2008 Reading List

I did it! I read 50 books during 2008. Here is my 2008 list:

1. Days of Infamy (Harry Turtledove)
2. The Magician's Nephew (C. S. Lewis)
3. Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson)
4. End of the Beginning (Harry Turtledove)
5. The Friday Night Knitting Club (Kate Jacobs)
6. Short & Tall Tales: Moose County Legends (Lilian Jackson Braun)
7. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
8. Mount Vernon Love Story (Mary Higgins Clark)
9. Blood Orange (Drusilla Campbell)
10. Mercy (Jodi Picoult)
11. Happiness Sold Separately (Lolly Winston)
12. The Horse and His Boy (C. S. Lewis)
13. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
14. Good In Bed (Jennifer Weiner)
15. Prince Caspian (C. S. Lewis)
16. Before Green Gables (Budge Wilson)
17. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
18. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (Joshilyn Jackson)
19. The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)
20. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
21. Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C. S. Lewis)
22. The Diary of Mattie Spenser (Sandra Dallas)
23. Bad Girls of the Bible (and what we can learn from them) (Liz Curtis Higgs)
24. Chronicles of Chrestomanci, volume 1 (Diane Wynne Jones)
25. Rhett Butler's People (Donald McCaig)
26. Emily of New Moon (L.M. Montgomery)
27. Emily Climbs (L.M. Montgomery)
28. Emily's Quest (L.M. Montgomery)
29. Chronicles of Chrestomani, volume 2 (Diane Wynne Jones)
30. Howl's Moving Castle (Diane Wynne Jones)
31. Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (Diane Glancy)
32. The Morgue The Merrier (Rosemary Laurey, Karen Kelley, & Dianne Castell)
33. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
34. Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler (Wade Rouse)
35. Those Who Save Us (Jenna Blum)
36. Anne of Avonlea (L.M. Montgomery)
37. Pushing the Bear: a Novel of the Trail of Tears (Diane Glancy)
38. In Her Shoes (Jennifer Weiner)
39. Anne of the Island (L.M. Montgomery)
40. Blood Ties (Pamela Freeman)
41. A Lion Among Men (Gregory Maguire)
42. The Art of Keeping Secrets (Patty Callahan Henry)
43. Twilight (Stephenie Meyer)
44. The Heretic's Daughter (Kathleen Kent)
45. New Moon (Stephenie Meyer)
46. The Shack (Wm. Paul Young)
47. Anne of Windy Poplars (L.M. Montgomery)
48. Nineteen Minutes (Jodi Picoult)
49. The Tsarina's Daughter (Carolly Erickson)
50. The Teahouse Fire (Ellis Avery)

I have set myself a goal of 75 for 2009.

More Knitting

This afternoon, Jon and I went to a graduation ceremony for our friend Jodi (the same Jodi I mentioned in my previous post: For crying out loud, I'm KNITTING!!). Anyone who has ever attended a college graduation ceremony knows that they are boring and long, and the entire point of going is to wait for one person's name to be called so that you can cheer for them and their achievement. So, I took a small knitting project with me. It is a dishcloth, and is intended as a Christmas gift for none other than Jodi and her husband. Little does she realize that I spent most of her graduation ceremony knitting!

Point of Grace

For anyone who does not know, Point of Grace is a Christian singing group made up of three women (it used to be four, but one recently decided to take some time off to spend with her family). Tonight, Laura and I had the opportunity to go to a concert of theirs, and we had a wonderful time. I love their music, and I am glad I was able to go to the concert.


Their special guest was Ronnie Freeman, another Christian artist who sings and plays the piano quite well.

We Have a Tree!

Despite our having talked about it at length last Christmas, I wasn't sure that we would get our new tree this year. But it went on sale for Black Friday, saving us $10 on the cost of the tree (my discount would have only saved us $3.50), so we got it. I cleaned out the area where it was to go and set it up. I did no shaping, nor do we have many ornaments (I have one that I inherited from my grandmother, one of Jon's that we found on a shelf, and five Coke bottles that are round to look like ornaments - none of which are on the tree in these pictures), but we have a tree up, and that is enough to make me happy (at least as far as the tree is concerned). As we receive them, I am also putting our Christmas cards into the tree. It's a really neat look, and I'll have to take a picture of the tree with all of the cards in it right before we take them all down.


With a toddler in the house, he's in nearly all of the pictures I take. I figured at least one of them should be intentional!

For crying out loud, I'm KNITTING!!

