Upcoming Retail Therapy

Princess Ivi is nursing a broken heart. It seems that the boy she liked doesn’t like her. He says she is too quiet. She was very sad last night and didn’t want to go to school this morning. (Stupid boy.)

Tomorrow, when I go to Palatka to cash my check, we are going to Payless. Shoes always make us feel better.

We have a busy day tomorrow. First we have to go to the post office and mail a ton of packages. We have to get up early though because the post office is only open until 11:30 a.m. Then we have to go to Palatka to cash my check and go to the shoe store. Then we are going to Keystone Heights. We will go to Advanced Auto Parts to return parts I bought for Dan's car. (He is apparently having a hard time getting it to me and I don't want to pressure him. I will return the parts and then, if he can get the car to me, I will buy them again later.) Then we have to go to the library to return books, to a store that I am dying to go into called The Dollarama (as I am hunting post cards), the health food store (to purchase more tea for my throat) and to the grocery store.

I am going to roast a chicken on Sunday. I have a craving for roast chicken with potatoes, onions and carrots. Yummm. I will make that Sunday instead of Saturday because after all of our running around on Saturday, I will need something quick to cook. I don't know what yet though. I will ask Princess Ivi for her input.

I have to remember to schedule an eye appointment at some point in time because I can't see well. I believe my prescription is off a bit. I would say so considering the fact that I am constantly enlarging the font on stuff so I can read.

Well, I am off to CVS for a "cheer up" gift for Princess Ivi.

WAYYYY Down in the Dumps

Things have been quiet here lately. Mainly because I have been feeling down in the dumps for a while. Reasons I can come up with are because (1) I have been sick almost since the moment I stepped foot in Florida back in early November, (2) I hate my job, and (3) after three failed marriages I am feeling distinctly UNLOVABLE.

I have a new pet peeve. Well, four actually.

One, if there is a package delivered to the office that is sitting on the counter, not addressed to anyone specific, don’t just ask me what it is. Get off your lazy a*! and open it and see.

Two, stop talking out loud about every thing you are doing. There are some of us who are trying to work and your asinine comments like "ooh, I bought my lemon water today because I like it" or "I wonder if this guy has a fax machine because they never answer" or "I have so many time tapes to enter" or "Blah, blah, blah" are really distracting. So shut up.

Three, I am not the friggin’ "receptionist". Therefore, when the phone rings, answer the f*@!ng thing yourself.

Four, enough with the dramatic sighs. I am sorry that you have to work or whatever but we all have sh*t that we put up with. Quietly put up with so maybe you could too.

Sorry. I had to write it or I was going to say it all out loud and considering I need my job and she has seniority, it would not be a good thing.

I did my taxes today. They look okay considering I am being taxed at the higher rate since I am filing "married filing separate". I am going to use it as a down payment for a car so Mom can have her van back.

Well, that is all for today. I fear that if I continue writing it will be full of even more rants and complaints.

Weekend Activities

I absolutely love Masterpiece Theatre. There is just something about those wonderful, amazingly talented actors enacting the classics like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and so on.

Wuthering Heights was on last night. Well, at least part one. Tom Hardy, who plays Heathcliffe, is an amazing actor and pretty damn good to look at too. I can’t wait for next week when the conclusion will be on.

This weekend was very strange. Princess Ivi and I went to town (Palatka) and cashed my paycheck and went to Walmart. While there, I bought a replacement camera because I can’t stand it any longer. I just bought a Kodak Easyshare C913. It is just a basic camera.

Then, we went home, ate frozen lasagna, made Toll House cookies and vegged. I went to bed at about 9:30 slathered with Vicks Vapor Rub.

I slept very late on Sunday because I had not been sleeping well since having this cold.

After getting up though and taking some medicine, I did laundry (about five loads). Yesterday was the perfect day for drying them on the line since it was about 68 degrees and the wind was fairly constant. Most of the clothes dried within half an hour to 45 minutes.

I also cleaned my bedroom, did dishes, made dinner, sewed a button on a Calorimetry and took a shower.

But I ran out of steam at about 7:00 p.m. and spent the rest of the night parked in front of the tv working on the Spiral Tube Socks.

Princess Ivi has been reading the Twilight books and she was very touched by them as she spent a good deal of time crying while reading Twilight and New Moon. I love to see her get so involved in a book.

