My 31st year is drawing to a close and so it is time for me to reflect to make sure that I did indeed end up with 31 new things. I didn’t really keep track, so I was quite surprised that I could keep going. Here are my 31:

1. Tried new sushi
2. Went to Hawaii
3. Tried new fish (cooked)
4. Had a mai tai (among other tropical beverages)
5. Caught up with Wheel of Time Series
6. Went snorkeling
7. Swam with a wild sea turtle (never even swam with a domesticated one, whatever that means…)
8. Travelled 3300+ miles in less than 9 days
9. Took up making cards as a hobby/craft
10. Got a PDA
11. Found a job that I actually like
12. Lost my first grandmother
13. Lost one of my heroes
14. Gained my first nieces (three in one year!)
15. Rode in a helicopter
16. Saw my first live volcano
17. Vacationed on a houseboat
18. Walked on the beach hand in hand with my husband
19. Got chased by a chicken
20. Spent the whole of the Christmas holidays with just my husband
21. Tried a new way to work
22. Carved my first pumpkin, all by myself
23. Made my first cut-out cookies (Halloween themed), all by myself
24. Discovered Pelligrino
25. Made my first holiday-themed napkin rings (they are so terribly cute…)
26. Chased off coyotes getting way too close to Dog in my socks with only a long plastic purple stick
27. Realized I’m allergic to raw honey
28. Tried out a new author without having been recommended to me by anyone (Ellen Crosby, Merlot Murder Mysteries. It is an a-ok series; nothing earthshattering, but entertaining)
29. Bought a comforter at a garage sale (much to Mr. H’s dismay)
30. Melted a comforter in the dryer (much to Mr. H’s delight)
31. Handed out candy to kids on Halloween night

Some of them were out of my hands, some of them were split second decisions, and some of them were entirely planned.

I had a very hard year death-wise; while the loss of my grandmother was tough, I’m still trying to work through the death of my beloved grandfather.

Other than that, I have been incredibly blessed with three nieces, many visitations from loved ones, and a job that pays well and that I love for the first time in my life.

Overall, I think it was a good year, with another couple of weeks yet before it is truly over.

My next large goal for being 32 is working through someone’s big list of top 100 novels everyone should read in his/her life. After finding that a bunch of people have made such lists, I opted for a mainstream one, just to get me started. This is also another effort to continue being more openminded about trying other books again. I read a tremendous amount of modern novels in college as a part of my ol’ English major, but I stopped b/c I’m more drawn to sci-fi/fantasy lit.

So here is where I’m starting: Time’s Top 100

I thought I’d go alphabetical, but considering I’m in the middle of a new sci-fi series that I’m reading (vs. listening to) and the first book The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow isn’t available at my library on audio, I’m skipping to All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren because it is available on audio.

Heck, let’s review the list and see what I’ve already read. The titles with stars are those that I’ve already read. Some of them are questionable; for example I’ve only gotten through book 1 and half of book two of The Lord of the Rings. So the plan is to go through the books I’m positive I haven’t read and then re-read the ones I’m not 100% positive on. Actually, All The King’s Men is one of those books I think I’ve already read, but since I already am reserving the audio recording, why not again?

The Complete List
In Alphabetical Order

A - B
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

*Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O’Hara

*Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O’Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

*The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

C - D
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

*Catch-22
Joseph Heller

*The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

*A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

F - G
Falconer
John Cheever

*The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

*The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

*The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

H - I
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

*Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

L - N
Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

*Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

*Lord of the Flies
William Golding

*The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

*Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

*Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

*1984
George Orwell

O - R
On the Road
Jack Kerouac

*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
Read the Original Review

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

S - T
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

*Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

*The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

*To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

U - W
Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

*White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

Ah…the unpacking. There is something about it that I love, and another that I loathe.

Upside: I get to decorate and putter around the house looking for the optimum placement of a particular knick or knack.

Downside: Being under a deadline. Family in town in 7 days. Furniture delivery in 9 days. Gah. Room total: 8. Rooms unpacked: 3.

Oh woe is Loricious.

Odd dream last night that involved Mike Aubrey of Real Estate Intervention on HGTV. He confessed to me, after I signed a confidentiality agreement, that he was actually Stone Cold Steve Austin. I wish I could remember more…

In a very mild “it was meant to be” moment, one of my co-workers had us blindly pick some giveaways from vendors. I received a nifty little notebook set, all in a wee binder and it has post-its and a pen. I have subsequently written down a ton of info about our house move in that notebook. Every company I need to contact, our mover details, what poor cleaning company will rush in to clean up our mess…

Triggered by this little slice of kismet, I decided that I was going to finally get Mr. H’s leather jacket fixed. I stopped at a tailor on my way home (thank you Sixpence for your expertise… ) and got the process going.

