RyRySays

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read ENTIRELY
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
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ?*
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy-x+
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (at some point *)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Sallinger x
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 x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens x
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (it's long man)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (see 24)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x+ (all 7)
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x + (umm that's one of the chronicles - way to go BBC)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x*
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
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 x + (that whole series too)
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
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 x
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 x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x+
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 x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (see 24 again)
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
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
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -x*
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom-x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x (in the process of reading the complete set of short stories)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
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 x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - x*+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x

A bunch of these are the "girlie" long-winded romance novels - the Eyre sister type stuff. I'm not into those books. Too many details! The ideas are great, the movies are decent...the words...loooooong. I think I will try to read them again now, when I might appreciate them more (hopefully). I do like books lists like this though - I think I will try to return to a New Year's resolution of the past to check out 1 classic with 1 new book every time I go to the library.

Here's Texts 1 and here are new ones since then:

True of false. Donald Duck is an only child.

Drugs are good.

When thou shalt decideth upon the hour of departure, whilst thou forward notification unto said inquirer?

It's officially the flu. They're giving me some weird ass inhaler.

In about...well now I am.

[In 3 texts, the entire dialogue from Monty Python regarding the Holy Hand Grenade]

Ike is the guy that Wyatt wants to make his head into a canoe

Shoes? For what?

Merry New Years

Your no good what is it?

The fact that I actually know what curling is scares me - I am losing my blackness - of to the hood I go

There is a raccoon behind my house. We are not friends

That girl ain't got shit on you

Nice. Lovely product of the weekend

Sorry. Been watching top model all day

I am sure someone dies since its sparks

I don't watch your face

Didn't see it. Can't remember reading it.

Mcdreamy is a mcdouche

Hells yea

Dr. Mary Minkin said 3

Does it go to kicks like soccer?

That 3d was giving me a headache

Teleflora is a roll co.

I am sitting on my couch and guess what I could use...snuggie

You You You

I went to Raleigh this weekend, intending to visit my uncles and hang out with them, but instead staying at my brother's house with his roommate(s). I did see my uncles and aunts and we had fun, but Matt's my second brother and it's been a long time since we've had faux-family game night. We played Pictionary first and Sam and I kicked butt...his guess of my drawing for Nelson Mandela sealed the victory. Then we saw Gran Torino - good movie, I recommend.

Matt, JB and I played multiple games of Life. I never really enjoy Life as a kid - it always seemed kind of boring. As an adult, it was a little more fun. I don't know if the game has changed, but insurance and stocks and things like that are used now and we never used them as kids. The one thing that does suck about Life is that it basically always ends up better than your real life. I mean, in one game I was a doctor, making $100,000 each payday (and never landed on taxes, thank you), had a husband, a girl, then twin boys, had a Victorian mansion and a lake house, saw Mount Rushmore, donated money to charities, had a boat and art, invented a mouse trap, discovered a planet, won a Pulitzer and a Noble peace prize, retired in the Millionaires club and still had $2.5 million in cash. Currently, I rent, have no husband or children, don't own anything worth more than $1000 (probably actually less than that), and have a good amount of college loans to pay off. I do kick ass at Pictionary though, so that's something.

It started off last night actually. I have a very sensitive gag reflex and I can't spit right. The combination is not good. It leads, on occasion, to vomiting. One of said occasions was last night. I am not a good puker; I'm full body, with nose, eyes, etc. involved. It's not pretty. I am also not sure if food poisoning was involved too because I ate salad with chicken (which should have been ok) and slightly questionable ranch. Either way, not a pleasant sight. Plus, lucky me, I missed the potty and hit the sink...which wasn't draining properly. So I used my coat hanger (aka home made toilet snake which I used to unclog my shower a few weeks ago) to open the drain wider. This led to cleaning the bathroom and re-brushing my teeth. And changing pjs.

This morning began with getting woken up an hour before my alarm with a combination of pacing, whining and barking from the dog. I ignored it for a few minutes, but I could tell that this was an emergency situation, so I got up.

Next was the rain. Normally rain doesn't bother me. The reason it's a problem right now is because the windshield wiper motor in my car is currently broken. Oddly enough, my appointment to get it fixed was today. So I drove, slowly, in the rain. It was ok because as long as I went under 40, I could see. I had to stop a couple of times to let people pass, but otherwise it was ok.

See aforementioned car appointment. My original "guesstimate" for all the things that need to be repaired was $500. The actual (or should I say closer guess) is more like $1000. So...they didn't fix anything! Luckily it was only misting on the way home. However, the wipers are stuck in the "up" position and I can't shove them back down. So now I get to decide on if I want to drop $1k on an old car, or try to get a "new" one.

Then, when I walked through the door, I got the unmistakable whiff of crap...dog shit! yay! There was only a small bit on the carpet, the rest was on the hardwood. It had been there awhile, judging by the fact that it was stuck on the floor and required scrubbing. So after scooping, hand cleaning, then mopping, the floor is done. Carpet is still going through its treatment process.

Then I think I am getting sick again (well actually I don't think I ever got over the sinus infection and now it's just bad again). Sinus pressure is awful, slight fever and my eyes are red, watery and killing me. Plus my stomach is still queesy from last night and the whole dog poop buisness did not help matters.

Wish me luck for tomorrow!

You know when you're little and you try to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. It takes awhile, but you get the hang of it at some point. Try swishing mouth wash and blowing your nose. It's much harder...and messier if you screw it up.

Yesterday I decided it would be a good idea for me to do some yoga instead of taking a nap. I don't know why that thought came to me, but it did. I have a Yoga Zone DVD and popped it in. Now Layla always gets uneasy if I am standing in front of the TV, she thinks it's play time and if I am not playing with her than something is wrong. So I started the video and she watched from the side of the room, with a look that said really. As I attempted to do the correct version of table top she actually sighed, laid down and just gave me a look. Then, when we were doing up dog, hand to the sky, she came between me and the TV and did it. She stretched into up dog - back legs/hips down to the ground, push up on front arms and look to the sky...then she did downward dog and stretched the other way. I called her a bitch; she trotted out of the room. Then as I was doing cool down, she came back in and stuck her nose in my ear. Hopefully I will some day out perform my dog, but I seriously doubt it - I'm not stretchy.

There is not much going on these days. I should try to do something more interesting, not only so that I'll have something to blog about, but also that I am actually doing something.

Oh well. I got a collector's set of all the Harry Potter books for Christmas and just finished reading them again. Then I imdb'd the movies and am super excited that they decided to split the 7th movie into 2 parts - I wish they had done that for Goblet of Fire. Now I am debating about whether to read the Twilight series. I already read a bunch of "dorky" lit or teen lit, so the combo of vampires and 13 year old girls might push me over the edge on this one. But who knows, maybe I should read it. Then again I like to read everything in a series right in a row so maybe I should wait awhile and read them all together.

What else...Layla got her rabies shot last week and it took 30 seconds. The vet didn't charge a crazy amount or anything, but I was gone from work for like 1 1/2 hours for it and it made me wish that I could get do it myself, until I remember that's gross and I couldn't job the dog's back fat with a needle even though I know it doesn't hurt her. She also needs a haircut. That's about all that's new here. Maybe something interesting will happen soon.