Book Nerds List

(aka more shameless pulling of memes from friends' FB pages because I refuse to ADD any information to what FB already knows about me. But I'll put it here, lol...)

==================================
Book Nerds List:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.


Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES blog post. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.


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

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

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

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 - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

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

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

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 Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

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

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

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl


100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

==============

Hmmm.... I guess I'm just weird. I've read 32 of these. And, shameful admission, of the ones I have not read, most are books I don't plan to read.

Te be fair, I read (for the first time) The Time Traveler's Wife for a book club (and loved it!) . Rebecca (meh) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (blech!), too.

Oh, and I counted audio, too. Cuz if I'd read a paper copy of that Albom crap, The Five People You Meet in Heaven I'd have tossed it about 5 pages in, but it made okay background noise for my morning commute. Ditto Moby Dick, which was not awful, but all that (grossly inaccurate) whale talk in written form would've driven me mad...

Music Mania

I avoid facebook as much as I can, but, sometimes, late at night, when no one is tweeting and it's not my turn in Words with Friends and I've already played the daily Qrank quiz... Well, then I'll load up ye olde FB app on my phone and see what people had to say...

Last week my friend Lisa had a meme that looked like fun, so here goes:

Expose your terrible musical taste!

by Lisa on Thursday, 11 November 2010 at 08:25

I'm playing along with the latest meme... here are the rules:

• Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.


• Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.


• Write down the first 15 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating, please. Just because you might skip the song when it comes up or be embarrassed for people to know you have it in your collection, you still have to list it.


• Choose a lot of people to be tagged. It is generally considered to be in good taste to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I'm betting that your musical selection is entertaining, or at least amusing. ( I don't tag people on memes any more)
  

Without further ado...

1. "Little Girls" - Oingo Boingo -- This song was a lot better when I was teenager wanting to date guys in their 20s. As the mom of a little girl now, well, I still like the song, but find the lyrics a bit perturbing...
   


2. "Love You Out Loud" - Meat Loaf -- one of my faves!
   


3. "Another One Bites the Dust" - Queen


4. "Copywrite (Do It All Damn Night)" - Strata G -- Everyone panned this goofy ad-rap album written by a copywriter, but the lyrics make me laugh.


5. "But It's Better If You Do" - Panic at the Disco


6. "These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " - Nancy Sinatra


7. "Found Out About You" - Gin Blossoms


8. "Lucky Ball and Chain" - They Might be Giants


9. "Welcome to the Jungle" - Guns 'N Roses


10. "Walk Like an Egyptian" - The Bangles


11. "Only the Young" - Journey


12. "Why Isn't That Enough" - Meat Loaf


13. "Love is Not Real / Next Time You Stab Me in the Back" - Meat Loaf


14. "Don't Stop Believing" - Journey


15. "I Got You" - Train

In my defense, my phone was still loaded with my pre-Meat Loaf concert selections when I did this last week...

And I <3 Meat Loaf.

The Journey? Well, I love Journey, too, even if it does make me old.

Tuesday Tirade: You Gave Her a WHAT?!

Parents (NOT grandparents, just 'rents!) you'll feel me.

Childless people, you NEED to pay attention.

Today we are discussing inappropriate gifts for children. Specifically LIVE gifts. Seriously folks, unless the little darlings' parent told you, "Go buy my kid a puppy/kitty/bunny/baby chick/pony," DO NOT DO IT.

Yes, pony. No finger pointing, but someone in our extended family wanted to buy J a horse. A HORSE. Horses are cheap. To buy. It's the care, feeding, and boarding that will convince you the horse has a better life than you do since his monthly roof rent is almost as much as yours. I pointed this out, kindly but vehemently, to the well-meaning relative and that was it.

I would love to be able to own a horse for my horse-crazy girl to enjoy, but it's just not in my budget. I'm struggling now to figure out how to pay for horse camp for the summer as it is...

Not all such bullets have been dodged, unfortunately.

One Easter weekend we went to visit my father and his wife. They were out at the barn where they kept their horses, sheep, and other random urban livestock--they live in Houston--and my dad was mowing the lot/pasture with a riding mower with the heavy duty pull behind mower attachment.

He mowed over a rabbit warren (thankfully BEFORE we got there!) With babies. Cute babies, babies old enough to eat real food. Only one survived the mower, though. TES (that would be The Evil Stepmother) rescued the baby bunny and took it in the barn.

We arrived, let the girlchild uno--this was in the late 90's--pet all the critters, have her pic taken with the horses, etc. I went out to talk to my dad. When I cam back to the barn my girl was proudly holding a cat carrier containing (guess!) and telling us all about her own personal Easter bunny.

She gave my kid a baby rabbit.

Ummm... No.

Guess who had to call the urban animal rescue when we got back to Austin to determine what to feed it, how to care for it, etc.? Yea, NOT the person who gave her the stupid (but yes, cute, fluffy, soft, and scared out of its little tiny mind) bunny that's for sure. Fortunately our bunny was determined to be old enough to be self-sufficient and we picked a favorite park where we like to play that had a lot of wooded trails and plenty of cover and set it free.

Buy me a margarita sometime and I'll tell you the story of how it "mysteriously" (quoting the 3yo here) got out of it's carrier on the way to the park...

My friend, Crystal recently became grandmother to a tarantula in a not dissimilar way, though I suspect her hubs may have colluded on that one since he had big nasty hairy spiders as a kid...

Do not, not, not, not, not give live gifts to other people's kids. Ever. PLEASE.

While I'm thinking about it, ask them before you give their 4yo daughter pink pleather hot pants and real, takes-acetone-to-remove-it-from-the-carpet, nail polish, too.

Tuesday Tirade - Brought to you by Thermos

DISCLAIMER: I want to apologize in advance for (ab)using the Thermos (R) brand name, but I've never seen a generic name for this product, though I have seen the generic product, it just never registered.

Having said that...

Did you have a lunchbox when you were a kid? The old school metal ones with a thermos inside that had the built in cup/lid cover? They were cool, weren't they? I mean that literally, too. My kool-aid stayed cold all morning in that puppy. And my chicken noodle soup? You could burn your tongue at lunch if you weren't careful to eat your crackers while the soup cooled to edible temperature in the cup/bowl/lid.

Well, my girl doesn't have that problem. Why? Because some moron kid somewhere dropped a Thermos, the glass liner inside broke, and the idiot didn't notice the shiny silver glass shards or the tinkling noise it made and ate/drank from it anyway. Now they line them with metal.

Which DOES NOT WORK as well. Some days it barely works at all. You can still find a few glass-lined Thermos vacuum bottles, but they are all huge and meant for construction workers or whomever to carry coffee. Way too big for a lunch box.

So now my kid gets cold food. Or warm drinks. Or, my favorite problem with the metal liners... They create such a hard vacuum when you seal in hot food that she can't open it at lunch. Apparently the adult lunch monitors can't either. Yet I always can... (rant for another day)

Meaning my kid gets snacks for lunch and comes home starving crabby. Since the crabby is a semi-given at age 9, I could really do without the starving.

Please, please, BRING BACK GLASS LINED KID THERMOSES*!

(thermoses? thermosii? anyone know the 'correct' plural for this?)

(Thermos image courtesy of kaboodle.com, despite the watermark, lol...)

Stolen from Lisa

I'm home sick with day 5 of a headache and can't sleep anymore right now and don't trust myself to edit myself, let alone someone else's stuff, right now, so you get a shamelessly stolen blog post, courtesy of Lisa at Put It On the List - who stole it from someone else. Doncha love the interwebs?

Below is my vacation map. I've visited all of the places below and stayed long enough to do something memorable. If all I did was drive through on the way to somewhere else, or change planes, I skipped that state, otherwise I'd have to add New York, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Colorado :-)


visited 16 states (32%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Looks to me like I need to get out more :-)

I'd like to visit:

• Florida -- I want to take the girl to Disney before she's too old to enjoy it.
• Minnesota -- I did a series of articles a last year on Minneapolis and it looks like an interesting place to visit.
• Indiana -- Friends across the street moved up there a few years ago and it'd be great to go visit them. We were there as surrogate family when their oldest girl was born (4mos younger than J) and the girls haven't seen each other since they were babies.
• Alaska -- Friends and family tell me I ~must~ be part polar bear I like it so cold. Be nice to see for myself. And I wanna see whales that are NOT in a ginormous tank at Sea World.
• Hawaii -- I'd have to be insane not to want to go to our own US tropical paradise, right?
• New York -- Hokey, I know, but I'd like to see the Statue of Liberty. And a Broadway show that is actually ON Broadway at the time. I lurve musicals.
• Colorado -- My mom lived here for a while and, well, it just looks purty in the pictures.
• Maine -- Just cuz.
• Oregon -- Why? Cuz it's there. You hear about the attractions of California and Washington and Oregon seems to be the unloved middle child. I'm all about making a state feel loved. (did I mention I'm in a lot of pain and can't see straight and I reserve the right for this to make no sense whatsoever? I did? Oh good.)
• Illinois -- See notes above re: Minnesota. I did a similar series on Chicago and want to see the Adler, the Field, etc.
• Michigan -- I wanna see Mackinac Island. Read about it, have family that's been there (the hubs has family in Michigan so we might even HAVE family there, lol), and it sounds like a nifty spot to visit.
• Oklahoma -- Being a good lil Texan I have spent most of my life disparaging the state immediately to our North (and based on my one hotel stay there it was NOT without cause!), but the pictures and stories of the Pioneer Woman and Shannon from Rocks in My Dryer have just about convinced me that I may have been a little too hasty in my judgment.

That's all I can think of right now. Must be time to go back to bed.

Tuesday Tirade: The Answer to All Of Your Questions is NO

I moderate a small local moms' group. I joined a few years ago and kind of fell into moderating.

Lately, though, it's been a bit of a chore. Why? The economy, of course.

People are tightening their belts. They're getting more creative with their marketing, and trying to do more while spending less. Social media, whether its the evil FB, I really hate that site, almost as much as I despise MySpace, Twitter, online groups, whatever, is mostly about investing your time and your personality.

So let me be straight up: MY MAMAS ARE NOT A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE FOR YOUR CRAP.

We are a small group, under 40 members. Biggest we've ever been was around 90 and that was primarily due to a lazy (guilty as charged!) moderator.

We're small so that people feel safe and comfortable talking about their families, their kids, their nursing problems, sex after babies, whatever the topic du jour is. People who stick around like our rigorous moderation.

When a woman joins -- Yes, it is a MOMS-only group -- we send her a note asking her to tell us more about herself and her family and how she heard about our little group before her membership is approved.

Don't answer the survey, don't get to join.

When she joins she's moderated for a while, either until she:

1. Unsubs after deciding we are not what she was looking for. This sometimes happens immediately, sometimes not til inflammatory topics (the mingling of religion and public education is good for weeding out the wimps) come round.
2. Posts enough that we feel comfortable letting her post without a babysitter.
3. Posts so damn much (that is ok) that it floods my inbox with crap to approve and I unmoderate her just to make it STOP.

We are serious about making our little group a place where moms feel safe and secure. We state upfront that if you are here to market your crap you are not welcome. Not if that's the ONLY reason. We have a lot of WAHM members and they talk about work, but, like everyone else with something to sell (garage sales, craigslist items, etc), are only allowed to actively market their biz one day a week. If you only post to market yourself, we will eventually kick you because that's not why the rest of us are there.

I say all this because the last week or so has seen a rash of service-oriented spam join requests. People with brilliant things to say for themselves (in the initial Yahoo groups form---I'm pretty sure they all gave up hope when they got the follow-up member survey) like:

1. I teach your children music. -- Really? No name? No indication of gender or whether or not you have a family or are just a perve who wants to eyeball our kids in the group photo albums? REJECTED
2. home work -- Are you offering to do it for my kids? Are you a maid service? A tutor? A work-from-home scammer? REJECTED
3. A dental hygienist for a local pediatric dentistry practice. -- This one was nice, but still a solicitation and therefore unwelcome. I'm still debating forwarding her spam to the practice to find out if they stand behind it or she was trying to drum up biz on her own...

That's a week's worth. I don't have time for it, we don't want it, and I guarantee you we will never let you in. We had a member in the past who harvested group emails for her home cosmetics sales gig---she posted normally, too, but we had to electronically smack her around and tell her not to do it again.

Maybe it's time to re-write our splash page? I haven't looked at it in years, but if it will make the spam stop...

Photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cursedthing/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Can't Rant

I was gonna rant but... (a) I want to do a little research on my topic and (b) I have a shiny new blog background and am finding it hard to be properly rant-ish.

Have no fear though, I am naturally inclined to snark and ranting, so I'm sure there will be some soon!

PS - I also took part in my first "Teaser Tuesday" over on my book blog, if you wanna check it out.

Tuesday Tirade: Lower Price is Not Necessarily a Good Thing

This has been bugging me for a while, and I was thinking I need to post more often...

For a number of health reasons I've been trying to incorporate more natural and high fiber products/complex carbs into my family's diet.

After trying about a jillion (or so it felt) different kinds of bread---and being shocked at the tiny amount of fiber in most whole wheat breads---I found one at HEB my family liked and that I, the occasional and totally random nutrition Nazi, approved. HEB's Glycemic Health bread--a healthy wheat bread with a whopping 2.5g of fiber PER SLICE.

It even, unlike many of the more expensive wheat breads, came in a sandwich-style option. You know, the really square bread with the thinner crusts. Since the girl has taken to pulling the crusts off her sandwiches and throwing them away, thin crust means more of her lunch makes its way into her face.

