Ganked from azure_dragon and scandiamaxie

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien I started but never finished - I can never get past that godawful Tom Bombadil chapter
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 - I've read a few, but it's a lot to get through
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 Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (all underlined except for So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, which was dull)
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 (??? Isn't that part of #33?)
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 (Utter drivel)
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 (400 pages of descriptions of countryside with an added paragraph of dying sheep. Yeah, that's my idea of a great read...)
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (Didn't like the movie; it's put me off the book)
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 (Hated it)
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
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 (Again, surely part of the Complete Works of Shakespeare?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So that's 27 read (28, if you include being forced to read Far From The Madding Crowd), and another 10 (11 if you include Hamlet as a seperate entry) that I intend to read.

By the way, is anyone else amused that Harry Potter places above the Bible?

The two hatched baby cardinals are doing just fine. Momma C isn't brooding anymore, but I did see her bring food to them, and they're both still doing the automatic open-mouth-wait-for-food thing as soon as anything gets near the nest, bird or human. Looks like the unhatched egg is a dud as there's still just the two of them.

Well, almost anyway.

As you may or may not know, Grace and I have a koi pond in our back yard. Between the pond and the house is a bush of some sort (I don't claim to be any good at this whole nature thing). Here's a photo from when we first moved in - it's the tall one on the right behind the concrete bench thingy:
( photos and more behind the cut )

Hilarious. I'm working on getting Sasha to do some cat yodelling right now

Behind cuts for your viewing pleasure

( Ho, Ho, Bloody Ho )

( For zis, I keeeel you )

( Hmm... feels kinda mouse-shaped and- Oh crap! Someone's coming! )

( Zoe tries to take her hat off (video) )

What with the long weekend thanks to umm... Thanksgiving, Brenda's been dragging me around the shops looking for gifts and decorations (everything's 50% off at Hobby Lobby). We've spent the last few days setting up our new tree (bought in San Antonio just after Christmas last year), and putting together garlands on the mantlepiece and the bookshelf in the living room, and today has been filled with giftwrapping and (unfortunately for me) Christmas music (bleccch).

Anyway, here's the results of our hard work:



Other photos here


In other news, we started Nutrisystem just over a week ago. We've been very good at sticking to it (except for Thursday which of course was filled with turkey, booze and other unhealthy things) but we've already lost somewhere around 10lbs between the two of us.

It's a little late, but here's this year's Halloween pumpkin:


Brenda had some problems with hers - she scraped the inside too much, causing some of the thinner pieces of the design to break. She wasn't particularly happy with the simple one she did on the other side either, so I won't post it here.

While I'm doing photos, I thought this was cute too. I had to take it quick before she moved, so it's a little on the fuzzy side:

Just a little shy of its 3rd birthday, my iPod has passed on. It is no more, ceased to be, expired and gone to meet it's maker, kicked the bucket, begun pushing up daisies and shuffled its mortal coil. It is an ex-iPod.

It's been showing the signs of old age for a few months now. Like most old people, it could no longer cope with volume (though the little bar went up and down, the volume itself wouldn't change), it occasionally got a little forgetful ("Sorry, I don't remember the third verse of that one, how about I just play you something else entirely?"), and sometimes even a little spiteful ("You left me in the hot car for a couple of hours! Not gonna play that song, now. Or that one.")

Today though it issued it's final death rattle. Getting in the car (no, it hadn't been left in there this time) I hit the Shuffle Songs option and it really did. It began to flick through every song in my library at a reasonably fast pace without playing a single note.

I tried to do a restore, but iTunes won't recognise it any more, and the various other things that Apple Support suggested didn't do anything. I'd send it in for repair, but as it's a pre-video model, it would actually cost more to have it repaired than to buy a new one!

Ah well, we've had some good times, but all things must come to an end eventually. Plus at least I know what I want for Christmas now...

So on Wednesday I headed into Dallas to take my NREMT exam. Didn't really know if I was ready or not, but I figured I had to get it over with sooner or later. As it turned out, I seemed to have a lot of very similar questions, just worded in different ways. I lost count of how many times the multiple choice answers wanted me to give patients nitroglycerin for their chest pain (not until I call Med Control, I don't), but it definitely turned up a lot. And was always the incorrect answer.

I found out Thursday that I passed by going to the NREMT website, but I've been holding off on posting until I got the hardcopy through the mail, which I was assuming would give me my percentage score.

I assumed wrong.

So while I am now a licensed EMT-Basic in the entire US (I have the ugly little card and funky shoulder patch to prove it), I have no idea if I aced it or scraped through, and it's really pissing me off. I got 92% on my class final exam, and the instructors claimed that we would likely drop between 5 and 10% for the NREMT, so I really want to know if I beat those odds. I can't see any way of finding out though. Grr...

Anyway, next up - find a job. Preferably one that pays well :-)

Wow, been a while since I used this thing. Not sure why, but I seem to have got out of the habit of clicking over to LJ on my daily internet trawl. I'm sure I've missed a lot of stuff going on with everyone and for that I apologise.

Of course a big reason for not posting is that it's not like I do much to talk about. Currently studying for my NREMT exam which is next Wednesday. I quit my job at the beer and wine store because I was finding it impossible to find time to effectively study in and kept having to put my test date back, which was fortunately free to do. I enjoyed my time there, particularly once I got to do orders (bringing in new beer for me to try is always fun), but it's not like I ever planned to be there for that long in the first place, and once I've got my exam done, I really need to look for a job that'll utilise my new skills. I'll be looking into Clinical Tech positions at the hospitals around here for sure. I know Children's Hospital down in Dallas does hire EMT-B's in that position and trains in IVs and taking blood, etc., but I'd rather not have to drive that far every day.

In other news, when the whole David Beckham signing for Los Angeles Galaxy was announced, I persuaded Brenda to come to some FC Dallas games with me as she's always said that Beckham's nice to look at as long as he doesn't speak. She agreed, so I signed us up for the 5 game "Beckham ticket package" which included 4 regular season games, and the Superliga game that promised to be Beckham's first game against MLS opposition (it wasn't, because he's constantly injured, but that's another matter).

Anyway, a weird thing happened - Brenda actually became a fan. She claims that she doesn't really know what's going on, but I think she understands more than she gives herself credit for. She upgraded our package to half-season tickets, and we've seen some great games so far. We also won a corporate suite for the game on Saturday against DC United for 20 people. Should be fun.

Stupid severe storms. Why can't they happen while I'm at home with no plans of going anywhere instead of while I'm at work?
*grumble*

So the other day, Grace and I went to see Gomez (and Ben Kweller but, apparently unlike a large portion of the audience, we were just there for Gomez really. Kweller was still good though, despite having the flu or something). Needless to say, we forgot to take our camera with us, but I figured I'd try taking some photos with my phone. This is the best of the bunch, and let's face it, camera companies really don't have much to worry about if this is the best my phone can do. Gomez were fantastic and what made it all the better was that after Ben Kweller finished, everyone rushed to the bar and we suddenly found ourselves with only about 3 people between us and the stage, and we were dead centre as well. Haven't been that close since my festival days, and fortunately, Gomez aren't the kind of band that has a mosh pit, so even Brenda got to get up close without having to worry about being trampled by people twice her height. We had a great view of all three of the front guys, and I don't know about Brenda but I could see most of the rest of the stage pretty easily too. They played pretty much all my favourites except for In Our Gun, but I figured they wouldn't be playing that as it's their only song that uses an upright bass and there wasn't one on stage. One thing I did learn about Brenda is that she hates latecomers who try to push their way to the front. One guy bore the brunt of this as she manhandled him out of our way. And I was left for a moment thinking "Ah crap, now I'm going to have to defend her when he tries to retaliate". Fortunately for all concerned (mostly me), he didn't and was probably too much in shock that a 5 foot nothing girl (exaggeration, but you know what I mean) threw him out of the way.

I'm considering shaving my head to raise money for a cure for childhood cancer. Only thing is, I'm not willing to give up my hair for a paltry sum. What I want to know, before I sign up, is how many of you would be willing to sponsor me? It doesn't have to be much, but every little helps. You can donate online or over the phone (but don't do it now, I'm not registered yet).

Britney paid to do it, but I'm no fool. You gotta show me (or St. Baldrick's at least) the money!

Netflix for books. Granted, we cancelled our Netflix because we never watched the movies, but I'm pretty sure we'd get more use out of this. Both of us always have at least 1 book on the go.

Randomly stumbling around the interwebs led me to find Looking For Group, a very well-drawn and funny comic based on World of Warcraft. It's only about 15 strips long so far, so there's not much point in me rattling on, why not just go read it yourself?

One word - fan-bloody-tastic!

Ok, The Departed is still my favourite film of the last year, but if Forest Whitaker doesn't win Best Actor at the Oscars (and the BAFTAs for that matter) this year, then it will be an utter travesty.

