this is not what I had planned

Today's horoscope was such a good reminder that I feel the need to post it here so that we can all be reminded of the different ways people express feelings and to stop being so judgmental all the time.

"It hurts when your heart is wide open and others just can't match the intensity of your love. For this reason, you may feel that it's safer today to demonstrate your ability to be emotionally detached than it is to show how much you truly care. Unfortunately, this will only allow those in your life to shut down even more. When you recognize that each person expresses love in a unique manner, you'll be able to graciously accept what is currently being offered without further judgment."

I'm done dogsitting and even though I did enjoy my brief stint with the dog, I'm happy to be back at my house where all is quiet, even at 4:30 in the morning and where I know how to find everything in my kitchen. Only a few more weeks here and then it will be off to the new place.

And now for my Sunday paper recommendations:

1. Excellent commentary on global warming can be found here.
2. If anyone wants to go to Sommerfest this Thursday night to see Sibelius, I'm in. It's one of the best and even though I've seen it already, I'd definitely go again!
3. This story about a 26 year old woman who is hiking from Mexico to Canada sort of makes me wonder what I've done for the last four years. I could have been doing something awesome like this...
4. And last but not least, The Hold Steady make the front page of the Variety section.
   

Have a great week, everyone and hopefully, you get a chance to enjoy what is supposed to be beautiful weather this week!

Quote o' the day:

"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught." - Marquis de Vauvenargues

Books books and more books.

I never fill these things out, but I feel somewhat compelled after both Abbi and Rachel did, so here goes. Direct any snarky comments elsewhere, but feel free to share this with others. Books are love!

If you post this somewhere else, this is how you are supposed to do it!
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read or have started but haven't finished.
3) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

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 (my dad used to read this to me as a kid - I loved it!)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller'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 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Isn't this technically a part of the Chronicles of Narnia??)
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
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Which did you like better, this or Angels and Demons?)
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 (This took me 100 Years of Solitude to read...)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (This is creepy good!!)
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 (Really?)
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

I've read just over half of these...what about you? Happy weekend, kids!

Quote o' the day:

"The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand." - Frank Herbert

can't you feel the pull?

Do you think, that amidst all of the political madness that is going on, we are actually making progress? I read all of the articles in the newspapers, about John McCain attempting to learn to speak better (I know some people that could give him some tips), Garrison Keillor telling John McCain to be careful who he consorts with, Bush is a lame duck that the whole G8 group wants out and all sorts of other things.

But are we making progress?

Anyone care to weigh in?

Quote o' the day:

"Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose." -Evan Esar