When I picked up the mail, I received yet another free catalog from Crate & Barrel. I heart this store, but much of it is a bit expensive. Then I remembered wise words from an aquaintence I met this weekend: why buy the expensive kind when you can purchase the knock-off for way cheaper at Target?* So, I cut out all the things I loved in the magazines. Paintings, lamps, vases, etc. got snipped with the description and pricing and I taped them all into a notebook for future reference. Then I tossed the catalogs. Recycling AND saving space. Marvelous! So when we get into our new house, I can reference the items and ideas in my notebook, price them out at different store, and voila! Knock-off heaven!

*Interesting story there: so I’m sitting in a lovely row-house basement, looking at all the neat things that my new acquaintence has purchased to decorate her house. I look behind an open TV cabinet door and notice a familiar bowl on a shelf. If any of you recall (Sixpence, MelBel, and Raggedy Android, specifically), I registered for a beautiful but expensive wrought iron bowl that looked like twigs and leaves fashioned into a bowl. Online, they had it sitting on a coffee table, so I figured it was the size of a normal punch bowl. Note the dimensions (I wish I had): it is almost 2 feet in diameter! The bowl at the acquaintence’s home was tiny! And looked a bit different but definitely more like what I thought it was going to be. Turns out for her wedding she made the same mistake, returned the giant bowl, and purchased the small knock-off at Target.

I use ours now to either house blankets or firewood. No joke.

I had a sort of private epiphany about my weight yesterday; I’ll just say that I finally looked at it from a point of view that resonated with me.

But what to do? Eat less, move more.

I was lent a book by a co-worker about the Body-For-Life plan which would have included me working out a crap ton at the military gym butt crack early in the morning. It would also involved eliminating my wake-up routine that Mr. H was concerned about, and he urged me to start out slow anyway.

So I made a Target run last night and returned with two 2 lb weights, 1 5 lb weight, and a pedometer. I was tempted to buy the $70 Reebok hand weight set, but thought that perhaps I should just follow Mr. H’s advice and simply…start…small.

I reset my Weight Watchers account, weighed myself this morning (the indulgences from the vacation weren’t as bad as I thought…), and I’ll click on my cheap-o pedometer to see if I come anywhere close to the 10,000 steps recommended today.

The very light hand weights are to take with me when I am power-walking and for the drive. Mr. H had the idea for the walking bit, and I figured if I moved a bit during my commute, that wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’m not yakking on the phone, right?

That’s all I have time for this morning. Maybe this will be a return to the original Diet, schmiet! theme.

October should be about the time that I should have a moment to breathe long enough to post.

Mr. H and I just completed a 56+ hour, 3300 mile trip to Illinois and Minnesota over the last two weekends. This weekend we are out and about. The following weekend we must finish packing and do major shopping. The following weekend we close on our new house and move in the next day. The weekend after that is dealing with the aftermath of the move and prepping for my sister, my niece and nephew, and my mom to fly into town from October 1 through the 5th.

After that…. after that should be nice and simple. Mr. H has taught me the benefits of unpacking 95% of stuff within the first week of a move, so I don’t feel that we will be forever unpacking. We should have our washer and dryer installed, the lawnmower, some new furniture… All we have left to do is enjoy the fall.

For pics on the house, visit the family website I keep.

There is only so much I can expound on dieting or the pain that living in a cramped apartment causes. Now that there are new things, I have a feeling that soon I will have more to say on my life.

Until then…

Tell me for true: that everyone else who read this article immediately saw the ramifications of the predator/prey relationship. When running away from, say, Predator, I know I can jump in a pool of mud and coat myself to disguise my heat signature…but will that also serve to disguise my innate glowiness?

I don’t believe Aliens see via heat signature, but to be honest I’ve never been able to sit through an entire movie, and besides which I don’t recall a whole lot of conveniently placed mud pits. I do remember flying miniature face suckers.

I wonder if they are guided like mosquitos, attracted to our exhalation of CO2… or are they sensitive to our body glow? Hm….

Seriously need to stop trying to do this within 5 minutes of running to work. Curses.

I periodically use this page as a hub of links to often-visited webpages, especially when I’m too tired to write extensively or am simply without anything to say.

First, I promise to write when my job is no longer up in the air and Mr. H and I get out of the circling pattern above our intended destination.

Second, during my morning perusal of tantalizing links, I noted that I started this blog approximately 5 years ago.

5 years ago:
1. I was 4 months into my first job post grad school.
2. Mr. H and I began our courting ritual, which was fight, flirt, and pretend that being friends was what we both wanted.
3. I talked my friends to drive in my recently purchased first car down to St. Louis for a July wedding of my ol’ friend Shakespeare. It broke down in the middle of no-where, and my no-smoking resolution crumbled quickly.
4. Wow, 5 years ago I smoked.
5. I weighed about 30 pounds lighter.
6. I had no nieces or nephews and my brother was the only sibling of mine married.
7. I lived with my late great-grandfather that had an ongoing war with the local squirrels.
8. I had trouble being coherent after 8 pm. I now realize it was all the exercise and fresh air I was getting. I have few issues with staying up until 10 or 11 now, although I do prefer an earlier bedtime considering I should be leaving for work in 10 minutes.
9. Many of my friends weren’t even mothers. Mofo’s kids are 4 and other, Mo’s kids are under 5, Mama May’s little ones are under 5…. Wow. Only Arenz, for the most part.
10. I wasn’t a daily multi-sneezer.

