From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
Goes kind of nicely with the whole “Donders = rogue / scoundrel” thing, dontcha think?
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Even though you’ve been described as reckless, selfish and cocky, you’re the type of person others love to be around. People like you because you’re a scoundrel.
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Click here to take the Star Wars Personality Test
(Sorry about the wonky formatting – it comes pre-formatted and I can’t figure out the code!)
Ahh, there’s nothing like a meme when you’re too sick to blog…
James tagged me for this mammoth meme, and I couldn’t resist.
FOODOLOGY
Q. What is your salad dressing of choice?
A. Paul Newman’s Balsamic Vinagrette
Q. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
A. Dairy Queen
Q. What is your favorite sit-down restaurant?
A. Lone Star Texas Grill – partly for the fajitas, partly because it’s a great restaurant for families
Q. On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
A. 15 – 20% – usually, the larger the bill the smaller the percentage
Q. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick of?
A. Chocolate chip oatmeal cookies
Q. What is your favorite type of gum?
A. Dentyne Ice peppermint
TECHNOLOGY
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A.
Q. How many televisions are in your house?
A. One that works, two more that collect dust and work capriciously only when we don’t want them to
BIOLOGY
Q. What’s your best feature?
A. Um – I’ve always liked my dimples. And I’m vain about my hair, though I’m not sure it’s my best feature.
Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A. Two massive boys (nine and ten pounds respectively) and a couple of teeth. Other than that, I don’t have any aftermarket alterations.
Q. Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
A. I like James’ answer about a sixth sense – I think my mother-radar is the most finely honed of my senses.
Q. When was the last time you had a cavity?
A. I can rarely go a year without them. The only thing holding my teeth together is the fillings, crowns and caps. Lucky for us, Tristan has inherited my cavity-prone teeth. Sigh.
Q. What is the heaviest item you lifted last?
A. Tristan decided he needed to be carried upstairs to bed last night. That’s a good forty-plus pounds. The wheelbarrow I built yesterday probably weighed near that.
Q. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
A. Only by drugs (the kind an anaestethiologist administers), not by concussion.
BULLSHITOLOGY
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
A. Nope.
Q. Is love for real?
A. If love isn’t real, nothing is.
Q. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
A. I was about 11 when I started asking people to call me Dani. Now the only person left who calls me Danielle is my mom and I kind of miss it. (All this to say I seem to have more than enough names as it is.)
Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
A. Depends on the season, but I look good in bright colours like yellow, coral and orange. Navy blue and black are flattering, too,
Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
A. This seems like the kind of thing one would block from one’s memory.
Q. Have you ever saved someone’s life?
A. Not that I’m aware of.
Q. Has someone ever saved yours?
A. In a physical and literal sense, no. But there are many people I credit with shaping who I am or helping me choose one path or another which, to paraphrase Robert Frost, has made all the difference.
DAREOLOGY
Q. Would you walk naked for a half mile down a public street for $100,000?
A. Heck, I’d do it for $20. (How far is half a mile, anyway? A kilometer or so? Can I at least specify that it be during the summer?)
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
A. I almost did it at a party a few years back just for the shock factor.
Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
A. Ick. No.
Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
A. I loved James’ answer to this: “No, but someday I might never blog again for free.” I don’t know what my answer to this question would be – but I don’t think I’m offensive enough as a blogger (yet) that someone would actually pay me to stop.
Q. Would you pose nude in a magazine for $250,000?
A. For a quarter-million? Could I at least have a feather boa?
Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
A. Gotta agree with James’ answer here: “Hell, I might do that just for the bottle of hot sauce.”
Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
A. Of course not.
Q. Would you give up watching television for a year for $25,000?
A. That one would be painful. I’d do it, but I would get awfully twitchy after the first couple of days.
Q. Give up MySpace forever for $30,000?
A. Yes. Where’s my money? (Never actually been on MySpace. Now Facebook…. that’s a different matter.)
DUMBOLOGY
Q: What is in your left pocket?
