books

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (i stopped reading about 1/3 into the second book)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (1st & 3rd books only)
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 - on my list of books to read soon
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Does the Childrens Illustrated version that Walmart used to sell count?)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - Own it, never read it.
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 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
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 >:-/ ... how...did this get on the list? and next to Gabriel Garcia Marquez??
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 ...the box set...many times
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 (read the first chapter...)
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 (Another "Children's Illustrated")
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 - Enid Blyton
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

on the subject of things to do before one dies...

Got this from my friend Jamie's blog & thought it was fun. Copy, paste & highlight the things you've done, if you wanna play along

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Alaska
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Been to Disneyland
7. Climbed a mountain (don't think so...but I've driven past the world's tallest hill a few times!)
8. Held a praying mantis
10. Bungee jumped
11. Watched a lightning storm
12. Taught yourself an art from scratch
13. Adopted a child
14. Had food poisoning
15. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
16. Slept on an overnight train
15. Had a pillow fight
18. Hitch hiked
19. Built a snow fort
20. Run a Marathon
21. Watched a sunrise or a sunset
22. Hit a home run
23. Been on a cruise
24. Seen Niagara Falls in person
25. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
26. Seen an Amish community
27. Taught yourself a new language
28. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
29. Gone rock climbing
30. Seen Michelangelo’s David
31. Sung karaoke
32. Seen Old Faithful geyser errupt
33. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
34. Walked on a beach by moonlight
35. Been transported in an ambulance
36. Gone deep-sea fishing
37. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
38. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
39. Played in the mud
40. Gone to a drive in theater
41. Been in a movie
42. Visited the Great Wall of China
43. Started a business
44. Served at a soup kitchen
45. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
46. Gone whale watching
47. Gotten flowers for no reason
48. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
49. Gone sky diving
50. Bounced a check
51. Flown in a helicopter
52. Saved a favorite childhood toy
53. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
54. Eaten caviar
55. Pieced a quilt
56. Stood in Times Square
57. Been fired from a job
58. Broken a bone
59. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
60. Published a book
61. Had your picture in the newspaper
62. Read the entire Bible
63. Visited the White House
64. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (ahhh, those good ol' days of chicken farming...)
65. Had chicken pox
66. Saved someone's life
67. Sat on a jury
68. Met someone famous (not yet, but once I was in a mall at the same time as John Travolta!)
69. Joined a book club
70. Lost a loved one
71. Had a baby
72. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
73. Been involved in a law suit

And, it turns out, I don't have pleurisy, but rather a similar condition called costochondritis...which makes me think of some kind of prehistoric animal every time I say it :)

Blue Roses

Here's a confession. One of my life's secret desires has come to pass.

When I was in high school Speech & Drama we watched the movie of Tennessee Williams' play Glass Menagerie. In AP English IV, we read Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. When I was in ENGL 2220 we read Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. In Intro. to Theater we watched a university production of Tennessee Williams' play Glass Menagerie.

Playhouse on the Square is currently doing a production of Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie a mere 5 blocks from my house, and I had no desire to go see it....it's kind of a boring play, after all, and I don't really understand why it's such a staple in literature and theater classes.

However, since the first time I read it, I have been intrigued by pleurisy, or, as Jim hears it, "blue roses". I thought it was a romantic illness, in the way that dying of 'the consumption' was romantic in the Anne of Green Gables books, and I secretly wanted to contract pleurisy. We now call consumption 'tuberculosis', and it's a nasty disease that no one wants. As is pleurisy, I have recently discovered .

I started out with my normal seasonal allergies a few weeks ago, which then moved down into my chest & caused a cough, which evolved into bronchitis this past week, which has now evolved into 'blue roses'. What is it, you may ask? WebMD has this to say:

"What is pleurisy?
Pleurisy is swelling (inflammation) of the thin layers of tissue (pleura) covering the lungs and the chest wall. The outer layer of the pleura lines the inside of the chest wall, and the inner layer covers the lungs. The tiny space between the two layers is called the pleural cavity. This cavity normally contains a small amount of lubricating fluid that allows the two layers to slide over each other when you breathe. When the
pleura becomes inflamed, the layers rub together, causing chest pain. This is known as pleuritic pain.
Pleurisy is sometimes called pleuritis."

It's like having a stitch in your side that just won't go away and gets worse when you inhale, and mine started yesterday afternoon. I stayed home in bed today so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone, which makes me cough, which makes the pain get sharper. So I spend like 8 hours wandering around on the internet, snuggled up in my bed. It was kind of nice, except for the breathing part :)

And now I can say that I've had pleurisy, just like Laura Wingfield, and cross it off my list of things to do before I die!

It's that time again!

We went to the fair again last month...it was the last time it will be at the Mid-South Fairgrounds, and they had cut down on their variety of rides, but we got our fill of head-spinning fun nonetheless!

My favorite thing about the fair is spotting amusing signs, and I was not disappointed this year. I share with you a few :)

Then, of course, there is the yummy, greasy fair food.

Mike was lovin' him some turkey leg

I had my first ever deep-fried twinkie :)

Everyone else decided to go on the water ride & got soggy bums

Food in the Sooner State

There are two fast food restaurants that I get really excited about when I go back to visit Oklahoma. I have to eat at these places at least twice when I go to Norman, and this weekend I got to introduce Michael to them!

Taco Bueno has the BEST fast-food mexican, with tasty tortillas and wonderfully seasoned refried beans...nothing like the bland taste-less-ness of Taco Bell (which i still eat, because it is cheap...and Mexican :) ) But, MMMMmmMMMM! I love me some Bueno! They also give you real salsa to put on your food, not some strange chemical-y 'taco sauce'.

The other place I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE is Braums. Their french fries are UUUM-Azing! They're thick, crinkle-cut fries that are consistently perfectly cooked, seasoned with this salt powder that is just so very tasty! And the burgers & ice cream are pretty yummy, too.

On the non-fast-food side of things, we went to GiaComo's in McAlester with my dad, where they make a mean ravioli. Ted's Mexican Cafe Escondido has several locations in the OKC metro area, and they recently opened one in Norman, to the great delight of Becky, Courtney & myself! We have to eat there every time I visit, too...homemade tortillas, amazing cheese sauce and salsa that they just keep bringing till we're stuffed with it before they even serve our 'real' food!

Yup, "food" is a close second to "seeing people I love" as a reason I visit Oklahoma!

"for the girl who has everything"

I'm sure my faithful readers have been racking their brains for weeks already, trying to figure out just what to give me for Christmas. Never fear, I have come to the rescue. Below, you will find...

The 2008 List of Things Most Coveted by Eve

1. A guaranteed parking spot in the Central parking lot

2. Reading caddy for the bathtub

3. Toyota Prius

4. A full set of flatware that matches

5. Smooth Legs

6. Trip to Colombia for a semester

7. Blender/Food Processor


What do YOU want?

Cold Feet

This is the problem with not having a lot of natural bodily insulation and being reluctant to give up my flip-flops as the weather cools down.

...It would also help if the people in my office would consider cutting off the A/C sometime before the first frost...