American Idol... allow me to digress...
This is the first season we have watched American Idol. I had always heard Simon is a jerk, but with 2 exceptions (he made fun of a guy for looking like a monkey, and he made a 16 year old cry in auditions) I have agreed with him all year. Call me crazy.
What I don't get is this Sanjaya guy... I feel sorry for him because I think he's being made a joke and might not realize it... but he seriously needs to go home. Oh yeah, HALEY is killing me today... she totally butchered one of my all time favorite songs today - True Colors - and I hope she goes home soon. She belongs on a cruise ship, not an album.
Let's see: Sundance was robbed, Melinda Doolittle RULES!
It's too bad they can't just crown Melinda so she can move on and then give the rest of the people a fair shot at winning. :)
3.25.2007
Books!
I got this from
Bibliomaniacs blog.
Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you've read.
Italicize the ones you want to read.
Leave blank the ones that you aren't interested in.
Movies don't count.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3.
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9.
Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18.
The Stand (Stephen King)
19.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20.
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21.
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22.
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23.
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27.
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34.
1984 (Orwell)
35.
The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44.
The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45.
Bible (Only parts)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47.
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52.
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54.
Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64.
Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67.
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68.
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72.
Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75.
The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80.
Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84.
Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96.
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
Consider yourself tagged!
3.15.2007
I bet you make quilts and blankets too?
(
From time to time over the next few months this space will contain a rant pertaining to the long journey that my husband has started with the health care system. Fortunately we have insurance, but I have discovered that in some cases that doesn't matter - you are still just a number and you wait just as long. And if an emergency patient comes in and needs the machine you are next in line for, sorry for you. You wait in the hall.)
Today we had a "3 hour" test. We walked into the hospital at 8:30am. We left at 2:30pm. Now who is bad at math?
Fortunately, I learned the last time Mark needed surgery and testing that I needed to find a portable project to bring along with me. So I taught myself to knit and have been bringing that with me. Yes, I KIP (knit in public).
The reactions so far are funny - I was sitting there making the fingers for Mark's
Knucks, which use 5 size 5 DPN's and looks very spidery when starting out.
This week, I have learned that people think if you are knitting, you can't hear them. This was true of the doctor who started talking mid-stitch so I finished the k and put the knitting down. And then the next day it was true of the family sitting in the radiology waiting room who were discussing what I was doing and taking bets while I sat 5 feet from them hearing every word but not looking up.
No, I was not wearing an iPod - but I thought about doing that later - I'll put on my headphones as if I'm listening to them, but not turn anything on and see what they say when they think I can't hear...
But the most confusing conversations went like this:
Stranger: "What are you making?"
Me: "I'm knitting some fingerless gloves" :: pokes finger through to show that it is a tube in the middle of all those needles ::
Stranger: "Wow, that looks really hard."
Me: "It does take some practice, but it's not too bad."
Stranger: "I bet you make quilts and blankets too."
Me: :: take personal inventory - wearing jeans and a plain t-shirt, nothing particularly artsy or even hand-made to indicate that I use a sewing machine, try to cover befuddled look on face :: "Well, I do, but not with sticks and string, that would take a really long time."
Stranger: "Oh, well my (mother | grandmother | aunt) makes those blanket things.
Me: :: do not make rude face :: "Oh really? that's cool."
And that conversation repeated itself at least 3 times yesterday in different waiting areas with different kinds of people - it's not like some poor old guy with no family was in there trying to make friends, or that some little kid was just bugging - these were old, young, male, female - and it was the same conversation.... what is it about knitting that makes you assume that I can make quilts? How do people make that leap? The only thing I can think of is that they meant "afghans" and didn't know the word... that's fine, I'm not being an intentional snob, I'm just confused about how they made the leap?!?
My favorite was the Pakistani guy that got tears in his eyes when he said "My grandmother tried to teach me to do that when I was little, but I didn't get it. Now I wish I knew how." ... and I wish there were enough hours in a day that I could have showed him.
Susans Place © 2006 Susan Wallace •