A. It’s 7:30 on a Sunday morning and I’m wearing track pants. No pockets. Besides, most women’s clothing doesn’t allow for pockets, let alone pockets you can actually put stuff in.
Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
A. I haven’t seen it.
Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
A. Carpet. Ugly faded blue carpet in every. single. room of the house that I hate with a burning passion. Stay tuned for the really tedious series of posts where we endlessly angst over installing laminate on the main floor and do absolutely nothing about it.
Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
A. Sitting is an option? That opens up a whole new world of choices, doesn’t it?
Q: Could you live with roommates?
A. Hell, I can barely share a room with my husband.
Q: How many pairs of flip-flops do you own?
A. Flip-flops are nasty. I absolutely cannot wear footwear that jams things between my toes. *shudder*
Q: Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
A. I got a ticket for an illegal right turn from Bank onto Slater about six years ago. (Livin’ on the edge, baby.)
Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. Once again, I couldn’t improve on James’ answer: “This.”
LASTOLOGY
Q: Friend you talked to?
A. Went to an Ottawa blog chix night out last night with Andrea, Alison, Chantal and Alison. Good times!!
Q: Last person you called?
A. Er, um, ahhh – I have no idea. Oh wait, Lone Star last night to order takeout!
RANDOMOLOGY
Q: First place you went this morning?
A. The porch (to get the newspaper)
Q: What can you not wait to do?
A. Um, win a million dollars? I’m drawing a blank on this one.
Q: What’s the last movie you saw?
A. Cars. It’s babysitting the kids as I do this meme. I’m such a good mommy.
Q: Are you a friendly person?
A. Mostly.
Want to be tagged? Let me know and I’ll link back to you!
Edited to add: tagged – Loukia and Karen and ScatteredMom and Bex and Nancy!
This is going to be another of those posts where I dump the contents of my brain (and my in-box) into your lap and let you sort through it like bargain hunters at a flea market to find the shiny bits in amongst all the drivel.
First and coincidentally, I think it was the last brain-and-inbox dump that I told you about the cross-border candy swap that Notes from the Cookie Jar hosted. I was partnered with Jennifer from In Case You Ever Wondered, who sent us a great package including Easter Tootsie Pops (the boys love these!), cotton candy and green marshmallow Peeps! Did you see that, Andrea? Peeps!
I fell down on the job and completely forgot to take a picture of my outgoing package, but I tried to find candy that I thought was uniquely Canadian. While I couldn’t find any Mack toffee, I included a Kinder Egg (okay, not Canadian, but not widely available in the US, from what I understand), a mix of mini-chocolate bars including KitKats, Coffee Crisps and Smarties, some Kerr’s gumdrops, and a box of Thrills Gum. Jennifer’s son said they should use the Thrills Gum for punishment!
Thanks to Scattered Mom for inviting us to play along! It was fun!
Speaking of good things that come in the mail, after a rather long drought that I sated by reading The Calligrapher, I have been blessed by the book gods lately. Nadine sent me two “just because” books, both of which will likely turn up in the 10-page-in reviews soon. (It’s good to have friends who work for publishers!) Then I was offered a review copy of Missy Chase Lepine’s The Sneaky Chef cookbook – review also pending.
And finally, have you heard about MotherTalk? I had the great priviledge of being a part of a MotherTalk salon back in October when we were in Toronto for the Motherlode conference, and I’ll be blogging on the upcoming tour for the Dangerous Book for Boys (which arrived in the mail the very same day as The Sneaky Chef!)
But what I wanted to tell you about today is another one of MotherTalk’s new initiatives: the MotherTalk Blog Bonanza. According to the e-mail from Miriam Peskowitz, this is how it will work:
MotherTalk will suggest a topic, post it on our blog and email an announcement. Whoever wants to blog, join us. This is not about an elite in-group with a secret code. No way, it’s about sharing an experience, writing together, and feeling connected through our blogs. I can already imagine what fun it will be to click through each other’s blogs and read all the posts.
