From dettiot

The top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

1984
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Anna Karenina
Beloved
Brave New World
Crime and Punishment
Dracula
Emma
Frankenstein
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Jane Eyre
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
Northanger Abbey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Blind Assassin
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The God of Small Things
The Hobbit
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
The Prince
The Silmarillion
The Tale of Two Cities
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
War and Peace
Watership Down
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Life of Pi : a novel
The Brothers Karamazov
The Iliad
Ulysses
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
A Clockwork Orange
A Confederacy of Dunces
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Short History of Nearly Everything
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angels & Demons
Atlas Shrugged
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cryptonomicon
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Foucault’s Pendulum
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Gravity’s Rainbow
Inferno
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Les Misérables
Madame Bovary
Middlesex
Neverwhere
Oryx and Crake
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Slaughterhouse-five
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Confusion
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Fountainhead
The Grapes of Wrath
The Historian : a novel
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Kite Runner
The Mists of Avalon
The Name of the Rose
The Odyssey
The Once and Future King
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
The Sound and the Fury
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Vanity Fair
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

It's been three months since I posted. I know I'm a lazy blogger, but that's a wee bit ridiculous. So, since I really don't want to pay attention to creative writing entries any more (don't worry, I'll go back to them) and I'm waiting for a phone call (and if it doesn't come in the next five minutes, I'll be officially pissed), I thought I'd drop in and say hi. Hi!

A few random things:

Dozen Bake Shop has the world's best scones.
Poetry written by teenagers is generally fairly mediocre, with a few random gems.
Weather should decide what it's doing so poor baby herbs aren't at risk of freezing.
Last night's House did not live up to the hype.
Last week's Grey's Anatomy did.
My birthday's in less than a week.
Julie Andrew's memoir is not particularly well written, but I love it anyway just because I love her.
I'm having issues finding books I want to read, even though there are many books that I need to read.

Toodles!

Not really, of course. There's no rest for the wicked.  But I'm on my last day of my mini stay-at-home vacation, and I really don't want to go back to work tomorrow.

Yesterday I laid out most of the tile in the bathroom, and tried to cut tile to fit the edges. Of course, the tile cutter I had wasn't up to the job so last night the husband and I went to the great home improvement warehouse and got a different kind...hopefully it will work well, and quickly, and I can get this job DONE.

I also put away the hip deep pile of laundry that has been spread across the bedroom floor. Now that was an accomplishment! I got a new dresser, and hopefully I can keep my laundry under control with the additional storage space.

Today, I need to do laundry, finish cutting and laying tile, and try my hand at adhering it to the ground. I also need to make more UltraSimple broth and prep rice and veggies for lunch tomorrow.  Being on this diet has been remarkably easy the last couple days, but I think it'll be much harder once I'm back behind my desk and away from my kitchen.

In other related news, I think this diet is a very good thing.  I feel clear-headed and moderately energetic.  I slept great last night.  And I weighed myself this morning and found that I've lost three pounds since Sunday morning.  That's AWESOME.  I don't know if I'll keep this up completely after the week is up, but I'm definitely going to try eating mostly veggies and staying away from the processed stuff. 

Okay...time to do a little cooking and make my last day off a good one. 

I'm trying an experiment.

Those of you who know me know I haven't been particularly happy lately.  Big fight with my husband (it's almost okay now), dissatisfaction at work (I still don't like being an administrator), annoyance with my crotchety old house.  But overlaying all of my specific problems has been a sense of general discontent with my life.  And, attached to that, low energy, regular weight gain, headaches, etc.

So, today starts my experiment: the UltraSimple Diet.  This diet purports to raise your metabolism, help eliminate common health concerns, raise allergy and, oh yeah, can help you lose 7-10 pounds in a week.

I just had breakfast: 2 tablespoons of olive oil with lemon (to flush the liver), a glass of hot water with lemon (to take the taste of olive oil out of your mouth, I assume?), a cup of green tea (yummy), and the "UltraSimple Shake" - tofu, soy milk, frozen fruit, flax meal, combination flax and borage oil, almond butter - not a bad breakfast, although I am still a bit hungry.

For snacks I get "ultrabroth" (veggie broth...yum), and lunch and dinner are both brown rice, veggies, and some protein. I think I can do this. And hopefully it'll make me feel better.

Wish me luck!

Dear Drunk-Ass Future Sister-in-Law of the Bride,

I would like to extend my whole-hearted thanks to you for ruining any fond memories with which I may have ended this bachelorette party.



So, instead of remembering the surprisingly fun evening, what's foremost in my memory is you.  You made yourself the Most Important One There. Gee, I can't wait for the wedding next week.
[Bad username: ]

To the three people who might read my journal:

If you are in contact with any libraries or librarians who have Gay/Straight Alliances or any other programming for GLBTQ teens (or adults, for that matter), can you please pass that information my way as soon as possible?

We are currently facing a potential challenge to a GSA started by a teen librarian and being held off-site to help the teens remain anonymous and would very much like to hear from other libraries who have done this and, if they were ever asked to justify the program, how they did so.

Thanks,
Me.

First, my zucchini died. Now, I think my cucumbers are dying. I have three cucumbers on the fine, the leaves are rotting, and the fruit seems to be rotting too.

This makes me sad enough to post to my LJ for the first time in a month.

dontfeedthetiki gave me her old "student" violin to act as my in-the-woods instrument, since the past two years my Lady Macbeth has succumbed to humidity and required surgery to be playable again.  After several months, a trip to the luthier and a couple of orders of Shar,  the beater might actually be ready to use.  She has:

• A new bridge (a viola bridge, actually -- there's something screwy with the fingerboard, and she needed a very high bridge to work)
• Entirely new strings (umm...you don't want to know how many I popped putting the new ones on)
• Fine tuners (purchased after I popped the third and fourth strings)
• A new chinrest
• A new bow (fiberglass, durable, cheap

She's still definitely a beater instrument, and it's going to take awhile to get used to playing her. I'm not sure yet if I want to take her to the hippie wedding tomorrow or not -- I have some pride, and at this point I sound rather like a rank beginner on her.  But, I don't really want to take the Lady, and I'd love to be involved in music-making if music-making is going on. Decisions, decisions. Maybe I'll wake up early and do some exercises.

Also, she needs a name.  My violin is Lady Macbeth, my viola is Ophelia (I was obsessed with both Mercedes Lackey's bardic voices books, and with Shakespeare, when I was naming my instruments). I don't think this one is quite ready for a Shakespearean name. Any suggestions?  I could just name her "Tiki," after the one who gifted her to me.

Like Maddie Gaiman, I'm not good at the whole subject thing.

Really, the point of this post is just to comment:

I find it very difficult to even start working on Friday.  Forget about finishing anything.

Current Mood: lazy

Some friends (hi, dontfeedthetiki!), my husband and I will be leaving in a couple of weeks to go up to New York for a festival.  This is the...fourth year we've gone, I think, and every year it gets better.  I begin anticipating and planning for the trip a good six months in advance, and I'm gradually getting more and more excited.  My excitement has manifested in several ways -- I've begun meal planning, making sure we have all the supplies we need, and blogsearching to see if anyone else is as excited as I am.

I found a few posts from people who are going, and that made me think: this year, for the first time, the husband and I will be going up for the whole week.  We're very much homebodies, and just hang out at our camp most of the time, and we don't mix and mingle much.  This is a pagan festival, and I'm pagan only in the most general "not a Christian, Jew or Muslim" sense, and I often feel like we don't really fit in.  We usually hang out with the druids, a very hospitable group, but I'd like to expand my horizons this year -- talk to other people, hear other ideas, try new things.  I love being exposed to things I haven't been exposed to before -- I'm not a believer not because I don't want to believe, but because I'm very hard to convince. Try to convince me.

Anyway.  Finding other posts made me think that maybe other people are as excited as I am, and blogsearching to see what they can find!  So, I'm putting out a call -- if you are going to Sirius Rising at Brushwood in Sherman, NY, post a comment and say hi.  I'm a 20-something fiddler and singer who likes few things better then reading, cooking and making music in the woods.  We always camp back in the woods on the other side of the hill...a bit of a hike, I know, but we love company.  And there's usually something good to eat or drink.