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description=A blog about books, movies, music, knitting, and photography. Sometimes cats and opinions get in the mix.;
description=A blog about books, movies, music, knitting, and photography. Sometimes cats and opinions get in the mix.;
description=A blog about books, movies, music, knitting, and photography. Sometimes cats and opinions get in the mix.;

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Text of the page (random words):
gnage to valentine s day signage with a brief stop over for new year s resolution type books in a blink so for six weeks we get to live with the valentine s day table brimming with relationship sex and dating books in varying shades of pink pink er pink and red for someone who is always acutely aware that valentine s day is sad s ingles a wareness d ay it can get old fast so i got to thinking why not an anti valentine s day type of display not neccessarily against valentine s day per se but one where the love stories don t end happily or not as the reader would wish also known as no heas happily ever afters just for a little balance and would be full of good books to read why not indeed so i made one with input from a few other booksellers the display is buried in the fiction section but i plan on catching unsuspecting book browsers with the sign who needs love the time traveler s wife by audrey niffenegger the remains of the day by kazuo ishiguro atonement by ian mcewan love in the time of cholera by gabriel garcia marquez the reader by bernhard schlink the english patient by michael ondaatje the thorn birds by colleen mccullough oscar and lucinda by peter carey cold mountain by charles frazier his dark materials trilogy by phillip pullman brick lane by monica ali the sorrows of young werther by johann wolfgang von goethe on love by alain de botton i deliberately went with more recent novels than classics because if i did classics anna karenina would be front and center followed by jude the obscure and wuthering heights as well as very obvious plays from shakespeare do you think i m missing anything essential looking at this list again i must have had booker awards on the brain eta one or two things on the display that slipped my mind writing this post posted by melissa ward at 12 43 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels tis the season happy dance random 19 january 2011 the complete booker challenge 2011 sweet try ing again for the booker challenge and add to my booker project i plan to start with the pix a mix of six level the sea the sea by iris murdoch the sea by john banville which i think is coming out as a movie this year so i should read it midnight s children by salman rushdie the remains of the day by kazuo ishiguro life of pi by yann martel the bone people by keri hulme the new penguin ink cover is awesome if i finish those i ll bump up the goal to the booker s dozen pefect opportunity to read possession again posted by melissa ward at 4 45 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels booker project complete booker challenge 11 january 2011 2011 to set or not to set reading goals in thinking about reading and blogging for 2011 i wasn t sure i wanted to do any challenges this year i ve come to realize they distract me i think and worry and fret far more about what i need to read for a challenge than what i actually read this gets worse when i have greater than one challenge going on at the same time i finished one challenge women unbound but had trouble finishing the other the complete booker and i only made minimal progress on my projects so i think i ll just do one challenge kind of one and a half i d like to work on the complete booker challenge 2011 it would help make a decent amount of headway on my booker project i ll probably start with the pix a mix of six read six booker winners and it might upgrade to the a booker s dozen read twelve winners or nominees from the short or long lists i ll need to get a challenge post up for that one i ve also signed up for the goodreads challenge which is simply a goal to read a certain number of books goodreads makes it really easy to track that with the stats page so i signed up with the goal of reading 100 books this year i ve not made a great start what with the mess of moving and all one hundred books in a year is like my personal glass ceiling somehow i slowly started accepting review copies from publishers this last year well just harperperennial harper paperbacks really i didn t go overboard thank goodness but i haven t been very good at getting things read when i need to for publication dates so i need to work on that i also have to pay attention to what i ask for because sometimes you get what you ask for i requested a review copy of the new christopher isherwood diaries never realizing for one minute that it was going to be quite thick and in the manner of diaries not terribly readable so i must keep a better head on my shoulders i apologize to harper for that one it s going to take me a bit to get that one read i also need to work on a few more of my projects especially the nobel and best american ones because the projects are really my pets they cover a nice cross section of literature without a great deal of cross over there really isn t much from what i ve found so in summary my reading goals for 2011 1 only sign up for real challenge the complete booker 2011 2 write a sign up post for the complete booker 2011 3 be smarter about review copies 4 work on my projects bring it 2011 posted by melissa ward at 1 31 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels reading matters reflection 07 january 2011 i haz a happee a happy new house be prepared for a long post with gratuitous photographic displays so thursday december 