Book List

Just to let you know I am still alive... I found an easy post to make:

I reposted this entry after reading it on Mixed Media Martyr's blog

The BBC says most people will only read 6 of these 100 Books.

Instructions:Cut and Copy the list into your notes... then...

1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (remove other persons X's)
2) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
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 X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
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 Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
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-time - Mark Haddon X
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 X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
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 X
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 X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
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

Total 39 I think... there are some that I might have read but can't really remember reading e.g. Far From the Madding Crowd and Wuthering HEights - I think they were both texts at school but I've forgotten them so completely that I haven't counted them. Mind you some of the ones I know I've read I'm a bit hazy on too...

And it looks to me as though reading the complete works of Shakespeare gives you both 14 and 98.... unfortunately the ones I have read aren't on there...

The balloon in the sky was spotted over Bristol this morning...

Hope you are all enjoying yourselves.

Playing Around

Imelda has just posted this game on her blog. The idea is to take the list and highlight each item that one has personally done. Then to add something new that one has done at the end.

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink - (trivially so as I've been to a bar on my own and been the first person there - I was dating the barman at the time ;-)
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game - (Wimbledon counts doesn't it?)
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa - boo they were closed when I visited!
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s nappy
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten tipsy on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment - (at my mother's funeral - you can't get much worse than that can you? It was the priest's fault... we'd told him her name was Gillian and he shortened it to Gill... all her life she had hated that happening and this man who had never actually known her did it to her in death!)
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse of both the sun and moon
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day - (that'll be speak like a pirate day, me hearties!)
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states - (7 I think but who is counting?)
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had/Have amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country - (oh my goodness... yes... my mother and I went to Greece and she chatted up the waiter at our hotel and got him to take me to a disco - horrendous!)
44. Watched whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero - (for ages after seeing Superman for the first time!)
58. Sung karaoke - (never, ever again...)
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football - (don't know what that is...)
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain - (as children we used have this brilliant game in the rain with wellingtons on both hands and feet, walking like and elephant and with a cardbox over our bodies... )
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business - (well I tried...)
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class (karate, tai-chi, qi gung, Kuk Sool Won)
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight - (the bad part was the fish finger curry the hosts made...)
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted a river
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert”
83. Gotten flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in a Rocky Horror Picture Show
96. Raised children
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour - (Jim is in a band... surely that must count!)
98. Passed out cold - (sort of when I cut my thumb once...)
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over - (does getting a job there first count?)
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a TV game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol - (I used to be a crack shot with my brother's air gun, though not as good as him of course... I also fired a "real" gun on an army stall at a fair )
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild - (when I collected them with a friend who was good at identification but when I tried to collect some on my own I was too scared to eat them - next thing I knew they'd gone maggotty! Yuck!)
118. Ridden a horse - (not well...)
119. Had major surgery - sort of... I insisted on only having a local anaesthetic...
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept 30 hours in a 48 hour time frame
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states (like Imelda that's easy, when you don't live in the U.S..... Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Greece)
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi - (yum! I've had "proper" sushi in a fabulous place in California, supermarket sushi and I've made my own sushi twice recently too.)
128. Had your picture in the newspaper - (but not since I was a child...)
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read “The Iliad” - (at school, a translation only and I can recall none of it now!)
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating - (I helped when we kept chickens when I was a child, I didn't actually do the killing though...)
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language - (yes and it was lots of fun!)
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone’s life
151. Organized a HUGE event!
152. Seen something you can't explain with science.
153. Had a book published.

and my addition:

154. Solved Rubik's cube.

Do let me know if you decide to add to this one!

Six Random Things About Me

Random splatters by Caroline in Corel Painter

Soulbrush popped in and has inspired me to tell 6 random things about myself. (You can see hers here).

To make them as random as possible I'm using a random word generator to prompt me:

1. chopped - I took a term of Karate when I was 22 - I stopped after that because I felt the instructor was ogling me too much and besides I was having a lot of difficulty remembering the forms.
2. prolonged - well the obvious one is that I've been off-work since 1996 but that's not new so how about a more positive one - when I was in my teens I was did a 12 hour sponsored dance and enjoyed almost every moment of it...
   
3. club - I'm not currently a member of any club but I have been in the past a member of the following sorts of clubs: archery, bridge, chess, go, TM, yoga.
4. undoing - my undoing has been chocolate, and now unsweetened cocoa! But is that news? No probably not... well how about a terrible tendency to have things stop working as soon as I've publicly claimed that they are working... do you think mentioning it now will take its power away?
   
5. institution - I went to Warwick to do Maths - it had been an institute of Mathematics before it was even a university - but the reason I went there was because it was nearer home than most of my other options...
   
6. flags - Irises are one of my favourite flowers. The Yellow Flag Iris is gorgeous but a bit too big for our town garden's pond.

If you fancy having a go at this I really recommend using that random word generator to nudge you.

Let Play Tag

Its ages and ages since I did one of these things... this is one that Jo had on Spinning Against The Tide

The Rules

Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags some people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1. Five things I was doing 10 years ago:

1. In 1998 I was studying HK (I've written quite a bit more up about this here)
2. I got Reiki attunements
3. I studied anatomy & physiology
4. Also interview skills for therapists
5. And a course on running a therapy business (that one was a waste of time and money, the rest weren't!)
   

