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.

This Makes me Laugh So Hard

I get these email updates from goodreads.com from my sisters-in-law, Jodi and Becca. And I get them to my gmail account, where the computer scans your email and subtly gives you advertisements related to what's in there. So today I notice this advertisement, right up top on an email update from Becca, via goodreads:

BeccaSale - ww.oneinfinitemarketplaces.com - 40%-60% Discount Becca (in stock)

I LOVE that they're selling Becca and that it's IN STOCK!!!! I can't wait to go get my discount Becca. I've been paying full-price this whole time!!! Cool web address, too!

Novelty-Size Cake

First of all, this picture does NOT do the cake justice.

So, ok. I went with the ladies to a restaurant called Claim Jumper after the RS broadcast on Saturday night. They had told me that the food was nothing special, but the desserts were huge and delicious. So we walked in the front door and there was this display case of dessert things, and at first glance, the desserts looked big and delicious. And then they pointed out to me the MotherLode Cake. I just started laughing and laughing and cackling. This is a cake that has six (6) full-size layers. SIX. A normal layer cake has like 2 full-size layers or else several skinny-minny layers, and they look pretty tall, like four inches tall. So picture that, times three, plus a bunch of frosting in between each layer. THE CAKE WAS LIKE OVER A FOOT TALL!!! I was instantly in heaven. And there next to it was the slice. You know in restaurants, where they serve your food on an oval-shaped platter dealy instead of a plate? That's how they serve you a slice of this cake. In the picture here, I've already eaten a layer and a half or so, which was ALL I could do before just boxing it and bringing it home to show Seth. Sweet Seth. He tolerates my love of novelties and can appreciate something catastrophically novel, but also he really likes stuff that's delicious. So I think that was the main draw for him on this cake. It really is pretty delicious.

My idea is to go back to Claim Jumper with Seth on a date. Maybe we could grab a mini-bacon cheeseburger from the Wendy's dollar menu on the way, but then the main event would be to split an enormous dessert. The one I wanted to bring home but couldn't, was the "I D'eclaire" which is an eclaire the size of a homemade loaf of bread and then with ice cream underneath it. I LOVE THIS RESTAURANT, if only for its huge, hilarious novelty-size delicious desserts.

Braggin' it Up!!

If you don't like braggy posts, don't read this. I'm totally about to brag about my genius kid.

Last Tuesday, Russell and I got the first Harry Potter book from the library for Eric. We gave it to him that evening after dinner. He read until Lights Out, Books Out time. The next morning we could barely get him to get dressed and eat breakfast, he was so mesmerized by reading the book. He asked if he could read it on the way to school, so Ok. I was going to take it from him when we got there, but he was so sincere and sweet that I let him take it to school with him. I always warn him not to get in trouble for reading when he should be doing something else, which has happened to him in the past. He got home from school saying he'd had "extra reading time" that day, and I was all..."I'd better not get a call from Teacher about this alleged 'extra reading time'." Then that night I went with the Young Women to the temple for like 4 hours. When I got back that night after bedtime, there was the book sitting there on the rocking chair. He had FINISHED IT in ONE DAY. He's 8.

So, ok, he's a fast reader. Seth was suspicious, asking me if Eric really got what he was reading and so on. Apparently he does. He's a pretty good quick reader. His whole thing, though, has been reading, reading, reading, and not doing anything with it, academically. There's this program at school, A.R., where books are rated by level. Last year teacher set a goal with Eric that he advance in the A.R. program by a whole level by the end of the semester. All you have to do is read books and then take a test. That's where he fell short. I would send him off to school with the admonition that he take a test today in order to meet his goal. He almost made the goal, with all my badgering.

When school started this year, I specifically asked Teacher if we could work together to motivate Eric to at least earn the 25 points you need (at a rate of several points per test) to get on the Wall of Fame. He had maybe 18 points built up over 1st and 2nd grades. So last week when he finished the book so fast, I told him if he could take a couple tests and get on the A.R. Wall of Fame, I would check him out the second Harry Potter book. Monday he took a test and got enough points to get on the Wall of Fame, and then out of the blue on Tuesday he came home saying he'd taken the AR test for Harry Potter and almost passed. Awww, so close, buddy. But he got the second book, for reaching the 25 point level with the other test. So I checked the book out on Tuesday night and gave it to him when I got home from Young Womens. I know he's a fast reader and all, but I was astonished when he came up last night after reading time to say he'd just finished the second book. Again, in ONE DAY. And you know they get longer with each book.

So this morning I get a call from Teacher. I was expecting it to be either a)Eric isn't doing his work, just reading, or b)Why are you sending him in with these fat old books that are 20 AR levels above where he is? But instead, Teacher said she was calling to check whether Eric had read the book by himself. Uh, yeah. At bedtime, I'm up reading Little House with Jules. I sort of stopped reading bedtime books with Eric 18 months ago. So, yeah, he read the whole thing by himself. She says, "Oh! Because he told me he was reading it by himself. I knew he was a good reader. But I just called to tell you he took the AR test on the second Harry Potter this morning and got 100%. And this one is 12 AR levels higher than the first one!" She was going to send home a list of other AR books around that level for Eric to read.

So it totally made my day. He's not only a super good, super fast reader, but he's also only a few points away from the next AR Wall of Fame level, and needless to say, the most advanced reader in his class. WAHOOO!!! Sometimes he's a bit of a bonehead about remembering to put his stuff away or looking in a certain place for something even if I describe it in detail to him. But he's a fabulous reading genius, dang it!!

PS: I love you all, but I'm going to go ahead and request that no one reply with how much of a genius THEIR kids are, because it's my brag about my boy. Feel free to leave admiring replies saying how great he is or how his head must be so big because he has such a huge intelligent brain, though.

A Couple Favorites

I like this picture of Seth from the wax museum because he looks like one of those guys who happens upon a news story being filmed and jumps in behind the on-location anchor and acts "funny." Except he just happened to stumble upon Dale, Sr. just after he won the big race and is sneaking up behind to celebrate with him.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of me from Madame Toussaud's. I like it not because of old what's-his-name, but because we look so natural. I'm just pointing something out and he's just good-naturedly glancing at it. He's not really my kind of guy, though. Plus I don't actually know how to play poker. I have some good ideas about how to do it, but I would DEFINITELY lose the Celebrity Tournament.