Scarf pics

Introspectrus

I've been turning a bit more introspectrus lately. I'm going to take a bit of a break from this blog for a week or so. I'm looking at a format change (visually) in the near future for this blog, possibly the others as well. Stay tuned. I'll absolutely be posting at the garden blog, though.

This Weight in History

Yup, I'm down another 5lb. Twenty total. The last time I was at this weight was sometime in college. I'm shooting for another 5lb by Mother's day. I don't think it will be a problem.

Yah me!!

The Great Spaghetti Harvest

My mom told me about this over and over, she saw the original broadcast.

The Great Swiss Spaghetti Harvest of 1957

Cookies and Gutters, and a Big Honkin' Egg!

It rained allll weekend, so I didn't get outside to do any work. Work desperately needs done outside, so....

Instead, I baked cookies! Not all weekend, of course. I found the recipe for 'Chinese Gingersnaps' online. It calls for 1tbsp of white pepper, 1/2tsp of cinnamon, 1/4tsp of cloves, and 5 whopping tablespoons of freshly minced/ground ginger. If anyone wants the recipe I'll post it, just let me know.

I decided to halve the recipe (I didn't have enough butter) and it still made 56 cookies.

I topped some of them with green sugar, some with regular sugar, some with nothing, and some with finely-minced candied ginger.

Guess which ones I liked best?

Matt went morel hunting Sunday morning. Didn't find any that were pickable yet. Soon. VEEERRRYYY SOOOOON.

There was a kitty hiding behind the tree, Max was going nuts here.

We went to meet a friend of Matt's for coffee, then after we got back we decided that we had to clean out the gutters. In our nice clothes. With the hose. And the muck. Did I mention our nice clothes?

Max helped, though, by barking at the drainspouts. You see, around here chipmunks like to hide in our drainspouts, so he had reason in his mind to bark at them. He also has the habit of grabbing onto them and pulling them off the house. The drainspouts, that is. Not the chipmunks.

He also helped by grabbing plants and pulling them out of our way roots and all. Very helpful, our Yorkie. Fortunately, the plants were already long dead, so no harm was done.

You can see ^ Matt's legs on the ladder, and Max at the far left of the picture, barking.

And here's a close-up of Max staring at the black water coming from the drainspout.

I also recently purchased a treat for myself. It is a peanut butter meltaway egg from Sarris Candies in Pittsburgh. It weighs 1 pound. It is everything I thought it could be. I figured it out, the entire thing is 2300 calories, 143 grams of fat.

Max's Spring Hairdo

I started giving Max his Spring haircut this week. I tend to have to do it in parts, so this picture was taken when his back was done, the top of his head, one ear, one front leg, some of his belly and butt.

Matt thinks he looks like and old Englishman.

Later that night, I got one side of his face done but the other was still long and hairy. I should have gotten a picture then.

BBC's Booklist

I stole this from Tim. I'm actually surprised at how FEW of these I've read.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:Look at the list and put an 'x' (I bolded) after those you have read and tally your total at the bottom. Let us know if you really LOVED any of them.

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 - Herper Lee (not complete but some)
6 The Bible (not complete but some, under duress)
7 Wuthering Heights - EmilyBronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel
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 (not complete but several)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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 (one of my favorites)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (not complete but some)
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 (not complete but some)
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
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 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 (major favorite)
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 (not complete but some)
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 Inferno - Dante
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 (not complete but some)
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.