bibliophile...

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

Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (i put a * by the ones i own...that i could remember off the top of my head)...Tag other book lovers.

1 Pride and Prejudice -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 -x*
6 The Bible - X*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -x*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -x*
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -x*

8/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -X*
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -*(seriously i own a copy from 1912)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -*
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -x*
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

10/20

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -x*
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 -x*
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -x

13/30

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*
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X*

17/40

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -x*
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -*
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -x* (one of my FAVORITE books)
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 -X*
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -X*
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

22/50

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -X*
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 -X*
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez –

25/60

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -X*
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -X*
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 -X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -*
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -X*
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -*

29/70

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -*
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -X*
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -X*
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 –

31/80

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -X*
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -X*
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 -

34/90

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -*
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -X*
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -X
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 -X*
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -X*
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -*

Read:38/100
Own:58/100
meh...not bad, i guess...i could read more...(obviously they are sitting in there waiting for me...and MANY i have owned before and not read.....) this was fun. my kind of "quiz"...

i just made a personal mission statement....holy ________

I am at my best when i feel strong and clear within my own spirit, knowing that i am beautiful and wonderful and a female warrior and a light-carrying spiritual being..
I will try to prevent times when i allow thoughts of other people's judgement and dislike of me invade my mind....when i wallow in procrastination and without direction.
I will enjoy my work by finding how to create a beautiful, calm home for my children so that they will have had a treasured, lovely, loving, calm childhood. i like to create an ecclectic environment that caters to my hedonistic, sensual tendencies... i love to be old fashioned and untainted by the media.
I will find enjoyment in my personal life through my love of reading, writing, reaching out to people on the computer, pondering spiritual principles within my own life,my relationship with jonathan , and within the mothering of my children.
i love to relax and make other people comfortable.
I will find opportunities to use my natural talents and gifts such as being a very strong encourager of other people and a muse who likes to share my differentness with the world.
i am a very strong feminine influence and know a lot about birth, and women's mysteries.
i tend to think that i write well, when i make the time for it, and i love to make collage art in all sorts of ways, either with paper, words, or through media on the computer.
i know a lot. i have a huge mind for trivia.
I can do anything I set my mind to. I will create a lovely home, provide for my children's needs without being materialistic, merely comfortable/comforting.
i will be a romantic wife.
i will get as environmentally sustainable as possible.
i will allow myself the time and comfort and self-esteem to write a book.
i will encourage other women in feminine strength and homebirth.
i will travel to all the places that interest me..
My life's journey is that i feel that i must write a book that is a huge encouragement for women both towards homebirth, and about raising their children with unorthodox methods, and feeling alright about that. about being equal, if not superior to men, and encouraging them to be as strong and outspoken as they can be.
When i am an old woman, i would like to be surrounded by my children, who are healthy, well adjusted, mentally stable and financially secure.
i would like to see my grandchildren, whom i have been able to influence as unique, beautiful individuals.
i would love to be surrounded by the women i have helped to empower and babies (who are now old people) that i have helped to come into the world peacefully throught the empowerment of their mothers (and their fathers).
My most important future contribution to others will be i hope to have inspired my children to be empowered individualists, unscarred by the media and herd mentality of this culture. i hope to have raised them well and kindly and beautifully and passionately and that i am able to guide them to being more prepared for adulthood than i was.
i want to be a good, beautiful woman to jonathan and a beautiful female partner to him..

I will stop procrastinating and start working on:

i need to find a way to build a wall between who i am now and my past, the people who have hurt me, who could possibly hurt me now, who would judge me, or my distorted habitual thinking about those things.

i need to lose weight and become more healthy to be able to live a longer, higher quality of life than i have done in the past. i need to decode why i am addicted to food and how to break that addiction so that i only put into my body healthy food. i also want to move my body more and be more flexible, lithe, and pretty.

i need to write the book.

i need to wake up everymorning with the selfassurance that i am worthy to be listened to and that i have very important things to say to women and be able to encourage other (poor) women every single day of my life.
i feel that i may be a very important carrier of strength to an empowered birth movement.

I will strive to incorporate the following attributes into my life:

ecclectic beauty and spiritual power
accomplishment of my life's purpose
personal magnetism

I will constantly renew myself by focusing on the four dimensions of my life:

practice yoga, eat only natural foods, ingest only pure substances, run, swim, breathe, be lithe, lose weight, beauty rituals
confidence in my personal truth, selfassurance in my creative belief system. talk more to people and share myself and my thoughts. listen to other's deepest thoughts without judgement.
close off from the negative past. learn to forgive. be more positively oriented. love myself.
be more kind. be more caring. be more passionate. be more giving. express myself better to other people. be comfortable with myself so i can eventually be more comfortable with other people.