So yes, I knit in public (KIP). It happens. Lots of people do it (though not many around here, it seems). Monday night, we had a rare opportunity to go to a movie with friends. As is usual for me, I took along my smallest current work in progress (WIP). I can knit in the dark by touch if it is a simple stitch and does not require me to follow a pattern, and that is what I do at the movies. It keeps my hands moving and keeps me from eating popcorn (which I'm really not a big fan of anyway, but if it's there, I'll eat it).
Jodi (one of the people we went with, and the one who sat next to me) just did not get it. There are now commercials before the previews (how sad is that?) and once we got settled in our seats, I broke out my WIP. Jodi exclaimed, "Sara! Why are you crocheting? Are you that bored?" and before I had a chance to reply, she turned to her husband Randy and exclaimed to him that I was crocheting. I calmly corrected her, "I'm not crocheting, I'm knitting, and it does not mean I'm bored since I am fully capable of multitasking, thank you very much."
Throughout the course of the rest of the commercials and the previews, and into the movie, Jodi would occasionally lean over to me and tell me to stop crocheting. She even leaned across me to talk to my husband and tell him to make me stop. Well, since I wasn't crocheting, I had no trouble ignoring the request (though actually ignoring her was harder). I only stopped when I realized that I had picked up a stitch somewhere. I couldn't see well enough in the dark to find the mistake, so I put it away and settled in to watch the rest of the movie.
If I had thought I was truly distracting her, I would have stopped without a problem. But I know for a fact that she only noticed me knitting during the movie because she saw me doing it before the movie. And if she ever would have looked closely enough, she would have noticed that my eyes rarely left the screen, so obviously I was watching the movie. I actually was more engaged in the movie before I stopped knitting than after. She moved about and made much more noise than I did with her insistence on checking to see whether I was still knitting.

The sad thing is, what annoyed me the MOST about it is her insistence on calling it crocheting! I love to crochet, and I do it well. But I can't do it by touch and therefore would never crochet in a dark movie theatre. The first mistake on her part I will overlook, but the continued repeated mistakes still bug me.

Election Stuff

I've had a week now to process the results of the election. I've seen people who are totally elated over the results, people who are completely devastated over the results, and many shades of gray in between.

At first, I was very excited about voter turnout. I thought that Obama's win indicated a higher turnout of voters in general, especially young people (18-25 age range) and minorities - groups who historically feel that politics does not apply to them (or, more appropriately, that the politicians do not care about them) and consequently do not show up to vote. I honestly thought that this standard of not showing up would continue and would cost Obama the election.
Then I found out that the overall numbers were about the same for this election as they had been in 2004. Slightly higher, yes, but overall very similar. So I thought that maybe a different demographic had decided to stay home this election. More digging proved different. Young people and minorities had slightly higher percentages than before, but only very slight - one or two percentage points. So obviously, the demographics of the American Voting Public have not changed.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the results. I still do not believe that Obama is the right person for the job, at least, not right now. I do think that some of the voters chose him simply because he is black, others because he is young, and many, MANY others chose him because they hate the current administration so much that anyone associated with it is an automatic no-go for them. None of these are "good" reasons to choose someone for the highest office in the land, but then again, at least those people showed up at the polls and voiced their opinions.
However, I don't think that McCain was the right answer, either. Neither candidate was my choice for POTUS. I did vote, and it took me a lot longer than usual because I sat there and thought about how I truly felt on each of the proposals as well as a fairly long debate with myself on who I would choose for President.

I am truly concerned for Obama's safety and that of his family. There have already been attempts on his life. He is in a very dangerous position; there are people out to get him. I do hope that he survives his four years in office, and I really hope that he is able to fulfill at least one of his campaign promises. The Democrats having a majority in Congress will help him in that regard - he is not likely to find strong opposition there.

Classic Books

This was on my friend Kelly's blog. The ones that are bold and in purple are ones that I know I have read. I don't remember all of them very well, so I am thinking of re-reading some of them soon. According to Kelly (who read it elsewhere), the average American has read 6 of the 100 books on this list. I have read 41 of them. What can I say? I've always been a bookworm.



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 - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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
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
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Pweauaion- Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoris of a Geisha- Arthur Golden
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
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
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
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

Not A Good Day.

It's been a hard day. It started out OK, but went downhill from there.

First, I realized that my rental movie was not only overdue, but I had not watched it yet and therefore it would either be another day overdue or I'd have to return it without watching it. I told Jon to just return it, but I just looked over there and it's still here. I'm going to pop it in when I get offline.

Then, I had to work today. That's not horrible, I just wasn't feeling it today. Yesterday was rough because not enough people were scheduled. Today was the exact same way. It's getting old.

