I realize that this is likely viral (in the sense that you’ve all probably seen 14 links to it in the last two days), but … I can’t stop watching it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-jv8g1YVI

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. According to another blogger, they encourage us to:

*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE

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
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 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
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
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
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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
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
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
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (abriged)

I figure 38/100 isn’t bad!

• Gonzo, Camilla, and the Chickies present “Free Range Strauss“
• Beeker (and himself) bring you “Ode to Joy“
• The Swedish Chef and Beeker sing “Habanera” from Carmen
• Sam the Eagle with (what else) “Stars and Stripes Forever“

Oh - and Statler and Waldorf (the two heckling old guys) have their own account too.  They’re home.

Many thanks to Adam for showing this to me.  I’ve not laughed so hard in a long time.

While I realize that it is not my fault that my husband chose to wear his four pair of dress pants to the point where the fabric utterly gave out in the seat before telling me he needed new work pants…

… I also realize that I had all day to do laundry, and that his new pants arrived in the mail, and I could easily have washed them with the other loads of laundry before, say, 2am, so that he could go to work wearing proper clothing in the morning and not have his boxers visible through the holes in his pants.

I really need to stop procrastinating on laundry.

1. Fresh Produce is *expensive*
2. Growing your own herbs is fun, but sometimes frustrating. I have gorgeous basil and mint and oregano … but I can’t keep the dill alive.
3. I’m very happy to enjoy local restaurants. I’m even happier to enjoy those restaurants when I discover that they buy their fresh produce from local farmers.
4. If you put bacon in the pinto beans, you can’t call your dinner vegetarian.
5. Even if you think you have the knitting put away, the cat can still get to it and eat some of the yarn. (here we go again)
6. I need to vacuum.
7. Good moods are contagious. After long enough, so are bad moods.
8. Yesterday was World Wide Knit in Public day. I knit on some kitchen things at the barber shop and while waiting for lunch. The only people to notice were a 4 year old in the barber shop, and Mr Greek Guy Who Owns The Restaurant (who wanted to know if/why I was making a sweater).
9. Fresh blueberries make awesome muffins, but I think I like frozen blueberries better in cereal. Frozen slushy berry crunchies are good!
10. Happy Father’s Day!

Ok, I promise not to do it again.

But after reading some stuff on a few other blogs, I felt the need to plug my favorite political columnist/podcaster.

Meet Dan Carlin. 

He’s not a republican or a democrat.  He’s probably part martian, and he’s definitely slightly off his rocker.  And he’s quite entertaining (especially when he gets really worked up about something).  I listen to his stuff because it makes me think, and I like thinking.  Do I agree with him?  ehhh… sometimes.  But regardless, both Hardcore History and Common Sense (political) are things I look forward to getting in my iTunes little downloady window thing.

Anyway - if you’ve got some time to kill, or perhaps a traffic-ridden commute, you might enjoy one or both of these podcasts.

I know I know, the first thing you think of is Garfield: “Diet is just die with a ‘t’ at the end”

But this isn’t that kind of diet.

I’ve been somewhat inspired by all my cleaning out of stuff, and also by seeing Crazy Aunt Purl’s decision to do the same thing. I’ve been thinking about something like this for awhile, especially since, really, most of it is just stuff. So I’m going on a “no spending” diet, and I’m going to see if I can’t pinch a bit more out of our budget to go into savings while I whittle away at the clutter and unnecessary things hanging around this apartment.

I’ve a few motivations for this:

1. Stuff is *expensive* and driving to go get it is getting worse. I live in one of the most inexpensive areas of the country to get gas, and that’s not saying much. If we’re not buying stuff, we’re saving money on two ends.
2. Electricity is even more expensive, and it’s getting to be Texas in the summer. The electric bill is likely to go up astronomically, even with the AC set at 78 or 80 degrees.
3. I work as a substitute teacher, and I want to go back to school to get a Masters degree. This means possible education expenses on my end, and no income from my job until September.
4. We’re kicking around the idea of buying our first house, and that means we need to trim down. The less stuff we have, the less we have to move, and I do not want to move clutter/junk.
5. (crunchy granola moment) I feel like I live a bloated lifestyle. I know many people that grow their own vegetables and don’t run the air conditioner and make a lot of their own clothes, and - while some of that kind of thing isn’t possible for me right now - that kind of lifestyle appeals to me. Maybe I won’t go so far as to never shop at a grocery store again, but switching to inexpensive/homemade cleaners, cloth grocery bags, local produce, and air-drying what clothing I can (the apartment contract won’t let me have a clothes line) are things I know I can do to cut down on our “carbon footprint”.

What I haven’t decided is how the SCA stuff is going to fit into that particular paradigm. Any events that we want to attend require at least 1.5, and sometimes upwards of 5, hours of driving each way. Add to that a $20-$30 event fee, and the cost of food, and this starts to get to be a pricey day out. I know for sure I’m going to an event in June (since I’m teaching a class there), but that may be the only event we get to until later in the summer or the fall, especially with an already planned trip away for a weekend in July.

But I know that the no-stuff diet is going to force me to only sew, knit, and spin from my stash, so that’s at least one thing I know I’ll get to continue for the time being. And hey - medieval folks managed to make gowns out of a lot less than the fabric I have hanging around, so I’m sure I can figure something out.

Anyway - my crunchy granola-ness aside, this all just seems like a smart thing to do, especially since we’re young and still setting up our future. Hopefully making habits out of some of this will help in the long run.

I’m not sure what it is about “holiday” weekends, but there’s something about getting back to the daily life that I always enjoy. 

Today’s “to do” list isn’t too bad, but I’m enjoying the familiarity of my routines again.

What did I do for my holiday weekend though?  I cleaned!  I love to sew, and I have a fantastic old sewing machine (that I both love and hate), but in this apartment I don’t have a lot of room to set up anything, so I’ve converted a small walk-in closet into a sewing room. 

Unfortunately, this means that said sewing “room” must be hyper organized, or it gets extremely out of hand, and there’s no room to do any sewing.  I keep all my yarn in there too, in plastic bins. 

So yesterday I pulled it *all* out, set up the standard three stacks (pitch, donate, keep), and started The Great Sorting.  I found some stuff I forgot that I had, a fair amount of nice fabric that will get made into various things, the remnants of a few projects that shouldn’t take long to finish, and a lot of crap I should’ve thrown away a long time ago.

But I suppose that’s how closet cleaning goes.  I’m always amazed at what I can’t bear to part with… and that if, in a few months or a year, I take another look at things, often I don’t have the attachment anymore.  I suppose that’s why I go back and re-sort things after awhile.

Maybe this week I’ll tackle something else in the apartment - it’s felt more and more like we just have too much stuff.

What do you call an Egyptian traffic jam?

Tootin’ car men.

What does a gay horse eat?

*wristflop* Haaaaa~aaaaaay!

Preview and purchasing stuff available at:

www.brainrules.net

And suggest that everyone buy and read this book, especially if you are a teacher, but also if you are a human being that would like to work better/smarter and know about how your brain works. It’s easy reading, very interesting, and tackles 12 things about the human brain that we can all use to help us be more productive in our daily lives.

So far I’ve finished the first three, and I’m really impressed. As a teacher, I’m finding this a critical read.

Absolutely worth the price of the book, AND you get the DVD too! I found it pretty easily in a local chain bookstore.