What’s with the recurring white stuff I see when I wake up in the morning and look outside? It’s been 50 degrees and raining; my daffodils are coming up; the lilacs buds are greening. And this morning, it snowed. A light dusting, but still, snow. Sigh.
See what happens when you don’t pay your bills? or your contractors? The mall is officially on the auction block this coming Friday. Anyone want to buy it? I’m sure it would make a great paintball area. I hope someone buys it and at least cleans up the mess. It’s an eyesore and has been for months.
Went to coffee today with a friend. We ordered our lattes and sat talking about life and babies (hers is one month older than mine). I began to get a feeling that I haven’t had in over a year. I looked at her and asked, “Did I say decaf when I ordered this?” Her response: “No.”
Sadly, the caffeine buzz wasn’t really strong, but maybe if I’d accidentally ordered regular espresso at 5 o’clock this morning instead of 3 o’clock this afternoon, I would have noticed it more.?
The spouse had to feed V a bottle a bit earlier than usual this evening, while I waited for my system to detox from the caffeine.
We are awake, happy and playful today. Well, maybe a little sleepy too.
Since last year’s tax preparation experience was less than optimal, I convinced the spouse that we should do the taxes ourselves this year, like we did before he started selling lots of stuff on eBay. Much to the spouse’s chagrin, I decided this long weekend was the time to do said taxes. But he was a good sport and pulled together all his eBay data so that I could combine it with wonderful things like W-2s and 1099s to create the desired result: a refund. OK, so it’s a very small refund, but considering the little ticker showed we owed a fairly decent chunk until I finished putting in the last itemized deductions, I am happy with it. Even better, since we budgeted to owe taxes, we have extra and the spouse has very kindly agreed to allow me to spend the previously budgeted money. Roth IRA contributions, here we come! Yes, I have a tedious mind.
Although I have done one of these before, I’m doing this book list also, since, well, I think I can say I’ve read more on this book list. Perhaps the more important question is how many of these do I remember. That list would be much shorter. I need to be working on rereading book 7 of HP before someone gets cranky with me for having borrowed it for four months. I owe said person coffee, twice.
BBC Book List
According to Turqois, the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Bold = I’ve read it
Italics = I want to read it
Strikethrough = I’ll never read it
?
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?(yes, the whole thing, once; I had to prove I could do it)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte?(I tried, I really did, but the dictionary was more interesting my junior year of high school)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell?
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (I read The Golden Compass but haven’t gotten around to the rest of the trilogy)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D?Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller??(I tried, I really did, but I couldn’t make it past page 50 or so, apologies to the spouse and the one who gave me the book because she really thought I should read it)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare?(or pretty darn close to all of them)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger?
19 The Time Traveller?s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger?
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald?
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker?s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh?
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck?
29 Alice 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 (see also No. 33)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini?
38 Captain Corelli?s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell?
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown?
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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 – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
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 (see also No. 14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
An interesting idea . . . positively intriguing, but if we’ve already stimulated the economy by purchasing a flat-screen TV, what else could we spend Veronica’s future earnings on? Ideas, people, I need ideas. I would spend it on saving more money, which may be counter-stimulative.
She just barely fits into the adorable winter outfit that her aunt Jeanie got for her. We tried it out today for her trip running errands with mommy and visiting Great-Grandma B.
We tried cloth diapers the first couple of weeks, but Veronica was so tiny that the diapers were huge on her. Now that she’s about nine pounds and I’ve started putting her in three-month pants, I’m trying again. So far I’ve just tried the prefolds, and they still make her bottom half look huge, but not nearly as badly as before. I’m still not folding them well, but maybe I’ll improve my skills with practice.?
And now, I think she’s finally fallen into a deep sleep, so I’m going to run for the shower before she wakes up again and needs to be held and fed and changed. Yes, this is now my life: hoping to get a shower by noon and utterly failing most days. I am not a very efficient mother; I can’t seem to get anything useful done around the house. Again, maybe I just need more practice.