For each MotherTalk Blog Bonanza, we also hope to have an informal contest, where the author might pick a favorite post, and send that blogger an autographed book, say. We’re not big into competition, we just want to spice it up, and send you a MotherTalk Blog Bonanza Winner emblem for your sidebar.
Next Friday (April 27) is Fearless Friday, inspired by Arianna Huffington’s book, On Becoming Fearless. From the MotherTalk blog:
Let’s all write about times in our lives when we stepped out of our comfort zones, when we challenged our usual fears and anxieties and all the nervousness that keeps us in line, keeps us in our places, and prevents us from having as much fun, as much influence, as much personal, inner-voice purpose in the world. Whether this stepping-out, this fear-overcoming, happens at home, on the playground, at school, work, in writing or in the aisles of Congress, let’s tell our stories, inspire each other, and make a place for ourselves in the world.
Click through to the MotherTalk blog for further instructions if you want to play along!
Have you seen True Mom Confessions yet? It’s part post-secret, part group therapy. I first found it via one of my government / social media buddies, Ian Ketcheson, and Ali had a post up about it yesterday. I found it irresistibly compelling for the first little while. I love how you can vote “me too” but not “you’re a moron” or “are you kidding me?”, and I love that there is no commentary. But since the last time I checked, now they’ve added discussion forums and I think it takes away from the elegant simplicity of the original concept. Still madly addictive, though.
Back when I started blogging in January of 2005, a lot of my friends rolled their eyes. Half of them had no idea what the hell a blog was, and those that did (I’m looking at you, Ãœbergeek!) thought blogs were the domain of tech geeks and lovesick 14 year old diarists – not 30-something working mothers of preschoolers. Since then, a few more people have discovered blogging – like 30 or 40 million people – and blogging has become fairly mainstream.
In the same vein, try to keep an open mind when I told you that I am newly addicted to yet another social medium: Facebook.
*pauses to wait for gales of laughter and rolling of eyeballs and slapping of knees to subside*
Yes, I know. I know. There are multitudinous reasons that I should not be spending precious time and brain cells on Facebook. One of them is that I don’t have enough time for all the crap in my life as it is, without adding another time sink. Another is that I’m actually over the legal age of majority, unlike the vast majority of other people on Facebook. But, I’m hooked.
So what is Facebook? Well, I’m still a bit of a newbie, and I only this week realized I could do stuff like import my own blog feed to show up in my profile. But you have a profile, just like any other social media site, and you can sign yourself up for various networks like where you live, where you went to school and where you work. (Beloved is a college teacher, and at the beginning of the year, they had a community police officer speaking at a staff meeting who opined that Facebook is the single most dangerous tool young people are using, because of the huge amount of personal information they share and how naive they are about posting their full names, addresses, mobile numbers and whatnot. Ottawa tech blogger EngTech had a great article about modifying your privacy settings to protect yourself, if you’re interested.)
The addictive part, aside from the networks, is of course the interactivity. You can chat, or send messages to your friends. There are also ‘groups’ that you can join, which are basically bulletin boards with photo sharing capability. That’s the quick and dirty – I’m quite convinced there’s far more to it than I am aware, but that’s what I’ve figured out by playing around with it.
It took a while. I signed up for an account maybe six weeks ago out of sheer curiousity. I figured if I’m going to speak with any authority about this social media stuff, I ought to take a peek and see what it’s all about. So I signed up, created a bare-bones profile, and took a little tour. I checked my high school graduating class (Catholic Central Secondary in London, class of 1988) and not a single person was registered. I typed in the names of a few friends, old and new. Nothing. And I shrugged and said, whatever, and went back to catching up on bloglines.
Maybe a week or so later, I commented on one of Suze’s blog posts about Facebook, and she ‘friended’ me, and then so did a couple of other people. Pretty soon I had a dozen or so friends, most of them from the blogosphere but a few from work, too. Then a really old friend, one from grade school and high school and one of the last people I would ever expect to see online (Fryman – it was Gary! Remember Gary??) friended me just before Easter.
