Reading
Funny
Nov 19th
I just saw this blog entry, and I think you should check it out because it is frickin’ hilarious. Ninjas. heh.
Also, I was just sitting here, browsing the internet when Ryan says out of nowhere in a high voice, “Look! It’s my little polar bear friend!” Um…yah. On World of Warcraft he has a pet polar bear. And a pet penguin.
Completely unrelated: we are planning on doing as much of our christmas shopping online this year as possible. The stores are already insane, and so as much as we can we would like to avoid them. It’ll be a challenge, but fun, I think. And theoretically it’ll mean we’ll get things done early since we need to allow time for shipping. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I just saw another add for New Moon. I read all the Twilight books, and really enjoyed them for their escapist feel. But those movies all look kind of ridiculous. Maybe they are better than they appear, but even reading the books I was thinking “this would be almost impossible to portray in a movie without getting totally CGI/totally cheesey/whatever.” Anyway…if you’ve seen the movie/movies and thought they did the books justice let me know.
I want to talk about the books I’ve been reading, but I don’t know what I want to say right now, so maybe I’ll wait a little while.
As a final note, the commercial for Al Gore going on 30 Rock is cracking me up. “There is an old African proverb that I invented…” HAHAHA.
Football/Lazy Sunday
Oct 18th
First the Vikings win (it might have been an eked out win, but it was still a win), and now Tom Brady is breaking records with his touchdown passing (in the snow, even!), and I have him as my fantasy football quarterback. It’s a good day for football.
We are one step closer to our vacation – I rented the car today. I read up on it and used Priceline, which I’ve never done before. The websites I read suggested bidding 30% lower than the lowest price you could find. But Priceline says right on their website that you can get cars up to 40% lower than advertised. So I bid 40% lower than the lowest price I found. And we got it! According to them, I got the car for 59% lower than the lowest price their site found, but I’m even happy with my 40%. It basically paid for all the taxes and fees. So that was exciting. I’ll have to let you know how it goes once we actually go pick up the car and stuff. Saving money doesn’t do any good if the service sucks.
I baked yesterday – carrot cake and pumpkin cake, both from The Pioneer Woman’s website. I love her recipes (I really want to try the chocolate truffles on the front page right now). I used yogurt instead of oil in both of the cakes, but they still have a LOT of sugar. But they are yummy. Especially with homemade cream cheese frosting (speaking of sugar). I could eat that stuff all day. I have made the pumpkin cake with the whiskey raisins and whiskey whipped cream – I would definitely recommend it either way. But yah…we don’t need 2 cakes around here, so I cut them up and we gave some to the neighbors, I’m sending some to work with Ryan, and we kept some for ourselves.
This entry is kind of disjointed. Sorry about that.
Ryan is making dinner tonight – either meatloaf or spaghetti and meatballs. Something with the hamburger that’s been thawing in the fridge. Either one sounds yummy to me. I plan on reading my book and watching TV the rest of the evening. With maybe a quick “put laundry away” spurt somewhere in there.
And on that note…back to my book (The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny).
Random Stuff
Sep 24th
-I am almost ashamed to say that I love Glee because so many people actively dislike it. I completely acknowledge and agree that the racial and homosexual stereotypes are pretty bad. But I love music, and I love the characters. When Mercedes threw a rock through Kurt’s windshield and then broke into song…I just loved it. And the teacher with OCD whose name I can’t remember. I love her too. And yet I realize it’s awful. I can’t help it. I’m also ashamed to admit how much tv I watch. So I’m not going to.
-Hypothetically, if you had a pumpkin scone and cherry Laffy Taffy for lunch with milk and cheese, would that count as fruit and dairy? I’m pretty sure pumpkin is a fruit, so I guess I doubled up there. that would be doubling up, right? Hypothetically.