2. What 5 things are on on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

I don't have to-do lists... I always feel overly constrained by them. Carla's current coaching posting is about them...

Here are 5 things I have done:

1. 2 loads of washing.
2. Sent distance healing to someone.
3. Checked the plants in the solar shed with Jim - some are doing almost too well and need planting out - luckily he's now finished the construction (raised beds and trellis) that was holding us up from planting things outside.
4. Made a particularly good Mexican-style breakfast that is turning out to have been a brunch.
5. Finished reading a book.
   

3. Five snacks I enjoy:

1. Hot cocoa - it may be a drink but its definitely also a snack.
2. Lindt's 99% cocoa.
3. Salted roasted pecans - overly salty but yummy.
4. Salted crisps - ditto!
5. Jim's sourdough toasted.
   

4. Five things I would do if I was a billionaire:

1. Stop dreaming about becoming a billionaire!
2. Buy a house with 2-3 acres in the Cotswolds - its where I grew up but we can't afford the kind of place I grew up in since it became stockbroker belt... As a child we kept lots of animals and had what seemed like a vast garden - I'm hankering for something similar though preferably not next to the busy A417!
   
3. Make sure all my family are okay for money too.
4. Give some of it to the Woodland Trust (I'm already a life member).
5. Have a housekeeper - now that would be a real luxury - I'm not much cope at it but love having a clean and tidy house.
   

5. Five places I have lived:

1. Duntisbourne Abbotts (that's the Cotswold village I grew up in).
2. Cirencester (where we moved after my father died and my mother had to sell the business).
   
3. Upper Dowdeswell (where I went to recharge my batteries after my first marriage broke down).
   
4. Paradise, Painswick (where I was living when I got together with Jim)
   
5. Bristol (where I've lived on and off in different parts for rather a lot of the last 23 years)
   

I shall tag Dru, Joy Eliz, Tinker, Imelda and anyone else who wants to play along!
(Don't worry if you don't want to do it - this is not compulsory!)

Update: Something I had no idea I'd make today so could not possibly have been on a to do list - a hummingbird SoulCollage® card - on my card blog.

And by maintaining focus

backround image used with permission from ubik14

The GreenishLady is playing a fun game.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.Now take your photo, add the band name and title to it, then post it.

I love the whole idea of this one! Though I did feel the need to get permission from the photographer before using their photo this way.

My band's name is Saint Fidelis, which is pretty lucky compared to what I just got when I hit the link to check it worked - Chelsea F.C. season 2004-05!

And the album is "And by maintaining focus" which comes from Oprah:

Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you're going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.
Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine, July 2003

What a great quote! And yes I can do with the reminder to stay focused - I've been a bit scatty recently - I've had milk boil over, burnt myself, written absolute rubbish in my journal and only later discovered I'd missed out whole words or phrases...

Someone has gone to town with this idea and made loads of pretend albums. If you do this (or have done it) please leave me a comment here so I can see yours.

Update: There are lots on flickr with the tag "cd cover meme"

Tinking Award

My eye photographed by Jim and then put through the hexagon tile effect in Corel Painter IX.

---

The ever wonderful Tinker has awarded me a Thinking Award - now I've noticed these and variations of them in some of the blogs that I read and so far no-one else (that I've noticed anyway) thought I deserved one. Of course that meant a bit of me felt left out and rejected but another part was feeling relieved, because unless you are the first in your circle of bloggers to get one almost everyone has already received one or two and it gets really hard to find someone new to pass the baton on too. And now that I've got one several other parts of me are leaping up to be noticed...

(This is a remix using the following flickr photos with appropriate cc licenses that allow remixing:Knitted brain by urbanmkr, Normal Invert by jovike, Ancient Cliff-Dwelling by laszlo-photo)

Pedant: "Meme, meme, meme.... "

I'm not going to let this part go on about memes again. It had its say ages ago. Its enough that I've made this grotesque picture for it - another variation on my critic... If you actually want to you can see it bigger by clicking on it.


(Remix using: poppy by mafleen, Antisthenes the Cynic by Alun Salt)

Cynic: "Have you noticed that everyone who gets this award is asked to link back to the original posting that started it? They are getting a huge number of links out of this. And search engines love the places with the most links to them..."

But not from me.

If you want to see the original wording visit via the link on Tinker's posting - I'd rather link to her than to someone whose blog I never read! Though yes I did actually go and read the posting that started it all off. And the cynics in me have an awful lot more comments about this that they are going to keep to themselves! (Oh oh I've gone plural in my inner cynics... :-)

Time for someone who is not so keen on thinking, I think:


Zen Unthinker:

"There really is too much thinking and not enough thought."

Well thank you for the paradox... Some of my inner parts can be a little hard to fathom...

Arising out of all this I thought it would be fun to have some new buttons to award.

The first is for all those people who think too much:




And the second to those who have managed to go beyond thinking, even if only briefly and know that I mean as its not something that can be easily described:



And of course as I cannot tell what you are thinking you will have to decide for yourself which to take - for most people who visit here I'd recommend both!

If you like you can link your award back here - but that's entirely at your own discretion.

Which would you like?