Right about that time, I discovered the weirdly addictive and voyeuristic habit of surfing my friends’ friend lists. I think that was the tipping point for me, where I started to actively check Facebook as part of my regular ‘check-comments-check-email-check-bloglines’ online routine. I’m still not wholly into it – yet. I signed up for a couple of groups, one for the KRZR bloggers, one for GTA bloggers and the people who read them, and one amusingly called “People who are too old for Facebook.” (And I’m even older than most of them! Yikes.)
Speaking of age, I don’t know whether it’s a coincidence of timing or something that just turned on in the collective DNA of my generation like the homing instinct of salmon, but it seems like my peers are suddenly flooding on to Facebook in massive numbers in the past month or so. My highschool graduating class suddenly has more than a dozen members (only one of which I’d be remotely interested in hearing from and most of whom I had never heard of.) My real-life and online friends are coalescing into cyber-existence at the rate of a new friend every day or two. This mad herding of the 30-something crowd, of course, is a sure sign that Facebook is no longer cool.
It’s not the cool factor that’s got me hooked, though. On the weekend, I discovered a new pastime, one that addicted me firmly and fully to Facebook: surfing the ‘friend list’ of minor celebrities. I’m not talking about A-listers here, not even B-listers. But I was fascinated by the friend list of David Akin, a political journalist who has ‘friended’ major Canadian politicians (Stephen Harper and Stephan Dion among them), celebrities like Rick Mercer, and writers like Paul Wells. (Props to Colin at Canuckflack.com, who got me stalking looking at David Akin’s profile in the first place.) And discovering them, I felt myself compelled to surf their friend lists, to see who else was cool and accessible. I’ve tried looking up a few favourite authors, for example, thinking maybe I’d be brave and send a note to say hello, but so far I haven’t found any of the ones I’ve tried.
Aside from the voyeuristic aspect of Facebook, which somehow seems even more personal than blogging, not to mention the ethics of stalking people I don’t actually know, there are social minefields to be navigated – especially for someone who considers a cocktail party unimaginably complex and fraught with potential peril. There is the issue, which has just happened to me, of what happens when someone you clearly don’t know tries to ‘friend’ you. I don’t want to be rude, especially since it’s entirely possible that I do somehow know this person perhaps somewhere in the distant recesses of my foggy memory (one more argument against the over-30 crowd being on Facebook – our social histories are just so much longer and more complex than the teenagers who can clearly remember the first grade when I can’t really dredge up clear memories of my early 20s.) At the same time, much like I struggle when asked to add a blog I don’t like to my blogroll, I don’t want to simply add friends willy-nilly. Call me old-fashioned, but stating someone is my friend means something to me.
Thank goodness I haven’t yet had to deal with the extreme awkwardness of having somebody I know but truly dislike trying to friend me. No, I’m not talking about you. But it is kind of ironic that even though I click every day to see who has signed up from my graduating class, with the exception of maybe half a dozen people, there is nobody from high school that I have the remotest earthly desire to hear from. Except maybe to puff up my chest and say ‘screw you, look how good my life turned out. Doesn’t it suck to be you in comparison?”
And I wonder why more people haven’t friended me.
So what do you think? Have you been on Facebook? Why or why not? Do you think Facebook is the new e-mail, and our grandparents will be doing it before long?
And, erm, if you’re on Facebook, feel free to look me up. If you can’t find me, send me an e-mail and I’ll tell you the secret clubhouse handshake to get in the door.
(Edited to add: one more reason to love Facebook – tonnes of Canadian content. From Kris Abel’s CTV blog today: “A recent explosion of new users has placed Toronto (Canada’s largest population centre) as the biggest group of users in the world (almost half a million), offering more members than both New York and Los Angeles combined.” I had no idea! I thought it was just a coincidence of geography that so many of the people I was stumbling upon were Canadian.)
APL always manages to find these funky little things!
| You Are a Chimera |
 You are very outgoing and well connected to many people. Incredibly devoted to your family and friends, you find purpose in nurturing others. You are rarely alone, and you do best in the company of others. You are incredibly expressive, and people are sometimes overwhelmed by your strong emotions. |
It’s all quite true, isn’t it? Mythologically, the Chimera was part lion (I’m a Leo, after all!), part goat (stubborn as the day is long) and part dragon (especially after the spicy Thai for lunch!)
