Sunday, March 15, 2009

BBC book list: I've read 32...

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

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' (plus) to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '-' (minus) to the ones you hated
4) Add a '*' (star) to those you have partially read
5) Tally your total and put it in the title.

(In my case a star usually means I didn't like it, if the book is no good I don't finish it...)


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x+)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ()
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x+)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x+)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (*)
I've tried to read this again and again, soo boring to me.
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ()
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( x)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ()
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 (x )
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X+)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x-)
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 (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (x)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ()
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
37. 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 (x)
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 (x)
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 (x)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x )
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 (x)
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 (X)
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 (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ()
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x)
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 ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ()
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x several abridgements)

March 15, 2009


This is the snowman A and J made all by themselves last week. I thought they did a pretty good job. The snowman is about as tall as they are.


I played my violin at the ward talent show. I think I surprised most people since they didn't realize I played. I played "Ashoken Farewell" theme from the PBS series "The Civil War".

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

March 3, 2009: 23 weeks along




I am about 23 weeks pregnant. Yesterday A said, hey Mom you are starting to get a baby bump. Yep, I started really showing in the last few weeks. I have collected a bunch of fluffy newborn diapers. This kid is going to be pampered.

Lip-smacking good!
little a always asks for food first thing in the morning. Usually she asks for snacks, sometimes pizza if we had it for dinner, the other day she asked for lipgloss...

Family at the Draper temple openhouse

Big A and friends, the Dancing Queens




little A’s favorite clothes: she has several favorite items of clothing.
1) Yellow pajamas. These are her favorites. When its not bedtime, she snaps them on like a cape and won’t be parted from them.

2) Purple pants, she loves the print on these pants and would wear these every single day if I didn’t hide them.

3) Pink vinyl diaper cover with tears in it. These are the cheapest lousiest diaper covers invented (left over from A, little A discovered this in storage and it was love at first sight). She calls it her “colors” diaper cover. Who wants a comfy white diaper cover when there is a cheap hot pink one available?

February 24, 2009: Missionary Night

I was asked to help present at a youth night about missionary work. I was supposed to tell about serving in the United States and especially about being a sister missionary.

Idaho Boise Mission: 2 hours from were I was living when I was called.

Idaho culture: Agricultural, pictures of Jerome county fair and Buhl corn pack.
The experience: 20 % of the people are members. You can go tracting and hope to get a drink at every fifth house! I did ride a bicycle in a few areas, but mostly I walked or shared a car with other missionaries. Most of the people I taught were spouses, children, or boyfriend/girlfriend of members. We had a baptism about every three weeks and averaged teaching discussions every other day.


Why I decided to be a sister missionary: I hadn’t always planned to be a missionary, but I had a strong, extremely persistent feeling that it was something I should pray about. When I did, the answer was a resounding yes!

Companions: I had 12 companions. 3 were from Mongolia. Much of my experience was influenced by these amazing sisters and learning about Mongolia and the how the church is growing in that small (population-wise) faraway country.


The food: Members fed us dinner almost every night. They were very generous, I will make dinner for anyone, I can never repay what I’ve been given. There were lots of delicious meals. Some of my favorite things were homemade breads, rolls, and cinnamon rolls and also corn on the cob in Buhl during the corn pack.

February 11, 2009: It's a boy!


Its a boy! He is due at the end of June. A and J guessed right again!

January 21, 2009: What is under your sink?




There is nothing under mine except a pile old brown grocery bags and what...a super-cute toddler!

January 17, 2009: New Camera


I am so spoiled! I got a new camera to replace the one that broke in August. We heard the salesman explaining how the Sony camera had almost no red-eye. “Really?” I said, “that’s the camera for me.” Wow it is pretty much true, almost no red-eye, super-fast exposure... so I can finally, at long last, photograph kids in action! This camera is 100 times better than our old camera for about the same price, I love it. This alien sticker picture shows what red-eye looks like on the camera.