Manic Monday #23 – Club

Roughly two years ago we, the husband & I plus a bunch of our friends, started a club of sorts related to a club (as in suit from a deck of cards).  It’s a semi-friendly, semi-out-to-kill Texas Hold’em Poker club! We get together once a month to steal each others money play some cards.  The club has always been one of my favorite of the suits.  It makes me think of puppy paws.

Well at these club meetings (if you will) we generally drink too much, laugh until we bust a gut, listen to music too loudly, and certainly eat too much!  But it is so much fun to get together.  Everyone that we invite to the club meetings (HA!)/ poker games is a blast to spend several hours with on a Saturday night.

Just the other weekend we had a club meeting / poker game in which I came in 2nd place.  Yeah me!  We often have 15-20 people attending.  Good times, good times….

Oh, I completely forgot to mention the new book club that some girl friends & I started.  Betches with books or BWB for short.  Sadly I had to miss the first club meeting.  I’m still training for the Breast Cancer 3Day so I had to miss the meeting but next time I’m there.  We selected the first book for our club to read; The Lazarus Project.  I’ve ordered the book from our local bookstore & I’m expecting a call anyday that it’s here!

 

Enough for now,

Ciao

Manic Monday #22 – Wax

 You know what freaks me out?  Wax sculptures!!  They are so life-like, well for the most part, if they’re good wax sculptures, then they look life-like.  But if they are bad wax sculptures, then they just look ridiculous.  Like bad caricatures of the real thing. 

I can’t go into any of those wax sculpture museums.  It’s like a nightmare for me.  Stupid, sure I realize that, but still I feel like any second those wax sculptures will come to life and begin chasing me a la an episode of Scooby Doo.  How silly is that?  I’m an “adult” woman for pete’s sake.  I should be able to walk into a museum that features wax sculptures without fear of a panic attack or attack of any nature.  Sheeesh.

And really the wax sculptures should be viewed as works of art.  The time, energy, and skill required to create them is something to be admired.  BUT the damn wax sculptures creep me out!!

Of course, then there is the most famous wax sculpture museum, Madame Tussauds.  Which you can now find in lots of major cities.  In fact, one of our most favorite cities (Las Vegas) has a Tussauds wax museum.  I can’t even begin to list all the celebrities that you’ll find who have been recreated as a wax sculptures.  Oh, ok, I’ll list some of them… The Jonas Brothers are newly made wax sculptures, Elvis, Jackie Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Brangalina, Marilyn Monroe, Hilary Clinton, Susan Lucci, Muhammed Ali, and Nelson Mandela just to scratch the surface!  

So despite the fact that I think the artistry is amazing, I still get the heeebbby jeeebbbbies from wax sculptures. 

Enough for now,

Ciao 

And here is where I steal another meme…

I was twittering again and came across a blog of awesomeness.  While thumbing through some pages, I found this intellectual, I can make myself feel better about my intellectualness or maybe give myself another thing to feel guilty about cause I’ve read only a quarter of these books so I’m not really an intellectual, listing of books.  I’m just saying.  But why not give it a go!  So when you’re done reading mine, copy the Key & List from here and then paste into your own space… be it myspace or blog or what have you. Don’t forget to change your answers. Otherwise we’d be like twins or something, OMG!  

 
Key

• Bold the books you have already read
• Italicize the books you intend to read
• My commentary in parenthenses for your enjoyment.  Cause I got something to say about it, ‘K. 

***********************

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte 
4. Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling (not gonna do it, I don’t have to do what EVERYONE else is doing)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell (I loved this book in HS and still love it. Just don’t let me get on the soapbox about those spying google / government satellite photos. Heh)
9. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier ( I saw the movie, does this count?)
16. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (I’m pretty sure I started to read this at one point in junior high but never finished it)
17. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch by George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell  (And I own the movie, so I should get additional points, right?!)
22. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Saw this movie, too. Robert Redford was delicious.)
23. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Yep, watched & adored this movie. I’m beginning to see a pattern)
26. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (RREEEEAAALLLY want to see this movie!)
27. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
34. Emma by Jane Austen
35. Persuasion by Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39. Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (again, movie)
40. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41. Animal Farm by George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (No desire to read the book however did see the movie.)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (CRAZY movie)
50. Atonement by Ian McEwan ( HELLLLO!?  Can you say James McAvoy?  Amazing in this movie)
51. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (I know someone who read this and she kinda did a book report on it… does that count?  Maybe for partial credit?)
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold 
65. Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72. Dracula by Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses by James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal by Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession by AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web by EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94. Watership Down by Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (Have seen both versions of this movie and although NOTHING comes close to the original, I do have to say that the new one draws you in with it’s creepiness)
100. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Manic Monday #21 – Boil

 On Friday, my blood was all a boil, about some issue with a customer (you can forget that ol’ adage about the customer always being right.  as far as I’m concerned, the customer is only always right if they agree with me!), and so when I first heard this word was Monday’s Manic Monday word, I was all set to write a post that was truly more of a stream of cursing, whaling, and teeth gnashing tangent.  But today, I don’t really feel like going that route.  I have since forgotten what it was specifically that had my blood all a boil.  To be honest, I don’t feel like dredging all that anger up again anyway! 

