PstLyfDiva

I took a geek test and scored "Total Geek"....and the geeks shall inherit the earth.

And now, a literature survey:

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and bold those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 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

Total:6

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy  
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 3

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
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

Total: 7

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 (How is this separate from the Chronicles?)
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

Total: 7

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (HURRAY!)
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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 7

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 - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 3

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy x
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 4

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 Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total: 3

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

Total: 5

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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 6

Grand Total: 51

My parents' visit was great.  The four of us had a really nice weekend together, shopping the farmers market, visiting galleries, lots of great food and even more cocktails.  My mom has come so far in the last two years in terms of accepting me, Christina and our life.  Moms often bring silly things to their adult children, my mom brought me a pair of Halloween socks.  She also brought one for Christina, that is huge for her and there is no way that would have happened even 1 year ago.  I am proud of my mom and I appreciate the work she has done to get to this point.  I know she still wishes that things were different, but she is accepting my life and that means the world.  

The one darkspot on the weekend was that my mother fell while in DC.  Apparently she missed stepping up onto the curb and fell right on her arm.  She was very proud that she didn't run her hose, but her arm was swollen, multi-colored and obviously painful.  My mother avoids the doctor like the plague, she has my whole life.  My dad tried to get her to go in DC, she wouldn't.  We tried to get her to go here, she wouldn't.  I threatened if she didn't go when they got back to AZ I wouldn't come out for Thanksgiving.  She went yesterday, a week after falling...she has a broken arm! Not a fracture, not a chip, full on broken and needs surgery and pins.  The doctors said they couldn't believe she was able to stand the pain that long.  I knew she was in pain, but she will never complain of pain.  She is having surgery today or tomorrow.  I hope her prolonged wait to seek medical attention doesn't cause her problems in the long run.  Stubborn much?

So many countdowns seem to be starting this week..................

First I have a model home move in next week. This was an easy one though, as I am only moving an existing model to a new one...I had very little new things to design or select.    

My parents are coming next weekend.  We have dilly-dallied the past month or so when we should have been preparing...but that is ok.  We still have time to make everything fabulous.  Sometimes we need a kick in the pants to jump start us to do projects we have talked about.  My parents visiting is usually the kick.  We started painting the living room over the weekend and I absolutely love it.  Just seeing it makes me excited to do more.  Even though I work in the industry, it still is amazing to me how one can of paint can totally change the feeling a house has.  

The other countdown is a three year plans that Christina and I have laid out for ourselves that includes her graduation, a wedding and a baby.  We have loftily talked about starting our family for years, but now we have a schedule and a plan.  I am really excited.  Of course that will be an awkward conversation with my parents, but an awkward conversation is not stopping us from our dreams!   Christina has now dubbed all of our house improvements, etc, "Making Room for Baby".  That caused a little confusion among her friends that I was already expecting, but we cleared that up right away.


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Christina and I had a great time with my grandparents.  Every night we piled up on the sofa and looked at old family photos, some from the turn of the 20th century.   Christina had never really seen many pictures of me as a small child, as I only have a handful at the house that span my entire childhood through high school.  It was great fun.  We ended up taking home many.  One big bag is for us to keep and then a box of very old treasures of photos.  Those we took under the guise of restoring them, which Christina will do, but the true reason is to make family photo books for Christmas.  I looked on Sn@pfi$h, they have some great book styles; I am really excited to see the finished products.  We haven't decided if they will all be the same or somewhat personalized to the recipients yet.  Either way, I expect they will become family treasures.

I had never seen many pictures of my biological great-grandfather, he passed away when my grandfather was a small boy.  There were quite a few pictures of him in the boxes, which is amazing in and of itself, as he was a factory worker in rural Alabama and these would have been taken in the height of the Depression.  We even found all of my grandmother's school pictures and her grades.

There was even a postcard written by my  grandmother's mother to her father in 1952,  when she was riding with my grandparents from her home Alabama to their home upstate New York.  The image on the front is of a quaint old-time road stop motel.  The caption was the small town (that has since been absorbed by our city) where Christina's university is located and is named for.  According to W!k!ped!a it is only 8.7 square miles.  What are the odds that 50+ years later we would have such a connection to this little blip on the map place?  Of course that came home with us! 

We really couldn't have asked for a better trip.  I am still amazed at how far my family has come in the last year.  I am filled with joy to feel like I am fully part of the family again.  

