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In general, I think that Americans' obsession with a shorn, uniform lawn is a bizarre thing.  People tend to clip the grass so close that in the summers it withers and dries out, and in the winters the earth is exposed.  People spend so much time on their patches of grass, if my neighbors are any measure of it.  One of the most slap-your-forehead stories I heard is this:  My ex's family, who used to live in Dallas, TX, lived in a place with a HomeOwner's Association.  Apparently, if a person did not keep their grass cut short enough, the HOA would send a mower over to mow their lawn, and then bill them.  It being Dallas, the short-short lawns all fried in the summers...when the lawn maintenance businesses in the area (who mowed the short-short lawns and edged and weed-whacked and dumped pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers) would then come and PAINT THE (dead) GRASS GREEN for them.

All that said, I understand a bit more why people may enjoy going out to mow the lawn, if they are stuck in a cubicle all day, away from the sun and outdoors and any green things.  But seriously, people.  Seriously.  Let's make butterfly gardens a national love instead.  Or rent out sheep or alpacas for grazing.

...from hecubuscathead 

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star “@” those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
.............................................................................................................
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen  X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien   X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee  X+
6 The Bible  X  (love some parts)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell  X
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 ...how about most?  X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
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  X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck   X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll   X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy   X (could not make it all the way through, though)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis   X (a few)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis   X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden  X (part of)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne   X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell   X
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   X+
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding   X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert  X
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   X+
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov   X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold   X(part of)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas  X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding   X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker   X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett   X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce   X
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath   X+
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt   X+
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell  X+
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker   X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert  X(part)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White   X+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle   X+
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   X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl   X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

...........................................................................................
total = about 35.  Hmm.

Hello all ~

Apparently I have been very self-absorbed, and Ravelry-absorbed as well. 

Update: things are fine here.  Finances are a bit crazy with my want-to-get-people-awesome-Christmas-gifts urges, but also much better than I had previously hoped: I will not have to board the dogs for two weeks over the holidays, but will be able to take them with me to my family's house.  Bonus in that I don't have to shell out the huge amount of money for boarding, and also we get to have the dogs around during Christmas, which we all like. 

I just got a BPAL order, after waiting over a month from first placing it... and now the scent I'd like to order more of is no longer available.  Rats.  First they discontinued my favoritist scent of all, and now when I found a good replacement - also gone.

I do have some full imps lying around that they sent that I'm not nuts about - if anyone want to swap for Thaleia (although no-one has it anymore, wah wah) or Katharina von Tussel, you just let me know! 

And I've been planning a wedding.  It will be small, and (hopefully) relaxed.  I am trying to take care of the big things first.  I have a list.  I am armed.

Have you ever picked up one of the Stephanie Meyers books, only to get a cracking great headache at the disturbingly poor prose inside?

Have you been watching as the weeks leading up to the Twilight movie have had tweens, teens, SAHMs, and other women in a fangirl frenzy of panty-throwing?

Or are you a big, big, superbig fan of the books, even though you realize they are trashy too?

Then you may enjoy these two sites:

1) Chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the first book, Twilight

2) A wiki, summaries, quotes, etc., with commentary on the lolfandom, Twatlighters, and more

HI-LARIOUS!

Thanks, rhiannon76  and d_c_m  for the tidbits and buck-up-little-camper advice!  Today, after running several errands, forgetting paperwork, getting a bit lost and minorly hysterical at getting lost and being late to an appointment, I finally got home in the early afternoon, with damp jeans from the heavy rains, and the urge to stay in.

I have been working on the sleeve to a knit - I am hoping to get this thing done as a Christmas present, and I finally started on the first sleeve last night, after finishing the body of this sweater.  I need to perservere with this sleeve, and do the other one, and then I can worry about other items.  My Christmas-gift knitting will be mighty small this year, though.  I tried to do more last year, and it seems as though for the most part, unless I guess *exactly* right as to what someone might want, it's not worth it.  Unless they are a knitter too and know how much effort it took.

I also did my first steeking, after machine-sewing (poorly) reinforcement seams in a sweater I knit months ago.  The cutting wasn't bad - the sewing was.  And now I am slowly hand-sewing in a zipper...poorly.  I have to go back and rip out half of what I've done, but...this is how we learn new things, yes?  Yes.  

Although it really seems to be time to get into bed and read sci-fi/fantasy books and do Sudoku and cuddle the dogs, I think we will be going have dinner and go see the UFC fights at a bar tonight.  (The Monkey is kindly treating due to my wails of "Woe!  Exhaust systems cost a pretty penny!  Woe!  Although the car is much quieter now....")

So I guess I should get out of yoga pants into something else.

Dude, I feel as though I am hemmoraging money. Hemmoraging. This is in part due to vet bills for the dogs (teeth cleanings, medications), and needing to replace the muffler and exhaust pipe system in my car.

*pause while I talk to the car people and realize that the bill is several hundred more than I had already expected.*

*sigh heavily*

*need at least one totally reliable working car in household*

So, to cheer myself out of the rapidly-growing financial funk I'm in (and let's not even talk about the economy, I know it is sucking globally because of financial liars, but bear with me here), I ask for suggestions of fun free things to do or enjoy that I can prusue in the coming months while paying off my credit card bill.

hugs and kisses

October 22

You are both a highly sensitive and a highly intellectual person, dear Taurus. This is a wonderful combination, and part of what makes you the superstar that you are. Today's planetary positions challenge you to think about how you can best combine these two key components of your personality. Have you ever considered writing as a career? It might provide just the sort of balance you seek. Give it some thought or, better yet, simply start writing and see whether or not it suits you.

October 17

Express yourself to the fullest today, dear Taurus. Feel free to take an unconventional approach when it comes to dealing with your emotions. Try not to get cajoled into thinking you need to fit into an artificial construct of who you need to be and what you need to think. All you need to do is think for yourself. Fight the established norms and become your own person.

October 16

The prevailing tone of the day is a mix of conflicting energies that might put some stress on your heart, but this is nothing you can't handle, dear Taurus. In fact, if anyone is going to make the most out of today, it will be you. Tap into your aggressive nature and act boldly toward the object of your desire. At the same time, however, make sure that there is harmony among those around you, and make sure everyone's needs are taken care of so that peace may exist among all.

Hey all

please go view my dragon eggs here, so they can hatch.

It's silly, but they are adorable.

Aaaannnhn.  *head tilt*

September 25

Are you feeling somewhat annoyed today? This is hardly surprising, since the day inspires you to take a long hard look at what is happening with your life. It's as though you suddenly realize that any decisions you make may have impact that reaches far and wide. But don't let that stop you from committing yourself to a course of action, dear Taurus. Be adventurous for once!

September 23

Sometimes people say that your kind miss out on life because of their tendency to observe themselves living rather than experiencing life directly. If that's the case with you, then today will be a real departure for you. You will suddenly seem more in contact with your sentiments, and will be more present and connected to those around you. It feels good for a change, doesn't it?

September 16

Some fascinating conversational exchanges with friends, relatives, and others close to you could take place today, bringing new ideas your way, dear Taurus. You have both the physical energy and the inner power to make things happen, so you should make the most of it. Consider carefully your needs and aspirations and formulate a plan of action as to how to make them a reality. You might be surprised by the results!

September 11

You'll have to expect a few disturbances in the harmony that has reigned over the past few days, dear Taurus. For example, your needs may not match those of your mate or your close friends, or, you may feel restless. Minor worries about the future may intrude on people's good moods. In short, this will not be a good day to look to emotional harmony as a source of satisfaction.

September 10

The mood may be somewhat oppressive today, dear Taurus. After having met the challenges of the past several days, you now find yourself in need of some well-deserved peace and quiet! Alas, the authorities are unwilling to give it to you. You can expect to be flushed from that quiet corner of yours and unceremoniously deposited at your desk. Work, it seems, will not wait until you've had a nap. You may feel like running away. Instead, why not start planning an exotic vacation?

September 4

At the end of the day, it is you who has to look yourself in the mirror and go to bed knowing that you are that person, dear Taurus. Think about this the next time you are tempted to make a rude comment or spread a displeasing fact about someone else. It could be that one side of you is able to rationalize behavior that the other side of you simply despises. Be sure that today you look at both of these sides of yourself in the mirror and not just the one that you are pleased with.


From: www.thefreedictionary.com