From the same site:
| You Will Be a Cool Parent |
 You seem to naturally know a lot about parenting, and you know what kids need. You can tell when it’s time to let kids off the hook, and when it’s time to lay down the law. While your parenting is modern and hip, it’s not over the top. You know that there’s nothing cool about a parent who acts like a teenager… or a drill sergeant! |
Well, thank goodness I have this confirmed in writing. Note to self: print off and keep multiple copies for future use with disbelieving children.
Have you seen the Alanis Morisette cover of My Humps? Props to Kerry for finding it. I was reading somewhere that Alanis hasn’t yet said what her intent was, whether it’s a parody or an April Fools Joke or a criticism or what. I hope it was intended to demonstrate how truly inane and stupid the song’s lyrics are, despite the catchy beat. I have to say, I like it!
For a truly disturbing YouTube experience, make sure the kiddies aren’t looking over your shoulder and then watch Kermit on Crank, where Kermit the Frog covers the NIN song hurt while rather graphically shooting up. I’m not sure I needed to see this one.
Yesterday, after I posted the interview questions and answers it occured to me that it would have been a fun time to play the cocktail party comment game and have y’all interview each other. Since it’s a long weekend, let’s do it now. It’s a cocktail party, and you all have to make small talk. Pay attention, cuz if you play there’s TWO parts to each comment. Each person who comments will answer the question in the comment directly above theirs, and then pose a question of their own for the next person. Got it? Each comment has the answer to the previous question, and the question for the next person.
The questions can be on whatever topic you like, and you can take as long or as little to answer as you like. The questions should be about personal preferences, attitudes and opinions, along the lines of the ones you see in those e-mail memes: what’s the last book you read? What’s your favourite movie? What’s under your bed? Vanilla or chocolate? What’s the best vacation you ever took? What are your pets’ names and why? (Yes, I know, these are lame questions. But I trust that you can do oh so much better.)
Okay, so my question for the first commenter is: What superhero did you want to be when you were a kid?
I think the success of any interview gives much more weight to the questions than the answers. That’s why I jumped on the chance to play along with the interview meme that’s sweeping through the Momosphere right now when Bub and Pie asked if anyone wanted to be an interviewee. She’s always thoughtful and clever and I was curious to see what questions she’d come up with for me. I wasn’t disappointed – they’re great questions. Now let’s see if I can do them justice with my answers! (And don’t forget to go back and read B&P’s answers to the questions posed to her by Mouse.)
1. You’re very open on your blog – it’s one of the things that draws readers in, makes us feel we know you. Experiencing your pregnancy alongside you and then the tragedy of your miscarriage was an intense experience for me as a reader. Do you ever regret the permanent record you’ve left here of your pregnancy in posts that now have a different meaning in light of your miscarriage?
There’s one post in particular I wrote maybe a week before the miscarriage when I was around 15 weeks or so, talking about how I thought maybe I could feel the baby moving. In retrospect, that was pretty unlikely, as given what we found out, the baby had likely died by that point. I called it “The Quickening” and I still get a lot of google traffic on that word (sigh, probably more now that I’ve highlighted it again. Darn spider-bots.) and it always made me cringe. I almost took it down, just because I was feeling a little bit bitter about it showing up in the referral logs, but I never did. That’s as close as I come to regret over any of it.
All of that stuff I wrote while I was pregnant was true as it was happening, and was a completely honest representation of what I was going through at the time, so no, I don’t regret any of it. It’s still hard for me to go back and read some of it, but I can’t say that I wish I didn’t write it, or that I wish I had thought differently at the time. I’ve always believed in sharing my joy while it lasts, which is why I could never wait to announce a pregnancy. Sad times may come, so live your moments of joy with enthusiastic abandon while you can.
2. Like me, you were married unhappily once, and are married much more happily now. Do you feel that your first experience in marriage helped shape your second?
Funny, my answer to this question after thinking about it was not my knee-jerk, first-blush response. I don’t write a lot about my ex because he’s not around to defend himself, and frankly, I’m done giving him any power over me, even all these years later. Suffice to say, he didn’t always treat me as well as he should have. He cheated on me, for one. Told his best friend that the best way to ‘train’ his new wife was to keep putting her down until she stopped fighting back, for another (and he practiced what he preached). And he was, in the most clinical sense of the definition, a pathological liar. He would lie even when the truth was a perfectly acceptable answer. He would lie for the sake of lying, even when there was no doubt whatsoever he’d get caught in his lie. And he lied to me about a lot of stuff – everything from “I took the movies back to the video store today” when he didn’t, to “I didn’t take your bank card out of your wallet and use it to take money out of your account” when he did, to “I didn’t sleep with her” when he did.
So yes, living with that for my most formative years (started ‘steady’ dating when I was 16, got married when I was 20, got divorced at 24) definitely affected the relationships that followed. When Beloved and I had been living together for a couple of years but not yet married, I went to see a psychologist for a while, and we worked through a lot of the crap I was still carrying around with me. She helped me understand that it was not okay for him to force sex through guilt and withholding of affection, which he did too often, and that I was not at ‘fault’ for his lies, his adultery, his difficulty in holding a job, and so many other things. Truly, the dozen or so sessions I had with that psychologist were one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.
All this to say that I was carrying a lot of emotional baggage by the time Beloved and I moved in together – but not in the ways I might have expected. I’ve never had trust issues with Beloved, for example. I trust him blindly, with my whole heart, and always have. It’s a kind of triumph of naivety and love over experience. But I do have residual control issues. For example, because I could never trust my ex to pay the bills, I must be in charge of the family finances now – I can’t cede control of that over to Beloved.
I was ready to answer this question with the many ways that the practice marriage has affected my marriage with Beloved, but I’m pleased to see that in the analysis, maybe I overestimated them. I’m sure there are a thousand other ways, large and small, that have left a residual imprint, but it’s surprisingly difficult to analyze what comes as a result of the ‘practice’ marriage and what was inherently me in the first place.
3. Who do you consider to be the sexiest Canadian politician?
I have three answers for this question, with varying degrees of qualifiers. To answer the question straight up, the sexiest current politician is Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, which I conveniently happened to decide not that long ago when I saw him on the Rick Mercer Report.
Now, if we can expand the parameters a bit, as he hasn’t yet run for his seat in Papineau, but when he officially becomes a politician, I’m going to have to switch my allegiance to Justin Trudeau as the sexiest politician. I’ve had a crush on him since long before the moving eulogy he delivered for his father.
And if we can extend the definition of politics to include speechwriters and communicators for national leaders, my vote goes to former Liberal campaign blogger Scott Feschuk. I have a wicked literary crush on him.
4. Severus Snape: friend or foe?
Ugh. I don’t know!! I’ve been re-reading the books to refresh my memory of the details of the stories in anticipation of the July arrival of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As I read, I’ve been trying to glean any little bit of meaning or insight to this very question in all the scenes where Snape appears.
WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!! If you have not yet read to the end of Half Blood Prince, STOP READING and skip to the next question!
I’ve been pondering for two years now whether Snape was simply fulfilling his destiny, or some sort of obligation to Dumbledore, or whether he was truly evil all along, or whether he was possessed by Voldemort. I don’t know! I’m too Pollyanna to think that Snape is a truly evil character who willfully killed Dumbledore, and Rowling is after all writing what are in essence children’s books.
My bet is that he was under some sort of spell or obligation. I’m itching to read the next book, though. Conveniently, it arrives the first day of my two-week summer vacation. Coincidence or excellent planning on my part? I’ll be torn the whole way through, racing to the end to find out once and for all what happens, but slowing myself down because there won’t be another helping of Harry Potter after this one is consumed. Peanut gallery, what say you?
