Books from Chelsea

Chelsea put this in her blog, and I realized I had read quite a few of the books on the list, and so I decided to do this fun little thing about me:

The rules:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Star the books you LOVE.
4. Underline books you claimed to have read, but really just listened to your class discussions/oral reports
5. Books you started but didn't love and didn't finish = ^
6. "I've only seen the movie" = #

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. 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
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 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 (why is this separate from #33?)
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. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Dune - Frank Herbert
51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
52. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen #
53. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
54. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
56. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
58. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
59. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
60. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
61. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
62. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
63. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas #
64. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
65. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
66. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding #
67. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
68. Moby Dick - Herman Melville #
69. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
70. Dracula - Bram Stoker
71. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett #
72. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
73. Ulysses - James Joyce
74. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
75. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
76. Germinal - Emile Zola
77. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray #
78. Possession - AS Byatt
79. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens #
80. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
81. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
82. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
83. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
84. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
85. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
86. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
87. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle *# (not all of them...)
88. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
89. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
90. The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
91. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
92. Watership Down - Richard Adams
93. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
94. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
95. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
96. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl #
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Turns out I'm the opposite of Chelsea, when I start a book, I finish it. Even Charles Dickens!!! I can only think of two books that I've started but not finished, and they're not even on this list. Anyway, this was fun, I hope it wasn't too boring for readers.

New Job!

I applied for a new position at BYU I.S. and starting Monday I am the Course Maintenance and Product Testing Supervisor. I'm pretty excited about it. For one thing I was getting a little bit burned out about my current job. For another thing, I only had until mid-October to find a new job, or my "temporary staff" status would expire. Probably the best thing is instead of making $xx.xx/hr, I'll be making $xx,xxx/year, plus benefits!

I start on Monday, and Becky, the current C.M.&P.T. Supervisor will be training me. I also have to go to the employment office to get paperwork filled out and set up a time to talk about how the benefits work and everything. I've never had a "real" job, so I'm nervous and excited all at the same time! I'm excited to learn more about how I.S. works, and to be doing something different than what I have been doing for 2 years. It's something new.

Lazy bum whoopla

I've been in a funk lately where I don't feel like doing anything, and I'm always tired. I decided to fix that.

First of all, I decided that a constant bedtime would be logical, as well as a constant wake up time. So this month, it's my goal to go to bed at 10:00pm every night and get up at 6:00am every morning. Yes, that means Saturdays and Sundays too. Although I might allow myself 7:00am on those mornings. Hopefully this will help my productivity level. It is also said that people that have a regular sleeping pattern are less tired throughout the day. I could definitely use that.

Last night I think we made it to bed at 10:30. So close... But I couldn't go to sleep until about midnight. Amongst the crickets having a hay day outside the window, the dog running around upstairs, the TV on upstairs, and not being used to going to bed earlier, I couldn't sleep.

Another thing missing in my life is exercise. Every day I walk to either the car or the bus, and then from the car or bus to work, where I sit on my tush all day at a computer. I thought about my options:

• get up at 5:00am to run
• run in the evening after getting home from work
• go to the gym on the way to or from work
• ride my bike the 11.2 miles to work

I picked the last option. Well, sort of. I decided that I could ride the 7 miles 90% downhill to BYU, and I would catch the bus from there. So we left the house at 7:05. It was pretty windy because of the impending thunderstorms, and only when it was uphill ironically. Dave would push me slightly up the hills to lift the burden a little bit. My favorite part was going down the diagonal hill. When we got to the intersection of Avenue and Parkway some girl had just hit a pedestrian girl with her car! The girl wasn't severely hurt, just limping a little bit, and the other girl drove her to the medical center. It added a little bit of excitement to the ride. By the time we got to campus, my bus had for sure already come and gone and it only comes once an hour. So I decided to keep riding until the next bus came, if it took that long. Turns out it didn't take that long. Dave came with me all the way out to work. It was a fun bike ride, but I am definitely going to be sore after an hour and ten minutes of bike riding. 11.2 miles in an hour and 10 minutes turns out to be about average of about 9.65 miles per hour (so my coworker informed me).

A post...

So this is me officially posting something on our blog. Isn't it gweat?

So I hereby officially declare before one and all that I usurp the authority to edit what Sarah writes if I don't like it. :)

Oh yeah...I even posted a picture! :-D (Just incase you didn't know...this is a 2007 BMW M5. It's even has very efficient gas mileage for having a 500 bhp engine).

Gas Rumors

I've heard the rumor that semi trucks are skimping on the refridgeration in their trucks in order to save on gas. In connection, I've also heard that people are having food go bad before the expiration date. ("I came back as a bag of groceries Accidently taken off the shelf Before the date stamped on myself..."?)

I don't know if these rumors are true, but yesterday I made macaroni and cheese in our gourmet kitchen with tools all over the floor. I cooked the noodles and drained them. I added the margerine and the cheese and stirred. I took the milk out of the fridge, and yes, it had gone bad. After I dumped it down the drain, I found out that our upstairs neighbors didn't have any milk either. Time to compromise. I added my secret ingredient and enjoyed half of the box of mac-ee-moni-and-cees. Dave came home and ate the rest not knowing about the lack of milk and the secret ingredient and agreed that it tasted...like macaroni and cheese.

I bet everyone is dying to find out what my secret ingredient is. I put in some whipped cream from a can in instead of milk! But now that I've told you, I'll have to kill you

My Turn

As you can see, Dave is officially one of the "contributers" to this blog, but he never writes. Therefore I reserve the right to write whatever I want. Every once in a while, when I get tagged for something and I want to do it, I will. :) Of course I'll try to keep the majority of posts about our life together.

The rules:

1. List three items in each category
2. Tag three other people you would like to hear from
3. Get to know your friends and family

Joys

1. Coming home and seeing Dave at the end of the day
2. Having a working kitchen sink (the water comes out the faucet and goes down the drain!)
3. Playing with my Mary Kay makeup

Fears

1. Death of someone close to me (hasn't happened yet, and I know it's bound to, so I always get terrified when people do stupid reckless stuff)
2. Spiders, Spiders, Spiders, and more Spiders. Even the dead ones. Thank goodness for spider spray from Home Depot, and a good vacuum!
3. Cops - they give me the hibijibis

Goals

1. Near Future: Get a better job, build my Mary Kay business, and get a mutt puppy from the pound
2. Future: Get a house, get Dave through school, move out of Utah, have kids and speak German to them, and live in a German-speaking country for a year or more
3. Distant Future: Travel the world

Collections/Obsessions

1. I buy a porcelain doll every time I go to Germany/Austria (So far I have two...)
2. The color blue. I am almost ALWAYS wearing something blue, and if I were to pick between two of the same thing and one was blue in color, I'd pick that one.
3. I have a very small collection of books that I'm working on enlarging. Whenever I would fly to Lake Tahoe, I'd buy one in the airport, read it on the plane, and on the beach.

Facts

1. I use my upper lip to plug my nose as I swim.
2. I'm allergic to avocados and cantaloupe.
3. I can whistle two notes at the same time

Tags

1. Brianne
2. Julie
3. Tracy