While at work, I banged into a corner, bruising my left arm, and, about an hour later, bumped a piece of the hot fryer, burning my right arm. I now have a bright red burn in the shape of a 7.

I get home and it's raining, but we have to put the recycling out tonight because they come at around 7:30 am, which is well before my wake-up time. So I got rained on.

Then, I get online and check my email to find that I've been cut out of my brother-in-law's wedding party. Perfect. Just top off my day, why don't you? I'm not really upset about it (after all, it saves me $200 for a dress), but I am disappointed and a little hurt.

Tomorrow can only be better, right?

Close Call!

Last night on my way home from work, I had a close call with one of nature's creatures. I don't like to hit any animals with my car, and I especially did not want to hit this one. Luckily, I saw it walking down the middle of my lane just in time and swerved around it.

Planning for Christmas

Yep, I'm already planning. I have to - we're on a very tight budget and I am sick to death of giving people IOUs at Christmastime (especially since it seems that there are times that we are unable to go back and actually give that person a gift). So I'm already in the planning stage.

Most people are getting handmade gifts. I prefer it that way, and the bonus is that (usually) it's cheaper as well. Only a few people are getting purchased items.

I got this far through the post and was about to make a list of what I've got figured out so far, when I realized that there is a very slim chance that one of my recipients may read my blog! So much for the list on the blog idea...

Automotive Issues

These cars are driving me up the wall. I so wish that Jon would get hired somewhere so that we can get a new car - maybe even two!

The starter went out on his car about two weeks ago. It just won't start. At this point, it's more of an inconvenience than anything else, because he's not working so it's not as if he has to go anywhere. If he really needs a car, all he has to do is take me to work and he can use mine.

Then mine decided to act up. First, it suddenly got extremely loud, as if the exhaust system is falling apart (it's not impossible). Then, the latch mechanism on the driver's side decided to break. At this exact moment, the door will not open AT ALL. I bought a new latch mechanism today, but I won't be able to get it into the car if we can't get the door open.
Additionally, the passenger's side door handle has been broken since late August. For a short time, both door handles were broken (it's a lousy design, but was all the rage in the late 80s and early 90s because it looks "cool" - yeah, it's real cool to have broken door handles every year or so). We fixed the driver's side door handle not long after I got out of the hospital, because once I started driving again, I had to be able to easily get in and out of my car.
We had to shimmy the passenger door open with a coat hanger to get into the car this morning. It was not fun, and caused a lot of what I call "quiet yelling" at each other. We were snippy and probably would have been yelling, but our landlord was here trimming the bushes out front, so we didn't want her to overhear us arguing. It was not fun, and I did too much straining trying to help Jon get the door open. I've been sore ever since, and I haven't been this sore in a couple of weeks. I actually took a Vicodin earlier.

This evening, I'm going to my uncle's house to have him help me with my car. He likes working on cars and has tricks for things now and then. Hopefully, he'll have a trick for this door latch thing.

An Unwanted Anniversary

Today is the sixth anniversary of us trying to have a baby. We have not been hard-core trying for this entire time, but it is still our 6th anniversary of starting the TTC journey.

It's an anniversary I could easily have done without.

Mystery Stole, Part Two

Here is my completed Part Two of MS4:

After finishing this and having to stop halfway across a row to take the picture (I did the same thing with part one), I was frustrated enough to purchase a 29" long circular to work this project on. Now I can spread it all out on one needle to take my pictures.

Mystery Stole, Part One

I'm working on the Mystery Stole (hereafter referred to as MS4) on Ravelry. It is a neat idea where the designer releases a brand-new pattern in stages to everyone who signs up for the group in time. MS4 is worked from the ends towards the middle and has six parts, five that are duplicated (both ends) and one center motif. The two pieces are then grafted together to make one beautiful stole. It is beaded, and the beads are an integral part of the design.

Here is my completed Part One:

{Note: I am thinking of merging my photo blog with this one. Neither gets updated as often as I'd like, and since there is usually a blogable story to go with each photo, I might as well keep them together.}

Today's Appointment

What a day, what a day.

I had an appointment this morning with my PCP because I have been having some abdominal pain. The doctor seems to think that it is a gallbladder problem, possibly stones. I had to have blood drawn and an ultrasound. The only problem was that for once, I had gotten up in time to eat breakfast, and the ultrasound required that I fast for 8 hours prior to having it done. So my small cup of fruit that I had for breakfast blew my entire day - I could not eat or drink anything until after my ultrasound, which was scheduled for 6pm. Which means that I finally got something to eat at around 7. I was STARVING!! Truth be told though, I was more thirsty than hungry.

