Between Loads

Things are still crazy busy around here - I actually have not knit in months but have been biking quite a lot.  I got some new wheels! I can already tell a difference in my leg strength -love those hill flattening gears!  Since I have last posted - way back in May - school has let out, a piano recital has been performed, the regional Synchronized Swimming event took place, the 8A baseball season has passed, friends and family have come and gone from town, 1 child has been and returned from camp, 1 is currently at camp, and the youngest goes to camp next month, one older child has been given an official promotion, and the other oldest child has graduated from college and moved across country (Seattle to Baltimore) to start his life!  Whew!  During all this time I have been working a lot, watching movies, and enjoying a few good books.  Currently I am reading Pillars of the Earth and really hate to put it down!  I saw this meme at Amy’s and decided to post.  I must say that there are a lot of really great books that I have read that are not on this list (obviously a Jane Austen fan) but it is a start:

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - hated this one!
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Atonement - Ian McEwan - saw the movie
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - loving the movies!
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Complete Works of Shakespeare(I have read many but not all)

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - saw this movie - don’t remember if I read the book
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Dune - Frank Herbert
Emma - Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Germinal - Emile Zola
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - saw the play at The Guthrie
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Middlesex: A Novel – Jeffrey Eugenides - loved this one!
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
My Antonia – Willa Cather
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Northanger Abby – Jane Austen
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - this one is on my short list to read
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Possession - A.S. Byatt
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Bible (I have read large sections of this)
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown * (I tried—I really did—but I just. Didn’t. Like. It.) - ditto Amy
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - really liked this one
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo - does the Disney movie version count?
The Iliad - Homer
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - loved it! Read it in 1 sitting!
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Loved the movies!!!

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
The Odyssey - Homer
The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Ulysses - James Joyce
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (haven’t read this one but loved the one about Snow White)
Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

 And you? Which are your favorites/most disliked on this list?

There.  I am sure that knitting will resume in the near future - I caught myself taking a sneak peak at the new magazines due out on the stands to start up the fall knitting…

I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind words regarding Miss Ellie.  We are all doing well - the hardest part was the drive to the vet’s office and the actual “event” itself.  We all cried and were quiet for most of the ride home but started to talk about other things as we approached our street.  It was clearly evident that the cat’s condition had been distressing all of us - and we all decompressed in our own ways and are very much relieved.  Mr. Tigger and Bruno don’t even seem to notice she is gone - they had already dealt with her sickness before the humans had. 

We had a wonderful weekend of baseball, fishing (8 yr old ds caught a nice sized Bass), and gardening. Still not very much knitting going on but I did receive a copy of Clue 9 from an angel and have several projects in the works. 

I am now trying to mentally prepare myself for our little “visitor” this weekend (shutter).

This morning I had a fabulous time teaching several 3rd-5th graders on the business of the crafting industry and making 2 different scrapbooks!  The kids were all very engaged, polite, and wonderful to work with! 

This afternoon we all drove to the vet’s office for our final good-byes with Miss Ellie.  She had basically stopped eating 3 weeks ago.  Dh and I were force feeding her, she even refused tuna water from the can.  She had dropped over 1/2 pound from last Friday and we decided that it was time.  Cats are very different from dogs…she probaby would have lasted a couple more weeks with the smallest amount of water possible - but would have been basically starving to death.

This is the sucky, hard part of being a pet owner.  The vet’s office was very kind and we will have a final ceremony in our back yard when the ashes are returned.  We went through many kleenexes but are remembering her like she was in the past, not like she had become (she looked nothing like the picture below in the end).  Strange how these creatures really get under our skin.

Miss Ellie

January 1, 1993-May 16, 2008

Tonight we had to tell our kids that one of our cats, Ellie, has an incurable cancer in her mouth and throat area.  She is 15, has lost almost 1/2 of her body weight in the past 3 months.  We were all hoping that the issue she was having with her mouth was just an infection, but it’s not.  Everyone is very sad.  We are giving her some medication which eases the swelling and we are squirting food down her throat which is giving her some more energy.  Some time in the next couple of months dh and I know we will have to make the “big” decision.  Right now she is not in any pain, still purrs, and wants to be around people but I have explained that cats handle dying differently than dogs and she will eventually tuck herself away more and more.  Thankfully we still have the other cat and the dog but it is always so hard.

My oldest son needs your help!  He is working on his last 2 classes for graduation in June.  He will earn his degre in Graphic Design and is putting together a project which deals with advertising challenges in foreign countries - namely the Middle East.  Please copy the questions and respond with an email to him with your responses.  He is looking for first names only - you can submit a photo if you would like but it is not necessary.  The deadline is Saturday.  Please feel free to send this along to anyone you can think of - Thank you in advance!  Send you responses to matthew.eide@gmail.com

I am creating an art book/ introspective “catalog” on examining and presenting normal folks’ views on the current situation between The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States.

**If you are in a country other than Iran or the United States, please send me a note, and I will be more than happy to include you in a special section of the book if I get enough participants.

If you would like to help, please send me a msg answering the following questions (let it all out, be as long as you want). I would also like to include a photo next to your thoughts, so if you would like, send a picture as well.

** pass this on to everyone and anyone**

**I do not judge the answers. Respect everyone’s opinion, so don’t write what you might think I want to hear. Write what what you think!

The Questions:

1. What do you think when you hear/see the word “Iran”?

2. What are your thoughts on the current situation between the United States and Iran?

3. What would you propose as solutions to ease any tensions between the two countries?

4. What do you think of an armed conflict with Iran?

5. Where does most information about the world come from? (Be specific: Which Paper? Which News Org.? Which Website? etc)

6. Does Iran have the right to nuclear knowledge and usage?

7. Would you like to travel to Iran? Why? Why Not?

8. What are some misconceptions about the US or Iran that you would like to inform the opposite party about?