Promises, promises

I keep saying "I'm going to blog," but my life is boring and I've already lived it once. So, in a half-assed attempt to keep myself blogging (something I've said before too), I'm sort-of half-ganking an idea from Sprite. She is doing the Winter Words reading challenge, and I'm just going to borrow the concept, but not fully participate. (It seems to be kid-organized, and they really don't need to be exposed to some of the stuff on my list. Plus, less accountability is sorta bad, sorta good.)

So, my word is SNOWMAN

Dying to Sin, Stephen Booth
Baltimore (or Portland)Noir, Laura Lippman (Kevin Sampsell) ed.
The Year Of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (currently reading)
Republican Gomorrah, Max Blumenthal (next on the list, due back to the library the same day as Wolf Hall)
Blood's A Rover, James Ellroy
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (already finished)

The list consists of stuff I've been dying to read but haven't gotten to (or got for Christmas - sadly, Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City just wouldn't fit), plus a few library selections. (It will most likely be Baltimore Noir, because I don't have a clue where my copy of Portland Noir is at the moment, but if it turns up, I'll read PDX first because I'm more familiar with the city, and I can keep Baltimore for my trip to Maryland Sheep and Wool in May.) So, we'll see how this goes. We'll see if I can get off my lazy but and post more often. A commentary on the Petrushevskaya should follow shortly.

How bored must I be...

... if I'm actually resorting to blogging? Well, "bored" may not be the proper word, but I'm blogging, so there you go.

What's happened since the last time I blogged? Well, I knit lots of stuff (mostly posted on my Ravelry account - habsgirl - although I've been lazy lately). Lots of socks and toys - socks for the fam and toys for my future niece/nephew, due near the end of the month. Clothing is waiting until the kidlet is born - no sense in knitting a cute widdle dress if it turns out to be a linebacker of a boy. (Not that I would knit a dress if it's a mere slip of a boy, either.) The Necco Wafer Hoodie from Twist Collective is on the list of probable knits, in navy with the stripes being gender-determinant. (Well, that and I need to dig up my leftovers from Kyoto - lime and white would work for either, but no pink for a boy.)

I still miss Carolina horribly, especially at bedtime. However, we do have a new cat - Schrodinger, an one-year-old orange and white male tabby from the Lanark Animal Welfare Shelter. Dad and I went out at the end of January, and he was the one who caught my heart (by scrambling onto my back when I was bent over.) His shelter name was "Yappers" and he is a talker. He and Rehnquist get on amazingly well - a tiny bit of hissing the first day, and now they play-fight all the time, at least when Schro isn't trying to bathe the 'Quist. ('Quist sleeps so deeply that Schro can usually get a fair amount done before 'Quist wakes up.) I think there's a photo or two in my Photobucket account (cat folder, user name habsgirl - it's so much easier when everything is under the same username).

Why no links? Well, I'm at work and figure this is pushing things far enough. Yes, you read that right - I'm gainfully employed... at my LYS (local yarn shop for the non-knitting reader(s)). It's part time, but gets me out of the house and earning some money. Plus, I manage not to spend the entire check here! (Mind you, I priced out a sweater earlier, and it's not the first time.) Spring and summer are slower times, and I'm taking advantage of a lull to type this up. It's funny how much I notice my ADD cropping up - knit a little bit (currently on a toddler sweater for a shop sample), then let's stock a shelf or two, no, let's surf the internet, ooh I want a cup of tea....

Otherwise, life progresses as normal. Maybe I'll actually start to be a less-negligent blogger. Or there's always Twitter. (Theory: short posts less effort to bore people with.)

Memes (with bonus commentary)

Yeah, it's been radio silence around here. I know I've said this before when posting a meme, but genuine content will most likely follow in a semi-timely manner. I saw this at Sprite's blog, and couldn't resist.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I used Cliff/Coles Notes twice in high school: "Oliver Twist", because we didn't read the whole book (whoever thought reading Chapters 1,3,5,9,... skip the section where Oliver is rescued and figure out who these new people are on the fly should be forced to read nothing but bad Harlequin romances) and "Vanity Fair", because I read 30 pages a night to get through that bloody thing, and I couldn't remember what happened at the beginning by the time I got to the end. My answer for the set question was the last one - every other list I was missing something ("The Name of the Rose"; "Moby Dick" and "Great Expectations"; "War and Peace", "Silas Marner" and "To The Lighthouse").

And now for the book laundry list (bold for read, italics for want to read):

1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (I quit somewhere in the middle of the last book)
3) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6) The Bible
7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8) Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (Read the first two, never got around to the third, although I liked the first two)
10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
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 (Only the 4 I read in school - I have issues with just reading plays.)
15) Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17) Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (I own it, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever read it.)
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
23) Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
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 (I read them one year during finals.)
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
40) Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41) Animal Farm by George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
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
52) Dune by Frank Herbert
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
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 (tried it - not if you paid me.)
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 (I'm counting it anyway.)
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
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
95) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (loved it - another book read during finals, and it was really hard to put down)
98) Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Forty-six read, with eleven (I think) marked for future reading. That's not necessarily a complete list - for example, if I ever get over my Dickens block, I'd add Bleak House (loved the BBC/PBS series), and some of these books I'd never heard of. I read relatively diversely, but figure any reading is better than no reading. (I read the "Twilight" series and they really suck, but the basic plotline is better than the V.C. Andrews books I gobbled up as a teen, so I'm not in any great position to criticize those who read them.)