So instead, I present this slightly more boring topic: our dinner.  Imagine, if you will, a giant pot of boiling water into which I will be lovingly placing spaghetti to be cooked to perfection for my beautiful family.  Now picture the spaghetti in boiling water ~bubbling nicely.  Doesn’t that look delicious?  Now, a smaller pot of spaghetti sauce begins to boil on the other burner.  Smell the aromatic scent of oregano, basil, thyme, tomatos, and a bit of garlic.  Are you ready to eat yet?

Enough for now,

Ciao

My recently devoured list of books

I realize that the title of this post is a tiny bit misleading… I didn’t devour a list of books, or a list, or a bunch of books, technically I didn’t devour anything, but what I did was READ a number of books quite quickly -one right after the other you might say- in a manner that could be called ‘devouring’ if we were discussing food.

Anyway, I’ve been on a reading binge again, although I don’t think you can equate this type of binge with perhaps a drinking, overeating, smoking, drug binge. Obviously.  Nonetheles, it takes up enormous amounts of time that would otherwise be spent doing more productive things.  Or, say, paying attention to your children & husband. Heh.  But its good to read, right, isn’t that what we’re told?

So without further ado here is the list of recently devoured books (and to reiterate, no books were harmed in the devouring):

1. Size 12 is not Fat – Meg Cabot
2. No Choice but Seduction – Johanna Lindsey
3. Perfect – Marne Davis Kellogg
4. High Five – Janet Evanovich
5. Hot Six – Janet Evanovich
6. Seven up – Janet Evanovich
7. Spirited Away – Cindy Miles
8. Into Thin Air – Cindy Miles
9. Deep Writing – Eric Maisel

The other day I started Hard Eight by Janet Evanovich, clearly the 8th book in her Stephanie Plum series.  And then!  Last Wednesday night!  We went to an author signing.  There were 450 authors at the event.  Many of whom I had never heard of before.  But here are a few of my favorites… 

Here’s me with Nora Roberts aka JD Robb

  Yes, I realize I look like a crazy fan (you should have seen the picture before I fixed the red eye.  Whoo did I look like a psycho).  And am I the only one who thinks she looks a bit like Pat Benatar?

Here’s me with Christina Dodd

  At least I don’t look nearly as crazy here.  Although I think I scared half the authors with my pronouncement that meeting them was like meeting a celebrity. 

Here is Stephanie Rowe

Here’s me with Suzanne Brockmann

Here is Julia Quinn

Here is Jayne Ann Krentz aka Amanda Quick aka Jayne Castle

So part of the deal was that you could purchase their books -signed of course- and a portion of the sale would go toward Round up for Literacy.  Needless to say I bought many books this night.  Hey, it was for a great cause!  Forget that I luurrve these authors it was for the literacy program.  Heh.

Now in addition to the two books I just checked out from the library, the eight books I bought at the event, the two books I just bought from our local bookstore, and the book I already started (as indicated at the beginning of this post), I have a HELLA lot of reading to do!  Wish me luck… I think I’m gonna need it!  You know, to find the time to read that many books before the next year ends.

Enough for now,

Ciao

Manic Monday #20 – Storm

Thankfully we haven’t had any storms in a while.  The last storm that we had was a strangely freakish thunder & lighting – fire starting – kind of storm.  I swear the cloud looked like it was from an alien invasion movie! I’ve never seen a cloud like it before.  In this part of the country we NEVER get storms like this one.  Well, I guess I can’t say we NEVER get any storms -since we had one.  OK, almost never do we get a storm like that. 

The gremlins were watching the lightening strike and counting the number of seconds between lightening & thunder.  It was quite a storm.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, it did cause at least two fires in our area that got out of control.  

At one point, the husband was driving on the freeway watching the lightening while talking on the phone with me and when I saw lightening strike so close that the thunder shook our house I started yelling at him to let me get off the phone.   

Slowly the storm passed right over us and then eventually drifted off in the distance.  But not before the storm clouds poured down huge sheets of rain.

Enough for now,

Ciao

How would yours look?

I stole this idea from a brilliant and highly entertaining lady. Give it a try. It’s fuuunnnnn, come on, try it, you know you want to, go ahead, it’s ok. Oh, yeah, and mine is at the bottom. Check it.

Here’s how it works . . .

• Answer each of the questions below.
• Surf over to Flickr (set up an account if you don’t have one-it’s quick and easy) and type your answers (one at a time) into the search bar.
• From the choice of pictures shown only on the front page, click on the one that moves you.
• Once the page with your picture opens, copy the URL.
• Surf over to the Mosaic Maker, set up your mosaic, and paste your URLs.
• Click “Create!”

The Questions:

• 1. What is your first name?
• 2. What is your favorite food?
• 3. What high school did you attend?
• 4. What is your favorite color?
• 5. Who is your celebrity crush?
• 6. What is your favorite drink?
• 7. Where would you go on your dream vacation?
• 8. What is your favorite dessert?
• 9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
• 10. What do you love most in life?
• 11. Choose one word to describe you?
• 12. Your Flickr name? (I had to substitute for this one, since Flickr didn’t recognize my account name).

 

Credits:

1. Desiree 1 by Nicole.Marie
2. Italian food 1 by openended
3. Fremont high school by to_mo (btw this is an actual pic of the front of my school)
4. Pink : the navy blue of India by colorfulexpressions
5. George Clooney by bearklektor
6. Gin & Tonic by 1Sock
7. A Boatman & His Dog Cruising Along in the Cannaregio Sestiere, Venice by Rita Crane Photography
8. coffee and chocolate mousse cake by naoko123
9. Movie star Vicky by adonaldson
10. books = bliss. by soulbella
11. Saucy by David G Kelly
12. Stanley Overflow by ~Rob~

Blogging in the airport

Hey, how cool is this?! I’m blogging on my iPhone using the new WordPress iPhone blog feature!
We are getting ready to go to Las Vegas for our anniversary. The one I sort of forgot about. This is our 13th anniversary. My, my, my, how time flies. We are staying at the Venetian Hotel and the last time we stayed there was three years ago. Pumpkin was only 4 months old & I was still breast feeding. So yeah, we had to do the pump n’ dump thing. Probably that was too much information.
So as usual the airport is the most fascinating place to people watch. And craziest small world ever encounter, we ran into one of my friends from HS! She was on her way to Vegas with her two little boys & her mom. Its funny but we only seem to run into each other at the airport going to Vegas. It happened a couple years ago too.

Manic Monday #17 – Stripe

I love stripes!  In fact, I love the colors of these stripes on this MM picture.  I was at my Mom’s house over the weekend and she has yellow & white stripes painted on one wall of her guest bedroom.  This is not my favorite look but I have seen stripes used well on some decorating shows.  I prefer big blocks of color over stripes of color when used on walls.  But, to each his own.

Hey, I just realized that the stripes in the MM picture would make a pretty journal cover.

Wait, what? It’s my anniversary today?

You know it’s bad when you are the WIFE and you forget your anniversary!  Not that I forgot it entirely, you see.  I just forgot this morning.  In our usual mad rush to get breakfast in the gremlin’s tummies, get them clothed, shoed, hair/teeth brushed, we both completely forgot to say Happy Anniversary to each other… and not even a small kiss goodbye as the husband rushed out the door.  That’s bad, huh?

It’s our 13th wedding anniversary.  I don’t have a thing about the number 13 so its just another year to me.  What shocks me, is that it has gone by faster than I ever could have imagined.

Here is where I try to explain away my forgetting of the anniversary:

1. It’s a Tuesday, for Pete’s sake
2. It’s been 13 years
3. I’m thinking about the upcoming 4th of July weekend – Parade, BBQ, fireworks and that’s just on Fri., Sat we are going to a BBQ at my mom’s and I’m supposed to walk 14 miles, oh yeah & 10 miles on Sun.  
4. I have two gremlins that I have to deal with - e.g. MOM she’s bugging me, tell her to get her feet out of my face!  She pushed me.
5. We are going to Las Vegas in two weeks to celebrate our anniversary – WHOOOOHOOOOO!
6. I have work I’m supposed to be doing – yawn
7. I’ve been trying to finish a couple blog posts that are dragging on – well actually I think I have ADD which has been keeping me for getting anything done
8. There’s a giant nail in the front tire of my brand new set of tires – DAMN IT
9. My two dogs need to be groomed so badly that my miniature schnauzer looks like a muppet
10. I’m almost done with the sixth book in the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich
11. I need to walk 4 miles today
12. Have customers I need to see today
13. Don’t know what all I’m making for dinner tonight

So there, as it turns out, 13 reasons why I forgot.

But on a positive note, I got a nice bouqet of flowers delivered today from the husband!  Well, technically it’s my Christmas present, a year’s worth of flowers delivered monthly, but hey it also happens to be my anniversary so I’ll just say it’s for my anniversary and be done with it.

Enough for now,

Ciao