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Reading Meme

So we’ve been tagged with a reading meme. I choose to tag Ms. No H to pass along this reading meme. the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you started and never finished and underline the ones you had to read for school.
If you want all the details, read Mike’s post below.

All I have to say is I’m terribly embarrassed by the ones I picked up and started, but never read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice

My Weekend in a Nutshell

Friday: Worked til 5:30, picked up Adam, biked home, worked until 11:30pm. Then played Wii Sports until after midnight. Hurt shoulder (pathetic, I know) playing Tennis, Baseball and Bowling.

Saturday: Planned on sleeping in, taking it easy and doing more work. Maybe improving Wii baseball and tennis games.

Saturday, actual:
Up at 8:00 a.m. Cleaned dining room and part of kitchen, cleaned living room.
Did more work.
Drove in Amy’s van (thank you, Amy!) to Chicago with Adam, his best friend from daycare, friend’s older brother, and their mother to the Allstate Arena in Rosemont to see The Wiggles!

Car ride down: minimal drama, going pretty well. Thinking that this will be pretty easy.

Fresh Garden Produce

Last night I had a craving. I wanted nachos. I had red onions, cheese and tortilla chips. I needed more. I braved the ferocious man-eating mosquitoes and headed to my garden where I plucked 2 red, ripe, delicious Roma tomatoes and a fresh jalapeño.
I chopped up the veggies and scattered them on a bed of chips, covered with freshly shredded cheese. Pop in microwave for 1 minute et voila! Tasty nachos.
The tomatoes were sweet and delicious, the jalapeño hot, but not too hot.

Tonight I thought my dinner was missing something. So, once again, I braved the mosquitoes and plucked 2 more red, ripe tomatoes from the garden.
I chopped the roma up in slices, drizzled olive oil over them and lightly peppered them.

Western Vacation

Our vacation out west photos are now up here.

I may try and turn some of the shots I took into panoramas. If that’s successful, those photos will go up there as well.

Back from Vacation

In 7 days:
Badlands
Black Hills (incl. Mt Rushmore and Crazy Horse)
Eastern Montana
Beartooth Pass (a road climbing up to 11,000 feet – a scenicly terrifying way to get into Yellowstone)
Yellowstone
Sleeping outside under the stars (no tent, long story)
More Yellowstone
Eastern bits of Idaho (incl. Victor, ID which is on the west side of the Tetons)
Jackson Hole, WY
Grand Tetons Park
Yet more Yellowstone
Return to Eastern Montana
Back through South Dakota and terrifying but brilliant storms.
Home.

I love mountains and the west. I haven’t been out west since 99 and really forgot how much I love the fresh smell of pine forests. I even enjoyed our second night of camping that actually involved sleeping in a tent.

The Drive From Hell

Ordinarily when the authorities say things like “avoid unnecessary travel” I do just that. Oh, sure, in the middle of winter when there’s just been a huge snowstorm it’s fun, no it’s mandatory, to put on the winter clothes and test your driving skills in ridiculous amounts of snow.
Saturday, unfortunately, I HAD to drive, up north to retrieve Adam from his week of camp Grandma and Grandpa, Spooner site.
I left home at 9:18am on Saturday and finally hit the opened portion of 90/94 at 12:20pm. It was bloody awful. And it wasn’t just the stop and wait bits. No, it was the idiot guy in front of me driving his teal Honda civic with a really loud, huge muffler. So everytime we got to inch forward, he of course, had to make a loud, annoying vroom vroom noise.

New and Exciting Medical Terminology

Costochondritis.

“Costochondritis is an inflammation of the cartilage that connects a rib to the breastbone (sternum). It causes sharp pain in the costosternal joint — where your ribs and breastbone are joined by rubbery cartilage. Pain caused by costochondritis may mimic that of a heart attack or other heart conditions.”

It’s pretty damn uncomfortable.

One Small Hill for man, one giant hill for me

Today I biked my usual route from home to Adam’s daycare and was about to take the easy way to the Monona Terrace bike elevator when I decided 2 things:
1) I needed to deposit money at the UWCU (on the square)
2) The most expedient way to do that would be to bike UP Wilson street.

I assumed I’d make it up to King@Wilson and my legs would give out and I’d look like a moron pushing my bike up the hill. Oh well… nothing ventured.. blah blah blah.

So I started out and kept shifting down and I made it to the King St. intersection and a red light which fortunately turned green before I had to come to a complete stop. I kept pedaling and made it all the way to the Capitol and around to the bank.

It's Like Raaaaai-aain...........

This morning my co-worker mocked me for not biking with essentials like a tire pump and a patch kit. “What would you do,” he asked “if you got a flat tire on the bike path?” Well, duh, I’d walk or ride the bus home, get the car and take it to someone to fix it.

Today I also decided I needed a front basket on my bike instead of just the saddle bags. My first reason for needing them was farmers market. One simply cannot bring plants home in saddle bags. My second reason became evident when I retrieved my birthday meal leftovers from my saddlebag and found that my Bang-Bang Chicken had all-but exploded. Fortunately, I had put it in a ziploc bag, preventing a much bigger disaster than a ruined lunch and yogurt.

Five, Six... Pick Up Sticks

On Sunday I raked up and hauled to the front yard a ridiculous number of branches from the back garden. Then I dug part of my front flower beds and planted in 9 new plants to add some variety to the hostas that have taken over the space. In the middle of all this I made a couple trips to garden centers to pick up the best dirt and potting soil available in Madison. And I’m not telling you where it is. :)