Old meme

I found this old meme in my "draft" and thought I would publish it.  I've updated it, I've read a few more of the books in the 3 years since I originally did it.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) put ? on the ones you've never heard of.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane AustenX
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte BronteX
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (a lot of it, not front to back, though)
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 X+
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 X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ?
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ?
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen *
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X+
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 X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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 X+
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 X
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 X
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 X+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ?
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ?
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flauber
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ?
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ?
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
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 X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Total read: 27
Total loved: 12
Total planning to read: 11
Total never heard of: 13

Hmm... anything else?

I'm trying to come up with some things to bring me up to date with the blog.



We went to Hawaii again (seems to be a yearly event). And look!



My mom came with us! It was her first time in Hawaii in like 30 years. It was fun to share our "life" in Hawaii with her.



Sabrina & Nana:



The reason for our trip, Richard's cousin (Don) graduated from high school!



This is the tradition in Hawaii. Everyone piles leis on the graduate. It was kind of fun to watch. Someone holds a sign up with the graduate's picture/name so everyone can see where they are.

We didn't plan it this way, but our nephew (Alexander Pono, AJ for short... Alex Jr.) was born 2 weeks before we got there. We all had colds, so we had to wait a week before we could go see him. Isn't he cute? He's already crawling! I can't wait to see him this summer (if/when we go).





It's not a trip to Maui without doing some touristy things.



Like the Atlantis submarine (first time for this!). Sabrina was just barely tall enough.

My mom's gotta work on her shaka:



Uncle Alex took us to the high school's field to play with his dog (Kala).



And of course we spent time at the beach.



Shave ice at our new fave stand Ululani's



If you're ever on Maui, this is the shave ice to get! They make most of their own syrups (their webpage says it's now 100%) and they use Roselani's ice cream. Yum! Plus, they started in Portland (who knew, right?) We found out because I was wearing my Blazer shirt one day when we got shave ice and had a good conversation with the owner.

I take so many pictures, it's hard to choose which ones I like the best. Our first morning there, we took my mom up to Haleakala since it's like one of the #1 THINGS TO DO.



I really need to clean my camera (I'm a little scared and apparently camera shops won't do it). This is my fave, some people don't get it:



I guess that's all for now, I didn't realize how long this would get when I started!

50 books in one year, 2011 follow-up

When I last left this blog, I was professing how this was the year I was going to make my goal of 50 books. I didn't. But I've come to live with that. With knitting, working full time, and now having two kids... well, it just wasn't a practical goal. This year, my goal is 30 books. I think I can do it, maybe even more. I got a Kindle Fire so I can read while on my pumping breaks. I've already finished my first book of the year and most of the way through with a second.

Anyways, my last years list looks like this:

January
1 Gone-Away Lake - Elizabeth Enright
2 Return to Gone-Away Lake - Elizabeth Enright
3 The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey - Trenton Lee Stewart
4 The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoners Dilemma - Trenton Lee Stewart
February
5 The Stranger - Alburt Camus
March
6 The Glass Dragon - Irene Radford
7 The Perfect Princess - Irene Radford
8 The Loneliest Magician - Irene Radford
9 The Wizard’s Treasure - Irene Radford
10 Marionette’s, Inc. - Ray Bradbury
11 Harmony - C.F. Bentley/Irene Radford
April
12 Enigma - C.F. Bentley/Irene Radford
May
13 The Postman - David Brin
14-28. OZ series - L. Frank Baum
December
29. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

Not too bad, I guess. This year I'm going to try to read more books I've never read before. I'll still be doing some re-reading. I really want to make my way through LOTRs again and the Earthsea series.
This year's list:
January
1. Farmer Boy
2. Little Men
Currently reading: Jo's Boys

Rapunzel, let down your golden hair!

Sabrina loves Tangled. She had been saying that she would be Rapunzel for months. So I bought the pattern (which was over my head since I don't do much sewing). With the help of my aunt and friend, I dumbed down the pattern a bit. It's a pattern for Princess Rapunzel, not the Rapunzel you see in most of the movie.

If you read the post before this, you know I finished it with literally hours to spare.

She loves it and that's all that really matters. I got this light pink cord to lace the front up, but it won't stay tied. I finally replaced it with some white ribbon (since she's wearing the dress at least once a week, my mom even let her wear it to church). I might get some better matching ribbon eventually, but she doesn't seem to care.

