Friday's Feast

One Hundred & Thirty One

Appetizer
What sound, other than the normal ringing, would you like your telephone to make?
Ringing's Ok

Soup
Describe your usual disposition in meteorological terms (partly cloudy, sunny, stormy, etc.)
Sunny with a chance of clouds

Salad
What specific subject do you feel you know better than any other subjects?
general books; cake decorating/baking; things Toddler says and does and the reasons behind his actions

Main Course
Imagine you were given the ability to remember everything you read for one entire day. Which books/magazines/newspapers would you choose to read?
This is daunting. Maybe one issue of Bookmarks magazine, the most recent Sunday NY Times, A Short History of Nearly Everything with parts of Annals of the Former World, a Spanish textbook. I don't know. I wish I could remember everything I read.

Dessert
If a popular candy maker contacted you to create their next confection, what would it be like and what would you name it?
I'll get back to this one. I have to read Where is Little Harry? by Graham Philpot to Toddler right now.

Book Meme. . . with a key!

I know you really don't want to read another long list of books and whether or not I've read them, but then again, maybe some of you will, since I was interested enough to read some done by others. But, of course, as with any meme, it sounded fun and how could I resist a meme with a key to refer to? Like a map. I love maps.
Saw this meme on Classical Bookworm

THE KEY

Books I've read
Books I want to read
Books I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole
Books on my bookshelves
? Books I've never heard of
# Books I've seen in movie or TV form
! Books I've blogged about
Books I'm indifferent to

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. # Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. # Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. # The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. # The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. # The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. # Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. ? Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. # Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)(I own it in Spanish and English, but I read it in English)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. # Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. # The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. # Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. # Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. # The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30.Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31.Dune (Frank Herbert)
32.The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33.Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34.1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. # The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41.The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42.The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45.Bible (parts)
46.Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. # The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48.Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52.A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54.# Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. ? The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. # The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62.The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. # Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. ? Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. # Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. # Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. # The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. ? The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. # The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. ? Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. ? Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. # Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. ? Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. ? Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. # The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. ? A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Two Meme

Took this from Adrienne at Bookmark My Heart.

Two names you go by: my first name and Mommy

Two things you are wearing right now: maternity shirt and pajama pants

Two places you want to go on vacation: Puerto Rico and England

Two things you are thinking about now: craving wedding cake and whether or not to eat another chocolate pudding cup

Two favorite animals: horses and owls

Two reasons you’re doing this survey: easy post for nighttime and it looked fun

Spell your name without vowels: Cmll

How many pairs of jeans do you own? Three maternity jeans, none of which I can fit into anymore; I can't even discuss my normal person jeans

What color(s) do you wear most often? burgundy, blue, brown?

What’s for dinner tonight? chicken paillards on salad greens with balsamic vinaigrette and baked potatoes with sour cream, butter, broccoli, cheese

Are you happy with your life right now? yes

[Do you own a…}

- PS2: No

- XBOX: No

- PSP: No

- Gamecube: No

- Digital Camera: Yes

In what state or country did you go to school after high school? Virginia--six hours away from home

What stores do you shop at? Right now, Motherhood Maternity, Target maternity, JCPenney maternity, Mimi Maternity, and a little bit of Sears maternity; also Kroger, Kohl's, Borders, B&N, TJ Maxx

How do you make money? part-time work from home bookkeeper/database manager

Last thing you bought? decaf caramel latte and chocolate chip cookie from Panera Bread

How’s the weather? pretty cold, 30s/40s; maybe snow Tuesday

Do you own big sunglasses? no, but I need some

What should you be doing right now? eating pudding and going to bed

Who did you hug today? my toddler

How many beds did you lay in yesterday? one

What color shirt are you wearing? navy blue

Name one thing that you do everyday: eat

What color are your bedroom walls? green

How much cash do you have on you right now? I think $19 in my wallet

What’s your favorite sport? yuck

When was the last time you saw your dad? two hours ago

What did you have for dinner last night? chicken pot pie

What’s your favorite Starbucks drink? vanilla latte or caramel macchiatto

Recent time you were really upset? a few nights ago when my husband asked me to edit an article he had to write for his work newsletter and then got mad at me because he thought I changed too much

Friday's Feast

Feast 129

Appetizer
What was one of the fashion fads when you were a teenager?
Pants called Skidz or something like that--they were a very thin cotton with a drawstring waist and when you "French cuffed" them at the bottom, they sort of ballooned out. And they were usually a plaid, I think. Mine had a magenta sort of color in them and my friend, Kristin, had teal and somehow we always wore them on the same day without planning it.

