The Big Read

swiped straight from Molly's blog - this was enlightening!

"The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six."

*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE .

(since Blogger won't let me underline and the formatting doesn't show up well, the books that I've read are Purple, and the books that I've read and love are Pink)

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
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
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 Meaney - 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
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I count 57 books on my "read" list - I need to get started on the other 43! I have a "slight" advantage, though - I have a degree in English Literature! :-)

Let me know if you post this on your blog - I want to go peek!

Cue the Music!!

I made it across the finish line in the Ravelympics Sweater Sprint! I used about 3200 yards (by my best guesstimate) of Wool of the Andes and a few yards of other assorted leftover yarns As of 11:25 last night (August 21st), she is done. I cast on at 8:15 in the morning on August 8th - by my count, that's 14 days from start to finish.
Once again, Kyle did a great job picking out the buttons!
I was derailed for a few days by a huge stack of band uniforms that needed to be altered...but she's done! I'm probably going to have to withdraw from the Mitten Medley - I still have uniforms to finish. I volunteered to do the alterations on a few...and their version of a "few" means 13 marching band uniforms (with competition uniforms and concert attire included). I just don't think that I can finish the uniforms, work a fundraiser at Blossom Music Center tomorrow from 2:00 - 10:00 and still knit a pair of mittens. Ah, well - there's always London in 2012! :-)

This just in from the ROC (Ravelry Olympic Commitee):

Congratulations on a successful challenge accomplished with effortless grace! Please accept this Ravatar bouquet from the beautiful Bobicii Nereids for a job well done,

and this medal from the head of the International Ravelympic Committee, Adonis Dionysius Bobicus Maximus.

And now please rise for the Ravelry International Anthem.
dum…dedumdum..de…dummmdedumdidoh…..(crescendo)…Dah!!!

Raucous applause and cheering erupts from the stands and mmm chocolate bars are thrown to the Ravlympians, and a cacophony of various Ravelry Anthems are heard across the stands…!

In the Home Stretch!

Day 10 - nothing left but the I-Cord border! I gave up on the hood - after 3 attempts to get it to look right, I decided to go without.I also need to find buttons and finish the pockets, but that'll take about an hour. :-)

School starts one week from today....ugh!

Back on my game

I'm back in the running for a medal - I finished the body. The shoulders are just pinned right now, and it looks pretty rough, but the vast stretches of garter stitch are done! I just plopped it on the dressmaker's dummy to take a quick picture.Tomorrow I'll work on the sleeves, and then I'll start the hood. I have to figure out what color to make the I-Cord trim...

For the record: I'm getting tired of garter stitch! :-)

Oh - and I canned 9 quarts of whole tomatoes today. I don't have enough for another canner load...yet.

Not much knitting today

Today was not a knitting kind of day.

I took the boys to marching band practice, and then I had a doctor's appointment (and now I have an appointment with a surgeon - the lump on the right side is growing, and now he's concerned with the left side. I see the surgeon on September 11th. Damn).

When I got home, I scalded a half bushel of roma tomatoes, and then went to pick up the boys from band.

We watched a Goodyear blimp fly over

and then I took the boys to a low brass sectional at their friend's house. While they were there, I made 21 pints of salsa. I had to go out and buy more canning lids...tomorrow I'm canning quarts of whole tomatoes (I have another half bushel of canning tomatoes) and making both dill and sweet pickles.
The eye doctor called, and my new glasses were in. I went to pick them up - and it turns out that they had called about 25 people to tell them the same thing. Wait...and wait. An hour later, wearing my new glasses, I went to pick up the boys from the sectional. We made dinner, and then we had a 2 hour baseball league meeting at city hall (we had some pretty serious umpire issues this year - it wasn't a good situation).

Anyway....that's why I've been a bad Ravelympian and only got 2 inches done on my sweater today. :-)

(the lighter strip on the left - on top of the tan stripe -is my waste yarn for the pocket)

Halfway through Day 6

The shoulders are pinned so that I can try it on for length. I just put in waste yarn in 2 places at the bottom fronts - I'm going to put in pockets when it's done. :-)

Day 4

The ASJ as of midnight last night:Whew.

The Games? They have begun!

I'm making the Adult Surprise Sweater for the 2008 Ravelympics (Go, Team Knitting Camp!)

I cast on at 8:15 Friday morning (I had to take the kids to marching band practice) and took a break for several hours in the afternoon to go to lunch and shopping with Mom and Dad. By the time I went to bed Friday night, I had this much done:

I cast on 279 stitches, and decrease every other row until I get to 157

As of midnight last night (Day 2), I'm done with the decreases and now I'm ready to start increasing back up to my original cast on number. The beastie looks like this right now:I'm not going to get much done today - I have to go work at Blossom Music Center for the band booth at the Cleveland Orchestra concert. Gotta love fundraisers...

Knitting Catch-up

I picked up my entries from the Medina County Fair yesterday.

In the "Scarf" Category, "Carol's Clever Little Shawl" took a 1stMy "Sideways Gloves," knit in Furlana Possum yarn, took a first:This one was kind of surprising, since I didn't get anything specifically knit for this category - I just took them out of my winter coat (I knit them in February), washed them, and took them in.

Placing a rather disappointing fourth was WindyFor some reason, I just can't seem to get the blue ribbon in the Adult Clothing category.
Maybe next year...

In other knitting news, the Lace Top Shell is on the KnitPicks website
They changed the ribbon, but that's just fine - I can see how the ribbon that I put in it wouldn't go with the shot setup that they used. This is one that I would definitely make again - it was a fast knit, is very pretty, and the yarn (Andean Treasure) is extremely soft

I finished the Sampler Afghan in record time! This is one well-traveled afghan - I knit on it for WWKIP in front of Canterbury Cathedral (that was the only knitting that I did the entire time!) and finished it at Knitting Camp. Not counting the 2" that I knit on vacation, I essentially started this the day that I got home (June 23rd) and finished it on July 27th. Whew! 13 skeins of KnitPicks Bare (220 yards each) in about 5 weeks! It should be in the October KnitPicks catalog. :-)

Now what to do? Since I seem to have depleted all of my brain cells, I signed up for the Ravelympics (Ravelry's version of the Knitting Olympics). I'm on the Knitting Camp team, and I signed up for the Sweater Sprint and the Mitten Medley. We cast on when the Olympics start, and have to finish by the closing ceremonies. I had a momentary lapse of reason, and signed up for the Adult Surprise Sweater (with hood!) and a pair of my own mittens. This could get interesting...