Books, Books, Books

So, I found this list on Facebook the other day and posted it there, but I also wanted to post it on the blog. I have filled it out below, but you should as well. Even if you don't post how many you have read, it's a good reading list; at least that is how I am going to use it.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this. Then look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Total them up and leave a comment with how many books you have read :)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

Total: 7

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X

Total: 5

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
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 X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 4

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

Total: 7

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
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 X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X

Total: 5

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
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 X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

Total: 5

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
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 X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 4

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total: 3

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dicken X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 5

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 4

Grand Total = 49

Island of Calm

I am not sure if I have spoken about this on the blog yet, but I have anxiety and depression. My anxiety issues got so bad last year that I had panic attacks just leaving my apartment. While I am not doing that any more (thank you happy pills and yoga), I do have to plan things a little bit more in order to give myself the time I need to process and handle situations I know are going to be stressful for me.

Obviously, moving is one of those times. Our apartment has always been the place that I feel safe and comfortable. I have been trying to keep it as clutter free as possible, but well, we have a lot of crap and now we are moving, so that is just impossible. So, I am trying really hard to keep a portion of the apartment as clutter free as possible. And for that reason, even if our apartment looks like this...

Our bed will look like this...

It is the island of calm in my apartment. We'll see how long that lasts :)

We were able to box more books last night, but we ran out of small boxes so are not finished yet. For that reason, we are going to extend the "how many boxes to move Kelli and Adam's books" contest. We have also decided to offer a prize. The person that gets the closest will get their choice of a Jane Austen book!

Again, we are taking guesses to how many boxes it will take to pack all of our books. Here is the information that you need to make the guess:

We have 10 bookshelves - when you add the small ones together it comes out to roughly 7 1/2 bookshelves of books
The boxes are 16 1/2 x 12 5/8 x 12 5/8

Please leave all guesses in the comments to this or yesterday's post and we will announce the winner this weekend after (cross your fingers) all of the books are packed. You have until Saturday at noon to post a guess. If you have already guessed and would like to change your it, you can.

In non-moving news. I was able to start on the baby blanket for yet unnamed niece. I really like the color of the yarn. I am really excited to see how this turns out! It's a fairly easy knit, so hopefully it will go quickly.

Moving on up...with a game.

That's right, we have started packing for the move that is now 2 weeks away!! We have a general packing schedule and if we can keep to it we should be just fine.First on our list of things to do - - pack the books! Now, this might seem like a one night thing; not in our world. Adam has talked me into (it took almost the entire 2 months to talk me into this) purging our books and selling some. He is definitely getting rid of more than me, but I did put some in the sell pile - you would all be very proud.
So, since we haven't finished packing the books yet, we are opening up a small game to anyone that reads this. We are taking guesses to how many boxes it will take to pack all of our books. Here is the information that you need to make the guess:

We have 10 bookshelves - when you add the small ones together it comes out to roughly 7 1/2 bookshelves of books
The boxes are 16 1/2 x 12 5/8 x 12 5/8

Please leave all guesses in the comments and we will announce the winner tomorrow after (cross your fingers) all of the books are packed. If you have already guessed and would like to change your guess, you can.

I'm not sure what caused it, but after the packing, I got yet another migraine last night. Could it be the moving? Maybe. Could it be the stress of work? Maybe. Could it be that I forgot to have breakfast and realized at 5 p.m. that I hadn't drank anything? Also a maybe.

Well, whatever caused it - it sucked. My right eye swelled up this time. I have posted a rather not great shot of me, but you can see the swelling of the right eye in it. And, worst of all, my migraine caused me to miss the new episode of True Blood. Damn you migraines.

New Yarn!

As some of you may know - my sister is expecting a little girl later this fall!!! She is due in October, so I only have a few more months to knit things :) I found this awesome baby blanket pattern in Debbie Bliss's magazine that I am going to make. I got the first round of yarn in yesterday.

It is Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran in Mauve. It is a really pretty dark pink that is going to look awesome with the chocolate brown color that will make up the 2nd half of the blanket. I'm excited to get started on it.

I am also finishing up on Mary's socks. I am getting so close. I have actually had some time recently to devote to knitting which is a very welcome change. Especially since I have a feeling with the move in a couple of weeks, that I will not have much time in the near future.I have really enjoyed knitting this pattern. It is River Rapids Socks by Sockbug.

They are turning out really nice. I'll post pictures of the final product soon I hope!

EMMA!

There is a new Emma movie coming :) I saw this on youtube earlier today and thought I would try and post it to the blog. Emma is not my favorite of JA's works, but I still love it. There is a humor in it that you rarely find anymore. They did a really good job of casting I think, so I'm really excited to see this version! I love who they cast as Emma and as Mr. Knightly. In the past they have done a good job on one or the other, but generally not both - so I'm excited.

I hope the video works...enjoy!!

Nephews, Nephews :)

We have been very lucky this summer to have both of our nephews come and visit (and they brought their parents, which was nice :) ) Eric, Michelle and David are visiting us this weekend. We went to the zoo when they were here on Sunday last weekend and I have taken some pictures that they posted to their blog to put on mine. I just love them. I should have more to post after this weekend.

Standing in line at Harry Potter!!!!! I'll let you all know how it is.

Migraines :(

Some of you know that I get migraines. I have gotten it to the point that they don't really hinder me too much any more because I can tell from my symptoms when they are coming on and I stop it before it gets to bad. Well, most of the time.

I woke up at 2 a.m. on Monday night with some pain, but was too lazy to get out of bed for some Advil. So...I woke up at 6 a.m. with even more pain and finally got up to do something about it. One of the things that happens when I get migraines is that my left eye swells up. I don't really know why, but it isn't very comfortable. So, needless to say, I didn't make it to work yesterday and ended up staying in bed with something cold on my left eye. (People at work are calling me pirate today :) I feel like I should be wearing an eye patch). I haven't had to stay home from work due to a migraine for a long time, so I guess that is good news, but I hate having to.

So, the good news from this is that the pain started to recede around 3:30ish so I was able to run to the library and get a couple of books to keep me company until Adam got home. They did a great job :) (And yes, I am feeling better today)

Testing. I signed up to be able to post from my cell phone. I don't really know when I would use it really, but I like the idea that I'm able to :)

Wow...July

I feel like I start a lot of blog posts this way, but sorry for the delay in posting. Things are starting to slow down a bit so I should be able to post more regularly coming up. So...what has happened since the last time I posted.

Well, the biggest thing I think is that we bought a car!!! It is the first time that either Adam or I have owned our own car and we are pretty crazy about it :) We will have a covered parking spot at the new apartment when we move, but right now Ace (we named our car) is sitting on the side of the street. Since we don't drive her every day, we walk by her on our way home every night to make sure that she is still okay. We got a gray Honda civic - four door. We are already putting it to good use. Adam took Ace to the driving range this past weekend. I'll post a picture of Ace later this week.

We also bought a new couch!! (Click here to see a picture of it) It has a chase lounge, which you know I am going to curl up on to read and knit; Adam might be able to use it every once in a while :)

I have to admit that I haven't been knitting as much as I usually do recently - we have had a lot going on and have had a lot to do in order to get ready to move. I have worked on a few things and will post pictures of them soon.

What I have been doing a lot lately is reading. My mom suggested the mystery novels by Kathy Reichs. I am a huge fan of the the tv show Bones which is based off of these novels. I have already gotten through the first two of the novels, Deja Dead and Death du Jour. I am going to get the next one, Deadly Decisions, tomorrow from the library when they are open until 9. In the mean time I have started Moo by Jane Smiley. I have heard that it is really funny, so I am looking forward to it.