Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Reading Meme

Another reading meme. Since I'm a book whore, I'm participating.

Look at the list of (100) books below. Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you want to read. Leave blank the ones that you aren’t
interested in. (Movies don’t count.)

1. The Da Vinci 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 Sorcerer’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) (in my stack of books to read right now)
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) (also in my stack of books to read)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
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 (Audrey 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 Travelling 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) (on my last 100 pages so I'm counting it)
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)

Tres Leches


One of my co-workers makes a fabulous tres leches cake. I had her bring in her recipe since my mom and I both wanted copies. (She had some here at work the day Mom and Dad were here fixing Dad's glasses) The entire recipe is in Spanish. Now, since Mom doesn't speak spanish I'm spending my slow day at work translating the recipe. I do have three native speakers in my office right now, but I want to give it my best shot before they tell me I've made horrible mistakes. Call me crazy, but this is how I get better. I haven't done a major translation like this since high school Spanish with Sra Dalnoky. College was three semesters of Italian so that won't be much help.

G is feeling much better. We spent the weekend lounging, running errands and enjoying the lovely weather. We're quickly plowing through episodes of the Wire on Netflix. Which, if you haven't seen it is a fabulous show. We're about half way through season 2 right now. Sunday was our semi-annual trip to Costco. Now , our condo is only 1250 sq ft so we really don't have room for costco sized things. That and the nearest one is about 10 miles away. We only needed rechargable batteries (for the Wii remote) and dog food. Somehow, we ended up with a 15 box pack of Mac N Cheese that I know *I* didn't put in our cart. It looked odd next to the batteries and Kashi cereal. I also ran into one of our former opticians. He's working the optical at Costco now and seemed very happy.

Monday was St Patty's Day. I got a random text from a former roommate. She was my roomie here in FL while I was on externship my four year in OD school. She got MARRIED on St Patty's Day. I wished she'd given me notice, I would have driven up to Atlanta to be there. Even if it was for a few hours. The weather lately has been absolutely gorgeous. I made sure to sit outside with a girlfriend for lunch at our local place for California cuisine. I had seared Ahi with mango and a lime ginger sauce over brown rice, greens. So tasty. We then wandered for frozen yogurt and sat at a bus stop bench to enjoy the sunshine. It was so nice I had to take the doggie to the park so he could enjoy the day too.

Today is a very very slow day at work. (hence the blogging) I have news about work I'll share later.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Long Catch Up Post

I just realized it's been two weeks since I've blogged. Good lord! Y'all must think I've gone and died.

Last weekend was fairly uneventful. G came off his plane last Thursday with a fever of 102. He spent the entire weekend on the couch, with fever, playing Wii. He is now under order to never make fun of my Lego Star Wars game again, because it is all he played all weekend. Heh. We stayed indoors all weekend watching Netflix movies and relaxing to get G better. Monday morning, no fever, he's still run down but back on his plane to his project in New Orleans.

My parents came into town Sunday night. My mother had a high school reunion thingy in Clearwater so they asked to spend the night. Which meant I had to entertain Monday morning. It started bright and early at Panera (my parents got up at the God-awful hour of 7am) with coffee and scones. And, since my father had broken his glasses I had to trot my happy ass back to work on my day off to fix him up. This, for some reason, ended up taking until 2pm effectively killing most of my day off. At least I could get some errands done while waiting for Dad's glasses. I dragged them to Target with me to get supplies. But, I was glad to see them and to help out Dad.

Tuesday night my friend had an extra ticket to the Ani Difranco concert. Since, i'm not in the habit of turning down free concerts and I happen to like Ani I tagged along. Now, I haven't really listened to Ani since about 1998. Thankfully, she played a bunch of her older songs so I could still sing along. She's so cute on stage, puts TONS of energy into things, tells stories, and interacts with the crowd. I had no idea she lives in New Orleans now. half way through the show, we were officially ready to KILL the guys behind us. They kept getting up throughout the show to run to the bar next door to Tampa Theater to do shots and then run back in. They were getting up, down,up, down.. ALL.SHOW.LONG. They kicked our chairs, made asses of themselves trying to hit on the girls next to them, and we're generally annoying. We were so glad when they left twenty minutes before the show ended! Ani was great and I had to go home and get out my old CDs. I also really enjoyed their opening act "Over the Rhine" and downloaded a few of their songs on iTunes. The singer has the lovely smoky sounding voice that made you think 40s jazz club. Very pretty.

Yesterday at work was the day from hell. It was "patients who no hablo ingles" day. Three non-english speakers with a 13 yo to translate = FUN FUN FUN! Try explaining advanced stage cataracts and scarred corneal transplants to a 13 yo. After lunch, I had two patients who only spoke japanese. Yeah, no dice there. One of them spoke passable english, so the techs did rock paper scissors for who had to teach the other patient how to put in their contacts. Add in five or six red eye patients, a ten minute lunch, and a last minute walk-in and you had a banner day! I ended up inviting over my neighbor for homemade soup comfort food because we'd both had craptacular days. (She brought wine and her doggie) It made it all better.