Capturing Becca

Love this photo....though not totally in focus, love that it captures Becca in what she truly loves.  This was at Pine Hill with her stable friends.  Cultivating those relationships, many with older women, is wonderful for Becca.  Tonite she baby sits for one of the lady's FIVE children.

Seeking....

A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life. 

Richard Bach

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.