(i did this with a mission statement builder online at: http://www.franklincovey.com/msb/ )

look what i made!.....the first owl

this might become a habit...
i had seen these stuffed owls on etsy last christmastime and was going to buy one for bella. this year i made one. that is a BIG change, friends, are ya feelin' me.

i cut out the "pattern pieces" from a brown paper sack. (from my little peabrain)....here they are, in case you wanna go into the owl business for your wee ones...

first the pieces of the base body....


then the wings and belly

p.s. to make the second wing...TURN THE PATTERN AROUND!!!! not the fabric, not yourself...not your attitude...it took me THREE times to get that! don't forget!

next the eyes and nose (beak...)

(it wasn't until i was sewing the eyes together that i decided i didn't like using the contrast fabric for the eyeball....so i used glittery black felt which kicks so much ass instead...also, beak is upside down in this pic. what you do to make it is make a "baseball diamond"...a diamond with a rounded top...viola! bird nose! the eyes are concentric circles, as you can see... i hate talking down to the reader AND have ocd...whatchagunnado...)

THEN i got a bright idea..."i don't want the back to be plain. i will sew the child's name on it...yay!"...jonathan cut out "letter patterns" for me (thnx jonathan dear)....this BRIGHT IDEA took FIVE HOURS to handstitch and fill! yay! but here is the picture of the pieces....
the "bellaluna"

the indigochildish idea behind the name was, (besides the PLAIN, which really was the main motivator) that wee ones who don't know their name yet would be able to SEE their name and maybe learn it, and have a "sense memory" for the letters in their name.(plus it shows ownership...something important to tots....i made that up)

THen the steps (this is where i refrained from taking pictures of every single little step like other yuppiebitcheswithblogs might do to you....i THINK you can take it from here...if i did it then certainly you can!)

*** i handstitched the bellaluna letters on the back and stuffed them with bits of filling (from an old pillow i had bought at walmart for $3...NEVER buy batting again! NEVER)


***then i sewed the belly on to the front and stuffed it a little.

***then sewed the wings on and stuffed them....

***then i sewed the eyes, guess what i did then...you're right! i stuffed the individual pieces of the eyes! you are smart! i knew it!

****then i machine stitched as much as i could (i stuffed the ears first THEN put it all inside out...) which wasnt much and was kinda painstaking, but i did it, leaving (of course) a hole in the bottom to stuff the rest....

***then i stuffed it...(that word is getting old, isn't it?) and sewed shut the hole.

***did the little tiny nooks and crannies that i had to fix and sew...

then sat back and MARVELED That i did it....

****then i took these pictures to share with you....

***Then bella got to hold it for a minute before it goes into the solsticecloset...

july 14, 2007

we were wildly in love. we were young. we didn't quite "get it" yet. we both liked marilyn manson. he read my tarot the night we met (i still have it...it was correct).we spent every minute together. we tried to grow up together. we failed at that. i am now trying to grow up apart. he wrote me poetry. i sent him hundreds of cards. we really tried. we both really, really failed. we did some things right, though. very right. our son is gorgeous, amazing, smart, and funny...just like us. we had neat things. we did neat things. we tried to supress our darker urges and places in us. we failed. the thing i miss most is the blue of his eyes and his laugh. the thing i miss most is his fathering. the thing i miss most is even his gutsy way of telling me to go to hell. i don't really allow myself to think of all this very often. the therapist says that is not the way to go about it. but my heart aches. it hurts. and when i think too hard about him i feel like i will die too...

fabrique

it looks unassuming, sitting there like that, doesn't it???? oh, but it isn't! guess what it is...just guess....
it is a HUGE bag of vintage fabric...i would say about a HUNDRED yards and more....
this was a gift to me from grandma mae whilst i was on vacation. free. gift. omg.

i could dream of buying a hundred yards of vintage fabric...then it could happen....
enjoy!

(i am sooooo grateful i could burst!)















and a STACK of flannel for bella jamas...a STACK....

and a PILE of corderouy....a PILE...omg

sabbatical....09.....deux

more musings...

*my body is changing, slowly but surely...marci's is very transformed. she is thin. this gives me HOPE, something i need, because i am eating like shit.

*i MISS The gym when i do not go there....a lot.

*i hate television. alot. with a burning passion. i am superior to television. my mind is VERY disciplined. people don't really like to hear me brag about that. people need to quit watching television.

