i can reveal this without guilt now...

Woo-hoo!

the summer olympics are over

i won't give a flying f@! about sports again for 4 years.*

*except for specific events my brothers participate in

irony

i get sunburned in Oregon way more than i ever did in California. Because Cali was so sunny it was freakin' hot and i hardly went outside.

the book meme

I've been seeing this around and decided to give it a go...

Bold means I've read it, red means I've read it more than once, and blue means I've tried to get through it but have not finished.

It's suprising how many of these books I have read more than once!

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 Faulks
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
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
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 Meany - 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 (I think I read the whole thing in high school, but can't recall)
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 (again, I think I read it all, but I can't remember for sure)
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
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


If you're feeling brave give this meme a try!

p.s. - Little Guy used this time to pull all the wipes out of the dispenser ;)

baby on the brain

this month i find myself (once again) asking the million dollar question...

on mommies

how is it that grown women, who are even mommies themselves, can still act like spoiled teenage brats if left with their own mommy long enough? or is it just my own beloved mother that drives me batty and bratty?

Sad, Sad news

LeRoi Moore, founding member of the Dave Matthews Band, passed away today.

The music that has meant so much to me will never be the same again.

I will treasure the many good memories of his genius.

today...

the good: I got to sleep in this AM.

the bad: I went to sleep last night thinking that since the ants were gone I needed to clean the rest of the ant poison off the floors today. I woke up this morning to find a fresh new trail of ants dining at Poison Lake. Technically I guess this is good too since they're unwittedly killing themselves.

the ugly: see above.

bonus good: Things are looking up for ScienceMama.

i'm going to have to face it

i'm addicted. 1/2 cup of coffee in the morning is the difference between day long lethargy and a near manic can-do attitude, not to mention whether or not i have a splitting headache worse than any alcohol hangover i've ever had. all this balances on a half a cup of java. wow.

home bound

It's already getting to me and I know it will only get worse. Time to get on the ball about developing out of house pursuits. I'm really hoping to get some student time in this year. Man I wish Little Guy had a grandma up here to hang out with from time to time...

justice cont'd

today i am once again outraged. over what? (well, here comes the broken record...) over a murder.

it makes me so sick to my stomach to think of Jaime's murderer possibly walking free, even gaining custody of their children. although this is not a likely scenario, it is a possible scenario now that there will be a new trial.

it makes me sick to think about my sister going through another trial. The enormous emotional cost of it, and the very real danger she will once again be in with her testimony in front of her instead of behind her.

but probably what disturbs me most of all are all the other domestic violence murder victims of the present and future. Our friends murderer was stupid enough, high enough, whatever enough, to commit his brutal crime in broad daylight with at least one witness. but what if he hadn't? what if he had actually put a moments thought into his crime? how are other murderers like him supposed to be convicted if the victim's statements to friends, family, and even the police are to be inadmissible?

how will there be justice?

King of the Mountain

So we never used to take Little Guy to the park much --even the nicest parks in our old Central Valley town had their ghetto element. On one of our last trips to the park there some nice teenage thugs threw their pit bull off the top of the playground structure and then laughed as the poor thing crawled away in pain.

Little Guy also never went to day care (just Grandma's house) and has just generally never gotten to be around other kids very much.

So it's not very much of a surprise that now there's a bit of an adjustment. Now we live by nice parks, populated by nice families and lots of young kids. And Little Guy just wants them all to know one thing...stay the hell away from his stuff.

It started off with the steering wheel on the playground. On 3 different occasions he slapped at other kids who came up and tried to use it when he was.

Then the other evening he took his possessiveness to a whole new level. There were 2 other similarly aged kids already there when we arrived, but they all happened to be off the structure at the moment. He climbs up gleefully and runs around in general merriment until he notices one of the other kids starting to climb the steps.

"NO NO NO no NO!" He yells as he runs across the bridge to the top of the steps. She freezes for a moment. I tell him to share and blah blah blah. She starts climbing again. He starts with the "No no no" again and as she gets closer he tries to hit her. Because apparently the whole structure is his now.

Oy. I know he'll learn in time...and we'll keep trying. But it's a little hard to make friends with moms at the park when your kid keeps assaulting theirs.

Ants Marching (to thier death)

Right now in my entryway there is a trail of ants greedily drinking from a pool of poisonous bait. Turns out the secret to getting them to take the bait is to accidentally kick the stupid trap so that the liquid spills out all over the tile. I may patent this trap kicking process its worked so well...

my feat of strength

While hubby was at work I picked up our big old 27" tv and carried it through the house, up the stairs and managed to hoist it to its new home, on top of a tall dresser.

I knew it was stupid and somewhat dangerous to try. I knew Hubby would be mad at me for it. What can I say...guys don't own stupid macho-ism.

Knock on wood

I think my Little Guy has flying down now -- recent experiences have been blessedly far from nightmarish. Which is good because we have more trips coming right up...

Liberty and Justice for All

On Friday August 1st my favorite aunt and her partner of 10+ years were legally married in a private ceremony. On Saturday they held a reception which Little Guy and I attended (Hubby had to work). It was quite a day.

It was a day to celebrate the love my Aunt B and Aunt S have found with each other. To acknowledge how special they each are and how happy we all are for them. They have been a unit for many years now but without the wedding there really hasn't been an occasion to do these very significant things.

I can only imagine the difficult road they each faced, just in coming to terms with who they are. I can only imagine the bravery it must have taken to be honest with the world and with their families. In spite of it all they avoided anger and bitterness and became good people who found love with each other.

I am just so freaking happy for them.