5. How do you think birth order affects the personalities of your children?
Another good question! I can definitely see that my boys seem to fit into their birth-order personality stereotypes, for lack of a better word.
Tristan, the first born, is a people-pleaser, and a little high strung. He’s keen and tends to be serious more often than not, and plays happily by himself. Simon, on the other hand, is mellower. He’s much more social and outgoing, and much more flexible.
This has been great fun to answer. If you’d like me to interview you, let me know in the comments. I don’t promise to be as prompt, let alone as insightful, as Bub and Pie was in sending her questions off to me, but I’ll do my best.
Saw Bub and Pie give the ubiquitous 100 books meme a great twist, and thought I’d try the same thing. I clicked back through more than 15 blogs trying to figure out what the original list of 100 books was supposed to represent, but couldn’t find it. (You can see the original meme here.) The idea is to bold the ones you’ve read, but B&P came up with the idea of categories, which I shamelessly stole and then substituted with my own categories.
Better than reading a cereal box
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
Les Miserables (Hugo)
The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
Shoulda stuck with the cereal box
The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
Read it twice, or more
The Stand (Stephen King)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling) *
The World According To Garp (John Irving)
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
School daze
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
1984 (Orwell)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) – in French, no less!
The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Watership Down (Richard Adams)
Lord of the Flies (Golding)
Started but not finished
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
The Bible – although after 13 years of Catholic school, I’ve got a firm grasp of the plot and how it comes out in the end
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
Erm, how did I miss this one?
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
Life’s too short
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
War and Peace (Tolsoy)
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
Ulysses (James Joyce)
Would have read by now, if I hadn’t been wasting all my time blogging about books
A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
Never got around to it
Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
Shogun (James Clavell)
Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
Emma (Jane Austen)
The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
Who?
The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
Blindness (Jose Saramago)
* I’ve started re-reading the entire Harry Potter series, starting with the Philosopher’s Stone, in anticipation of book 7 this summer.
(Edited to add: oops, it’s a meme for sharing. Consider yourself tagged if you want to play along!)
I have so many little mental post-it notes stuck to my forehead that I can’t see through them anymore. I’ve got to get some of this stuff out, coherent post be damned.
Do you like free? I like free. Do you like camping? I like camping somewhat less than I like free, but even stuff that I don’t ordinarily like, I am magnanimous enough to like if it’s, well, free. So I’m all over KOA’s annual free camping weekend. Pay for a site, or one of their funky little cabins, on Friday May 11 and stay for free on Saturday May 12. This will be our third year (see previous adventures here and here) and like last year, our ‘camping’ will consist of cramming the entire extended family (six adults, four kids under six) into a perfect little cottage at the Ivy Lea KOA campground near Gananoque. I can’t wait!
Camping not your thing? Prefer culture to campfire? How about a live performance of the Barber of Seville, direct from the Metropolitan Opera House, broadcast directly to a local movie theatre in high definition? I love this idea, and wish the boys were old enough to enjoy or at least appreciate it. It’s happening this Saturday in select theatres. I wish I could go!
I thought this was way wicked cool. Michelle at Scribbit created a custom search engine for mom blogs. I liked the idea so much, I added it to the sidebar. Scroll down (waaaay down, gosh that sidebar is taking on a life of its own!) to give it a try. Michelle has added more than 1500 mom blogs, so you can do a custom mom-blog search on whatever tickles your fancy.
Blogger ingenuity at work to make your world a better place! (And I’m happy to sponge off it, for the price of a link!)
And now for the laundry list of other things. (That’s a funny phrase, isn’t it? I mean, who makes a list to do the laundry? Lord knows I need a list to keep track of just about everything else in my life – you thought I was kidding about the post-it note reference above? – but I’ve never been compelled to make a list to separate my whites from my colours.)
Man, I get some weird shit in my in-box. Lots of people want me to tell you about their stuff. I am ashamed to admit, I simply ignore most of them. It seems terribly rude, and makes me feel ungrateful, because I know it’s nice people like you who made this blog a place worth of solicitation. So I’ve decided that every so often I’ll just dump all the stuff I get into a single post and I can stop feeling guilty about it. (I kind of got this idea from Paul Wells, who said he posts every 100th news release he gets, in its entirety.)