Soup
Name one thing you think people assume about you when they first meet you.
I think people think I'm nerdy or just generally "not cool." I think this is left over from high school, where it wasn't that big of an issue anyway, but, you know, these things have an effect.

Salad
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being highest, how hard do you work?
generally speaking, housework, maybe a 5; taking care of Toddler, maybe 9; when I was teaching, maybe 8-10.

Main Course
If you were given a free 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl to sell anything you currently own, what would you advertise?
cakes? But then I'd have to start making cakes for customers and I don't feel like I have the time to devote right now.

Dessert
Fill in the blank: I love to ___________ when it is ____________.
I love to read during the day when it is snowing.

Look at this fun meme that I can't do

Here is a fun meme from Karen at Verbatim wherein you look up the very first time you ever used Amazon.com. I'd love to know what I ordered ten years ago or so, whenever I first used it, but I was in a different world back then and wouldn't have a clue what my password might have been. I'm pretty sure I first started using Amazon in 1998 and I have some good guesses what my email address would have been, but no way can I know my password. In 1998 I was 23, now I'm 31, in a house, with a husband, a child, and one on the way. Who knows what password I used in my swinging-single- working-downtown-going-out-for-beers-after-work-and-huge-chunks-of-free-time-every-weekend-kind-of-life I had back then. Oh well, on my current account I can go back to 2003, but that's too recent. I was teaching first grade then and ordered a bunch of teaching related and children's picture books. Blah, who cares. But other people should try it, I think.

Back to Blogging Meme

I feel like whenever I haven't blogged in a long time, I always come back with a meme. I guess it's an easy way to get back into it. Without further ado...

Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
Hardback or trade, I guess. Usually what I want to read is not usually in mass market, except maybe classics, but then they fall apart so easily.

Amazon or brick and mortar?
Oh, a little of both, I suppose. I love getting fun mail, but I do love a visit to the bookstore as well. As long as I get my books and latte BEFORE we go visit the Thomas the Tank playset

Barnes & Noble or Borders?
Well, I used to be a die-hard B&N girl, having worked in two of them, one in the cafe, one on the bookside. But now, Borders is a teensy bit closer to my house (they're both within 3 miles) and sometimes I think they have a wider selection. But this may not be true. B&N definitely has the better cafe.

Bookmark or dogear?

Bookmark, for sure. But I know I used to dogear as a kid. The mistakes of the young.

Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?

My books are pretty random. They're kind of together by subject, like Buddhist stuff is together, the Best American Essays are all together, books about writing are together, but beyond that, it's a happy mess. I don't think I'd ever alphabetize by title, though.

Keep, throw away, or sell?
I generally keep, occasionally sell, but throw away a book? In the garbage? No.

Keep dustjacket or toss it?
Throw that away in the garbage, too? Weird! Although I do remove the dustjackets from Toddler's books before they go into his general circulation.

Read with dustjacket or remove it?
Leave it on, unless it keeps sliding off, which hasn't happened in awhile.

Short story or novel?
Novel. I really don't like short stories. I've tried. I just don't.

Collection (short stories by same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?
In the case of short stories, I'd go with collection because then you can get a sense of the author and learn whether you can trust her or not and whether you like her or not. Too many short stories get freaky towards the end. In the case of essays, though, I go either way. I love them all.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
Neither. But that's not really fair because I've never read Lemony Snicket and I've only read the first Harry Potter book. No desire to read more.

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
I aim for the chapter break or at the very least, the white space break between paragraphs which show up now and then. Otherwise, if I'm falling asleep and reading the same sentence again and again, I quit then and there.

“It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?
Once upon a time, but, hey, I need more than that.

Buy or Borrow?
Both, although I haven't borrowed in a long time, and (looking down in shame) I'm not a good returner of borrowed books.

New or used?
Love 'em both!

Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse?
I hate reviews and the NYTBR is boring to me. Also, my local newspaper reviews books I'll most likely never have an interest in. I tend not to trust recommendations, either, because most people I know don't read what I read. BUT, having said that, I have found a lot of bloggers who are kindred reading spirits and do go off of their recommendations. Otherwise, I browse and look online, follow the whimsy of one book leading to another, and I do LOVE book lists.

Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Whichever, depends on the story

Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading?
Anything I can get.

Standalone or series?
Both are great, but I do tend to read way more stand alones.

Favorite series?
Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin; Below the Root trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey

Favorite books read last year?
The Country Life by Rachel Cusk; A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Favorite books of all time?
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Banned Books Meme

I saw this on Cam's blog who saw it here as a meme. Just to see if I'm like Cam and read a lot of these in school or on my own, I'll do it with the meme instructions: bold the ones you've read and italicize the ones you've read part of. (Cam's is beautifully color-coded, but I'll annotate instead since I need to get in bed and read the third Wizard of Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore.)

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain read on my own, maybe middle school age?
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes read parts of in 8th grade Spanish
#4 The Koran read parts of in college
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain read on my own
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift in college
#8 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer read in high school
#9 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne 11th grade English
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman read on own and parts for school
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli college
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank read on own in 6th grade; borrowed from school library
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker read in college for Gothic literature class
#18 The Autobiography of Ben Franklin by Benjamin Franklin in college; also own and it's a TBR in entirety
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne on my TBR shelf
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck read on own in last few years
#22 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy read on own high school
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce read in college for Ulysses class
#26 The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell read for 6th grade English (too young)
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire on TBR shelf
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee read on own recently
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 The Dubliners by James Joyce I think we read this in that Ulysses class
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley read for summer reading in middle school
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser read on own in 2006
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell read on own in 6th grade
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 The Lord of the Flies by William Golding read for summer reading in middle school #47 Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys
#48 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway read in 10th grade English
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury read on own, maybe high school
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller read in 2006
#56 The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 The Color Purple by Alice Walker read parts of from my grandmother's shelf when I was too young
#58 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger read 11th grade English
#59 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison read on own fairly recently
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn read in 12th grade English
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck read in 2006 or 2005
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou on TBR shelf
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson saw TV movie
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser on TBR shelf
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath read on own long time ago
#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 The Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl read to my husband on car trip from NJ to VA a few years ago
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov read in last few years
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut read in last few years
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder read on own elementary school age
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin read in last few years
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig read to my first grade class when teaching
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Of some of the titles I haven't read, I have read other books by the same author like D.H. Lawrence, Richard Wright, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway, but I guess those titles haven't been challenged. I am lucky that Banned Books have never affected my life--no teacher or parent has ever said a book was unavailable to me and no library has ever told me that a book was off limits.

Friday's Feast

I haven't done one of these in a loooong time.

Appetizer
1. Which celebrity (or celebrities) do you think will make headlines this year?
probably Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise; I doubt the media is finished with them yet.

2. Soup
They say good things come in small packages.
What is something little that you think is great?
Toddler!

3. Salad
Name a song that makes you want to dance.
This is sure not to be a popular answer: Get Right by Jennifer Lopez

4. Main Course
What is your favorite font?
Well, I used Comic Sans A LOT when I was a first grade teacher and it's not that. I don't have a lot of fonts on my Word program, but out of those I would choose Book Antiqua or Georgia. But look here for tons of amazingly cool ones. I use this site sometimes when decorating cakes. It helped when I wanted to write the birthday boy's name in lieu of the word "Cars" on that movie's logo.

