses), I have decided to pursue that route. And don’t worry, I’m very aware that working in HR isn’t just like reading an HR blog. I know that it will have its own challenges. I want to do it anyway.

And so here I am. Obviously I’m just at the beginning stages of my search, and I’ve only applied for 2 jobs so far, but the thought that I’m ready to move forward when the right opportunity presents itself makes me really happy.

If you pray, say a prayer…my current job was my first “real” job, and so this makes me very nervous.

I totally stole this from SheLikesPurple, which isn’t very nice of me, but I’ve been looking for a really long list of “recommended reading” books and this totally fulfills that need. Plus I like these kinds of things. So, here it goes:

Below is a list of books printed by The Big Read, an organization that—according to their Web site—hopes to “restore reading to the center of American culture.” They say, though, that the average American has only read six of the following hundred.

Key
1) Bold the books you have already read
2) Italicize the books you intend to read
3) Personally added: Notes in parentheses next to note-worthy titles.

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1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (I’ve read half of it, and keep meaning to get to the rest. I promise!)
4) Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling 
5) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Read it in high school…I might have to reread it at some point - so many people found it so fascinating…I wasn’t a huge fan.) 
6) The Bible (I’ve read parts of it…but never the whole thing)
7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (I can’t really remember if I read this or not, but I don’t think so.)
11) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15) Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (How can I NOT want to read this? It’s named after me! ;-))
16) The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17) Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch by George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (We read this in high school and then watched the movie, and all I can remember is how horribly cheesy it all was.)
23) Bleak House by Charles Dickens (This title sounds like a book I would enjoy.)
24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy  (I’ll leave this italicized, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get to actually reading it.)
25) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (LOVED THIS SERIES)
26) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (I think I read this in high school…if not, I WANT to read it)
29) Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
34) Emma by Jane Austen
35) Persuasion by Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
37) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39) Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (I saw the movie…does that count?)
40) Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41) Animal Farm by George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (His book Angels & Demons was WAY better…but neither of them had really fabulous writing…I just like the subject matter) 
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
50) Atonement by Ian McEwan 
51) Life of Pi by Yann Martel (I’ve heard it’s awesome, but I have no idea what it’s about.)
52) Dune by Frank Herbert (Ryan keeps wanting me to read this…I think it’s Ryan…someone does, I think…maybe it’s just me??)
53) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (I think I tried to read this once…and failed, miserably.
58) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road by Jack Kerouac (I read this in my Popular Culture in the 1960s class in college. That class was AWESOME.)
67) Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding 
69) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick by Herman Melville 
71) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens 
72) Dracula by Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses by James Joyce 
76) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal by Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession by AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte’s Web by EB White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I don’t think I’ve read this, but I’m not sure…)
90) The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94) Watership Down by Richard Adams (I hated this book. I thought it was dumb. You can hate me if you want, but that’s what I thought.)
95) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

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Total: 30 - I only counted the ones I had entirely read. Now to get started on the ones I haven’t (along with the books I have on reserve at the library already and the ones previously recommended to me by my fabulous aunts).

Your turn. Feel free to leave comments regarding books on the list (or not) if you don’t have a blog.

Oh, and speaking of books - I finished Love and Other Near Death Experiences and am in the middle of The Death Collectors. The first one was funny and a quick read…good British humor. The second is a murder-mystery type. I like it so far, although *note to self* don’t get the “large print” version (it was an accident). It makes you feel like you are reading Ramona Quimby Age 8 or something.

You know those days when you want to get to work super-early so that you can get a bunch of stuff done before everyone else gets there? That was supposed to be today for me. I had the alarm set for 5am. And then I woke up and it was 8:04. AHHH!!!

Bad enough I slept in, but did it have to be on a Friday? I’m the only one in our office from 8-8:30 on Fridays. Of course. So if I smell funny and my hair looks like crap they will just have to deal with it. Because I was here by 8:15. How’s that for a commute?

Hopefully everyone else’s Fridays are starting off better than mine!

I was reading a few blogs, and then linking to more and reading them and on and on….err…I mean….I was WORKING! Yes. Ahem. And then suddenly, I went to scroll down a page I was reading (using my mouse, not the sidebar), and the whole window (with like 20 tabs) closed. It was supposed to give me a warning! Actually, before the warning it was supposed to wait for me to TELL IT I wanted it to close. And THEN I was supposed to get a warning asking me if I wanted to close all the tabs. It did neither of these things. And because I don’t get to use Firefox at work (everyone should use Firefox - it is THE BOMB), it didn’t ask me if I wanted to restore my session when I went to open it back up. And God knows that I can’t even remember what site I was reading, much less what the other 19 tabs were or how I got to any of them. So now I am telling the internets about it because I don’t feel like expending the energy to find them all again. That is a procrastination project for later.

So, internets, did you get that? I’m very mad at you for closing all my tabs without at least giving me a warning. That was not a nice thing to do on a Tuesday that has felt about 900 hours long.

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In unrelated news, I thought I would give you a quick run-down on the book I’m reading. I’m not quite half-way through it yet, but I need to finish it by Thursday (it’s a 1 week only, no renewals, no reserves book). It’s an interesting variation from your standard science fiction, and I like it a lot more than I usually like science fiction (maybe I’ve just been reading the wrong stuff). The gist of it is that this alien life form comes to Earth and takes over human bodies. The aliens are called “souls” and they basically get implanted in your brain and can access all your memories and stuff. Most people’s actual personalities disappear when the soul takes over, but the book is about a woman who doesn’t give up the consciousness fight when they put a soul in her. Like I said, I haven’t finished it, but so far I would recommend it. It’s got a really good story-line, and the characters are pretty believable. Of course it’s sci-fi, so there are a couple things that are a little out there, but that’s to be expected. And it’s a pretty quick read so far, even though the hard-cover copy I got from the library is 619 pages. Check it out. The Host, by Stephenie Meyer.

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I was trying to think of something witty to close this entry, but it’s just not happening. 8 hours of insurance will do that to a person.

I’m sorry for the lack of posting lately. I’ve been feeling very blah recently, and so didn’t get around to writing anything. Plus our “computer/spare room” has been pretty much taken over by my wedding dress, which I don’t really know what to do with. So I don’t go in there much.

We had an awesome weekend visiting friends in the Cities, and we apparently avoided some nasty traffic on the way home because only a few hours after we drove up 35E a portion of a bridge passing overhead collapsed onto it. You would think they would be watching the bridges around there a little closer, but who knows what happened. Anyway, it was like 4 or 5 hours after we had passed through that it happened, so it’s not like it was the car right behind us or anything. It’s hardly even worth mentioning, except that my life is rather boring lately and so I have to reach to find anything interesting to write about.

We are in Duluth from now until the 3rd week in August, when I will be driving to New York for a friend’s wedding. I’m very very excited about that trip, but we figured out how much it’s going to cost us, and holy crap! Traveling that far is expensive! Even in my little car that gets fabulous gas milage (42 mpg the weekend we went to Fargo and back). Oh well. It will be worth it, I’m quite certain.

I still haven’t figured out the photo posting, and Ryan’s response was “um, I’m not sure” and then to promptly forget that I even asked, so he’s been no help. I think it has something to do with the fact that we host the totallyserial website on our own server (who am I kidding?? Ryan hosts it on HIS server), and the photos aren’t on the server. That’s about all I’ve figured out though. So there will be some harrassing until he tells me what I need to do. A person can’t blog without photos. It’s inhumane.

Well, it’s about 5 minutes till quitting time. Thank God. Time to go home and zone out while watching Jon & Kate + 8 and reading my latest library find, The Host.

In bullet form!

• Friday, you did not get here nearly fast enough, and yet if you asked me what I did this week I couldn’t tell you because it went by so quickly.
• I feel tricked. I went to Walgreens today to get a stick of the Bodyglide stuff recommended by Molly, and they didn’t have it. I also wanted some Zycam (recommended by my mom) to defeat this cold that’s trying to sneak up on me, but they didn’t have that either. They did however have candy and pop and lunchables, and I had nothing with me for lunch….so now I’m eating salt and sugar for lunch. Thanks alot WALGREENS. Jeeze.
• I should remember that if I’m craving a Diet Coke in the morning when I’m buying lunch I should just buy 2. I don’t carry cash, and now I’m craving Diet Coke again and I don’t have any because I drank it this morning. And the dang store across the street that lets me use my checkcard to purchase it makes me buy $5 worth of other stuff (read: more candy) that I don’t need.
• I wore cute but very tall shoes to work today. And then I realized that I had a chamber of commerce event I wanted to go to over lunch. The chamber building is 3 blocks away, so I always walk. But now my feet hurt. Way to think ahead, Becky. GOSH!
• Do you think I could whine and complain some more??

I had a post that I was working on answering the last few questions, and I was going to put a picture from last weekend in it (we had a fabulous time, by the way), but I can’t figure out how to post a picture while I’m at work, so I need to talk to Ryan about it, and working on a computer is the last thing I want to encourage him to do in the evenings (he does it enough already!). So yah…excuses, excuses. Next week maybe I’ll put up TWO pictures just to make up for it. But no promises.