-We are expanding our office, which means there’s been a lot of construction going on all over the place and people moving to new desks and workspaces. They have figured out a way to get myself and the other woman who works next to me some more (much needed) space, but only after she brought it up when we found out they were planning on putting us right back where we were. Thank God she said something. It’s a little crowded back here in the corner. Unfortunately, our desks will stay the same size. Oh well.
-The pregnancy/birth book I’m currently reading is, as my mom would say, a little “hippy dippy.” Even though she lists lots of statistics and stuff to illustrate her ultimate point(s), the fact that she says her children see special colors around their siblings when they are born and that they remember being born (she asks them every year) is a little…out there for my tastes. And it makes it hard for me to take anything else seriously.
-Ryan and I are headed up north for Oktoberfest this weekend. We both have tomorrow off of work, so this is effectively Friday for me. And I am SO HAPPY about that. It should be a fun weekend all around. I will try to get photos posted, but no promises.
-I’m in a much better mood than when I wrote earlier this week. Thank goodness.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nov 27th
We have eaten all the turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy, and vegetables we can handle. We’ve played a few card games, and now everyone is relaxing. Ryan is fixing his sister’s computer, his mom and I are watching TV, and Lisa and his dad are hanging around here somewhere.
The pumpkin cheesecake with gingersnap crust that I made tastes good, but it got REALLY tall in the pan, and then I had to bake it a full 20-25 minutes longer than the recipe called for, so the outside got dark, and the crust kind of fused into a kind of gingersnap caramel candy. I’m not sure what I did wrong…perhaps the wrong sized cheesecake pan? And next time I’ll try putting it in a water bath to keep the oven moist. Any expert cheesecake bakers out there with ideas of what might have gone wrong? It still tastes good, though, so I’ll definitely try it again.
This year I am especially thankful for family. I know that’s a total cliche, but every day I am reminded of how lucky Ryan and I are. We get along very well with each-other’s families. We both come from large families that are super-supportive, and the older we get the more we realize that that isn’t as common as it should be. And this is our first Thanksgiving as a married couple, which kind of puts an emphasis on the family part of it.
Of course I’m also thankful for other things that are less sappy. For instance:
- Facebook, and it’s ability to let me keep up on people (some might say stalk, but I don’t like to label things)
- Blogs – I get great recipes, read different perspectives on the news, and have a fabulous time living vicariously through people. Plus, some of them are very educational! I swear!
- Our apartment – it might not be anything fancy, and we could definitely “use” more space, but it’s the perfect size and cost for us at this point, and I LOVE living next door to our friends. We can wander back and forth, visiting, drinking wine (or beer or pop or whatever), and just hanging out. It’s awesome.
- Having a washer and dryer in our apartment building – we just got this about a month or 2 ago, and I am so so happy that we no longer have to transport all our laundry and the detergent and everything else to the laundromat. Also, the cost savings….my God, the cost savings….
- Books (and by extension, the public library) – I’ve really been on a reading kick since we got married. I think I was overwhelmed with not having any spare time to read for a while, so now I’ve been devouring whatever book I could get my hands on. And so I’ve been spending a lot of time at the library.
- Recently the city of Duluth had to make some big budget costs, so they’ve been asking people to volunteer there. I decided that volunteering at the library is pretty much the PERFECT job for me, so I signed up. So now, every Monday and Thursday I’ll be spending 2 1/2 hours there after work reshelving books in the non-fiction section. And I’m thankful for that too – I’ve been wanting to do some volunteer work, and this seems like it will be the perfect thing.
There are many other things I’m thankful for (um, our FRIENDS, for instance), but it’s late and apparently Ryan’s mom and I are going to try to brave Kohls tomorrow morning to pick up some scent diffusers for gifts for the people she supervises. I’m just hoping to make it through the experience without punching someone (Just kidding – I’m all bark and no bite, in case you haven’t noticed). We aren’t heading out until about 8, though. We aren’t THAT hardcore.
Happy thanksgiving, everyone!
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Aug 28th
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’m a thief!
Aug 4th
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
8) 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.
WTF people?
Jul 29th
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.