I talked to my grandmother last night, she is quite a character.  I honestly have never met someone who talks as much as she does and finds a way to transition from two completely different topics smoothly.    The conversation can start about dinner, go to the gutters, maybe clothes, her church friends and wind up talking about the fabric for her dining room chairs.  Keeping up can at times be futile.  Christina loves when she leaves a message because it always goes something like, “Laura? This is your Grandmommy LastName from way down south in Huntsville, AL.” (I should note that I only have one living set of grandparents and have for the last 14 years, of which she is fully aware.) She then proceeds to leave a message that is at least 5 minutes long about everything she has done, each time you think she is about to end she starts back and if she runs out of things to say about either my grandfather or herself she tells me about my parents  and sister…who I talk to daily.  I love her to death, but she is a world class chatterbox. 

 

Last night she called because Christina and I are driving down to visit them this weekend and she wanted to tell me the plans she made.  This will be Christina’s first time visiting them, though they met in AZ last Christmas.  Since meeting last year, my grandfather always asks about her and sends his love, which I find incredibly sweet.  We are looking forward to the visit.  It will be nice to have some one on one time with them and it will also be a nice little vacation for us in a time when vacations aren’t really doable.   

 

If you told me a year ago that we would be going to my grandparents’ house this summer I would have thought you were crazy.  My mom tried her hardest to keep our relationship a secret from them, you know…keeping up appearances.  Amazing the changes a year make though, this time last year I was trying to work up the nerve to talk to my parents about bringing her to Christmas, this year my father was the first to say, “And of course Christina is invited.”   It took 7 years for us to get to this point, a lot of time wasted, but being here feels wonderful.

Last fall we went apple picking, a whim I had that inadvertently opened up a new world to me...canning.  I am probably one of the last people that one would imagine to be a canner.  I love to cook, but don't do "down-home" cooking, however there I was with about 40lbs of apples and needed to do something with them.  I made the obligatory apple pie...four times in two weeks. There is only so much apple pie that two people can eat.   I tried an apple cake (fail), an apple pancake (success) and many other baked goods, but still barely made a dent in the apples.  Perusing the internet for apple recipes I came across a recipe for apple lemon marmalade and decided that with absolutely no experience I would make it and can it.  I made 12 jars of apple lemon marmalade, it was good, but a very specific taste, I didn't know how many jars of that I could really use or give away.  So then I tried apple butter....it was to die for!  I already have "orders" for it this year.  And thus a canning queen was born.  From the beginning of October, when we picked the apples, until Christmas I made:  apple lemon marmalade, apple butter, orange marmalade, cranberry jam, and cranberry mustard...I was hooked.  For Father's Day this year I made peach bbq sauce, Thai sweet and spicy chili sauce, mango curry, Oktoberfest mustard and a sweet & hot mustard. 

We planted a garden this year, so I can make tomato sauces and other tasty treats.  They are still green and I was eager to start canning, so last weekend I looked up on http://www.pickyourown.org where we could pick blueberries.  I found a place http://www.woodallblueberries.blogspot.com/  about an hour away with hours that fit our work schedules and had reasonable prices and conned Christina into going.  G00glemaps took us on a roundabout way to get there, but the drive was beautiful, magnificent views, which only added to the evening.  We spent about an hour and a half picking and got two gallons (about 12 lbs) of berries for $15!  We were the last pickers for the season, so the owner knocked a few dollars off the regular price.  We went a different way home and counted 64 deer on the way.  Beautiful.

I gathered recipes last week and started working my way through the berries this weekend.  I made blueberry jam, blueberry lime jam and blueberry citrus marmalade -- total of 24 jars.  I am going to make more of the plain and I think the lime.  I also made a blueberry danish that was delish.  This week we are going to make blueberry sour cream ice cream to have when a friend comes for dinner.  At this point I have about half the berries left, whatever is left at the end I am planning on freezing, so we can have delicious blueberry treats all year long.  

I can't pinpoint exactly what it is about canning that I love so much, but I truly find it cathartic.  Maybe it is the combination of cooking and science and being so involved that my mind is freed from all other worries.  Maybe it is my inner introvert loving to have time to herself.  Whatever it is, I am glad I have found it, not only do I enjoy it, but the fruits of my labors are enjoyed by many! 

 

Not that I post much here, but in case anyone sees this I wanted to put a plug in for my partner, Christina.

I nominated her for a tech makeover to help her out with school.  She is a photography major and is extremely lacking in the way of needed technology.  If you click here you can read her story and also vote for her:  http://www.needatechmakeover.com/2008/10/laura-needs-a-tech-makeover-because/

The judging isn't based solely on votes, but they do factor in, so each vote helps.  One of the judges even highlighted her as one of her favorites on her blog: http://mightygirl.com/2008/10/08/chances-one-in-85-baby/ 

Thanks!! 

And imagine if she won, I would really have something to post about!! 

