I really want a Madsen bike. Heads up. Also, this makes it easy for W...

Mama’s Holiday Wish List Meme

TodaysMama and Provo Craft are giving away a sleighful of gifts this holiday season and to enter I’m sharing this meme with you.

1. What 5 items are on your holiday wish list this year?
Slippers, These bird earrings, This Sesame Street book, This is It DVD (I am hoping it will be available at Christmas!), a gift card from Fabric.com

2. What is your favorite handmade gift you have received?
The quilt my grandma and my great-aunt made for my wedding. I love that I have a tangible reminder of their love every day.

3. What handmade gift have you always wanted to tackle?
I would love to be able to knit socks, but I can't figure out the purl stitch. Also, I'd like to make some vanilla, but I never remember in time to get it started.

4. What was the best Christmas gift you received as a child?
A record player with a huge box of read-along records.

5. What items are on your kid’s wish list this year?
What ISN'T on her list is an easier one to answer. If it is on TV, it is on her list.

6. What is your favorite holiday food?
Buckeyes, Beans and Rice, Lechon, and Yucca do it for me.

7. What will you be hand-crafting for the holidays?
Some secret presents, and maybe a few decorations. But maybe not. I am making these for neighbor and hostess gifts

8. What is your favorite holiday movie?
Meet Me in St. Louis. Hands down. I also love Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas.

9. Favorite holiday song?
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.

10. Favorite holiday pastime?
Anticipating. Also wrapping presents.

If I win, you can come on my trip.

Great Escape Meme

1. If you could escape to anywhere in the world where would it be?
Today it would be London. And I would see everything. And then I would eat something that W would think was disgusting but I would relish.
2. What song do you play when you are by yourself in the car?
Jack Johnson's Banana Pancakes. But I play it when there are other people in the car, too. It is just my favorite, lately.
3. If you had a night to yourself, and money was no object, what would you do?
I would fly all of my favorite people to me and we would eat trunk tamales and roasted corn.
4. What is your guilty pleasure?
Ice cream and TV.
5. What is the farthest place you have traveled away from your home?
Chile.
6. Last book that you couldn't put down?
The Continuous Atonement by Brad Wilcox.
7. When you want to escape into another time, what movie do you watch?
I don't ever do this. Not to another time, I mean. I like the time today. Olden days are stinky. And full of no technology. But my favorite movie to escape with is Love, Actually. Or Sneakers. Or Buffy TV box sets.
8. What is your favorite local escape?
The pumpkin patch in Las Cruces, New Mexico
9. How do you escape on a budget?
Sometimes we drive to California and just go to the beach, but when we are really broke, window shopping and a good meal will do it for us.
10. Best food you've ever had while on vacation.
Cuban Sandwiches in Miami at La Carreta Cafeteria in Bacardi International Airport, while on the way to Chile. So much better than when I make them at home.


This is contest entry for those crazy folks at TodaysMama and Cricut. Be sure to check out Cricut's cool new cartridges and the chance at $30,000 in travel for you and your friends at the Great Gypsy Escape site! http://bit.ly/FWcud

Stealing a Meme Because it is Too Hot to Think

From ~J.
Put an X by the states you have been to (airports don't count).

I've decided to make the names of the states in which I've lived GREEN.

Alabama -
Alaska -
Arizona - X
Arkansas -
California - X
Colorado - X
Connecticut -
Delaware -
Florida – X
Georgia -
Hawaii -
Idaho - X
Illinois - X
Indiana - X
Iowa - X
Kansas -X
Kentucky -
Louisiana -X
Maine -
Maryland - X
Massachusetts – X
Michigan - X
Minnesota -X
Mississippi -
Missouri - X
Montana -X
Nebraska - X
Nevada - X
New Hampshire -
New Jersey - X
New Mexico -X
New York - X
North Carolina - X
North Dakota -
Ohio - X
Oklahoma -
Oregon - X
Pennsylvania -
Rhode Island -
South Carolina - X
South Dakota -
Tennessee -
Texas - X
Utah - X
Vermont -
Virginia - X
West Virginia –
Wisconsin -
Wyoming - X
Washington -X

30.

Also, the change of command went really well. More when I get the pics back. And it is not hot.

Nothing Like a Meme When My Brains don't Work.

Where is your cell phone? charging
Your significant other? Kuwait
Your hair? skunky
Your mother? teaching
Your father? selling
Your favorite thing? esposo
Your dream last night? healing
Your favorite drink? rootbeer
Your dream/goal? London
What room are you in? living
Your hobby? sewing
Your fear? blindness
Where do you want to be in 6 yrs? snow
Where were you last night? home
Something that you aren't? tall
Muffins? daily
Wish list item? pregnancy
Last thing you did? exercised
What are you wearing? clothing
TV? on
Your pet? shnauzer
Friends? yup
Your life? awesome
Your mood? ennui
Missing someone? daily
Drinking? water
Smoking? hot
Your car? Explorer
Something you're not wearing? chaps
Your favorite store? TJ's
Your favorite color? most
When is the last time you cried? Friday
Who will resend this? you
Where do you go to over and over? Target
Five people who email me regularly? weinerenhancers
My favorite place to eat? Bombay
Favorite place I'd like to be at right now? Utah
Four people I think will respond: nope.

Props to ~J and CW.

Dear Tiffany: Brits are Stupid.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I put an X by the ones I have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X (Under Protest.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X (I would name a kid Scout if I were allowed)
6 The Bible (the WHOLE Bible)
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
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (LOVE.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X (12th grade. What up, public school!)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Not all of the sonnets, and not Cressida and whoever.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (12th grade again. I liked that it had cursing)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X (12th grade. I did a lot of reading)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X (Man, between making out and reading, I had a full senior year!)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy X (So lame. That is how you know I am not a natural geek.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X (12th grade. Top five favorite books of all time.)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X (5th grade. So intelligent.)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X (She dies in the end.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X (Not about the magician.)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X (The lion is Jesus.)
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
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X (Ashamed.)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X (At least once a year)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X (Four Legs Good! Two Legs bad!)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X (LOVE.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ( I think I actually read this one. Not sure.)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X (Every Year.)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X (Read in high school. Too young to grasp.)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X (9th grade. Still reference the conch.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X (Fig and I disagree on the surrealism.)
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 X (Top five favorites.)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X (SO recommend it.)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X (Poor Lenny.)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Actually on my list to read.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X (Scary.)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Saw the movie. Enough.)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Ew, no.)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (Tried about three jillion times.)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X (Ashamed.)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (Hated it all thirty times I had to read it.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X (Better as a musical.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I've tried so many times. Page five is a record for me.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Ew, no.)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X (LOVE)
80 Possession - AS Byatt X (Top five)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X (Lesbians!)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( I know I read this in High school, but can't remember if I finished it)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X (12th grade.)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X (LOVE)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (Isn't this the one with the bunnies?)
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

First Five Gimme Gimme

First Five Gimme Gimme (From Queen Scarlett)

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me!

my choice. for you. this offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
2. what I create will be just for you.
3. it’ll be done this year. {translation: you may be waiting a little while}
4. you have no clue what it’s going to be ... it may be cards, a poem, a bookmark, something yummy or a complete surprise to you (and me!) ... who knows? not you, that’s for sure!
5. i reserve the right to do something extremely strange.
6. most importantly, you must offer the same deal on your blog - the first 5 people to comment on your blog (or if you do not have a blog, facebook) get something made by YOU! the first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me they did win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me ...

Those were the rules as copied exactly from the Greek Goddess' blog. She added an idea. If you're not the kind of person that wants to make something tangible for others, how about some kind of service for them, any type, any size? (But what I give you will not be a service, because I am lazy and don't want to serve you.)

Tagged by Kayt

Normally I do not do the memes, because they make me have the panic attacks. But this one was one was a topic I was already thinking about, and I took the Zoloft this morning so it should be fine.

Total Number of Books Owned

I would imagine close to 200 between the three of us, although I have been thinning them recently. I used to feel like I could never give away books, but moving so often has cured me of that. W is currently the book hoarder. I am trying to get him to use the liberry.

Last Book Bought
It is a tie--I ordered two off of ebay this week:
The Magic Spectacles (One I have been searching for for years)
Montessori from Birth to Age Three

Last book read
The whole book? That would be A Few Good Eggs. It is about fertility.
Every night I try to read some scriptures, though.

Five books that mean a lot to you:

The Book of Mormon. It is the basis for my every day living
The Grapes of Wrath. It is the first book that made me want to be a writer
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The first book to ever Speak to me
Miss Suzy When I was about Jooj's age I had it memorized. My Aunt would show me to her friends and tell them I could read.
Crossing to Safety. Really, anything by Wallace Stegner. I did my senior seminar on this work. It touches my heart.