More Books Read and New Favorite Author

Mr. Darcy’s Daughters by Elizabeth Aston - I really like this book. I love Camilla. She is the type of daughter I always imagined my two favorite characters would produce. The other daughters, Letty, Georgina and Belle, annoy me and I am somewhat disappointed in imagining them as the children of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy. But this was a wonderful book and Elizabeth Aston writes so well one could almost forget that she is not Jane Austen.

The Exploits and Adventures of Miss. Alethea Darcy by Elizabeth Aston - Alethea Darcy is a wonderful character. She is very much like her sister Camilla (from Mr. Darcy’s Daughters, above) and I love her.

The True Darcy Spirit by Elizabeth Aston - I really liked this book. It took a little getting used to the fact that Horatio Darcy is Cassandra Darcy’s cousin but as long as I reminded myself that they were distant cousins, it seemed okay.

I love this author and I can’t wait to read the final three books in the Darcy series.

This makes 11 books read so far in 2009. A big dent in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

A Book Meme

I found this on my Ravelry group - 52 Books in 52 Weeks and I thought I would share it.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

More Books Read

Books read this weekend were:

Persuasion by Jane Austen
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Currently reading:

Mr. Darcy’s Daughters by Elizabeth Aston

Latest Book Read

I just read Home to Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani. It was okay. I don't like when writers try to "write" an accent so they spell the words the way they think it would sound with the accent. It is just a pet peeve of mine.

Anyway, the book is okay. There were parts of the story I loved and parts I didn't.

What is cool though is all of the recipes throughout the book. I am going to go through today and make sure there are none that I want to write out to save.

Intention and Regret

On my daily blog readings, I came across this posting by EtherKnitter with respect to her resoltions for the year:


Live with intention. We never know how much time we have, or what might impede our ability to appreciate what we have. The universe is 15 billion years old. Our lifespan is smaller than a dust-mote in comparison. Each moment is wonderful and precious. I intend to remember that more often.


Well said.

I am also going to try to not live with regrets. Mistakes are made and the key is to learn from them.

Happy Birthday Marci!

Happy Birthday to the best big sister in the whole world!

I love you very much and I am so thankful to have you in my life. I feel blessed to have you as my sister and my friend. You are an amazing mother, friend, confidante, aunt, sister, daughter, wife, hero...you get the idea.

When I think back on my childhood, you are the center of all of my good memories.

I know I may not say it enough but I love you so very much and I would be so lost without you in my life.

I love you!

Lazy Long Weekend

I had a long weekend this weekend due to New Year’s. I read a lot. Which is good because I joined the 52 Books in 52 Weeks group on Ravelry.

I read Chasing Fireflies by Charles Martin. This is a wonderful book. I especially liked this book because it was set in Brunswick, GA and mentions St. Simons Island, Jekyll Island and even Jesup, GA. I find this interesting because my daughter was born in Jesup, GA. I liked this book because the story is wonderful, the detail is awesome and the characters were lovable.

I also read When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin. I liked this but not as much as Chasing Fireflies.

I finished The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd as well. This was enjoyable and I love the thought of living with "colorlessness".

I just started Home to Big Stony Gap by Adriana Trigiana this morning.

Princess Ivi read quite a bit too. I love that she likes to read. She started Twilight last night.

The rest of the weekend was spent resting as I have a severe sore throat, and watching movies from the DVD shelf. I did a little knitting on the Spiral Tube Socks but not much as I was so achy that it hurt to lift my arms.

I made banana bread with the pile of over-ripe bananas which were sitting on the counter. It was good (although I don’t care for Banana Bread). Princess Ivi and Mom both enjoyed it. The recipe was from Mom’s old Joy of Cooking cookbook. I love the simplicity of the recipes in the book. Although there are some that have strange ingredients like cow’s tongue.

I did make a yummy quiche. It was a ham, potato, broccoli and cheese quiche. Mom made the crust for me since I can’t make pie crust to save my life. Instead of shortening, she used bacon grease so the crust tasted like bacon. It was very good and I will definitely make it again.

Here is the recipe if interested:

Ham, Potato, Broccoli and Cheese Quiche

3 to 4 medium potatoes, cut and partially cooked,
1 to 1 ½ cups frozen broccoli, cooked
3 cups cheddar cheese
2/3 cup heavy cream (or milk)
4 large eggs
3/4 cup cooked ham (or bacon)
Basil
Parsley
Salt
Pepper
1 uncooked pie crust

Whisk together eggs and cream. Add potatoes, broccoli, cheese, ham and spices. Stir well. Pour into pie crust and make sure level. Cook at 350 for 1 hour or until done.