5. Dessert
If you were to write a do-it-yourself article, what would it be about?
How to decorate a cake

Lunch Break Meme

Saw this on Pages Turned

1) My uncle once: looked like Clark Gable to me when I was 11 and in my Gone with the Wind phase, but now, I just think there's a slight resemblance.
2) Never in my life: have I had a Reese's peanut butter cup, Snickers, or Butterfinger (peanut butter, yuck!)
3) When I was five:I won the school Halloween costume contest but was too shy to come to the center of the playground with the principal so everyone could see my costume
4) High school was:sometimes fun, sometimes disturbing, mostly annoying
5) Fire is:pretty to watch when it's contained
6) I once saw:the movie "She-Devil" being filmed in my hometown
7) There’s this woman I know who:is an amateur pilot and professional writer (I'm so jealous
8) Once, at a bar: I got really drunk, danced, and ate pizza (oh, that was more than once)
9) By noon I’m usually: looking forward to Toddler's naptime (but I think he recently officially dropped those naps)
10) Last night: I stayed up until 12:45 am baking rugelach
11) If I only had: a little more free time
12) Next time I go to church:might be when the new baby gets christened
13) What worries me most:things that could happen to Toddler
14) When I turn my head left:I see the whole living room and the Christmas tree
15) When I turn my head right:I see the French doors to the deck
16) You know I'm lying when:I'm a little too adamant about what I'm saying
17) What I miss most about the eighties:being a kid
18) If I were a character written by Shakespeare, I’d be:I haven't read Shakespeare since college
19) By this time next year:I'll have a 3-yr.-old and a 9-mo.-old. Yipes!
20) I have a hard time understanding:my mother
21) You know I like you if:I ask you questions about yourself
22) If I won an award, the first person I’d thank would be:the person that gave it to me is the best answer, courtesy of Pages Turned
23) Darwin, Mozart, Slim Pickens & Geraldine Ferraro:interesting, fascinating, who?, old hat
24) Take my advice, never:go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line
25) My ideal breakfast is:homemade apple pancakes with butter and syrup
26) If you visit my hometown, I suggest you go to:Manhattan instead; it's a very short bus or train ride away and way more interesting
27) Why doesn't everyone:stop being snobby
28) If you spend the night at my house:you'll have to sleep on the couch because we're out of bedrooms now
29) I’d stop my wedding:if I just knew it was wrong
30) The world could do without:sensational news
31) My favorite blonde is:Val Kilmer
32) If I do anything well, it’s:read
33) And by the way:it's very windy out right now

Christmas Meme-ories

Haven't posted in awhile because we've been working on this:



















and this:




















I saw this meme at Carl V.'s and Iliana's and it's just the kind of meme I'm in the mood for.

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?
Hot Chocolate, but M. loves egg nog and we just saw the Alton Brown episode that's all about egg nog. We love AB and if we try his recipe, I'll try some again.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree?
Santa wraps

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
white on tree, white on the outside of house; but when I was little in the late 70s and 80s we had colored lights on the tree and outside. The ones on the tree even blinked. Groovy!

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
Nope

5. When do you put your decorations up?
Usually the first weekend in December

6. What is your favorite holiday dish?
Christmas cookies

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child:
I guess Christmas morning with my parents and brother and sister when we all still believed in Santa: the excitement of going to sleep on Christmas Eve after our annual party with extended family, getting up early, staying in pajamas all day playing with our new stuff, the dinner with grandparents that night

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
When I was 8, I was lying in bed on Christmas Eve and my mom went into the closet in my brother's room across the hall from my room (he was a newborn) and pulled out a huge black garbage bag and headed downstairs. I knew then it was full of our "Santa presents."

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?
Before my parents moved here, we had our annual Christmas party with my dad's brothers and sister, my grandmother, and the 10 cousins. We always played a card game with two decks: one was dealt out to everyone, and the other one was held by my aunt. She called out a card and if you matched it, you picked a wrapped gift from the pile. Then when there were no more gifts in the pile and your card was called, you had to steal from someone else. When all the cards had been turned in, you opened what you were left with (sometimes nothing.) That would qualify as the only gift I ever opened on Christmas Eve.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas Tree?
Lights, garlands of red and green beads, and a string of fake candy, then the red balls we call tomatoes, then the little glass balls, then all the other ornaments, usually the Hallmark Keepsake ones last just because they're stored in their original boxes at the bottom of the ornament box.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it?
LOVE IT

12. Can you ice skate?
Yes, but I haven't done it in a long time. When I was little, my mom took my sister and I to lessons and just regular skating every weekend at Warinanco Park in Elizabeth, NJ. The smell of winter and a big woodburning fireplace mixed with the smell of snack bar fries will always be tied to that place in my mind.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?
Any book, my skis when I was 17, my ice skates when I was about 11, and maybe my cassettes of Use Your Illusion I and II when I was about 16. Younger than that and, like Iliana, I loved Barbie's and all her accoutrements.