Lately I haven't been able to find my bread at all. I was upset, and finally decided a couple weeks I was going to stop by the store when I had a few minutes and ask the manager about it. Just to make sure I didn't look like an idiot, I went to check the bread aisle first. And found what I was looking for... sort of:



It had the same name, but a few key differences. It was, indeed, cheaper than the $2.38 I was paying before my bread went away for a revamp. It was also roughly 2/3 the size. The OLD sandwich loaf was 24oz and more slices since it was thinner cut. This little gem is 16oz and has fewer slices because it is no longer a sandwich-style loaf. It's also got the thick crust my kid won't touch with a ten-foot cafeteria spork.

A little math reveals that:

A) It is now more expensive per ounce, the package just has fewer ounces:
$1.59 / 16oz = 9.94 cents per ounce
$2.38 / 24oz= 9.92 cents per ounce

B) The idiot person who created their new shelf tags either lied on purpose or was dyslexic*, because there is no way that I can find that makes a 16oz loaf of bread that costs $1.59 work out to 6.63 cents per ounce. This math does work IF you keep the price and base it off the older, 24oz loaf size.

*I can totally say this --- my baby bro, the AwesomePenguin, is dyslexic, so I am not just making crap up here. It COULD happen.

I know, I know, it's just bread.

And I've watched in horror as coffee sellers have done the same thing for years now.

A coffee can from 1970 is the same size as the one I can buy today---but mine will have 3-5 fewer ounces in it than the one from when I was a kid.

This does not mean it is right. It also means I have to buy TWO loaves of bread for the week.

$3.18 vs $2.38

Somebody at HEB wanna step up and tell me just how that works out to a new lower price?

Yea, I didn't think so.

I Know It's Free, but...

Today's rant topic was up in the air til I got a paperback swap request that inspired me.

Here's the deal: Paperback Swap let's you list your unwanted books. If someone wants it, you mail it to them, paying the postage yourself, and you get a credit to use to order a book you may want from someone else. So, for the cost of postage at (usually) media mail rates--guaranteed to be cheaper than all but the most baseline clearance books at Half Price--you get a book you want to read without paying $5.99+ for it. Pretty sweet, right?

Not sweet enough for some people. I am, frankly, thoroughly tired of people who want me to send them something for free but have a laundry list of conditions the item must meet. Things I've seen people bring up in PB Swap conditions include:

• "I don't accept hardback books without dustjackets." Really? That's too bad---you are very unlikely to ever get to read a book you want from my collection. Dust jackets annoy the crap out of me and 9 out of 10 of them that enter this house on a book I own get recycled. I'm interested in that's between the covers, not what's decorating them.
• I am not willing to accept books that have been withdrawen from libraries" Pet peeve #1 - Do Not Look a Free Book in the Dustjacket and spit on it! #2 - everyone you request a book from will receive a copy of your conditions---take the time to spell your ridiculous demands properly people! #3 - If it's good enough for the library, why isn't it good enough for you? I ~never~ order anything from paperback swap with the thought of adding it to my permanent collection in mind. Why not? Because I never know what I'm gonna get. If I get something I want to add and it happens to be in good shape, yay me! If it's not, I'll read it and pass it on and pay for a permanent collection copy.
• "Books with a strong moldy smell." Yea, cuz I post those a lot. If you have legitimate allergen issues (I always warn people who mention allergy issues that I have had cats near my books in case it is a problem) that's one thing, but statements like the above are just being b1tchy. Even more so since all of these gems came from a SINGLE person.

And I'm sure it will not come as a surprise to anyone that I rarely mail books to people like this. I've learned the hard way that demanding types like the one described above are almost never happy with what they receive (again, for FREE) and I've had one go so far as to deny credit for the book received.

Play nice with the rest of us, people, or take your unwanted books and go somewhere else! I'm sick of you, you paperback primadonnas!

Yes, I am probably overreacting, but I'm crabby and this person's poorly spelled laundry list of book issues just lit my fuse.

Circulos in Apricot

Yarn-haters, save your time and skip this one--it's all about my nummy new project.

Since I finished the wavelength I decided to reload the handy project jar with another (hopefully, as I just realized I am using the wrong yarn) one-skein wonder port-a-project.

Kim Guzman's Circulos Scarf.



Mine is working up in Jagger Spun's Zephyr Merino-Silk blend in Apricot. I was super excited when I bought the pattern last year because I ~thought~ I had the perfect yarn. Yes, I already had the yarn. It was a love-the-feel-love-the-color-gotta-have-it impulse buy from my fave LYS.


I'm pretty excited about this project. It's an intermediate project and this is the third time I've started it. I'm 8 rows in so far (of an estimated 50-58) and this is the first time it has looked mostly like the picture. I think my stitches are still too loose, but I'm calling it my interpretation of the pattern and letting it ride.

I am proud of myself that I can do something, so far, that I was thoroughly unable to do a year ago. It's also something I taught myself to do, out of sheer determination (and frustration at not being to make more advanced projects because my technique was ALL wrong!)