*my home is very welcoming to come back to. it is an oasis. it is gorgeous, and believe it or not, it is back together the FIRST night i am home. everything is put away or sorted and away...the dishes are done....i ran all the errands, i cooked the dinner, caught up the laundry, and did all the groovy stuff...IN THE FIRST DAY

*just because you finally get the glass bottle thing down, that is not a reason to yank out your iud and have another baby...can you imagine i had that thought? another baby, holy shit.....sunset morrison moonstone ;)

*my cousin tatted me a MOONSTONE....its friggin incredible...will post a pic tomorrow or so when it is hung...gorgeous

*i heart books. alot

*http://indigoadults.wordpress.com/ check that shit out. seriously...check it out

*i am listening to a killer accoustic version of "romeo in black jeans" on kbco the studio c channel...one of my new favoriteist things...

*senator al franken ....no kidding.... awesome

*holy crap......


*i am not quite portraying my mind very well this evening. maybe tomorrow, huh?

sabbatical....09

wow...those are two gorgeous mommas....(she has the best one in her camera!)that is marci and i...two of the bestist grrls i know...
now on with the musings....(in no particular order---the musings may be actual thoughts i had whilst sitting, dreams i had whilst sleeping, and hey, folks! i DROVE for over TWENTY FOUR HOURS in the past week....what have you done??! haha)

*jonathan and i are like two twining garlands of ivy that have been wrapped around a telephone pole since the 1950's....( i saw some of those...) we havent been wrapped since the fifties, but the pole is our marriage, the kids, our LIFE and the base love...and we MAY be DIFFERENT from each other, but just TRY to unwind two twining garlands of ivy from around THAT pole...good luck with that

*there are very, very, very crumbling parts of this country...i was right about that...and i would bet that the crumblingest parts of it voted mccain...

*there is hilly, green, AMAZING country in kansas...i did not remember that.

*the greyhound bus is ALWAYS running....ALWAYS...ALL THE TIME...constantly forever

*my son sebastian has a beautiful family and we have all been aged by our loss...the two year anniversary of which was today....:(

*the town i began to raise sebastian in is full of wretched people, just yuck. i remember knowing i couldn't even TRY to be like THAT....once again, i was correct.

*my cousin owns the town of farmington iowa and i am so glad i got to see it with her. she has done AMAZING things with her life, all things considered....(kinda like me, only a million times more and better... go check out her blog if you don't believe me: www.nicholejarvis.blogspot.com)

*my children are GOOD travellers. even the babies. all three in a lumina for well over twentyfour hours this week, and mostly always smiling and loving on each other...yeah. you NEED your minivan, mmmmhmmm....

*everyone showered me with gifts...i need to remember to be more GIVING...LOTS more...

*we went from having zero copies of the deathly hollows to having two copies of the deathly hollows. hardback. for zero dollars. that is over forty dollars worth of two books....speaking of books!***the bookstore in eaton was closing, so i got TWO BAGS of books for ten bucks (a LOT of books, man) and found two books that i have been WANTING to give to my cousin for a DOLLAR EACH at hastings...yay!...and i read half of the book Truth (with jokes) by SENATOR franken...good (tedious history) stuff

*nebraska is GROSS...there is NOTHING good there...

*we listened to the song "mr bojangles" in its ENTIRETY....approximately 2 minutes till the end of the ENTIRE SONG, bastian said increduously "What is he even talking about??!!!" hahahahaha omg hilarious!

*i just survived countless of billions of possible deaths at 80 miles an hour (yes, i drove that fast the ENTIRE way, for the MOST part)....i am very grateful to have gotten here alive...

*toast is NOT a FREE HOT BREAKFAST...

*stayed at a hotel and did NOT turn on the television, nor swim in the pool...i have changed.

*the sprawl along the I-25 corridor of colorado between loveland and fort collins is an INTENSE spectacle...the sprawl along harmony road in fortcollins, same thing...wowzer (can't someone tell these people we are in an economic CRISIS?!!!)

****************
well, hell. i have a LOT to do tomorrow, don't i...i wanted to to this but it is pushing two...a.m.

i will have MUCH more to type later...and will kick myself till the tylenol pm kicks in for what i forgot...it's a lot

goodnight world

no links...sorry

gotta sew! gotta prepare! vacay in less than 40 hours!!!!
hope you (whoever you are) aren't disappointed in me...
have some fun...look in the archives, they are a friggin mine of goodness...
here are some pictures i took of my bedside world...just to make it up to you.
goodnight :@