I know it is four months until Christmas, but for me it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas! 

After 6 years and 6 Christmases not spend together Christina will be coming to Arizona with me for the holidays.  I emailed my father earlier this week stating my case, that the holidays were hard for me not having the person I share my life with with me, not even being able to mention her.  He was very supportive and talked to my mom.  He showed her my email, in which I was very honest about how it all made me feel, more honest than I have ever been with them about it all.  Shockingly my mom agreed!  So it looks like Christina and I will be headed to the desert this Christmas! All I can say is, "Wow!" 

I am happy, nervous, excited, anxious and so much more all at once.  

Apparently since moving over from Di@ryl@nd I have not be very attentive to my little patch of the internet. But never fear, lists can appear!

To continue my list of 100 Thing to Do Before I Go, I present you with 21-40

21. Be in the audience when Christina graduates, beaming with pride.
22. Be a supportive mother.
23. Take lots of pictures and keep them organized to share
24. Watch the sunrise on a sleepy beach
25. Pay someone else to mow the yard
26. Keep a neater house, so it can truly be our sanctuary
27. Accept mom's issues as her own.
28. Play the violin again
29. Do something kind for someone who needs it anonymously
30. Have late night dinner parties at long tables where no one notices the time because the food, drink and conversation are so good
31. Make amends with Jerome.
32. Smell our babies' hair after they are born
33. Ask for and accept help when I need it
34. Live in the now
35. Watch less television
36. Bake cookies with our future kids
37. See the pyramids
38. Have a book published
39. See the Taj Mahal
40. Take Christina and our children to pick mussels, like I did as a little girl


Getting these things in writing has kick started something in me. Updates from the list posted last month:
19. Plant a vegetable garden -- we started seedlings which will be planted outside in the not to distant future!
20. Recycle more -- we have been avidly recycling everything we can and have turned it into more of a game than a chore.  

After reading Maggie's at MightyGirl
I thought it was a great idea so here is the start of my list:
1. Get married and it be legal
2. Resolve issues with mom
3. Officially come out to my grandparents
4. Get out of debt
5. Experience pregnancy and birth
6. Have Christina be legal co-parent of future children
7. Have Christmas with entire family, including Christina
8. Finish college…finally
9. Learn to be less self-protective and instead just “be”
10. Lay on a blanket outside and look at the stars
11. Take picnics regularly
12. Take Christina to Paris for the first time and watch her face when she sees the Eiffel Tower
13. Travel to Asia
14. Finish losing weight and maintain
15. Read at least one book a month
16. Volunteer again
17. Find my passion
18. Take time for myself – walks, spa, read, whatever
19. Plant a vegetable garden
20. Recycle more

So we are starting to do a bit of groundwork heading towards starting our family. I am switching gyns to one that is family friendly,. I ordered a dvd from a $perm bank we are interested in. Right now it is baby steps (no pun intended), but steps none the less. I find myself reading more and more blogs of pregnant or trying to conceive women and feeling vested in their successes and challenges. Even though it is a few years before we can begin, it makes it more real to be doing these little things right now. Sigh.

Life has been a rollercoaster this year, though honestly, when is it not? I need to take time and do things I enjoy for me, that really has not been in my repertoireas of late. I have a long list of life changes I am embarking on making, I think they will not only behoove me mentally, but physically and financially. I have been too much of an observer of life the past couple of years, it is high time to reclaim my life...to own it.

Here are the plans, anything I have already done towards it is in brackets
1. Lose weight (Already lost 25lbs, want to lose another 30lbs)
2. Get control of finances (This is the first year my Christmas bonus is going towards reponsible things, something that will help us gain control on our monthly finances)
3. Excercise, not only for weightloss, but for mental wellbeing. A couch potato isn't usually a happy person (Does buying a fitness DVD count towards progress?)
4. Buckle down at work -- I am so much happier at work when I don't slack. (This week I have been making a conscious effort to stay on task. I haven't been perfect, but been a lot better and therefore happier)
5. Get the house clean
6. Get the house organized
7. Plan our wedding. We have not focused on planning, mostly because of finances and it is hard for me to get excited without having family support. It is time to get excited!!
8. Work on uniting my family and bringing C into the fold.


I am almost giddy to make these changes!

Yep, it is official. I am a nerd. How about you?

So all in all the visit with my parents went well.

They arrived late Wednesday night and I went to dinner with them sans C at a little Thai place. Thursday I spent the day with them, visiting all their favorite old haunts. We stopped by my office so they could see it; they hadn’t seen it since we moved. Of course my nutty boss accosted them, in a good way.

