Second, Second

This is a cozy photo of our couches right when we got them. Since then, I have taken away all the throw pillows. I got tired REAL QUICK of scolding the children to pick them up and stop playing with and on them. So, they disappeared from the scene. I do plan to make new more play-able and floor-able pillows using some pillow forms I got free from Dot 'n Jay, who got them from one of the storage-units they bought at auction, but obviously I haven't done it yet. How cozy and warm this picture looks!

First File, First Picture

I felt so successful doing that tag thing with the fourth photo in your fourth picture file that I decided to do one with my first file, first photo. Maybe next I'll do the 2nd, 2nd and then the 3rd 3rd and so on.

I actually have no active knowledge about this picture. It's taken on the back deck of our townhouse we rented for a year when we moved to Denver. The date on the picture leads me to believe that it might have something to do with the first day of school. Why else would I just take a random photo of Eric on the back deck, and why else would he be wearing a shirt with buttons and an undershirt, unless I made him for a special occasion like the first day of school? So that's what I think it is.

Here's Your Tag

Jodi tagged me to do the Google image search and I tried to do it but failed. Maybe in the future I'll try it again. THIS tag, however, proved to be the easiest one I've ever seen. This here picture is one of many, MANY pictures Eric and I have taken of his Bionicle creations. A couple of them he has uploaded to his Lego page and named. I don't know if this is one of them. I think this picture was actually taken by Eric, judging by the terrible framing. But it could have been me. You know what? No, it couldn't have been me. No way am I taking the picture and leaving the plunger in the frame. As a side note, Eric has been just taking the didge lately and grabbing his own photos of things, so it's a major blessing for Seth's peace of mind that my sister Dorothy found an awesome spongebob USB camera on sale at Target for 5 bucks for Eric's birthday. I feel that he will love it. Eric will. Seth will love Eric NOT using the family camera. I will love the software the comes with it and allows you to superimpose SpongeBob into your photos. So this is my "fourth file, fourth picture" tag and I don't know if it's fair to tag other people or if it will make me feel like a loser if they don't do it, so I'm going to go ahead and just tag.....mmmm...Gretch. And Jon. A little Blog Fodder for ya there.

I HAVE Read Something Good Lately

I saw on the list of 100 books Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne. You know, it's funny. I'm 30 some-odd years old and I never actualy realized there was a real official book. I should have. It's totally obvous. It had to come from somewhere, plus my sister-in-law Jodi was sending me quotes from it on my mission. My thing is, I don't know whether to let myself like Winnie the Pooh, because it's been so adulterated over the last 80 years. Plus the characters and stories have been totally raped since they've been bought by Disney. "Classic Pooh" merchandise?

So I took the children on a whim to the library, because Eric needed another Harry Potter book. And while we were there, on a whim, I looked up Winnie the Pooh, and there it was. The original book. Jules ridiculed me for checking out a Baby Book. Haha! Little does she know!

I actually really liked this book. I love the random capitalization, because I do that too. I love the cleverness and the way not everything is explained out in full detail. And most of all, I love Eeyore, and I'm about to write in my favorite quote, which I read out loud to Seth after reading it and laughing out loud.

The Old Grey Donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought,"Inasmuch as which?"--and sometimes he didnt' quite know what he was thinking about.

Classic! So, great book which I'll probably read aloud to the children sometime in the future, and too bad about it getting totally watered down and cheatinized. I actually feel the same way about Curious George. Although he's not quite as clever.

Read Anything Good Lately?

"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 blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them! :)"


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
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
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
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

I don't have anything underlined because I can't figure out how to do it. I love the usual things, the classics, the Narnia. Also I take issue with some of the things on this list. NO WAY is this the definitive 100-best or top-100 books list. Bridget Jones' Diary? Please. And why list The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe separately from the Chronicles of Narnia?

So anyway, This reminds me of the time I got a flier of the "100 classics not to miss" from the Provo City Library and set out to read all 100. That's why I can put so many titles in Bold. Also I can proudly list that I have read several other "classic"-type books that aren't on this-here list: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and like that, plus the book I'm currently reading, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I didn't think I would like it but it's pretty interesting so far.