One thing hasn’t changed: I still can’t resist lists and, as such, I am always running late.

More later! Until then…

K, back to what I was saying before the SNL/McCartney tangent.

NPR used to do a series called This I Believe. Penn Jillette did a fantastic piece rooted in implied meaning to a statement.

An atheist doesn’t believe in god.
Mr. Jillette believes there IS NO GOD. I capitalize it because Mr. Jillette’s deliver is that of triumph.

What triumph? That the statements are different. That NOT believing in god implies that there is a god. “I don’t believe in you” versus “I believe there is NO YOU.”

See the difference?

I heard this piece on NPR, Jillette’s essay, a couple of years ago, and while I do not agree with him, his reasoning, his clarification through his language of what he exactly believed, resonated with me.

Finally, earlier this year, during my mythology phase it occurred to me that the First Commandment* has some implied meaning that I never considered before.

From here:

“exodus 20:2-20:17
2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 3you shall have no other gods before* me.
4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, 6but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation* of those who love me and keep my commandments. “

While I have a few consistency issues with the latter half of this commandment, what interests me is the statement “you shall have no other gods before me”.

My epiphany is that this implies there ARE other gods that could come before this God. It implies the existence of other gods. Examining the mythology of the time supports this theory as monotheism was quite new to the world at this time. If there is just one God, Thee God, and no other god existed, wouldn’t you think that the author would have said. “I am the Only God” or “Thou shalt believe there ARE NO OTHER GODS” or something less nebulous?

My co-worker and I get along fabulously well, although she is definitely more solid in her faith, so I posed the question to her. She said that she believes that the other “gods” references are simply idols, inanimate objects with no sentience let alone any divinity. I nod. A good discussion unfolds and I get a better idea of her belief structure. Like many other issues, one can’t argue with interpretation. If that is what people choose to see, that’s cool. She does not agree with my proposed implication, and I do not agree that the “other gods” referenced were simply statues. I see the implications.

I’m not exactly sure where I will take them though.

Gotta run!

*Now, things can be lost in translation as this website claims; we aren’t talking about the possibility that churches, altars, etc. could be directly contradictory to the First Commandment.

I’m not sure if I went too much into it whilst in my mythology phase, but I’ve been somewhat meditative on God, god, deity, the Dude, whatever, ever since. Mr. H and I went for a drive to Aspen a couple of weekends ago. During these long road trips, we usually stumble upon some pretty deep discussions. Although some of them, like in Hawaii, are quite silly.

Example of our Hawaiian talk, enroute to Waimea Canyon on Kauai:
Loricious: …so the mixture of felsic and mafic rocks comes out in a rock called diorite. Like your WoW character. It is a salt and pepper rock, black and white.
Mr. H: (singing) Ebony and Ivory… I am black and you are white…
L: (laughing) What in the world are you singing? Are you making that up?
MH: Heh, no, its an old SNL skit, with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
L: They were never on SNL.
MH: No, it was a parody of them. It was Eddie Murphy… and that other guy…
L: Wow, what other guy?
MH: You know… that guy. Joe… it was a joe.
L: Joe Pantoliano? Joey Pants?
MH: No no… Joe… Joe…
L: Joey Bishop?
MH: No no… Joe… Joe…
L: Wow, I can’t help you, honey. I don’t know that time of SNL at all.
MH: Joe… Joe…
TWO HOURS LATER
L: (reading a map) so if we take this road that way, we should end up in a town…
MH: Definitely a “P”.
L: (groan)
MH: Joe “P”. Definitely starts with a “P”…. Joe… Joey… JOEY DANNIBUTAFUCCO!
L: (busts out laughing) That doesn’t start with a P! And you are thinking of a combination of Danny Bonnaduce and Joey Butafucco. IN ONE LAST NAME. (laughing so hard she can hardly speak)
MH: (also laughing so hard he can hardly drive)
ONE HOUR LATER
MH: Joe…. Piss… AH! Pissk…. PISCO! JOEY PISCO!
L: Good for you! That sounds familiar.
MH: God, that was going to drive me nuts. Joey Pisco.
L: Alright.
FIVE MINUTES LATER
L: You mean Joe Piscopo?
MH: YES! FINALLY! So do you remember the skit?
L: Honey, I don’t even know what Joe Piscopo looks like.
MH: Oh. … Well it was a really funny skit.
L: Sounds like it.
MH: (singing) “Ebony and Ivory, I am black and you are white…”

Heh… good times. … What the hell was I talking about before this?