Taking up crochet again (I learned in 7th grade home ec... how old does that make me?!) has taught me patience. It has taught me to forgive myself. It's taught me to laugh at my mistakes.

Since I write and edit and type all day, it also lets me explore my color sense in a physical way. I never realized how satisfying hand-crafting could be---even if it means I will eventually die with the world's largest collection of home-made scarves!

As a nice side benefit, hands full of hooks and yarn cannot be filled with snacks and munchies while watching tv. This has yet to have a visible effect on my waistline, but hope springs eternal!

PS - Lanel: What colors, how long/wide do you like, and are you allergic to any artificial or natural fibers I need to know about?

Over & Out

My mom hit one of those round number birthdays this week. To celebrate we are off to a small Texas vineyard that puts their unusable season end grapes to profitable use by letting people pay to come stand in buckets and stomp them ala Lucy's Italian Movie. I hear the town where the vineyard is has some sorta firefighter celebration this weekend (eye candy!) so this should be fun.

Which means I will be away for a bit--the hotel has wi-fi and I could take my computer, but I'd rather hang out with my mom--sorry blogiverse.

J had friends over last night -- wanted to give their mom a little relief after a rough day plus she has my kid like ~all the freaking time~. I had big plans to work on a book I need to lay out (yes, I'm still freelancing in fits & starts) while the kids were holed up in J's room doing mysterious small person things (please not another ceiling fan swing!)

*sigh* What actually happened is that we took the kids to dinner, came home and they holed up in her room as planned. Then I sat on the couch and watched Raidman play Rock Band 2 til about 1230am and watched some "Castle" on the dvr til almost 3.

Crocheting all the while! I finished the first large panel of my shopping bag. It went from 13 rows to complete at 42 rows. I even got 4 rows done on the 2nd large side before calling it a night.

Also got a full row & change completed on the wavelength scarf yesterday (kind of a slow afternoon at the day job). It is in its jar in the trunk of the Bug to take to the hotel and work on tonight--the shopping bag requires too much in the way of extra supplies (more yarn, stitch markers, etc) and the scarf is all neatly packaged.

I lurve my project jar!

(sorry for the crummy phone pic)

Book club tomorrow night so I don't see myself back at a computer til Monday sometime, but I'm fairly certain you will all survive without me. Somehow.

Progress!

(non-yarn content, too, this post -- scroll for it baby!)

Pics later, I promise, gotta get 'em off my phone!

I had to choose between yarn & blogging yesterday since my regular afternoon/evening routine was interrupted by doctor's appointments and grandparents in town.

The yarn won. I got another 8 rows on the new shopping bag's 1st panel.


Not much, I know, but learning a new stitch pattern on a project like this is always slow going. I have no idea how long I crocheted yesterday, but it was long enough to watch 2 more episodes of "Heroes" on the DVR with the commercials skipped (sorry NBC!)

Today I finally got to work on my scarf again! I haven't touched it in months, so that was nice. It's a very small yarn/hook though, and a very long scarf, so got a few inches done in the 15min I had on break at work, but that's all.

Also managed to get another 3 rows on the shopping bag ("Burn Notice" on the DVR, lol) tonight, so pretty sure I made my 20min for the day. Woohoo!

AND NOW FOR MY NON-YARNALICIOUS NATTERING:

I was part of a small writing group a few years ago that met at a restaurant in Hyde Park that was so danged crunchy I couldn't even get coffee there (FAIL!).

I quit going for a while due to family stuff (it was 2hrs on a Saturday morning) and when I went back about 4months later, they were GONE. A little digging on the Writer's League of Texas website tells me the group apparently called themselves, "15 minutes of fame" and had a Yahoo! Group and other stuff I had no clue about. They moved to BookPeople (i.e. even ~further~ into Austin!) and now appear to be defunct.

What I liked about this group was the format. I don't currently have any writing goals other than to do MORE of it. I have no target market, nothing I want critiqued, etc. The group was very freeform, loosely based on Natalie Goldberg's, "Writing Down the Bones". Met for 2 hours, socialized a little, then did 10-15min sprints based on prompts suggested at random by everyone, then read aloud.

You ~could~ bring a WIP and read from it, instead, if you wanted an opinion, but writing was supposed to be done with the prompts each time. It was a refresher, a mind and word expander for 2 hours a week. I wrote a lot of dreck. I got stumped and wrote nonsense sometimes, but by golly I WROTE.

I also wrote the only piece of fiction I've ever sold at one of these Saturday morning sections. It was flash fiction and sold to a now-defunct webzine, but, by george, someone paid me ($10--woohoo!) for my fiction.

I'm trying to start something similar with Jenn.