So in this post that is dying for any sort of a segue and more or less in their own words, I give you:
The Tutorlinker: “We use Google Map API to search and point tutors. Parents/students can simply type their address to search and compare tutors in their area and there is no registration. Tutors can go through simple registration step to be listed.”
Centre for Disease Control’s Mom2Mom: “CDC’s new website has a lot to offer, and I want to make sure that the word gets out. So if you have the time and the inclination, check out the site share your advice – you can even share your past blog posts on the message board – and engage with other moms.”
The Starter Wife: “After being blacklisted from premieres to pilates, Molly Kagan (Debra Messing) searches to rediscover life after divorce. A brief respite in Malibu and some oh-so-Hollywood friends prove to be the perfect cocktail for her transformation from “Starter Wife” to her new life. Based on Gigi Levangie Grazer’s New York Times best seller of the same name, The Starter Wife also stars Judy Davis, Joe Mantegna, Miranda Otto & Anika Noni Rose. I am working with USA network to help raise awareness for a promotion that they are running for The Starter Wife in conjunction with Ponds. Their contest, “40’s and Fabulous†is an essay contest looking for stories from real women about why your beauty and confidence now makes you happier and more comfortable in your 40s than you were in your 30s or 20s. To enter, all you have to do is visit the official site. Five winners will be showcased in their own USA commercial — and win an all expense paid weekend of pampering in Hollywood, including a fashion/beauty makeover and tickets to The Starter Wife premiere!”
(Full disclosure: the end of this e-mail offered a Ponds gift pack in exchange for posting something about this. I am *not* accepting anything in exchange for this link, just adding it to the pile in case it’s something one of you might be interested in. Me, I had a hard time reading right to the end, what with my eyeballs rolling back in my head like that. But hey, to each her own. And hey, if you do enter the contest and you do win, you’re morally obligated to bring me with you to the pampering and premiere weekend, right? I mean, I’m all ethical and shit, and I’m mocking the whole concept with my usual subtle finesse, but Hollywood pampering and premieres? I’m all over that!)
Edited to add: Rats, I forgot one! I wanted to tell you that Scattered Mom from Notes from the Cookie Jar is hosting a cross-border candy swap. Since Beloved was so excited to get a package of candy from the States during the last candy swap, I think I’m maritally obligated to sign up for this one. You only have until March 25 (this Sunday) to sign up!
Chantal at Breadcrumbs in the Butter (one of the funniest moms I know) tagged me for this meme on real moms. The idea is to use the phrase “real moms” as a writing prompt. I loved what she wrote, and had a hard time deciding where I wanted to go with this one.
Real moms laugh. A lot.
Real moms work outside the home.
Real moms breastfeed exclusively.
Real moms always put the needs of their family first.
Real moms hire cleaning ladies.
Real moms let their babies cry it out.
Real moms use cloth diapers.
Real moms believe in circumcision.
Real moms choose public schools.
Real moms trust the experts.
Real moms feed their kids only home-made, organic, preservative-free food.
Real moms go to church.
Real moms believe spanking is child abuse.
Real moms believe in the family bed.
Real moms think a child belongs in his/her own bed.
Real moms believe in corporal punishment.
Real moms are athiests.
Real moms consider opening a can of spaghettios making dinner.
Real moms trust their instincts.
Real moms choose private schools.
Real moms are horrified by circumcision.
Real moms use disposable diapers.
Real moms would never dream of letting their babies cry it out.
Real moms love to clean the house.
Real moms aren’t afraid to put themselves first sometimes.
Real moms bottle feed exclusively.
Real moms stay at home with their kids.
Real moms cry. A lot.
Real moms love their kids.
Now I’m supposed to tag five other people. Hmm, okay, I’d like to see what TwinMom, Nancy, Alison, Bub and Pie and Miche have to say.
