My Super-Hero Power August 6, 2008

Those of you who know me best know that my super-hero power is the ability to find new and entertaining ways to hurt myself.  Well…entertaining for everyone else.  Last week I added to that list.  Ok, so the event itself wasn’t that entertaining, but the timing was!

So what happened?  I was walking up some stairs, tripped, and came down really hard on my right wrist.  The docs thought it might be broken so I’ve been wearing a cast-like splint ever since!  I’m waiting to hear back today from the second set of x-rays.  My doc didn’t see anything but we need the official radiologist report before I can graduate down to a normal brace.  I’m really looking forward to that call!  I’m sick of this thing.  Especially because my thumb is incased…  I want my thumb back!

I’m sure you want to hear about the irony.  Well – this all happened four days before our first craft show here in Ellensburg.  It  was supposed to be my week of creating jewelry like mad – my time to focus on the business since school was out – and that all was for naught.  Instead I spent the week watching movies and reading books.  Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy both of those past-times, but it was hard when I had so much else I wanted to do!

The good news is my PSS joined me for the weekend.  Because of her I was still able to do the craft show.  She was my pack-llama!  We had lots of fun girly time over the weekend and my dear husband was marvelous in how well he put up with us!

Over the last two days my wrist is finally starting to feel like its healing.  I can type without pain – and I’m thinking I might be able to get some cleaning and organizing done today.  And maybe – if I’m very lucky – I’ll get to make some simple jewelry 🙂

Oh yes!  Another reason my PSS is simply awesome – she bought me Breaking Dawn!  The newest book in the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer.

It was fantastic.  I won’t say more than that because I don’t want to give away anything I shouldn’t for those of you still waiting to read it – but I will say I loved it!  I had so many questions on how she was going to resolve different matters in this book, and I think she answered all of my questions satisfactorily.  At least…I don’t remember any questions being left over 😛  That is always a good thing!  I look forward to seeing what else she comes up with in the future 🙂

In fact – if the book hadn’t come in the mail yesterday I proably would have posted yesterday – but I was too engrossed in the 756 pages of fun to do anything else!

100 July 14, 2008

Thanks to sallers for finding this and putting it up on her blog!

The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

Here’s how it works.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn’t like.

4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read only 6 or less and make them read.

Note: I don’t have an underline option- so my read and loved are italicized and bolded 😀
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4. The 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 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 Hitchhiker’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
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 – 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 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’ 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 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

Wow – for some one owns literally several hundred books – you’d think I’d have read more of those 😛

Books July 9, 2008

I’ve always loved to read.  It’s in my blood.  My Mom first read to me while she was pregnant with me, and my love for books was permanently sealed!

Lately though, I have to laugh at myself when I read.

I’m taking creative writing right now right?  Well, I sat down to read yesterday, tired from doing what felt like a million and a half things that morning, and found myself doing something strange.  I wasn’t just enjoying the story and the plot, I found myself noting “ooo…that was a good detail to include” and “nice way to develop the tension in this scene” and other comments that I would write in the margins of my class mates papers.

I was reading the book and noting devices the author had used.

I must be losing my mind.

Ok, maybe not losing my mind, but seriously, that’s a wee bit insane!

Oh wait, my PSS would do the same thing 😛

Conclusion – my PSS and I are insane.

Good-bye Spring, Hello Summer! June 13, 2008

My husband thinks I’m crazy.  The photo’s below are why.  That’s ok though!  I like being a little (or a lot) weird 😉  This is my tribute to the end of one season in my life, and the start of another.  Enjoy!

Spring – I started out with three classes, dropped one for a variety of reasons, and still worked my tail off all quarter!  This is photo is the end results of two classes, and ONLY two classes mind you…

And the sad part is that I realized after I took the pic that I forgot to include one of my books…  That’s ok, I was getting tired (I’ve been cleaning) and didn’t want to reassemble the already disassembled pile!  And I don’t know why the photo is blue either.  Mo fixed it before I took the next photo…

Summer – I have three classes this summer and I’m really looking forward to my creative writing class!  You’ll probably here a lot about that in the up coming months…  Here’s my books for the next quarter 🙂

Do you notice the difference in size?  Now, granted, I don’t have notebooks started yet for those classes, so I’m sure the pile will grow over the course of the summer!

I found this photo about a week ago in this blog and it made me grin so big!  I may not be a teacher yet, but I’m headed there!

I found this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip a loooong time ago.  I’m a big fan of C&H 🙂  The funny thing is that, when I originally found this, I had no plans whatsoever to become a teacher!  In fact I would vehemently protest that I would never be a teacher.  At that time I had a room mate who was a teacher, and she would occasionally use my computer, so I put this up as my desktop background, and got thoroughly berated.  😀  I was quite proud of myself…

Back to Spring thoughts, I’ve been taking a lot more pictures lately of just life in general, and this is my favorite spring shot that I took this year!

The one sad thing about summer this year is that I don’t foresee myself finding anyway to get to the beach 😦  I love the beach and Bethie and I usually end up there at least once a year.  But it’s harder to get to the beach when I have a 4 hour drive before I even get to my home town and Bethie…  And I have a jam-packed summer ahead of me.  So I suppose memories will have to suffice for now!

I do have some fun things planned for this summer though.  Including my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary party!  Aren’t they cute?

I’m so dreaming of the sun right now…  I should take a walk later on, it looks beautiful outside and I need the exercise!  Who knows…maybe more photos will find their way on-line 😀