Now I get to wait for the results. Since the technician is not allowed to give me any kind of a diagnosis, I don't know any more than I did before the ultrasound was performed.

Before Green Gables

Before Green Gables

I found this book in the library by chance and thought it looked interesting. Boy was I right. If you liked Anne of Green Gables, you'll love this book.

Doctor's Appointments

So I called my ob/gyn's office yesterday to make an appointment for a pap & pelvic. Not that it's my favorite thing to do, but it does have to be done each year. And I'm overdue - I should have had this done back in April.

The soonest they could get me in was JULY 23rd. And, I have to drive 35 miles for the appointment (once upon a time I could get them done here in town). This, to me, seems a bit ridiculous, especially since I wouldn't even be seeing my regular doctor (I'd be seeing a "temp" doctor) and I don't want anything fancy - just your standard girly appointment.

So I stopped in at my family doctor's office this afternoon to see if I could get in to see him any sooner. Guess what. June 30. Only 2 weeks away (instead of 7) and right here in town. I guess I'll be calling to cancel that ob/gyn appointment. I wasn't going to see her any more after that one anyway, seeing as we're moving at the end of August.

Which leads me to - going back on the pill. I don't really want to, but with all of the stress and excitement of moving, we're not really TTC right now anyway. It's much better for me (and my sanity) to go back on the pill during this time so that I can know exactly when AF will arrive and how long she'll stay. Irregularity is a nuisance at best. This way, after we're moved and settled, I can start again with my new doctors, hopefully not having to start completely over with the procedures, etc.

S is a fun letter...

I'm noticing that I can make a lot of cute logos/names with an S. Which comes in handy since my first name starts with an S. A couple of examples are Sara's Sox, which was my original idea for a business (beaded socks). Then I branched out into sewing and came up with Sara's Stitches as a business name, with Sara's Sox as a subsidiary (sounds way cool that I have a subsidiary, IMO).

The one I came up with today isn't intended as a business name per se, since I have no intent to go into photography as even a side job; it's just something I enjoy. But I wanted to have a cute name to make into my watermark for those rare times when I do take pictures for someone else, or just to make my watermark stretch further across the picture (I don't want someone to be able to easily edit it out with PhotoShop). Today's cute "S" name: Sara's Snapshots.

I'm going to beat someone senseless someday...

Or maybe they're senseless already and that's why I'm so frustrated!

I work in the deli department. A large portion of my job is slicing up various meats and cheeses for customers. For reasons that I may never understand, 95% of customers are EXTREMELY thick-headed when I ask for clarification on how thick or thin they want their slices to be!

There is no such designation as shaved - nor do I have a setting on my slicer for slivered, chipped, deli thin, sandwich thin, average, medium, etc. We have a chart with numbers corresponding to various thicknesses for a reason. Our slicers have dials with NUMBERS on them to indicate the how thick the slice will come out. When I ask you to clarify what you mean by "shaved" by using a number, don't look at me like I'm the idiot and repeat that you want it shaved. Doing so is likely to cause me to do a piss-poor job with your request, since you did a piss-poor job of telling me what you really wanted. PICK A DAMN NUMBER!

And please, for the love of anything you wish to love, please don't ask me to shred your meat. That's why you have a food processor and/or a blender. Shred it yourself. I have better things to do, like throw things at the customers who insist that they want their meat "shaved".

I just finished this book:

From Booklist
Infertility and infidelity pack a potent--and potentially fatal--one-two punch to Elinor and Ted Mackey's once-idyllic marriage in Winston's perceptive and poignant exploration of marital commitment and liberation. Intelligent and successful, the Mackeys appear to have everything going for them except the ability to become parents and the agility to withstand the devastating emotional impact such a loss imposes on their relationship. Her hormones in a state of turbulent imbalance, Elinor becomes alternately volatile and withdrawn, driving Ted to seek refuge at the local gym, where his nubile personal trainer, Gina, is more than willing to provide the sympathy and support he craves. Madly in love with Ted, single-mother Gina has a secret weapon to eventually win him over: her ten-year-old son, Toby, whose open adoration of Ted may prove too hard for anyone to resist. Once again, Winston demonstrates a laserlike ability to focus on the inescapable reality of contemporary relationships, tempering her characters' abject pain with appealing good humor.

Carol Haggas Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

Here we go again!

Yet again I am going to attempt to be a good blogger. I do well for a while, then forget to blog for days, weeks, or months at a time. I actually have at least two blogs somewhere in cyberspace that have been abandoned for over a year.

So we'll see how it goes. I enjoy blogging - it blows my mind that I'm not better at keeping on top of it.