Teehee!

If it were not for the fact that I already spend way too much money buying clothes from J. Peterman (on sale, mind you) these pantaloons would be way tempting. I have no clue what I'd do with them, but I'm sure I could figure something out. Of course, once I got started with the cheesy old-fashioned under-pinnings, I would probably feel compelled to find a corset, bustle, and petticoat set to match.... It's like the "If You Give a Moose a Muffin" of Bethany World.

Book Tag

Taken from my mother's blog:

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
--and, because I'm a negative sort of person, I'm adding another marking
5) Place a '--' next to those you didn't like

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X +
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 *
Running total: 8

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 X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
Running total: 12

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell *
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald *
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X +
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Running total:16

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
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 Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
Running total: 23

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 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
Running total: 27

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 X +
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X --
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Running total: 30

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 X
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
Running total: 32

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X --
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 X
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X+
80 Possession - AS Byatt
Running total: 38

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
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 Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Running total: 42

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 X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X --
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X +

How many have you read? 48. Less than half? Granted, some of them are on my "to read" list, and several are on my "never ever ever read" list, so those really shouldn't count.

Pondering the mysteries of life

As I sat downstairs tonight, watching Funny Face and trying to do homework, one thought kept invading my mind, driving out all considerations of Gilded Age politics and John Calvin's influence on the American mind:

"Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?"

This question has plagued me for years. I can't decide which one I prefer.

That should explain why this piece from Ziegfield Follies delighted me so much.



Actually, I was just bored and looking for something else to do.

But what else happened?

I can tell that I have been watching a leeeeettle too much TV of a certain sort.
When I'm studying, it helps to have some sort of background noise going. Most often, I take over the family room and put on whatever old movie TCM is showing at the moment. My brothers make fun of me for this, and any time they see a black & white scene on the TV they will start groaning (even though they like old movies) and talking about their crazy sister.

Well, I just finished watching a DVD of one of my favorite old movies, It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. When the film ended, something just didn't feel right. It was incomplete. Something was missing. Then I realized that I was waiting for Robert Osborne to pop up and start spouting trivia about the movie.
I'm not sure I can live without hearing what sort of tantrums Claudette Colbert threw on set, why it was considered punishment to work with Frank Capra, and why Myrna Loy turned the script down....

I'll be sure to include this in my next interview....

Here's a tip for anyone who doesn't like being misquoted in the newspaper:

When you're running late, stopping by school to drop off a paper before heading to work, do NOT smile at the friendly looking lady in the trenchcoat as you pass by at full speed.

If you disregard the first tip and commit the enormous faux pas of making friendly eye contact with said trench-coated female, do not reply when she says good morning. In short, disregard all usual rules of politeness and decorum. Brush her off. Give her the cold shoulder. (Insert brusque cliche of your choice.)

IF you make another mistake and allow the woman to engage you in conversation, and she asks if you would mind answering a few questions, don't stop to think, equivocate, or explain that you are freezing and running late. Just walk away as fast as your awesome little high-heeled lace-up boots can carry you.

IF (perish the thought) you are fool enough to answer the journalist's questions, well, I suppose you deserve what's coming. Whatever you do, though, do not answer her questions about Spring Break plans by saying that you will be working rather than traveling. She will twist your statement in a way that makes you sound like an unreasonable, greedy, money-grubbing Silas Marner-type... AND go on to mention your place of employment.

Case in point.

Ok, so I like to blow things out of proportion. The two sentences dedicated to me are not all that horrible or embarassing. I just really, really, really don't like being misquoted. And I don't remember saying anything like what the article suggests. This isn't the first time I've been misquoted in the paper. (Yes, I have been in the paper before. I'm, like, a celebrity or something.) Back in 2003 one of the FW papers did a story on homeschooling and my family was part of it. I don't remember much of the detail, but the journalist who spent a few days with us took almost everything I said to her completely out of context, and was even worse with my mother.

What can I say? Fame sucks.

The Best Bunko Story Ever

Our church ladies gathered for our monthly bunko party this evening. Admittedly, these evenings always lead to some goofiness but THIS was special.

First, for anyone who has no clue what bunko is, here are the rules. I was at a table with our friends Gail and Tori, a mother and daughter who were teamed up for this particular round. My partner was DoRena. We were on the sixes round (the idea being to roll as many sixes as possible OR 3 sixes at a time for a bunko) and were fooling around testing out "magic" words to yell at the dice to make them behave. The round went something like this:

Tori: Cheese! [rolls dice, gets one six]
DoRena: Ovaltine!! [rolls, doesn't get any sixes]
Me: [laughing] Ovaltine? Sorry, but I don't think brand names count.
Gail: [rolls, gets nothing]
Me: Pizza! [rolls, gets nothing] Ok, so that didn't work.
Tori: South Side! [rolls, nothing]
DoRena: [rolls, nothing]
Tori: Try yelling "Concordia", Mom. Maybe that'll work....
Me: Concordia to get sixes?
Gail: Ok, Concordia! [rolls, gets 1 six] Hey! Concordia [rolls, gets 1 six] Concordia! [rolls, gets another six] 666, with Concordia... very interesting.
Me: Bean! Give me a name, someone we don't like.... [holds dice, waiting suspensefully]
DoRena:Oh oh oh, that guy... in Texas... with the megachurch....
Me: Joel Osteen!!! [rolls dice.....]

3 sixes, at once. 666. Not only is that the sign of the Beast, it's a bunko, worth 21 points and a win! DoRena and I erupted in shrieks and laughter. The rest of the room was completely mystified, not understanding why any bunko would be SO amusing. When we told them, they understood.