Taunting Happy Fun Ball

Hey Baby It’s The Fourth of July

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:18:43 GMT

Fourth of July activities were fun ... we went to the Big Giant Mall, had coffee at Veras (where I discovered that you could get a White Zombie with skim milk, sugar free flavor shot, and hold the whipped creame and it still tastes awesome) then went to Powderhorn for fireworks. My new camera does not photograph fireworks well, but it will videotape them! I put a couple clips on my facebook. Last year the firework smoke triggered my asthma, but I was fine this time around - probably because I'm in better physical condition.

Saturday morning I got up at 4:55 and ran, this time 21 minutes (woo hoo!) I did go back to bed when I got home though, then got up to go to water aerobics at the Y at 9. I spent a couple hours at Bob's Java Hut on my laptop catching up on some work work and school work, then I was home most of the day after that. I made fish for dinner.

This morning I skipped running to give my body some recovery time, got up at 7 and did laundry, vacuumed, took out trash then went to a meeting.

The rest of today is open but I think I'm going to stay in the AC. I do reserve the right to change my mind.

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:08:09 GMT

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

WATCHING MOVIES DOES NOT COUNT!!!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte <-- HATE
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - started, could not get into even after seeing the movie.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - I patently hate 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 - I have read Macbeth, Hamlet, Midsummer Nights Dream, Julius Ceasar, and a few others, but not ALL.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - read part of it, bored to tears.
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 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - read when I was little, don't remember a great deal.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - this is a duplicate of #33
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 - AA Milne - Yes this is actually a novel. Clever and fun too.
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
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'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 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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Some of them, there were a lot of adventures.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - read in both English and French language
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 - this is a duplicate of #14.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

25/100
I am wondering where Ernest Hemingway was when this list was compiled (and don't tell me he's dead) I mean there should have been at least one - Charles Dickens had multiple entries and William Shakespeare had the the same play listed twice (complete works includes Hamlet and Hamlet was also listed on its own) The Chronicles of Narnia was also a duplicate of The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe as it is a portion of The Chronicles of Narnia. I am curious as to what grade the person who came up with this list is in and when they will be graduating from Jr. High.

July 4, 2008

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:49:58 GMT

I've decided to start running, a bit around the block in the morning. I ran for 10 minutes on Tuesday morning, 15 minutes Wednesday morning, and 15 minutes this morning.

Thursday was an excused absence from running as I had been at the Drive By Truckers concert the night before which went til 12:30 and didn't get me into bed til 1:00AM. I never did get fully awake yesterday.

I'm still doing the Y the same amount, I just thought a little early morning exercise might do me some good, and being a user of public transportation, getting on the bus and going to the Y then making it to work by 7 just isn't realistic. I've noticed that running actually increases my energy level for the rest of the day.

Today however, I will be going back to bed as I'm off for the fourth.

The Drive By Truckers concert was by the way fantastic. The only downside was when some drunk girl spilled her drink all over my back side, but once it dried I forgot about it. I got a whole bunch of pictures which I intend on putting on my facebook page, but first I need to get them off my camera onto my computer.

I'm at the end of my 3rd week of online college. I'm at 98% in both classes. I know that people probably thought that I was an excellent student in high school, but I really pretty much pissed it away, I graduated with a 3.25 by the grace of God and honors points, otherwise it would have been a fairly solid C average. Out of my college credits from 1993, I earned 26 but only 6 were of an adequate grade to be transferrable. (Still that's two classes I won't have to take... unfortunately, they're interesting ones.) I really never should have skipped the second grade. That among a huge measure of other things contributed to my academic demise and long term avoidance of school. Now I'm just working to get a marketable degree so that I can have something to fall back on... I really do have a good job with AT&T, but if it were to go bye bye, then I would be back to "Thank you for calling corporate America, how may I provide you with excellent service and allow you to verbally abuse me over something completely trivial?"

Plans for the day include hanging out with some people and seeing some fireworks. Woo Hoo!