More later....

Rest in Peace

Carolina
September 29, 1992-December 19, 2008

I miss you, baby girl.

Meme-licious

(Too much Project Runway - Blayne seems to be infectious. Send help if I start talking in the third person.)

Since I'm doing the Rubbernecker swap at Ravelry, I figured I should (a) get off my ass and post something and (b) try to post something that might give a glimpse of insight. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I decided to the Flickr meme that's been floating around forever.

The rules:

Using fd’s Flickr Toys,

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker).

The Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Here's the mosaic:


1. Sarah Carbon, 2. there's nothing better than summer, 3. Noel Coward, 4. llibreria - bookstore - Amsterdam - HDR, 5. RocknRolla at TIFF08, 6. freedom by mr r.banks esq, 7. Montmartre, 8. Hello cake, 9. polanski' s dark shadow, 10. Stepping Into The Unknown, 11. Why Choose When You Can Have Both ?, 12. anna

Note: The actor shown in the celebrity crush photo is not actually the person I'm crushing on. I like to be difficult, so it's a photo that came up during a search for that actor (male). Sadly, it took three actors to find a photo that I liked that fit my criteria. I later looked at 4 pages of Flickr photos of actor #1 and couldn't find anything that didn't have the relevant actor in it. (Actually there is one shot that had there been a still of the relevant still, I so would have used it. Mind you, I think it might contravene some Flickr policy about nudity, so phooey.) Oh, and don't think that figuring out actor #3 will be any clue to #1 (or #2 - I'm fickle and strangely wide-ranging.)

And, since I said I'd post these months ago, Rehnquist indulging in a favored - only by him, mind you - hobby:

More meme-y stuff

Not a lot of creativity in my brain lately. Therefore, memes.


What it is: the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Oliver Twist is only half-bolded because I only read about half the book. Someone in my high school English department decide it was a good idea to read it in the following manner: Chapter 1, chapter 3, chapter 5, chapter 9, continue hopscotching until Oliver gets rescued and goes to the country (I think), skip the entire happy bit, pick up again when Oliver returns to London and continue hopscotching until the end. This is NOT a recommended method of reading any book. (Dickens still gives me shudders. We were supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities two years later, and I'm glad it got skipped entirely.)

As for the books I read for school, Oliver Twist, 1984 and The Grapes of Wrath were all assigned high school texts; Brave New World was one of two choices for a compare-and-contrast essay with 1984 (Fahrenheit 451 being the other choice, which I read later); The Scarlet Letter and Lolita were both read for independent study components in high school (Lolita got picked because I was on a conference and had to get a book during my lunch hour that would fit the "We want a creative writing course, and we will get it even if it means subverting every attempt the teacher makes to deviate from our plan" plan - the essay ended up on perverted behavior in literature); and The Prince and Crime and Punishment were assigned college texts.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

I mean to post and then I don't. And when I get around to it? A meme and a recently finished object. (Actual Knitting Content.) I saw this TV meme at sprite's and was curious to see how I'd do (bold for series watched in entirety, italics for shows where you've seen episodes):

50. Quantum Leap
49. Prison Break
48. Veronica Mars
47. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
46. Sex & The City

45. Farscape
44. Cracker
43. Star Trek
42. Only Fools and Horses
41. Band of Brothers

40. Life on Mars (but I'm working on it)
39. Monty Python’s Flying Circus
38. Curb Your Enthusiasm
37. Star Trek: The Next Generation
36. Father Ted

35. Alias
34. Frasier
33. CSI: Las Vegas
32. Babylon 5
31. Deadwood

30. Dexter
29. ER
28. Fawlty Towers
27. Six Feet Under
26. Red Dwarf

25. Futurama
24. Twin Peaks
23. The Office UK
22. The Shield (also working on this)
21. Angel

20. Blackadder
19. Scrubs
18. Arrested Development
17. South Park
16. Doctor Who

15. Heroes
14. Firefly
13. Battlestar Galactica
12. Family Guy
11. Seinfeld

10. Spaced
09. The X-Files
08. The Wire
07. Friends
06. 24

05. Lost
04. The West Wing
03. The Sopranos
02. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
01. The Simpsons

Results? Fourteen shows watched in their entirety and 23 that I've watched at least an episode of (most are more - only Band of Brothers and The Sopranos are that low - I hated The Sopranos and tend not to watch war stuff.) (A) I watch a lot of TV (a lot of what I watch isn't on the list) and (B) there's a lot of good TV not on this list. Although I am glad CSI: Miami didn't make the list - I do not get why it is the most-watched show in the world. Scary, huh?

As for knitting, meet Palmer:

The pattern is Otto by Ysolda Teague, and well worth the $6 I paid for it. (Although my lack of embroidery skills has left him with a funny looking nose, poor thing.)

He joins Sophie and Elijah (who I really want to rename, but nothing's fitting yet):



So much cute.