7 Quick Takes Friday

1.

For a number of years now I've followed along as my mom has posted the 7 Quick Takes on her blog every Friday, as well as reading the Quick Takes on Jen's blog. I was trying to think of something to blog and saw that it was Friday, so I thought "Hey, I'll give these Quick Takes a shot".

2.

Ever since the sixth season of Doctor Who ended last Christmas, I have been eagerly following the production and filming of the seventh season.  Now the start of the seventh season is just around the corner! I'm curious to see how the first five episodes will go... after today's mini-episode of Pond Life and a few leaks, it's pretty certain that Amy and Rory's relationship is heading down the drain (NOT cool Moffat.  Not cool.) We also know that episode five "The Angels Take Manhattan" will give us the departure of the Ponds before a midseason break leading into the Christmas Special and a new companion.  The first episode premiers tomorrow - so the questions will all be answered soon!

3.

I am an avid Pinterest follower, particularly of the dessert recipes and DIY projects and I saw this really cute gift idea the other day. 

Turning a tie into a handbag?  I think I will try this one.

4.

Cheesy Bacon Oven Chips with Chipotle Sauce

Also from Pinterest - does this not look amazing???

5.

While I tend to take after my father as far as the majority of my personality goes, I do tend to talk and tell stories in the same way that my mother does - namely, I will leave out bits of information (usually crucial to understanding what I'm talking about) because I just automatically assume that my listener knows what I'm talking about.  I experienced this again last night while telling a friend about my adventures out east with My Knight.  I was going through the highlights of the week, finished telling about the trip to the Divine Mercy Shrine, when I said how we went down to the ocean one day, "and oh! I saw an incorrupt arm!" She gave me what I guess was a confused look as I continued to talk about how interesting it was, when she interrupted me, wanting to know where exactly I had seen this arm.  I realized I hadn't mentioned it was at the Shrine of Saint Edmund of Canterbury and correct myself.  Her response was one of relief.  "Oh! Good... I thought you were walking along the beach and you found this arm, and you meant that it was just preserved or petrified or something and I was like 'AMANDA! Shouldn't you have told someone about this???'"

6.

At some point in the last few days, my dad mentioned to the younger ones that one of his great-great-great-great grandparents was Indian, which led to the boys dressing up in war paint and creating Indian names and a discussion as to our heritage.  We're a mix of quite a few things, though we're not sure exactly how much or where it all comes from, since no one in the family has done much in the way of genealogy, save for my great-aunt on my dad's side.  I found the folder with the family tree she gave to me a few years ago and we've been looking through it.  In our brief research, we've figured out that we are approximately 12% British, our great-great-great-great-great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War, a great-great-great-great grandfather was in the Civil War and our great-great-great-great grandmother was told to get on a boat going from England to Australia, rather than England to America to join her husband, and nearly did but for her brother stepping in and keeping her from being sent to increase the population of women Down Under.

7.

I was doing some photo editing with pictures I took of My Knight during our visit, and I just love how this one turned out. I was trying to express why I liked it to my sister, and I was going on about how it looked like those black and white photos you'll see of saints on holy cards, and pictures like that and she stopped me with "You mean you like it because it looks like an old photo?"

Yeah.  Yeah, that would be why I like it.

Catching Up and a Reading List

It's been quite a while since I've written something up for here... but I have been busy, and that's my excuse! Work, life in general and grand adventures tend to occupy all your attention at times.

Last week I took a trip out east to visit my Knight, and we had an absolutely beautiful time together.  It felt like time slowed down, and we were able to really savor each moment together, something that I feel will be a help in the long months ahead until we see each other again at Christmastime.  We had many fun outings, including a trip to the National Shrine of Divine Mercy, located in the beautiful Berkshire Mountains (trust me, this prairie girl was super excited!), a trip to the ocean coast, and seeing "The Dark Knight Rises" in the epic IMAX theater.  I have been home for a few days now, and it's hard, but we did have such a wonderful time together, and I know that the time will pass quickly until our next visit.

While I was away, my siblings started up with school again.  As I am not in schooling this year, I'll be helping out  little bit when I'm not working, and teaching two of the younger ones to play the piano, and doing a format writing class with two of the older ones.  I'll continue to teach myself how to play the guitar, and then in my spare time I'm going to read a lot of books.

I've seen it passed around in Facebook notes several times, and I'm sure you have as well.  The note that goes:
 BBC Book List

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

I've read a fair number of the books already (30 if I counted correctly and didn't miss any), which leaves me with 70 more to go!  I'm always looking for new books to read, so I feel that there is a pretty good chance I'll actually do this. 

I edited it a little bit (taking out The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, for example... I think that will be a separate reading project), but here is the list.  The titles in bold are the books I've read - how about you?

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 (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible 

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – Ken Keasey

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 Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather

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

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 A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

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

A Family Holiday: Day 2

Today was a much sunnier day than yesterday, and our plans for swimming were not interrupted.  We packed the car with swimsuits and sandwiches for lunch before heading off to our parish for mass, and from there we drove to the lake for an afternoon of watery fun.

A Family Holiday: Day 1

The Plan:
I go to work in the morning, mom does groceries, dad gets stuff done, in the afternoon we pack up and head out to the beach for swimming and a picnic.

The Reality:
The morning went slower than planned, so we decide to post-pone the trip to the lake until tomorrow.  Which is just as well because I ended up having a killer headache all day due to the change in weather pressure and we had a huge thunderstorm blow through in the middle of the afternoon.  We got a lot of rain that was desperately needed around here, and the power only went off... three or four times for no longer than 40 minutes.  By the time we were ready to grill the burgers for dinner the rain had stopped, which was unusual considering our track record of only grilling when it's storming or snowing or any other kind of bad weather.  (We almost never end up grilling when it's sunny out...)  Day one was finished off by watching the film "We Bought a Zoo" - a good, fun movie despite the handful of regrettable swear words including one that I'm glad I know went clean over my siblings heads - but it was funny and clean otherwise and one that we all enjoyed.