Something closer to home, so my precious escape-from-the-house time isn't mostly spent driving downtown. Something with no heavy expectations of me, particularly since I am living in the land of the dayjob these days.

Jenn wants something with a structured (at least a little) critique format so she can work on stuff to submit to publishers.

We're working now to establish a happy medium, most likely still based on "Writing Down the Bones" (gawd I love that book!). Will let you know when we figure it all out and will put out a call for other interested writers once we have something firmed up.

In other news: I'm going to be a grape stomper!

I'm taking my mom to a small vineyard this weekend for her birthday so we can channel some Lucy & Ethel and gets our feet purple. There will be photographic evidence of this expedition (it's included in the package) but there are no guarantees I'll share the pics.

New Project!

In an effort to actually MAKE my goal of coming into hands-on contact with my yarn every day this month (ha!) I took my scarf project in it's little canister up to work today to work on in my off moments. Then ended up running to the grocery store for the fam over lunch and not having any free moments.

I got home and stared at my afghan. I'm using a way oversized hook for the yarn, so it's pretty airy, but still heavier than I want on my lap when it's our 45th day this year of 100+ degree temps.

With this in mind, I decided to start something new. Really new. Up til now everything I've done has been pretty simple--scarves and super simple afghans. This is pretty darn simple, too, but still a new thing for me.

I'm making a shopping bag to keep in the car--I seem to always forget to have a bag on me when I go to the library and always manage to leave with more books than I stopped to drop off. I'm working on this absolutely adorable bag from CrochetKitten.com, the Shopaholics Shopper.

I went with Lily's Sugar 'n Cream because (again!) I got a bunch on clearance this Spring when Hobby Lobby reset their yarn aisle. My main color is sage green with the citrus fruits ombre for the trim (& possibly the bottom since I have 4 balls of the green and 2 1/2 of the ombre).

I DID start this tonight while watching old Heroes on the DVR (5 more eps & I'll be caught up!) and got four rows in. Then had to frog the last two because I realized at the end of row 4 that I'd frelled the beginning of row 3 and it was just ~wrong~.

But I touched yarn! I even managed to start making something with it! Woohoo!

Bought Me Book

Well, it's 1043pm and, once again, I have yet to lay hands on yarn today.

I found myself having to choose after work between going to the grocery store or going to the book store. The book store won and let me tell you, I heard about the lack of milk in house when I got home. The things I do for this blog!

I brought home a copy of Easy Beaded Crochet. I saw it Saturday when I was shopping for small people birthday gifts (for the uber fun pool party Saturday night) and books for my reluctant reader and talked myself out of buying a book for me. All the purty lampwork beads yesterday made me rethink that decision. So at least I got a fiberrific book.

There's a scarf in there, supposedly 20's inspired, that I want to try. The yarn in the book is green, but I have something of a similar weight/feel in a sweet pale mulberry color that I got for an even sweeter price at the discount shop last year. I just need to check my arts and crafts stash for some beads.

I'm a little concerned that the beads will misshape the scarf, and the directions in the book even indicate that this is a strong possibility. That's the clearest part of the directions, sadly. The directions in this book are extraordinarily brief. I'm almost sure I can figure it out, but the sparseness is a but intimidating.

I still have an hour (yes, Candy, I spent 20min on a blog post, what can I say, I'm slow and friggin' verbose) so Imma go grab some yarn... :-)

Fiber is Fun!

Okay, if you are one of my many non-fiber/yarn obsessed friends, feel free to go away. For, like, a month. I've decided to take part in Fiber 'Tudes Daily Dose of Fiber 31-Day Challenge.


Why?

I've been neglecting my yarn lately. I've added to my stash, a bit fanatically, but not only am I not doing anything with it, I recently (last weekend, while cleaning my lair office) frogged* a bunch of WIPs that I decided were not what I wanted them to be. So I have all this yarn, all these patterns, and I'm not doing anything with them.

*FTR, I'm a crocheter, not a knitter, but we don't have a special word for this in crochet so I borrowed the knitting term. The Fiber 'Tudes gals are knitters, but I hope they won't mind me hooking along this month.

Oh, and the holidays are coming and I'm feeling the need to inflict homemade gifts on everyone I love again, haven't done it in a year or so.

Current WIPs (that were not taken apart for their yarn) are an afghan for my aunt, and a fancy scarf for me.

The afghan is a super simple ripple variant mostly Simply Soft with a little fancy stuff I got on clearance thrown in every 5 rows or so.

The Wavelength scarf, well, if I ever manage to finish it and get it blocked (I ~need~ to stop stalling and get some foam mats for blocking projects) it will be fantabulous. The pattern is here and the yarn I chose, inspired by the pattern's name, is Ella Rae's lace merino in color 106 (the teals).