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you?
great excuse for baking cookies, parties, togetherness, family time, decorations, the general feeling of excitement and anticipation in the air

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert?
Christmas cookies! also pie and coffee

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
putting up the Christmas tree, first with my parents and siblings and now with my husband and son

17. What tops your tree?
(copying Carl V. for posting picture)

I like this OK. It was a gift from MIL. I would probably choose something different if I had the chance. But when I was little we had this star with a cutout in the middle of it. In the cutout was a cylinder with a paper roll of little stars in it and when you turned it on, the cylinder rotated, shooting light stars all over the room. Kind of in the vein of a disco ball. Told you we had a groovy tree back in the day.


18. Which do you prefer: giving or receiving?
Both, but I do love the feeling of giving something that someone actually really loves and you can really tell. It's a great feeling.

19. What is your favorite Christmas Song?
The Little Drummer Boy, any version. Remember the ice skating mentioned above? Well, there was this skate guard there named Ken who I had the BIGGEST crush on. I must have been around 10 or 11. He must have been 22 or 23. Every weekend we would hold hands and skate around the rink and while I was doing my lesson, he would skate with my sister. It was totally not creepy or anything. Anyway, I remember him singing this song with me while we skated around. I do like the Bob Seeger version. I just have to say, one song I don't like is that "Baby, It's Cold Outside" one, especially when sung by Regis and Joy Philbin. When Nick and Jessica sang it, it wasn't that bad.

20. Candy Canes! Yuck or Yum?
Yuck! I hate peppermint! But I like the way they look as decorations.

The One Word Meme

Got this one from BettyBetty

Yourself: curious
Your partner: caring
Your hair: brown
Your Mother: confusing
Your Father: better
Your Favorite Item:
Your dream last night: I could've told you this morning, but now I forgot
Your Favorite Drink: gin and tonic with lime
Your Dream Car: don't care
Your Dream Home: one that feels cozy but is still roomy
The Room You Are In: living room
Your Ex: a friend (just when we see each other in social situations; he's married to my best friend's sister's best friend. Got that?)
Your fear: anything negative pertaining to my child
Where you Want to be in Ten Years? teaching again and happy
Who you hung out with last night: in-laws and Toddler's cousins
What You're Not: too snobby
Muffins: yummy
One of Your Wish List Items: a nice cookie press
Time: 11 pm
The Last Thing You Did: taped Studio 60; made cornbread
What You Are Wearing: yoga-type capris, V-neck maternity T-shirt
Your favorite weather: crisp fall
Your Favorite Book: Jane Eyre
Last thing you ate: cornbread with butter
Your Life: everchanging
Your mood: content
Your Best Friends: interesting
What are you thinking about right now: bloglines just went down again
Your car: new
What are you doing at the moment: this meme
Your summer: alcohol free (pregnant)
Relationship status: married
What is on your TV: the evening news on mute
What is the weather like: chilly, nighttime
When is the last time you laughed: talking to my sister on the phone about 2 hours ago

Consider yourself tagged if you see this and want to do it. It's a fun one.

Poetry Meme

Cam tagged me for this. Thanks!

1. The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to was
the nursery rhymes my grandmother used to say with me when I was really little. I remember Simple Simon and one about putting salt on a bird's tail that I loved.
2. I was forced to memorize (name of poem) in school and........
I remember my whole 9th grade English class having to memorize Shakespeare's sonnet 29. I remember snippets like "trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries" and "look upon myself and curse my fate" and that's about it.
3. I read/don't read poetry because....
I generally don't read poetry but I always have this plan to. I guess it's just because I'm so taken with the book form that I don't give poetry the time it deserves.
4. A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is .......
I remember in 8th grade LOVING "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes. That got me into poetry for a little while, but eventually I left it again.
5. I write/don't write poetry, but..............
I used to write poetry in high school and college when I was a way more dramatic version of myself and had huge emotions to get out. Now I never do. Am I too self-censored now? I hope not.
6. My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature.....
I think that I just can't speed along through poetry like I can with other literature and that's to my detriment. I need to slow down. And sometimes when I read at night, depending on the pacing of the book I'm reading, the words keep going through my head when I try to sleep, which defeats the purpose of my reading before bed. So maybe poetry before bed will help me slow down and savor ideas and words instead of getting a frantic brain.
7. I find poetry.....
sometimes boring; sometimes inspiring; sometimes beautiful and interesting
8. The last time I heard poetry....
was when I read Tumble Bumble by Felicia Bond to my son before he went to bed
9. I think poetry is like....
unlocking inner thoughts and emotions that cannot be expressed any other way

