Unmitigated

What Was I Thinking?*

Even though she doesn't like Charlotte's Web, which is practically un-American, today I want to send you to see MamaDawg at TwoDogsRunning.** As part of Citizen of the Month's Great Interview Experiment, she asked me some provocative questions. And also some goofy ones. And a couple that are unclassifiable.

Then, as if that weren't enough, she practically promised me she was going to mess around with my answers. I'm thinking she is going to add in a few y'all's and bless her heart's to make me sound more intelligent, which can't be too difficult.

While you are there, you should check out her multi-part story of surviving Hurricane Katrina. Then head back to July's archive for this story of her debutante ball. You won't regret it. And be sure to tell her how cool Light of Her Life is, because she is.

* I know what I was thinking. I was thinking that Emily (MamaDawg) is the best reader, EVER. For weeks, she was unable to get past the comment robot on my blog, so she e-mailed me her comments! When she could have just blown me off! How awesome is that?!***

** Spell check wants me to change MamaDawg to Marmaduke. I think I've found a new name for Emily.

***!!!

One Hundred People and Things

People who were at my house Saturday night for Music Night: 17

Homemade mini-cinnamon rolls I had for breakfast Sunday: 4.5

Persons under age twenty who engaged in a surprising political discussion Saturday evening, one of whom was 11 years old:  3

Days I have left until parent/teacher conferences: 8

Toilet seats broken by 16-year-old-Boy Sunday morning: 1

Post ideas I have waiting in my Palm Tungsten E2: 3

Loads of laundry I needed to take care of today: 3

Days until my VOTE NOV4 t-shirt is scheduled to arrive: 19

Hours I am likely to nap today: 1.5*

A's and B's currently had by 16-year-old-Boy: 6

Blogs I can't do without: 6

Bags of garbage generated by the cleaning of my children's rooms: 8

Average number of M & M's I usually grab from candy dish every damn time I walk through the living room: 10

Days I have missed posting since I started this blog back in June, owing to no internet access: 4

Days I have posted twice: 6

Grand Total: 100

Looking forward to the next 100 posts!

*whew, took care of that .5!

Specifically, Purple, With a Stripe

Another color thing that's going on around here is Husband's achievement yesterday of a new level of testing at martial arts. He and both of the kids study Wing Chun Do with Rocco Ambrose whom you may remember me raving about here. WCD was founded by James DeMile (whom we know as Sijo, Chinese for 'founder'). Sijo trained with Bruce Lee in his Seattle days, after being a champion boxer in the navy, along with Jesse Glover and about a half dozen other tough-guy, street fighter types. He then went on to codify a form of Wing Chun that was based almost entirely on body mechanics and efficiency of motion and called it Wing Chun Do. Rocco is the inheritor of that system when Sijo is finally ready to retire.

Just a little background on the system, so I can share a couple pictures I took yesterday at Husband's test. The adult belt progression goes like this: basic, white, yellow, orange, orange stripe, purple, purple stripe, blue, green, brown, and black. Husband and 16-year-old-Boy are now both at purple stripe.

Rocco has the clipboard, Husband is doing a move called 'converging' across the floor. It concentrates all the core muscles into a punch called a chung choie. That's 16-year-old-Boy looking all tall and skinny with the practice pad.

Husband and I were out of town when 16-year-old-Boy tested for his stripe, so I asked him to show it to me so I could take a picture. This is the pose he elected to use. Can you say, "Dork?"

And here's an awesome shot of Sibok Rocco Ambrose and the newest addition to the rank of purple stripe. This is what it looks like when your teacher is also your good friend.

(This is actually my 100th post. I promise to do something one hundred-y for tomorrow)

Ooh, Pretty Colors!

There is nothing like a piece of richly colored glass to catch my attention. I have lots of glass stuff all over my house to attest to my fascination. I have stuff from eBay, thrift shops, garage sales, antique stores, old family stuff, and on and on. But one of my favorite things to do is this:

The people who make Orange Crush were using these vintage-style bottles a couple years ago. I saved three of them and I fill them with water and food coloring. They glow on my kitchen window sill. I can change them for the seasons or my mood. These are purple, orange, and amber-brown for fall. Sometimes I make them cool colors, sometimes warm, it's cheap and fun and makes me feel creative.

The Big Read

I got my first comment this week from Jennifer at My Chaotic Peace and decided to blogart this idea that she blogarted from someone else. I feel pretty good about having read 39 of the 100 titles so far. There are a dozen or so more I'd like to read, and another eight or nine that I started and didn't care for. The list seems a little heavy on the French Revolution, and why is Hamlet listed separately from the Complete Works of Shakespeare? I've read most of Shakespeare's histories, and several comedies, but the Complete Works? Kind of a tall order. I feel I should get extra credit because I own and have read all three volumes of the Annotated Arthur Conan Doyle.

"The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline (or color) the books you LOVE .

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like."

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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Seriously? All of them?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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  (Umm..this is part of the Narnia Chronicles)
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
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 Meany - 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 (Loved Saturday, hated the movie of this one)
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 (Another double-mention)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (en Francais!)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo