books

I saw this on another blog and because i am always looking for more books to read, i thought it would be good. unfortunately, i have already read 90% of them. if you have any suggestions for books i might like, let me know. i have also read a lot of other books written by some of the authors listed. if i liked one of their books, then i generally try to read more of their work.

Look at the list of books below:
* Bold the ones you’ve read

1. The DaVinci 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)
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 (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)
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 (Audrew 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 Traveling 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)

decadence at work!

eee this morning at work i am drinking irish creme in my coffee while i eat fancy gourmet chocolates. life is good!

a weekend of FUN

last weekend was like two weekends packed into one. lots going on and barely enough time to do it all! it started out friday night with going to get a Christmas tree. i love decorating the tree, i love the tree smell, i love the cosy way it makes the house feel. we got one from the nursery near our house. we have never been organized enough to go and chop our own, but i did enough of that growing up so it doesn't bother me too much. plus, i feel sort of sad for these precut trees, since they just go in the chipper if no one buys them.

i spent the rest of friday night and saturday morning finishing my book club book for the month, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. we had some lively discussion over eggs benedict at Oscar's in Kitchener. good way to start off the morning. then i headed home to tidy and grocery shop before my friend mike came over. alex and i took a load of stuff to the dump, we are really trying to get our garage cleaned out! we can barely move in there!

when mike arrived we went to the theatre to see The Golden Compass. i was a little disappointed when it ended abruptly and mike told me there are supposed to be two more movies :( but i am happy they are finally starting to make more fantasy series into movies, i am looking forward to the Dark is Rising movie coming soon as well.

after the movie we went back to our place to make about 200 cookies. gill joined us for dinner, and then we got to work. we made Spicy Cardamom Crisps (my fave), Molasses Sugar Cookies, Cranberry and Almond Biscotti and Lemon Shortbread Cookies.

From THIS To THIS

the cookie extravaganza took us about 4 hours and gill mixed up a few minty martinis to get us in the christmas spirit. even mike and alex helped after they got their fix of need for speed on the xbox 360 :)

sunday was also quite busy. we woke to about a foot of snow, which meant we had to shovel ourselves out. gill headed over to her house and i loaded up the borrowed van with some of our old furniture to take to gills new house. once we shoveled out i took the long snowy drive to guelph and spent the day helping gill paint her new house (see pic below).

once it started to get dark i drove home so that we could finish decorating the Christmas tree, and we spent 2 hours wrapping all of our gifts. I want to post a pic of that too.....and i will next week. I asked for a little wee camera for Christmas so if i get it, it will be easier to post pics. not that we don't already have enough cameras at our house, but i want something teeny that i can put in my pocket. as much as i love the pics from the SLR, it is a pain to lug it around and i've already got carpel tunnel from WOW.

another Hawksley song

another little taste of the new hawksley album has been released. This song is called "all the trees are hers". i am liking it a lot. i still think that "piano blink" sounds kind of like a Christmas song, in a good way of course. i can hardly wait till the new album comes out, it is still over a month. the official release date is January 29, 2008. i hope that they continue to release some of the new songs, it has definately gotten me hooked! but of course, i would listen to anything by hawksley, he is just that good.

XC season begins!

we went skiing at Schneiders Bush this weekend. what a wild ride. Joel kept saying some of the hills were double blue. i have double blue bruises now to prove that correct! Schneiders bush is all uphill and downhill, very few straightaways. imagine snowplowing down a crazy steep path that is less than 2m wide, and then having to make a 90 degree turn. alex left some blood on the trees, let me tell you. it was a good time, and maybe next time i will be more prepared and won't feel like i am hurtling down through a treed corridor to my death.

aw the horror

i hope the days of neverending drywall dust are coming to an end. the bathroom renovation is proceeding as planned. since i am not home during the week i tend to come home on the weekend to a lot of progress, which is quite nice. this weekend i am hoping to see some floors and paint on the walls. it will be excellent (if it happens). this is what it looked like a few weeks ago.....

1 month already!

i have been at my new job for one month today. i can't believe how quickly the time has gone by. it is quite strange living away from home, but i guess it makes going home on the weekend all that much nicer. i'm not sure how long this will go on. i am hoping to get another job closer to home soon, but "soon" could mean 3 months from now. so i will wait and keep my fingers crossed. in the meantime, i am enjoying it here!

its the first snow of the year!

snow snow snow, i am so excited! this is so much better than the rain we've had the last two days! i don't even mind that i had to spend 15 mins sweeping off the buried car or get wet pants, shirt, hair etc.! welcome back snow, we missed you!

mmm hawksley

the new hawksley workman album is coming out January 29! i am very excited. i just listened to the first single today. the song is called "Piano Blink". it is definately more mature than TOS. can't wait to hear more. i experimented with some software called freecorder and i recorded the new song from a stream on the official hawksley website. give it a listen here.

more newness

this past weekend we headed up to the new Black family compound on Blackstone Lake. earlier this year my MIL sold the family cottage and purchased one with road access, and 4 small cottages, one for each boy! we headed up this weekend to start unpacking. we are planning on spending christmas up there this year.

here is a photo of the main building:

most of our time was spent inside unpacking all of the things from the old cottage and making the place comfy for christmas time.

here is the inside of the main building, upstairs:

Alex and I took a tour out on the paddleboat to get a few good photos of the property and all of the buildings. here we are, with a photo that Alex took of the whole property!

we can hardly wait for christmas this year!

newness

so i have started my new job, and so i thought i would start a new blog since the old one got.....smushed somehow by alex ;)

i'm hoping that this new job is heading towards something and i feel ready for some changes to take place. new is good! it's interesting now as i feel like things are changing a lot. we are going to the new cottage tomorrow (more newishness) and i am living at my MIL's house, which is a new thing. it is definately strange to be married and living apart, but it should be only a temporary thing.

when i move back home i am going to try to make some changes. i have gotten lazy since i have been married and i want to start getting back to some of the things i used to do and miss. i am also going to try hard to be even more environmentally friendly. i am generally pretty good but there are a few easy things i can do to make our house/family even more environmentally sound.

traveling is still on the horizon, and of course renovations. i am sure i will be posting pics from both. i'll be back to talk about my adventures, both new and old.

it's been a long time

Been a long time since I posted on my blog. Big things are happening though.....
1) I got a new job which I will start in 2 weeks
3) Lots of new house renovations
4) 2 lvl 70 WOW characters (ha ha had to throw that in)

to claire

Claire Claire, where is your hair?
You are one year old and your head is still bare!
I've never seen a baby with a smile so fair
You're all wiggles and giggles and you don't have a care!



Happy Birthday!