book time

I've borrowed the following from MaryBeth's blog... an amazing person who married two more amazing people...

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (Since Blogger won't let me underline, I've used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

Here goes...What about you?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (well the first few)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell*
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (um only maybe a third)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
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
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky*
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
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
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
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
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon*
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
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
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
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
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

but alas no reading tonight, only getting ready for my doctor's appointment tomorrow. Need to get all my questions answered. In the meantime, food for the famished:

Paneer

Today we embarked on a cooking adventure.  Making paneer.

We bought organic whole milk, scalded it, and poured in some fresh lemon juice.  Well I say 'we' but really it was all about Traveler.  I am blogging while he presses it.






I'll be in charger of making curry out of it later tonight.

movie night

Last night Traveler took me out on a proper movie date. As much as we love movies, rarely do we do the movie date and we never did in the early days of our relationship.

But I this time pour myself into the role. I put on my new books and a sassy skirt. I wear my red scarf and a black over coat. Trav turns the car around and waits out front for me to dress – so I really was picked up. We chat about non-life changing topics on the drive with a lot of laughter through out. I tease and flirt. At the movies I let him order the tickets and then I order food treats, “Umm I'll have a small popcorn unless you have nachos” “no that is fine, can I also have M&M's – ooooh dark chocolate ones please” “oh and I definitely need a drink”

Cha-Ching. I am not a cheap date.

But the whole time I was thinking – wow my lover has taken me back to America. We pulled into a HUGE mall parking lot, and I thought “huh welcome to America.” And then I walked through the mall with all the glass store fronts and shiny tiles and though “hmm I'm back in America.” The escalator brought be back to Australia because it was a conveyor belt one that is more like a moving ramp than a stairs, but that feeling only lasted for a moment. The entrance to the movies was a huge dark carpeted foyer with lots of cardboard cut out movie stars. You walked and walked to get to the very small counter. I think I said aloud at that point “Traveler you've taken be back to America!” Every single movie on offer was a Hollywood blockbuster with only American accents – well okay, our movie featured spies who sort of had accents.

It is not often than you get such a full blown immersion into something from home when you live overseas. I am not sure if I should be happy or not about it, but it was impressively noted.

Recipe

I discovered this interesting looking recipe online today. I may have to try it.

Photo & Recipe from A Wee Bit Of Cooking; A scottish food blog.

Garden time

Today we started on our garden. Well Traveler and my father did heaps of prep work creating raised beds out of some freebie wood.  Our neighbor had bought a truck of compost and a pile of horse manure had been accumulating near our designated garden area.

Today's main task was to transport the material down to the raised bed.  


This wasn't so much back-breaking labor as tricky. The ground was saturated from recent rains and the clay based soil turned quickly into a mud slide. It was more like steering a heavy sled with rubber boot skis than pushing a wheelbarrow. Going up was tricky because we had already started creating earthen steps to help walking. These may be good when finished for walking up and down, but they just made the wheelbarrow lurch a bit.



We also spread the dirt even, put up some wind breaking fence mesh, and was given a starter set of plants.




We'll keep the plants inside for a bit - it is winter here after all. If the cold southerly winds didn't give that away this weekend, the moon being out before dinner certainly hints at what season we're in.

Independence - Thanksgiving

This year we celebrated the Fourth of July with a traditional thanksgiving spread. It was part of our rental agreement - I must start by giving thanks that our new 'landlords' are lovely and generous and are really kind to include us around their farm.

We put on an amazing spread with rolls, turkey, steamed veggies, mash potatoes, gravy, cranberry spread, stuffing, lettuce, and followed by apple and pumpkin pie.


It was the first time I ever saw my Mom start eating first and not worry about getting up to do one more thing in the kitchen.


Somehow fireworks were procured to add to the sense of celebration.



 
And I found success in rising my bread using this setup

34th birthday party

Traveler turned 34 recently.  Heaps of people turned out to celebrate.

I knew the party was off to a great start when my friend H arrived and started decorating the misty window.


Soup was served with the heap of four wonderful children who carefully set the table, counted the guests, carried bowls, and announce that hot soup was coming through the crowd.



Our wonderful friend Aiden brought the yummiest cupcakes.  The children were surveyed about what they tasted like.  One said that they tasted like "ocean".  I suspect that carrot and zucchini may have been involved. They were lovely.


And the night rounded out with conversation and dancing.  I just love this shot that I think is reminiscent of the era in which my darling Traveler was born.

Even though he was shy about sharing that it was his birthday, it was great to celebrate with everyone.  See you all next July!