If I ever make Rapunzel hair again, I'm going to do it differently. The pattern is wrong in it's measurements, so I wasted a skein of yarn trying to figure it out... cheap yarn, I should say.

Sadly, Elias didn't get a costume. I wanted to buy one, but Richard said no since he wasn't suppose to be here until November. Next time, I won't listen (not like I'd want next time to be another Halloween baby, 2 scorpios in the house are plenty).

The best Halloween ever!

Elias Alanui Yago
10/31/2011, 7:09am
6lbs 9oz, 19" long

Let's see how short I can make this labor story. I don't know who will even see this, so I'll go shorter than on ravelry, but longer than Facebook.

I was working on Sabrina's Rapunzel costume until 12am. I didn't have any notable contractions, I'd been having small ones off and on for a week or so. Mostly just Braxton Hicks. Anyways, at midnight I decided I was done enough with the dress for her to wear it trick or treating and we could finish up some last minute things in the morning. I had purposefully taken Halloween off so we could have a fun day, making caramel apples and doing crafts. My last thought as I was drifting off to sleep was "I guess I won't be having a Halloween baby after all." (since my labor with Sabrina was over 25 hrs).

I woke up 2 hours later in active labor. Richard was sleeping downstairs, but I waited an hour before I went down there. I thought it was going to be a false alarm. I called my mom at 3 something because she lives 45 minutes away and she was going to come and stay with Bina. I called the advice nurse, who told me to drink 4 glasses of water and take a warm bath "to see if it stops" (I told her I was having very painful contractions, but she didn't believe me because I was talking to her through them). My mom got there after 5, she told me I could ignore the advice nurse, but to sip water and take a shower. I knew something was wrong as soon as I got it the shower. If I moved, I would have another contraction. So I got out, slowly.

I laid on the couch for awhile, my mom trying to tell me to get up and walk through them. (oh boy, this is getting long, sorry!) I told her I couldn't. Richard and her were talking and I yelled at them to stop talking. Then I said, we need to go, this isn't right. My mom gave in. She thought I was being a wuss, but I told her that the worse thing that would happen would be that they'd send me home if I wasn't ready.

I knew this labor was different than my first. I have a very high pain tolerance, but I was crying through contractions. Part way down the road I realized we forgot the camera... I said "screw the camera."

The walk down the hall to labor and delivery is a long one. I had multiple contractions, having to lean against the wall. The receptionist called down the hall "do you want a wheelchair" "No, I'm fine." Once we got there, she did a quick and dirty check-in, cuz she realized I was on the verge of having the baby. I kind of felt like I was going to have him right there. They got me into triage, sent me to the bathroom to empty my bladder and get the gown on. I thought I was having the baby on the toilet, so I called Richard in to help me. We had to get the triage nurse to help me into the gown. As soon as I was down on the bed, I wanted them to check me. But first, they had to take my vitals. grr, I felt like I needed to push already.

In walks my midwife (thank goodness she was there already!) and says "Let's check you" I was at an 8. The triage nurse was talking to me about pain meds, but my midwife cut her off and told me that she had to be honest with me, there was no time for meds .They didn't let me get off the triage bed, they wheeled it down to the delivery room. She checked again (since I sounded pushy) and I was at a 10 and free to push. It's funny how you can go from an 8 to a 10 in the few minutes it took to get to the delivery room.

They put my iv in between pushes. He was out within 5, 30 minutes after I arrived at the hospital. I tore, rather badly. I was glad they put the iv in, so they gave me something for the pain while they sewed me back up (that took a long time).

(oh boy, I think this is longer than my story on Ravelry. Maybe I should have just cut and pasted it)

That's my 5 hour labor story. Lesson learned? Don't listen to the advice nurse.

My mom didn't believe Richard when he called her at 7:30 to announce Elias' arrival. Richard promptly send pictures to facebook and no body could believe he was here already, especially since they all read my post the night before about finishing the dress.

Sabrina got to come and see her brother immediately and she also got to go trick or treating with her cousins.

I feel so lucky to have a Halloween baby. I made jokes the whole pregnancy about how cool it would be (my due date was 11/12).