Pics of WIPs later, gotta get the girl ready for a late afternoon swim party :-S

Tuesday Tirade: This One's for the Girls

(my apologies to Martina McBride for the blatant title theft)

(potty talk alert - sorry ya'll, there's simply no way to avoid it this week)

Yes, it's a gender specific gripe; it's allowed, since I'm railing against my own gender. Hell, it's allowed cuz this is ~my~ blog. :-)

I need to talk about hovering. You hoverers out there, you know who you are... Stop, please, just stop.

For the uninformed, a hoverer is a woman who is obsessed, to the point of paranoia, with the notion of germs on toilet seats in public restrooms. So obsessed that rather than sitting on the toilet she will "hover" over it in some bizarre semi-erect squat and attempt to pee in the bowl without touching the seat with any part of her body.

I gotta tell you: most hover-types have lousy aim.

So women-who-hover, I have to ask. WHY?

• You can't get pregnant from sitting on a toilet seat.
• Unless the skin of your backside is covered in open sores, you can't catch a disease by sitting on a toilet seat.
• The most "eww" things on a toilet seat are deposited there by (you guessed it!) other hovering chicas.

Just sit your butt down ladies!

Failing that, clean up after yourself! If ~you~ don't want to clean up your own urine, why the hell do you think someone else wants to?!

And, and this should go without saying, but I'm going to go there anyway, if you are in the loo to make a more significant deposit, please, please, please, sit down!!!!!!

Tuesday Tirade: Blinded by the Light(s)

It's dark, it's cold, and you just want to get home.

You see lights ahead of you,..Suddenly, from around the bend in front of you, blinding light!

You can't see the road, you can't see anything, and you're pretty sure you must have missed the signs and drove onto the set of a Close Encounters of the Third Kind re-make.

