Sunday, December 21, 2008
Ever have one of those days...
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Things I've Done
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii (Well, I never visited before I moved here, but I've visited other islands. Does that count?)
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightening at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight (I don't remember any specific instances, but I just know that there's no way I made it to adulthood without having had at least one pillow fight somewhere along the line.)
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten Caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle (Hubby pointed out that I have, indeed, done this one. Technically, he's right-40 MPH does constitute speeding out here!)
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (does a fish count?)
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Rode an elephant
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
"Apple Kuchen" recipe
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day-December
For comparison, here is a picture of the same bushes exactly one month earlier. It is from a different angle, but you can see how much they've changed in that short time!
Here is a closer-up shot of the leaves. (Sorry about the Basset butt-he was busy exploring!) If anybody can tell me what the actual name of this is, that would be great! **Edited 8/11/09-I finally found out what this is! It is Euphorbia leucocephala.
Thanks for stopping by to check out my garden!
Five Go-old Rings!
Even if you don't buy anything, stop over and tell her I said, "Hi!" She's quite sweet!
Monday, December 15, 2008
Good news update
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
A little help, please.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Props to Hawaii Pacific Plumbing Supply Company
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
What I'm Reading Now-The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern Worldby Steven Johnson-In 1854 cholera swept through the Soho district in London, killing hundreds of people in a matter of days. Popular theories at the time blamed miasma (bad air) or the weak constitutions and filthy living conditions of the lower classes for these deaths; but the Reverend Whitehead, who attended many of these deaths, noticed that class and cleanliness seemed to have nothing to do with who was dying. Cholera appeared to be an equal-opportunity killer. At the same time, Dr. Snow, who was an expert in anesthesia and had done many experiments with vaporous substances like ether and chloroform, thought that the whole miasma theory was a bunch of bunk. He suspected that cholera was spread via the water supply and set out to prove his theory.
Monday, December 8, 2008
How I'd Like to See This Go Down
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Weekly Geeks #27-Dewey
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
My Life in Hawaii in a Nutshell
Friday, November 28, 2008
Late to the game
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Tesla Roadster still $109,000
Saturday, November 22, 2008
It's big purple suit time!
That's right, every year about this time, I pull out my big purple suit*. Because I get cold. Laugh at me all you want, but for me 72 degrees with a breeze blowing in off the mountains is cold. The fuzzy socks are more of an all-purpose, year-round thing. They make me feel like a Muppet, which is fun.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Thoughts on my Kindle
only has a small tab and two corner pieces to hold the Kindle in place. These worked ok, but not great. Sometimes the Kindle would fall out and land on your face if, say, you were reading in bed with the book over your head. (I never had this problem, but my husband always seemed to be close to losing an eye to the Kindle). The new covers have 3 leather corners with a 4th elastic-and-leather corner that you can use or not and an overall classier design, in my opinion. Also, my husband is now much safer.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Tuesday traffic
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Monday
Thursday, November 6, 2008
R.I.P. Big Coconut Tree
We are having some landscaping done, and I am taking pictures of the process. I am excited about the landscaping-our yard right now mostly consists of California grass (read: really tall weeds)-but I am sad about one thing. We have (had) a beautiful palm tree in our yard that had to be removed. It was leaning toward the house, and if it ever came down, it would have taken out the entire front portion of our house, not to mention the possibility of our cars and anyone or anything which might have been in the yard at the time. We wouldn't have been so worried about the lean, but the ground looked like it was coming up around the base of the tree, and we get massive wind storms in December/January which could easily topple the tree right over onto our house.
What I'm Reading Now-The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Who had the best voter turn out?
Monday, November 3, 2008
I'm being quoted internationally!
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Just a word
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Blogging for a Worthy Cause
Freedom!
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Thanks to all the Weekly Geeks!
Wierdness
I've read two books back-to-back which talk, in a fair amount of detail, about humans being dismembered. (Unwind and American Gods)
You can watch a trailer for The Fall here. Watch it and then try to tell me that the little girl in this film, Catinca Untaru, isn't the cutest thing you've ever seen! Go ahead, try. Can't do it, can you? I didn't think so.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Posts Showing Up in Google Reader After They've Been Deleted
Weekly Geeks #21-First Lines challenge
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
Miss Lonleyhearts by Nathanael West (thanks, Katherine and Icedream!)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
The Trial by Franz Kafka (thanks, Eva!)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (thanks, Eva!)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (thanks, Rachel!)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (thanks to commenter "thescriblerus" on Belle of the Books)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (thanks, Susan!)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (thanks, Eva!)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Ulysses by James Joyce (thanks, Ali!)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (thanks, Rachel!)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
City of Glass by Paul Auster (thanks, Joanne!)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (thanks, Rachel!)
26. 124 was spiteful.
Beloved by Toni Morrison (thanks, Eva!)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
Don Quixote by Cervantes (thanks, Softdrink!)
28. Mother died today.
The Stranger by Albert Camus (thanks, Eva!)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
Waiting by Ha Jin (thanks, Ali!)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Neuromancer by William Gibson (thanks, Jessi!)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky ( I knew if I pulled enough books off my shelf I would find something!)
32. Where now? Who now? When now?
The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett (thanks to Penryn via Rachel!)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
The End of the Road by John Barth (thanks, commenter Miriam!)
35. It was like so, but wasn’t.
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
39. They shoot the white girl first.
Paradise by Toni Morrison (thanks, Yasmin!)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early.
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (thanks, Rachel!)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;
44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (thanks, Ali!)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (thanks, Susan!)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis (thanks, Eva!)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded.
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
53. It was a pleasure to burn.
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (thanks, Eva!)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
End of the Affair by Graham Greene (thanks, Joanne!)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (thanks, Eva!)
59. It was love at first sight.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (thanks, Icedream!)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (thanks, Tammy!)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler (thanks, Yasmin!)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (thanks, raidergirl3!)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (thanks, Eva!)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (thanks, Katherine and Icedream!)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Herzog by Saul Bellow (thanks, Rachel!)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (thanks, melydia!)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James (thanks, Susan!)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (thanks, Susan!)
76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
The Towers of Tebizond by Rose Macaulay (thanks to commenter "_lethe_" on Rachel's site!)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (thanks, Susan!)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The Go-Betwee by LP Hartley (thanks, raidergirl3!)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
Crash by J.G. Ballard (thanks, Susan!)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (thanks, Softdrink!)
83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (thanks, Softdrink!)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
Last Good Kiss by James Krumley (thanks, Joanne!)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves (thanks, Softdrink!)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.
Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (thanks, Yasmin!)
89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (thanks, Ali!)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (thanks, Susan!)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue.
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (thanks, Maree and Icedream!)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (thanks, Icedream!)
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (thanks, Icedream!)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
The Red Badge of Courage (thanks, Ali!)