Mama’s Holiday Wish List Meme

1. What 5 items are on your holiday wish list this year?
a phone call from the u.k.
soap supplies
an organized quilt room
new sweats
a deep bathtub that does not leak into the basement

2. What is your favorite handmade gift you have received?
any handmade gift is my favorite. what i love about handmade gifts is that i know whoever made it was thinking about me while they were making it. that is no small thing.

3. What handmade gift have you always wanted to tackle?
a piece of wood furniture

4. What was the best Christmas gift you received as a child?
i just remember how badly i wanted that crissy doll and how happy i was when i got her. woo! (oh, and yeah. my own hair was just like that little girl with the short straight blah hair in the commercial.)

5. What items are on your kid’s wish list this year?
music and clothes and toys and stuff

6. What is your favorite holiday food?
my neighbor across the street’s famous shrimp cheese ball w/ crackers

7. What will you be hand-crafting for the holidays?
in my other life? quilts and cards and name tags. in this life? maybe a knit hat or two.

8. What is your favorite holiday movie?
a christmas carol with george c. scott

9. Favorite holiday song?
white christmas. among many.

10. Favorite holiday pastime?
not being at work. hanging with the family. a nap

is it too early for a hearty “happy holidays!” to you?

saw this on facebook this morning from my friend and neighbor guy francis:

newest tattle,

“Dad, Mattie just squeezed my tongue with pliers!”

This is my life.

my response:

got up and made applesauce oatmeal muffins for breakfast (mostly to heat up the house after someone left the windows open all night–it’s a cool 63 inside this morning and i refuse to turn on the heat already).

“when are you going to make biscuits again?” was my thanks.

this is my life.

what’s your life like today?

so my friend ~j wrote this really great best of this weekend post. in it she asked her readers to share their best. i thought to myself, “i may have to think hard about that.” then i decided at the end of a week in which it seemed i was reminded at every turn of the worst of about myself, i really did need to spend some time thinking about the best of something.

and then i didn’t want to take up ~j’s whole entire comment field, so here goes:

so this really was one of the best posts evah.

i was a good mom in that i spent almost my entire weekend supporting my kids in their various pursuits. and i did so not out of some sense of obligation, but because, aside from the bahamas, there was truly nowhere else i would rather have been.

i learned that my daughter can fly.

she’s the number 12 who caught some air on that play

i got the best seats in the house at the big game.

ok, to tell the truth i was not on the 50-yard line, except i pretended to belong there during halftime so i could see the show

but really, to tell the truth, our randomly selected seats put us on the top row right below the band. it was loud. and that was awesome!

last night after a super long weekend on top of a long week all of a sudden i heard the sky fall open and the rain came tumbling down. rain makes me happy.

and if that weren’t enough, this morning i awoke to the sound of thunder and even more rain falling down. it was still dark out–but that early-morning-almost-light kind of dark. (which is my favorite.) all my windows were open and everyone else was still asleep, so i just lay there in my bed and listened. it was lovely. a bit of heaven on earth.

my lime cilantro rice turned out pretty good tonight. i remembered to put in the green chiles this time. it was yum.

and i just realized that luke’s father is indeed darth vader.

only without the mask. that swooshy black cape. the husky voice. and those neck-breaking black-gloved hands. but he has the hat thing down pretty well (hat day at the local elementary)

hey–sometimes ya gotta look hard to find something to smile about.

(this phread)

USING ONLY ONE WORD

Where is your cell phone? anywhere
Your significant other? better
Your hair? messy
Your mother? home
Your father? heaven
Your favorite thing? home
Your dream last night? violent
Your favorite drink? cold
Your dream/goal? well
What room are you in? living
Your hobby? soap
Your fear? unfinished
Where do you want to be in 6 yrs? here
Where were you last night? home
Something that you aren’t? enough
Muffins? blueberry
Wish list item? debt-free
Last thing you did? slept
What are you wearing? jammies
TV? cable-less
Your pet? numerous
Friends? amazing
Your life? good
Your mood? overwhelmed
Missing someone? lots
Drinking? no
Smoking? no
Your car? dirty
Something you’re not wearing? shoes
Your favorite store? quilt
Your favorite color? blue
When is the last time you cried? hmmm.
Who will resend this? anyone
Where do you go to over and over? work
Five people who email me regularly? yes
My favorite place to eat? Spicy Thai
Favorite place I’d like to be at right now? bed
Four people I think will respond: you

From the BBC via La Yen…

X means I’ve read it even though apparently the BBC presumes most people have only read 6 of 100.

O means I’m putting it on my to-read list thanks to La Yen’s recommendation.

(La Yen, next time I want something from La Yen via the BBC. And do you think it’s cheating that we are English majors and all?)

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (the WHOLE Bible) X (I did it for a steak dinner)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Do I get points for at least owning them–I’ve read most?)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy X
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy X (La Yen: So lame. That is how you know I am not a natural geek.) (Dalene: Same here.)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky X (Russians are brilliant.)
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 X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen (Love the movie. Not a huge fan of Austen in print. There. I said it.)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Possibly the only person on the planet.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X (I thought it was a real memoir.)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X (I had a crush on CR.)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X (I was the last person on the planet.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez O
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins X
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 X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
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 O
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (I read a book about reading it in Tehran.)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X
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 X
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X (Finally, after about 20 times giving up by page 25)
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 O
80 Possession – AS Byatt O
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X (Every last one.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (Does it count if I saw it as a midnight movie?)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X (in French no less.)
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 X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X (At least 100 times.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

A blog video response to Kacy’s post When Chen Fei Screamed I Felt Weird:

I think it’s been long enough since the Olympics that I can mention this. I heard that Chen Fei Paul Hunt is really good and stuff but this is the only part of gymnastics that I watched and it made me feel really uncomfortable. If I knew Chen Fei Paul Hunt I might say, “So, uh. Why did you do that?” but probably I would never ever speak of it. Not a great video of the actual scream dismount(s), but this was all I could find. I guess most of the world is like me and wants to pretend it never happened.–Adapted from Every Day I Write the Book, by Kacy
(Ummm…did I mention I stole this from Kacy?)