Then you drive into the rock the road curves around and really DO see the light...
~~~~~~
Extreme? Not really, especially not for anyone who has driven in the Texas Hill Country at night.

I was googling for a pic or a reference for this post and all I was able to find are articles, primarily on auto insurance websites, touting the benefits of upgraded headlight bulbs. No one talks about the down side.

I am light sensitive and tend to wear sunglasses even on overcast days. Driving at night is easier for me because, generally, I see better. Until some dippo with super-bright blue or purple headlights pulls up just far enough behind me that their lights glare into my car via my side mirrors. Or a situation like the above with opposing traffic comes up. I've hated these damned things since they hit the market. Now that I no longer drive a SUV and most headlights are eye-level with me (see previous rant re: trucks and people who don't need them) it's worse.

Sure those lights improve visibility for the driver of the car equipped with them. That's awesome. That way they'll have a nice clear view of the compact car as it runs into them when the driver is blinded by said flippin' super-bright headlights.

Tuesday Tirade ... And Justice For None

I had jury duty yesterday. I didn't want to go, but I did. I didn't meet any of the conditions for WHY they should excuse me, and, well, apparently getting people to show up for JD in Travis county is hard because they've started issuing arrest warrants for no-shows. So I went.

Don't get me wrong. I think jury duty is genuinely important, one of the responsibilities of liberty. It is one of the few opportunities for people who are not lawyers or politicians to be involved in the legal process in this country. I don't believe in summary judgment or that any one person has the right to determine the guilt or innocence of another--too easy to abuse such a system--think dictators and police states! The right to a trial by a jury of our peers is important. Or at least, it should be.

My father always says he would ask the court to decide were he ever in criminal trouble. I asked him why. He told me, "I don't want my fate in the hands of twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty."

image shamelessly borrowed from potbust.com (one of the coolest I found googling "Justice images")

Yea, makes ya all warm and fuzzy inside, don't it?

It's sad, but that seems to be the attitude of many. In the weeks leading up to my jury duty I had people tell me all kinds of opinions about it. Things like (and I wish I was kidding):

• Let people on welfare do jury duty, they're already getting paid by the state.
• Lie and get out of it, that's what everyone else does.
• What a waste of time!

Maybe it's the last vestige of the 8th-grader-who-wanted-to-be-a-lawyer-when-she-grew-up in me, but this response bugged the hell out of me. If I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I want a trial in front of intelligent, hard working people. The problem is intelligent hard-working people don't want to be on juries.

Let's address my number one reason for not wanting to go: If Mama don't go to work, Mama don't get paid.

In a short 2-4 day trial that is an inconvenience, for me, but not a tragedy--now that dh is working too. If mine were the only paycheck feeding the family it would be a different matter altogether. A long case, such as one that may involve the death penalty or life in prison, is a break in pay no one with a job can afford. I've always dreamed of working for one of those rare companies who understand that jury duty is a legal and moral obligation and not a get-out-of-work-free card and pays people while they are out. If more places did this, more responsible, intelligent, hard-working (emphasis on the working part) people would be willing to serve on juries.

I feel bad for the defendant in the case I came four people away from being on the jury for yesterday. The ADA told the jury pool that the jury would most likely come from the first three rows. By the time voir dire was over most of the first FIVE rows had been excused on a litany of thin reasons, like, (yes, someone said this!), "Well, it never happened to me, but my mother's best friend's sister's nephew had it happen to him and I just don't think I could be impartial in this case."

Maybe the decline in the justice system in America isn't all the lawyers' fault. Maybe, just maybe, it's our fault, too.

Tuesday Tirade: Do Ya Really Need a Truck?

I live in Texas. Home of trucks the size of egos, which is to say freakin' huge. I also live in ~urban~ Texas where such things are rarely more than some guy's ridiculously oversize compensatory device.

Yes, I said it.

If you live in town and drive a big truck--especially one jacked up even higher--women, or at least this woman, are going to think you are making up for some shortages south of the border, if ya know what I mean.



Even if you own a boat/trailer/off-road toy, most of the places you will drive to and park to use it are, ummm... paved.

The bulk of people who own these trucks ~never~ need a giant truck in their daily lives--my mother and brother both did this, so I know whereof I speak. My brother never used his truck (not jacked up--he lacked judgment, not taste) as anything other than point A to point B transportation. After a few years of feeding that sucker at the pump and paying the frequently higher-for-trucks insurance he traded in his truck for something still guy-like (the new Charger) but more practical in his daily life.

My mom? She ~loves~ her truck. And ends up helping everyone she knows move their furniture as a result. She also bought her truck when she was living out on an unpaved road and working at decidedly uncivilized construction sites--in other words, she actually needed a truck when she bought one. When she moved into town feeding it got tiresome and she bought herself a little VW that she uses for 90% of her driving.

You know why I really hate all these stupid urban trucks (and let's not even get me started on the Expeditions, Escalades, or, heaven forfend, the stupidest thing ever sold to people who don't need it, the frickin' Hummer!) though?

Because their owners seem to think that driving them gives them the right to be flaming nimrods on wheels, in parking lots, and pretty much anywhere else. You own a truck--it fits in one parking space, there is no good reason to spread it across three--especially somewhere that parking is already limited (like, oh, a school parking lot!)

Nothing pisses off a guy in a ginormous pickup as quick as me and my little Bug not being intimidated by him. Dude, I have friggin' awesome car insurance, a seat belt, and air bags--you don't scare me.

Petroleum is at a premium, exhaust is in excess--really, unless you have a career in a field that requires the blatant consumerism and (looking for another word for excess, gimme a sec) that is a Texas pickup, give it up and get a real car.

Tuesday Tirade: No Butts About It

Woohoo! After a long hiatus to twiddle my thumbs & paint my nails, Tuesday Tirades are baaaack!

Today we're talking butts. No, not the one you sit, the ones you most likely walk on: cigarette butts.

I've been a smoker. Some of my good friends smoke. My parents have all, at one time or another, been smokers.

I don't want to talk about the health implications of tobacco use (it's bad for you, duh!) or the environmental impact of the tobacco industry (*shudder*) or even secondhand smoke. I just want to talk trash.

Smoking is not exactly the most publicly acceptable vice, and many places these days, especially in Austin, don't accommodate smokers. I happen to work someplace that does.

There are pretty color printed signs protected by plastic all down one side of the building that say "Designated Smoking Area." Said area is conveniently in a dead end that no one who does not want to suck nicotine has to walk through to enter or exit the building. Even with all the construction going on around my office they've made an effort to accommodate people's nic fits. There are several picnic tables, all of which are under cover--a rarity in Austin smoking areas.

And there are lots of trash cans. Three very large square bins, two of them the quaint kind with the sand pit in a tray on top--so people have a place to put out their smoke. So... Why the heck do I have to walk through a snowstorm of cigarette butts to exit and enter? How hard is it, really, to rub that puppy out and PUT IT IN THE TRASH!

I walked past a grounds guy one day between Thanksgiving and Christmas on my way into the office. He was on his hands and knees next to one of the previously mentioned trash cans, hand removing each and every butt people hadn't bothered to throw away. They litter the ground all around the smoking area, yet the giant ash trays are almost always empty.

What is wrong with you smokers? Have you just gotten so used to tossing your trash (which incidentally stays in landfills a really long time and requires the deaths of a heckuva lot of trees each year to make the paper that's wrapped around the tobacco) where ever you happen to be when you finish your cigarette that even when you have a place to toss it, you can't be bothered?