I Like These Quizzes That Tell Me What I Already Know

Saw this on Kailana's.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Everybody's Doing It: The Aspirational Meme

So Litlove has written a meme that has appeared on many of the book blogs, and who I am not to jump on the proverbial bandwagon? The chocolate genoise for the Swiss Black Forest Cake is in the oven for my dad's birthday. Both men are sleeping, the big one and small one. So I think it's time for a Sunday meme.

1. What part of the past would you bring back if you possibly could?
This may sound weird but somehow I must explain. It would be being a kid and living with my immediate family. Like elementary school age. Of course, not everything was perfect and there were always issues, but I was less aware of them at that age and I sometimes (especially at holidays) miss the camaraderie of living with a brother and sister and two parents and dog and cat. I love my life now and living with my husband and creating that same (albeit more functional) environment for my kids, but I just loved being a kid myself.

2. What character trait would you alter if you could?
I would have more patience and not be as bossy to my husband, especially regarding Toddler

3. Which skill would you like to have the time and energy to really work on?
Writing. I talk about it a lot and do it very little.

4. Are you money poor, love poor, time poor or freedom poor?
I'm going with freedom poor. A two-year-old kind of limits where you can go and what you can do. But I don't begrudge this. I don't want him to grow up too fast and I know my time will come again when I'm not the necessary Mommy anymore. And then I'm sure I'll miss that time, too.

5. What element of your partner’s character would you alter if you could?
He needs more patience sometimes.

6. What three things are you going to do next year that you’ve been meaning to do for ages but never got around to?
Now that I'm not teaching cake decorating anymore, I'm going to make my former class night into a writing-outside-the-home night. I'm going to get licensed as a home baker so I can make cakes for my friends' new children's party planning business. Hmm, I'm going to finish the Christmas cross-stitch I started for my mother-in-law a year and a half ago. She didn't get it for Christmas last year and it won't be ready for this year. Maybe Christmas 2007?

7. If your fairy godmother gave you three wishes, what would you wish for?
OK, I'm not a science fiction nerd, but I would really like to be able to time travel. I just have this burning, yearning desire to go back in time and just see everything and everyone in certain time periods. I wouldn't even have to get involved, just observe. Like now I'm reading Mayflower and I would LOVE to be able to go to Plymouth in 1620 and just see it all as it really happened. Second, I would wish for a greater awareness of global warming for everyone in the world so we can slow and ultimately stop whatever is not natural. And third, continued health and increasing happiness for all family and friends.

8. What one thing would you change about your living conditions?
Less stuff + slightly bigger house = breathing space (and room for downstairs bookshelves)

9. How could the quality of your free time be improved?
Well, I take what I can get and I try not to do housework during naptime so I can use it for my dabblings (reading, listening to classical music, baking, blogging) but I suppose if I slept longer at night, I wouldn't fall asleep reading at 2 in the afternoon and therefore I'd get more reading done. But I'll probably continue to go to bed too late because I also like my adult time after Toddler goes to bed.

10. What change have you made to your life recently that you’re most proud of?
I quit my cake decorating job and I was offered a position with our local writers organization as their second paid employee. I was interviewed and, for all intents and purposes, hired, but now the actual hiring has to pass through a board meeting. So if all goes well, I suppose I'll be quite proud of my new job.

An Attempt at Organization or, I Feel Like Playing with a Book List

Since I am currently reading 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley (see sidebar for link), I thought I should go through the list of 100 books she read and comments on to see what I have read already. For organizational purposes only. Or out of guilt that I'm devoting all my reading time to Mayflower and not to this. (But I think it's because you need to be really awake to read this book, and with a two-year-old and 23 weeks pregnant, I'm not often that wide awake. I'm already blaming something on my daughter and she's not even born yet. Sorry, New Baby!)


Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Author unknown, The Saga of the People of Laxardal
Snorri Sturluson, Egil's Saga
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron
Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, vols. 1 and 2
Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Voltaire, Candide
Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
The Marquis de Sade, Justine
Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Bride of the Lammermoor
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Jane Austen, Persuasion
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Nicolai Gogol, Taras Bulba
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
Honore de Balzac,, Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Well, I need to read this one again because when I was reading it the last time, I got to the last 2 or so chapters and then lost it. I couldn't find it anywhere. So I read 95% of it.)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Emile Zola, Therese Raquin
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street
Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, volume I, The Wreath
James Joyce, Ulysses
Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, volume 1
Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet flows the Don
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
P.G. Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees it Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
John Gardner, Grendel
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
J.M. Coetzee, Foe
Toni Morrison, Beloved
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Nicholson Baker, Vox
Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Arnost Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

Yep, good thing I own the Smiley book. It's going to take me a while to catch up with her.

Early Reading Meme

I can't resist reading memes. This one's from Kate's Book Blog.

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?
I was four and I taught myself. I did used to make my mom write out the alphabet for me all the time so I could copy it. And I remember copying the words in books right above the printed word. But my parents tell the story of when they were reading a familiar story to me, I think it was Pinocchio, and they started to paraphrase, I corrected them and asked why they weren't reading the words anymore. And that's when they saw I could read.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?
We had shelves and shelves. There is a picture of my sister and I in our pajamas sitting on our books which we had lain flat edge to edge across the whole living room rug. I'm going to my parents' later, I'll have to find it. The very earliest book I remember loving was this one with penguins and it was some kind of phonics book. (I think it was one of the ones that helped me learn to read. I've always been a phonics/linguistics nerd.) Then there was a brown book with a lion on the cover that was like a Time/Life nature book of all different animal photographs. I pored over that one. I also loved Arty the Smarty.

The book I remember borrowing from the library every single month was Peppermint Fence which was actually an old reading textbook. I later found it on eBay and now I have my own copy.

3. What's the first book that you bought with your own money?
Hmm. I remember the first cassette tape I bought with my own money because I had such buyer's remorse as soon as I left the record store that I went right back in and tried to return it. They wouldn't take it. It was Madonna's True Blue. But the first book with my own money? I remember borrowing money from my sister to buy Judy Blume's Forever and then feeling so guilty because it had so much sex in it and my sister was still in elementary school. (Not that I let her see it.) Anyway, it must have been Sweet Valley High books. I was crazy for those and the Babysitter's Club series in 5th/6th grade. Prior to that it was a lot of Beverly Cleary, Nancy Drew, and Judy Blume for the younger set. And then there was Betsy's Little Star which was actually the first chapter book I ever read but I feel like my mom must have bought that one for me.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?
I was not a re-reader. I remember my best friend constantly re-reading her favorite book, Freddie the Thirteenth about a girl from a huge family, and I always thought that was so weird of her to do. The first and only book I ever read more than once (three times, to be exact) was Jane Eyre.

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?
Like Kate from Kate's Book Blog it was probably Gone with the Wind. My sixth-grade teacher loved it and showed us the movie in class and, of course, I got all enamored with it and had to be Scarlett O'Hara for Halloween that year. So I did read it that year I was eleven. But now that I think of it, Little Women may have come first.

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?
No, but I can do the opposite--books I read as a young teenager that I could never read now. I used to read tons of Christopher Pike and Dean Koontz novels. Now I'm scared of my own shadow. I don't know how I did it back then. (I do think I'm more easily disturbed by scary and violent material now that I'm a mom, though.)

Dare I Post This?

It's a blog quiz. What's your Literary Personality? But, a coloring book? I took it twice, once before bed and then first thing this morning, refining my answers the second time and I still got the same result. It's actually pretty true, but it makes me sound fake and shallow.

You scored as A coloring book. Children love you--and so do many adults. They find you approachable, simple and friendly, all of which perfectly describe you. Instead of throwing big words around, you communicate in the international language of pictures. In order to be as open as possible, you present yourself simply, allowing those around you to customize you to their liking. Sometimes this results in you turning into a primitive masterpiece, and other times you resemble a schizophrenic's daydream. So long as the one talking to you understands you, you're happy. Zen and the art of crayon-sharpening.

Your Literary Personality
created with QuizFarm.com

But I Knew This Already

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes