And She Knits Too!

I didn't win the lottery so I'm back at work...

And I've got nothing to blog, so you're going to have to suffer through a meme.

Tagged by Michelle:

Turn on your MP3 player. Go to SHUFFLE songs mode. Write down the first 15 songs that come up--song title and artist--NO editing/cheating, please. Choose some people to be tagged. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about your musical tastes, or at least a random sampling thereof.

Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

(Take Me for A Walk in the) Morning - Serena Ryder

Mamma Mia - ABBA

Groove is in the Heart - Deee-Lite

Minus - Beck

Prince of Darkness - Indigo Girls

Walking in your footsteps - The Police

Bright Eyes - Jeff Healey

Complainte De La Butte - Rufus Wainwright

French Suites Track 9 - Glenn Gould

Ramble On - Led Zeppelin

Linger - The Cranberries

Kiss Off - Violent Femmes

Heros - David Bowie

Crazy for you - Adele

I'm not going to tag anyone--but you're all welcome to leave a list in my comments or let me know that you played too.

Beachy and not-so-beachy books

I've bought my beach books, and because I didn't have anything on the go after finishing Eragon (I will not read the rest of the series--too much description...) I started the trashiest of them, The Other Boleyn Girl.  It's meh.  Good enough to read on the subway and to put me to sleep, but not all that great.  It'll be good for the beach.

I have said this before, but it's still true: Graduate school killed my love of reading.  I still read a lot at work every day, mostly policies and collective agreements, and I find it hard to read anything that challenges me in the evenings because I'm tired and want to zone out.  I'm working on it. 

I picked up Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayer, on Juno's recommendation and plan to have my feet in the sand and a Corona in my hand when I start that.  I'm also bringing along a review copy of Knitting The Threads of Time: Casting Back to the Heart of Our Craft which sounds really interesting.  I doubt I'll have time to get through them all with the kids to snorkel with and sun to soak in, but there's no harm in trying. 

A friend put up this list which I thought was interesting.  It's a meme, but only if you want.  My total=32.  I find this list a bit Dickens heavy.  What about Toni Morrison or DH Lawrence or E.M. Forester instead?  Like all these lists, it's a statement about what is considered worth reading (for me, NOT The DaVinci Code).

***

The Big Read (http://www.neabigread.org/) said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list. So ... copy this list, remove my yeses and nos, and add your comments (favourable or otherwise) about the ones you have read. Don't forget to include a total. 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - 10 times at least.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – Started a few times.  Probably will never read it
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - YES
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – YES
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - YES
6 The Bible – I went to Catholic School, so have read parts of it.  No interest in it now.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - YES
8 1984 - George Orwell - YES
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - YES (and everything else she wrote--some neat trashy stuff)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – YES
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – YES
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – (Only what I had to read in high school--not because I didn't like it, just because I never got back to it.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - YES
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot- On my TO READ list
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - YES
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - YES
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens-
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - YES
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - YES
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - YES
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - why so much Dickens?
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen - YES
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - YES (one of my favourites)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - YES
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 –
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -YES
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Never will
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 - YES (20 times at least--one of my favourites)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - YES
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - YES
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - YES (liked it but preferred Amsterdam)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - on my nightstand
52 Dune - Frank Herbert- YES
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - YES
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 - YES
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 - YES
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie -
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - YES
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 - Have it.  Need to read it
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -YES
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - YES (excellent book)
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - YES
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton –
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - YES
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupe – YES
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 – Shakespeare – YES

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Working on it with Emma
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Is it lunch yet?

From Michelle, a little something to get the tummy rumbling.  This is the Omnivore's Hundred list of foods the gastronomic Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives.

The rules of the meme: bold those you have tried, strikethrough those you wouldn't eat on a bet.

I have a few things I wouldn't eat and a few that I'm not sure about because I don't really know what they are.  I'm not the most adventurous eater (though I was suprised at how many things on this list I've tried).

1. Venison (otherwise known as "free-range beef" at our house.  My father in law and Craig (to a lesser extent) hunt so we eat various kinds of game.)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (this may be the cheese Craig tried to poison me with on New Year's.  Evil).
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese (My grandfather loved head cheese, and the smell of my grandmother cooking it makes my stomach turn.  I may have tasted it as a child but am repressing that memory).
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (not a whole one, and never again--too hot.  They’re good cooked though).
27. Dulce de leche (my mom always made it for almost-stale cake, though I suppose it would be the french version)
28. Oysters
29. Baklava (I prefer Loukoumades for Greek dessert)
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl

33. Salted lassi (didn’t know until I looked it up; my next door neighbours are Indian and brought us this drink to celebrate Eid.)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar

37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin (just a bite, didn’t like it)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian

66. Frogs’ legs (but I’ve seen kids on a survival camp catch their own frogs and eat the legs; they were hungry!)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis

69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill (Bambi; it was freshly hit by my FIL’s truck).

76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (or something similar).
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam (well Klik, the Canadian spam)
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake