The Big Read

Shamelessly stolen from a friend’s website, because I think reading books is important :)

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.

1 ) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk the books you LOVE.
4) 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 ;)

I’ve read 58…

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
**4. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - various
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. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
**19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
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. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. 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 - A.A. 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 Meany - 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’ Diary - Helen Fielding
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 - A.S. 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 - E.B. 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

Bumper stickers of the week

Seen in Olympia this week…

“Don’t act stupid -we have world leaders for that!”

“Will work for peace.”

And my favorite:

“Two girls, one cupcake”

and no, I have no idea what it means :)

Finding the rhythms of the neighborhood

I’m learning the rhythms of this neighborhood -where the sun falls in the garden at different times of day, when the mail comes, when people come and go on my street… Friday mornings are a bit challenging due to the garbage trucks that rumble in at what for me is an early hour, and then the neighbors who get out and rumble their cans back from the street just as I’m getting back to sleep :)

And then there’s the house itself - getting used to the sound of the furnace, which sounds like distant thunder, finding the places where the floorboards creak, knowing when a car is pulling up to my house or my neighbor’s house, which shares a driveway, figuring out where the cat is meowing from and where she has found as her newest hiding place.

Today, I spent a lot of time in the garden. This morning we looked for the right sunny spots to put the raised beds that came yesterday, which entailed some moving around of patio furniture and rearranging of pathways. Now there are places to sit out of the sun, which is a good thing. Sophie favors the chair under the honeysuckle arbor, or hiding under the couch near the tall grass.

We had our first hot day, so I made use of that same chair, which is the coolest shady spot in the garden. Later I enjoyed the slightly cooler temperatures in the evening, and while I was sitting outside, had a new delivery - my composter. Between the vegetable garden (which doesn’t yet quite exist) and the composting, this should be an interesting year of garden adventures for me - hopefully small enough to be manageable, with more of my food coming from home and less leaving it!

Inherited gardens

It’s interesting to be in possession of a garden not your own, even a small space like mine, that has been carefully tended by someone else. The first year is fun, as you watch to see what comes up and decide what to keep, what to move, what to add.

So far, the things I really like: Lilacs, hydrangea, foxgloves, white bleeding heart, lily of the valley, small forest floor ground cover plant that I’m not sure of, azaleas, the amazing honeysuckle vine that creeps over the arbor, japanese maples and ferns.

Those that may get replaced: Pansies and geraniums in planter boxes (not my style), a couple of clumps of grasses that seem completely out of place, a very large jasmine vine (some like the scent but I find it overpowering), orange daylilies, yellow chain tree out front.

Things to add: clematis, climbing rose, vine maples, salal, raised beds with veggies!!

Tweet!

OK, I’m finally giving in :) and joining Twitter. Just to see… Help make it fun and come on board! The more of you that are on there doing interesting things, the better :) And if you’re already on Twitter, let me know your user name so I can find you … mine is TeresaMichelsen (simple, but descriptive! LOL).

And if you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, check it out at the link above. It’s just a way for us all to let each other know what we’re doing whenever we feel like it, in a sentence or two. Kind of a nice way to keep in touch with people far away. If you’d like a little customizable PC-tool to have it on your desktop instead of visiting the website all the time, you can get that free at Twitteroo or Twhirl.

See you soon!

Eat this fish

The other day, a friend asked me why I said he should not buy farmed salmon… not to mention shellfish from Asia, etc. I had some answers for him, but it’s a complicated subject. If you’re interested in eating sustainably, seafood is becoming a more and more difficult and confusing prospect, even though it’s healthy and low on the food chain, and therefore would generally be a more desirable form of protein.

So, I was really happy to see this guide to sustainable seafood, developed by a reputable source, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It has local guides for various areas, a searchable database, and explanations for each rating. You can look up any fish or shellfish you like and find out which types are the best choice, which are good alternatives, and which to avoid - and a detailed explanation of why.

So for example, Alaska-caught wild salmon is in the “best choice” category. Washington-caught wild salmon is in the “good alternative” category - and farmed salmon from anywhere in the world, along with Atlantic salmon, are in the avoid category.

In case you’re wondering, farmed salmon are a major problem because:
- When they inevitably escape from their pens, they compete with wild salmon for food and spawning areas, and dilute wild species with inferior genes, producing salmon that are less able to survive in the wild
- Salmon rearing pens generate mounds of fecal waste on the bottom filled with excessive organic material, antibiotics, and pollutants
- Farmed salmon have parasites and diseases (from being raised in such close quarters) that can spread to wild fish
- Antibiotics used to prevent the above diseases are ultimately released to the environment and contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistant diseases
- It takes three pounds of wild fish to feed one pound of farmed salmon. Yes, they grind up fish and feed it to fish that don’t eat much fish. So in other words, for each farmed fish, three wild fish are lost. Not a good trade.
- Farmed salmon are pale and tasteless compared to wild salmon, like so much artificially grown food.

Is it really worth the few dollars you might save?

It’s kind of funny…

but I’m much less annoyed by gigantic SUVs now that i know how much they’re paying for gas…