LOVE this quote

The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit.
~Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

How many have you read?

This is a ranked list of "the world's" favorite books, in order of popularity. How many have you read?
Instructions: Copy this list. Bold those books you've read in their entirety; italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or just read an excerpt.


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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
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
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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 Hitchhiker’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 Berniere
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

On the road again....

Life's been rough the last few months and I let the blog go because I didn't want to be blogging about personal issues that are private.  Tho....would have been nice to if I could figure out how to make this private, but then here I am back to the debate about is this a public blog to keep my family informed or is it a private journal?  Guess I'm seeing I need a private one to journal about so that things get our and put away.

Regardless....I'm moving ahead again.  Life happens, I need to keep looking for things that make me happy and live whatever time I have hoping for the best.

Ladies and Gentlemen.....let the grilling begin!

It's that time of year!  I have been debating about buying a grill for ages and finally decided that a Smokey Joe won't do.  With my luck, Cowboy will be way too enticed by the smells inside and decide to clean the grill for me when I'm not home, chewing it to bits due to its small size and being just his height.  The big 22 inch was a bit large, but JUST RIGHT is the 18.5 inch.

So....off to Target I go, grab the grill and a charcoal chimney, to Lowes to grab the charcoal keeper and some hardwood lump charcoal.  Home again, I gather the tools shown on the instruction sheet and haul the box in to my bedroom where I can IM for online help if I need it.  Well, it went together easily and actually remembering how to work my camera and upload pictures took longer than putting the grill together.  So.....here it is.  And.....to follow the advice of the first person I bragged to and showed this picture to.....no I WILL NOT be grilling in my bedroom.

Anyway on to the evening.  I stuffed two sheets of newspaper in the bottom of the chimney, loaded it with coal and lit the paper.  About 30 minutes later I dumped the coals and put the salmon and veggie kabobs on the grill.  I have a feeling I missed peak cooking time and perhaps it was more like 40 minutes of charcoal heating time because I lost heat and cooking pretty quick.  I need to not be distracted and maybe check the coals at 15 minutes.  I did have to finish dinner in the oven, but the grilled out taste was there, sans any lighter fluid taste.  I am going to keep trying this til I get it down.  Watch out Leander, we are out for grilling goddess of the town.

...spring has sprung...

Look what I found in my backyard under my bedroom windows.  I've got three rosebushes out there and they are FILLED with blooms.  I love being able to cut and bring them inside to appreciate.  I think that a cutting garden needs to be in the planning as well as my veggie garden.

Gardens.......that needs to be another post.  I have some ideas I want to get down...fencing, plants, flowers....excitement!

I'm out of that funk I was in, everyone is safe.  Birthdays are always so disappointing, you'd think I'd learn by now that there is no one (besides my sister) who is going to make it anything at all.  I need to just decide to do it myself.

Onward to the end.....

I'm 50 today.  This is the first and only birthday that has bothered me and it's bothering me a LOT.  Over half my life is gone.  Women in my family aren't long lived.  Mom lived to 62 and her mom was in her 50's.  I'm afraid that the longer dreams and things get put off, the more likely they are not to ever happen.  I may not have a lot of time left, I want some good in my life but seriously wonder if it will happen.

Alone at 50 with no one to share life's joys and burdens sucks the big times.   Yea, I'm in a crappy mood for this birthday.  Top it all off?  I don't think my kids will remember and they are all I have left.  Oh well.  Just another day....who cares. 

Latest Video

No shushing allowed

Mention libraries and people automatically go into shush mode.  I'm sorry but libraries are changing and public libraries especially.  We have to change to stay relevant professionals.  Technology is taking over.  Cell phones are our number one method of communicating whether text or vocally.  I can not tell you how often library members need to access an account online and talk on their phone to the representative.  I have no problem with this.  Bring out the cell phones.  Bring your lunch or a drink (just not at the computers).

More important, libraries are becoming the center of the community.  Not just for information, but for hanging out and chatting, meeting up, playing games.  Talking requires a bit of noise.  I'm all for it.  I want to share information, laugh, have fun.  No more stereo types at my library about shushing librarians, or the librarian from the black lagoon.  We're not monsters.  Typically we're happy, a bit off kilter, goofy, people that like to laugh, love artists of all kinds, enjoy diversity and love to chat.  Come on, visit with us.....I promise, no shushing from THIS librarian.

AARP

I joined a few minutes ago.  I had a few minutes where I cried.  How can I be that old and where did my life go?  I feel 27 inside, wishing I could do so much of it over again and not be affected by what people thought or expected.  Still no clue why in the world we are here.  Guess it's just all a little piece of evolution.

Cirque du Soliel - Dralion

When I bought the tickets it seemed such a long wait for Dralion to arrive at the Cedar Park Center.  It is now seven days before arrival, 10 days before I get to take my girls and go see the show live.  I'm so excited.  The last time I saw it live, Melissa was a new baby so it has been 14 years.  Can't wait to see the girls reactions to it.

And the changes continue

It's been way too long since I've written but I've been debating about this.  Is this blog supposed to be a journal of my inner thoughts?  Uncensored?  A place to air my questions without fear of being judged?  Or have I decided to write it to share with those I care about what is going on? 

Originally it was the latter.  I suppose that is so to an extent still, and because of that I've not written in quite some time.  My life has been chaos, difficult, confusing, out of my control, not of my choosing, something I want to run away from, disassociate myself from.......and as a result I've chosen not to journal about everything going on though it probably would have been a good thing for me to write down and work out what was going on in my head.  But......I've been angry and upset as well and don't want to write things that could be read by someone that would take them personally or misinterpret them, so I've held back.  Still haven't resolved all this but have recently decided that I need to figure out if I can have a completely private place to journal, kind of like Doogie Howser but without reading it to the television camera.

So.....one thing I've learned for the 100th time is to take care of me and do things for me.  I'm still figuring out who Sandy is, after being the girls mom for so long, and I'm finally doing things.  I bought tickets for the girls and I to go to Cirque du  Soleil in a couple weeks.  In May, I'm going to see Trans Siberian Orchestra with a few friends.  I've initiated the contact and event and need to feel more comfortable doing that.  If I want to do something, chances are there is someone else I know out there that does too.  I need to open my mouth and cultivate those friendships more for my own sanity.

*raises glass* here's to hoping I can continue my blog......without long interruptions due to that thing called life.