Lucy, posing

Lucy, posing

Summer

Whoops. I haven't posted in almost two months. I keep Tweeting and Facebooking everything I would normally blog.

The summer is flying by. Steph and I are taking a knitting class, which has been lots of fun. I've always wanted to learn to knit, and it's as much fun as I expected. In class, we're making sweaters, and outside of class, I'm trying to finish a bloblike thing that I've decided is a blanket for Spike. I'm hoping that he will like it despite its odd appearance. After that, I want to try my first sock, and I have a pattern for a kitchen rug that looks easy and interesting.

In other news, we got a scooter yesterday. It's a Buddy 125 and it's made by Genuine Scooter Company. It should get 90-100 miles per gallon, which I'm excited about. Steph and I both got motorcycle permits, and we'll take a safety course and get our licenses within a year. I'm currently afraid of turning corners on the scooter, but I'm reasonably good at traveling in a straight line so far. We also got high-quality retro-looking helmets. (I want my head to remain in one piece.)

Our garden has begun to produce vegetables. We've had several radishes, some small carrots, a few cucumbers, and some zucchini, including one that is larger than the dog. (The dog weighs more, but the zucchini is longer.) I blanched and froze some zucchini, and I'm going to make zucchini bread this afternoon. Really. I am.

Wicked float at Pride parade

Wicked float at Pride parade

Just a dream

My coach has been out of town for a couple of weeks, and I've been working on my Bronze moves in the field again. That's the next test in the adult stream; I have to pass it before I can test Bronze free (which I'm not ready for yet). Last night I had a vivid dream that I went to the rink in the morning for a lesson and I found that my coach had signed me up for a test session without my knowledge. (I don't think this could actually happen, but apparently it could in my dream.) I decided that I may as well test even though I didn't feel ready, and to my surprise, I passed. Tomorrow I'll have to see whether my dream improves any of the moves in real life.

My favorite David Letterman Top Ten List

One of the local radio stations used to read the David Letterman Top Ten List from the night before during my morning commute to work. My favorite one was "Top Ten Greatest Books of All Time About Guys Named Steve," and I found it online and sent it around in an e-mail. Unfortunately, I lost the e-mail in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2002, but I Googled it tonight and found it.

Top Ten Greatest Books of All Time About Guys Named Steve

10. "War and Peace and Steve"
09. "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Steves"
08. "The Grapes of Steve"
07. "The Steves of Wrath"
06. "Steve Grapes Steve Wrath Steve Steve"
05. "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Steve Is From Cleveland"
04. "Where's Waldo? Is He With Steve?"
03. "Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown, Volume VIII: 'Mysterious Guys Named Steve'"
02. "The Joy of Sex with Steve"
01. "The Bible" (King Steve Version)

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

For an English major, I've always felt that I'm not particularly well read. When I got 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I checked off the ones I'd read, and I scored a miserable 29. (I've since read 5 or 6 more.)

I was pleased to find a new challenge over at Editorial Ass. Moonrat, inspired by her friend Andromeda Romano-Lax, made a list of 100 books she wants to read to fill in some of the gaps in her coverage of "classics and great contemporary fiction." The time limit is five years, and they both gave themselves "25% accident forgiveness," which means that if they finish 75% of the titles on the list, they'll consider themselves to have completed the challenge.

I'll start today with my own list, so I aim to finish by April 2, 2014. This leaves time for me to read plenty of other interesting books along with these. When I made my list, I started with the lists from the first and second editions of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and a list from the Guardian of 999 notable books of some sort (I forgot to save the title of the list!). At least 97 of the 100 books on my list come from there. In addition, I limited myself to only one book per author. Here's my list.

1. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe


2. Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


3. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende


4. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis


5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou


6. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov


7. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen


8. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury


9. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë


10. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov


11. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan


12. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess


13. Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs


14. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs


15. Possession – A.S. Byatt


16. The Stranger – Albert Camus


17. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote


18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll


19. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra


20. The Awakening – Kate Chopin


21. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad


22. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper


23. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane


24. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe


25. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick


26. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens


27. Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)


28. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky


29. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


30. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas


31. Silas Marner – George Eliot


32. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis


33. The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison


34. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner


35. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald


36. Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman


37. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden


38. Lord of the Flies – William Golding


39. The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett


40. Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy


41. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller


42. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway


43. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo


44. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley


45. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James


46. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce


47. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis


48. Kim – Rudyard Kipling


49. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos


50. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence


51. Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard


52. Main Street – Sinclair Lewis


53. The Call of the Wild - Jack London


54. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez


55. Life of Pi - Yann Martel


56. Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham


57. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers


58. Atonement – Ian McEwan


59. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville


60. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell


61. Beloved – Toni Morrison


62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov


63. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell


64. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak


65. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath


66. The Godfather – Mario Puzo


67. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque


68. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys


69. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth


70. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie


71. Contact – Carl Sagan


72. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


73. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger


74. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink


75. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott


76. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair


77. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn


78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein


79. East of Eden - John Steinbeck


80. A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne


81. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson


82. Dracula – Bram Stoker


83. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe


84. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift


85. The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington


86. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray


87. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson


88. Walden – Henry David Thoreau


89. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien


90. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy


91. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain


92. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne


93. Candide – Voltaire


94. The Color Purple – Alice Walker


95. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace


96. Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace


97. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells


98. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde


99. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe


100. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

In the interest of full disclosure, I've read about half of Dracula and maybe 60 pages of The Hobbit, and I may have read part of A Sentimental Journey in college, but I don't remember much, if anything, about it. I'm starting this evening with Wide Sargasso Sea.

Obligatory monkeys on ice post

Hilarious.

Photos and updates

I'm a little behind in my blogging again. My synchro team, Cincinnati Style (sorry, no Web site this year), skated well at Fraser in late January despite only having skated three practices together as a team. (One skater on the team was injured, which left them without have enough skaters to compete. In an effort to recruit an additional skater for the rest of the season, they ended up recruiting three.)

In our category, Open Adult, we tied for fifth out of nine teams. (The tiebreaker gave us sixth place.) We were thrilled, as we thought we'd surely be ninth. Here are some pictures of us on the ice.

Here we are doing footwork in a circle:



This is a pinwheel, again with footwork:



Here is a tri-spoke:



This is part of a block that moves down and across the ice:



We have another competition (Tri-States) in two weeks; we've worked hard on polishing the program and adding footwork, changes of hold, and other touches. I'm thrilled to report that the traveling circle doesn't scare me anymore, and I think we're improving each week. It's wonderful to skate on a team again -- it pushes me out of my comfort zone and makes me a stronger skater, and I love being part of something that's so much more than any one of us can do alone.

A week after Tri-States, I'm competing at the Deborah Burgoyne North American Invitational in Wyandotte, MI. This all-adult competition is friendly and fun. I'm working on a new program, and my goal is to skate the entire thing in time with the music. (And remain vertical, of course.)

Random tidbits

1. We have named the Rabbit. His name is Eddie.

2. Phoebe doesn't seem to be bothered by Eddie. I drove her to work last week and she behaved perfectly.

3. Wii Fit is tremendously fun and cool. Except the part where it is mean to you when you skip a day. It will let you add activities, but not to previous days, so I couldn't find a way to tell it that I had spent FOUR HOURS at synchro practice on Sunday and there was NO WAY I was going to be able to drag my sorry ass onto that balance board afterward.

4. I'd like to thank the lady at Michael's who told me the secret to crocheting dish scrubbies. They're made of tulle. Who knew? Turns out we have quite a bit of it left over from the wedding, so I tried it. I learned that 4" is too wide, but 2" should work. The scrubbie I made is a little dense, but I think it'll still work okay.

5. Huckleberry is playing kitty soccer with one of Spike's bones. Seriously.

2009 resolutions

1. Read 45 books or more this year, 15 or more of which are on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list.

What the heck -- let's try this again.

2. Lose most of the 34 pounds I gained in the past two years.

My goal is to fit back into all of my pants. We have recently begun to use our new Wii Fit, so I hope it will assist me in this goal. I will also eat more fruits and vegetables and not so many cookies, chips, and the like.

3. Keep doing 50 pushups, flutters/Supermans, and situps every night.

Every night that my arms aren't KILLING ME from FOUR HOURS of synchro practice, that is. I joined a synchronized skating team in Cincinnati that lost a skater recently to a knee injury. They were desperate to find a replacement because they no longer had enough skaters to compete. I forgot how sore your arms get when you hold them up for two hours at a stretch!

4. Consistent loop.

Or, failing that, a semi-consistent loop. I'd be happy with one in ten right now -- I haven't seen my loop in months. If you happen to discover it wandering around Cincinnati or Michigan somewhere, please send it back. I miss it.

Last year's resolutions: Update

1. Read 45 books or more this year, 15 or more of which are on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list.

Nope. I only made it through 31 books, and only one of them is from the list. The upside of this is that I can't die!

2. Use up another three bottles of perfume.

Done.

3. Save money toward the Smart car and our wedding.

I mostly succeeded at this resolution. Both the Rabbit and the wedding are paid for, though our emergency fund isn't as robust as I'd like.

4. Increase my daily pushups and situps to 50 each.

I achieved this, along with slowly adding 50 Supermans (also known as flutters).

5. Go out for lunch only once per week at work.

Well, it wasn't only once per week, but over the year I averaged less than twice per week.