I'm not going to delve into anything that would spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it, so I'll just say one more thing. Gillian Anderson looks way, way better now than she ever did as Scully.

Oh, while I'm here, does anyone know of a good website where you can bet on the Oscars? Last year I picked all 6 of the big 6 awards (Actor/ress, Supporting Actor/ress, Director, Picture) and probably would have won a decent amount on a small accumulator bet. This year I've got a pretty firm idea on at least 3 cateogries so I'd like to be able to make a small (read couple of bucks at most) bet but I have no idea of how to go about it.

Yeah, I got them all correct, which means a whole lot of people have taken it and got 100% since mrsjadephoenix did. Very US-centric though.

This week has been pretty busy. On Wednesday I took my TABC permit course, which basically allows me to legally serve drinks when we do the winetastings at the store. Dead easy, but very time consuming - ironically, I almost missed starting up a tasting because it was taking so friggin' long.

Yesterday was the written part of my drivers test. Easy again, particularly as I managed to get about 5 questions on punishments for DWI and the like which, oh, I'd just learned the day before thanks to TABC.

Today, of course was the road test. I was a little bit worried about this one as, in 9 years of driving, I think I've parallel parked once since my last test. So this morning, after getting my appointment time, I went out and practiced. Managed to get the hang of it pretty quickly, but in the end it didn't really matter. I'd forgotten that the space they use to park in is absolutely massive to take into account the idiots testing in Ford F150s or Explorers. It was so big, I didn't even need to straighten up, just zipped back and was in.

So yeah, I passed and now I'm fully legal to drive in TX. Judging by other road users, this appears to entitle me to:
- drive at 30mph above the speed limit at all times and in all conditions,
- weld down my indicator lever, as this is never used in TX,
- perform an emergency stop and/or cut across three lanes of traffic each time I spot a drive-thru I suddenly want to frequent,
- talk on the phone and drink coffee simultaneously while driving on the highway
amongst other things. Fun times.

Huh, according to my calendar thingumajig, I've not posted here since the 20th of December. That's probably true actually, seeing as that last few posts I've started I've ended up deleting in disgust, boredom or a combination of the two.

So let's see...
Happy Christmas and other December holidays!
Happy New Year!
Outrage at [insert retarded thing that Bush administration did here]*!
Other things!

*It's not like there's not a whole lot to choose from

Tonight I had a beer that was 21% alkeyhol. Damn, it was the most awesome thing that's been in my mouth since... well, actually since about a few hours before - we also went to Banana Leaf which do the most awesome Thai curries (besides mine). Just what I needed to warm me up on this cold Dallas day.

We've had some serious rain over the last few days; in fact the koi pond is already overflowing. It's a good thing the fishies are in hibernation and spending all their time on the bottom of the pond or they might get washed away!

The 'rents were here over New Year which was pretty cool. We had good weather then, so we got to do a whole load of fun things like going to San Antonio and Austin and eating and drinking way too much. They had a good time and were continually amazed by how much cheaper everything is here. Once I get my citizenship, I'll have to sponsor them for their own green cards - they'll be able to live like kings if they ever decided to move here.

In other news, Gomez are going to be in Dallas in February so I snapped up tickets as soon as they went on sale. I've only seen them once, at one of the festivals, but I'm really looking forward to it. Ben Ottewell has a fantastic voice. Here's a video of them on Leno for those of you that don't know them:



In other, other news, Michael C. Hall is up for a Golden Globe for Dexter. I will be most unhappy if he doesn't win - he and the show are both fantastic. Can't wait for the second season...

Working in a beer and wine store does have its downside - the temptation to buy all that wonderful beer. On the upside, my beer fridge is now fairly well stocked for Christmas!

I have
6 bottles Fuller's London Porter (possibly my favourite beer ever)
5 bottles Pyramid Curveball (Ok, it's a summer beer, but it's damn good!)
4 bottles Shiner 97
2 bottles Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA (possible my second favourite beer ever)
1 bottle Dogfish Head Midas Touch (a recipe based on an analysis of the drinking vessels found in King Midas' tomb)
1 bottle Unibroue La Fin Du Monde
1 bottle Unibroue Maudite
1 bottle Unibroue Blanche de Chambly
1 bottle Full Sail Pale Ale
1 bottle Rahr Blonde Lager
1 bottle New Belgium Sunshine Wheat
1 bottle Samuel Smith's India Ale
1 bottle Avery Karma
and a load of Shiner Bock too.

Yum!