Then came Thursday night, the night they met C. I made reservations at a nice local restaurant. I had actually only been there once before, the last time they were in town, it was good then and owned by the same people who own one of the nicest places in town, so I thought it was a good place. My parents arrived 20 minutes late. C and I were both extremely nervous, their tardiness only made us more so. When they got there my mother didn’t take off her sunglasses and continued to wear them until a few minutes after we were seated. She had obviously been crying. The service was terrible, they repeatedly got my father’s drink wrong (how difficult is it to make a citron martini?!), we ordered two appetizers, only one came out, the waitress disappeared time and time again. But you know what? I think that helped the evening, it broke the tension and created something to laugh about.

My father really made C feel welcome and was very warm to her. My mother was polite and cordial, but didn’t engage C in conversation and never really made eye contact with her. She did have one of the reject drinks they brought my father though, which helped matters immensely. Much to my surprise she invited C to go to breakfast and spend the day with us on Saturday. At the end of the evening my father hugged C and my mother gave her the cheek. You know what I mean – that thing a woman does when she knows a handshake is too formal, but doesn’t really want to hug you. More than I truly expected out of a woman who has managed to go 5+ years without ever saying the name of her daughter’s girlfriend.

Saturday was much more relaxed, we went to our favorite dive breakfast place, down to the Market and a couple of other places. Again my father made C feel welcome. My mother tried, but she isn’t “there” yet. I don’t fault her for that at all; I know this was a huge step.

After they left I sent my mother flowers with a note that acknowledged that she faced something that she feared and telling her I appreciated it and hoped that we could open up a dialogue now. I hope this is the first step towards our family being truly whole again and my mother acknowledging that it includes C.

C and I are ecstatic that this weekend does not involve any home renovations to prep for their visit. We worked for 6+ weekends and then for 2 weeks during the week as well. A weekend of movies at home sounds fantastic!

We had our German Shepherd/Basset Hound fixed Monday. He is around 10 years old. How he became ours is a long, family dramatic story full of resentment and lack of communication that started about 2 ½ years ago.

We were originally supposed to have him for 2 weeks, which turned into a year, then a year and a half with no financial contributions from the “owners”. He came with a half of a bag of W@lm@rt dog food (which he refused to eat), a rusty bowl and a collar that was too small. That was it. We got him a dog house, senior-age food, biscuits, bones, a bed, etc. Then they called and said they were ready to take him back. They planned to tie him up. We said no; that was the day Yappie became our dog.

He wasn’t fixed when he came to us, but since he wasn’t ours we didn’t think it was our right to fix him. His former owner, a relative by (almost) marriage, was aghast when we talked about fixing him. We let the guilt he put on us prevent us from doing it the first time we took him to the vet last year. We talked about it, but it always came back to that.

Then last week he got out three times within 36 hours, running after a dog in heat. The final time he squeezed out through the gate of the fence, catching his tail in the process and ripping out a chunk of fur. This couldn’t go on. Not only for our sanity, but for his safety. Friday we made an appointment for him to get his shots on Monday and also talk about neutering him. I told my friend, “I am so c0ckbl0cking him.”

We had the first appointment in the morning and the vet asked how soon we wanted to do it. I said, “ASAP” – he said, “How about today?” Now that is service. It was perfect, it was really the only day that it was convenient as my parents are coming to town today and we had a lot on our plate!

He came through the surgery fine and was completely stoned when I picked him up. He is such a sweet boy; he just wanted to be petted. He did fine until we went to bed and he started a true Bassett Hound moan, which I have never heard him do before and he did it all night. He was better yesterday after he (finally) took his pain medicine.

And his former owner? We decided it was none of his business what we do with OUR dog.

My parents arrive tomorrow evening. I will be their first time in the Star City in 3 years. The last time they came was only for a couple of hours as a stop through after we spent Thanksgiving in NC with my sister.

They are arriving fairly late, so I will have a drink with them at their hotel. I am taking Thursday and Friday afternoons off to spend with them, which will be nice family time. Thursday evening they will meet C for the first time.

Wow.

It is nerve wracking. C and I have been together 5 ½ years and they are just meeting her now. I am anxious, nervous, excited, eager, dreading, basically every emotion in the world that pertains to first meetings. I really hope this meeting opens up a new kind of relationship with my family, especially my mom. She doesn't have to agree with it right off, but she does have to accept it. This is obviously real. We have put in the time, we have done the work. We are for real.

I am also scared, scared that this will backfire and irreparably damage my mother and my relationship. It has suffered enough as it is. It used to be fantastic, but she has preferred to ignore the most important part of my life and therefore neglected our bond.

52 hours my parents, C and I will be sharing a meal. Wish us luck!