30 i went to the bank and signed my life away but i got the keys to my new house i stopped by lowe s for painting supplies picked up some lunch changed out of my suit i apparently am the only person i know who dresses up for a house closing but i have a suspicion that the loan officer is happier loaning a large sum of money to a person who looks like a professional not a dumpster dweller and headed over to my new house with a few things including the house warming present from my bank now that the house was mine i could think about what i wanted to do with the rooms in the new house the master bedroom needed a coat of paint not too far from the starting shade of blue but the original job was really shoddy did they thin the paint before using it the smaller bedroom my office needed several coats of paint to cover up that ghastly shade of pepto bismol pink and some work to cover really bad drywall patches this is not as pink as it should be but i was having trouble getting the correct exposure because the lighting in that room is really dank also on the list of things to change mom and dad came down to help dad to help paint and mom to get started on the kitchen see below for what was up with the kitchen we weren t done with painting that evening it was just too many walls to paint even with jess and jackie coming over to help and we needed another full coat in the office to cover the pink even though we d started with a tinted primer so back to the condo for bed which was really the couch because i had to start taking the bed apart for the movers i didn t go to sleep until nearly 2am because i was also taking apart the stereo system and packing all the clothes in the drawers in my room up at 6am and i took the cats over to the new house which involved tricking two highly suspicious felines into their carriers also known as giving up on doing it nicely and dropping them butt first into the carriers packing them into the car with all their toys blankies and new litter boxes and taking a mercifully short car ride with two howling animals they were installed in the downstairs bathroom known as the cats bathroom for the day then i raced back to the condo in time for the water heater guy to install the new water heater old water heater was peeing water on the floor at the condo the movers to come for my furniture and the contractor to fix the drywall i was practically paying the buyers to take my house it was like a circus we found little kitty hoards under all the furniture after the movers left dad and i worked on more painting we didn t finish until saturday but the results were well worth it my bedroom has a much more saturated blue color along with a more even paint job so it feels very calm and peaceful the cats felt more at home once we got the bed made when i let them out of the bathroom they wouldn t go anywhere without me even crying to get me to come downstairs so they could use the kitty box chaucer would stand at the bottom and cry to have me to come down and get him my office turned out to be amazing the color is bimini blue and after a coat of tinted primer and two coats of color it looks exactly like the card i ve got a little touch up work to do still and we got a bit of paint on the woodwork but i m busily filling up my bookshelves with books so do you want to hear about the kitchen the kitchen was a disaster the oven was beyond disgusting i m sorry i didn t remember to take a picture like multiple years worth of cooking pizza directliy on the racks without a pan level of dirty we had to vacuum the ashes out of the bottom after running the cleaning cycle my mother who is quite good at getting kitchens in order spent nearly three days cleaning cabinets even borrowing the putty knife to scrape god only knows what off of cabinet bottoms she made me promise that the next time i buy a house i request on the offer to have a professional cleaning done prior to close and that goes for my brothers and sisters in law too in the end it turned out to be a very nice and clean kitchen with a low wall looking over the foyer where chaucer likes to sit and vulture the food i swear that i cleaned my condo unbelievably well prior to the sale on january 5 it took two days and you could have eaten off the floor in the bathroom where the litter boxes sat true story i had the carpet cleaned at the condo prior to closing it was so sad to see it empty even though i am happy to be well rid of it it was my first house and i cried when my realtor called to tell me the sale was completed bye bye old kitchen it doesn t even look like i lived there or anyone for that matter among the surprises at the new house i was gifted with a large porch swing they asked if i wanted it and i said i didn t care because i already had a swing so they left it and multiple junk drawers full of old makeup barbie shoes hair ties nails screws keys crap about 3 50 in pocket change which i fed to the peanut butter bear bank and these i think these are what i used to put notecards on but they were holding up the shower curtain in the upstairs bath not only were they slobs they weren t very smart because these bad boys rust classy so my new house is slowly coming together the cats have settled in nicely i found favorite toys upstairs on the third day so they adjusted quite well dante has found his old hiding places again i ve got a lot of boxes left to unpack and i don t have any nice living room furniture as yet but it feels like home now welcome friends my youngest brother and sister in law gave this to me for christmas a few years ago i never had a satisfactory place to hang it until now posted by melissa ward at 1 31 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels cats friends happy dance parents thanks 04 january 2011 bye bye 2010 recapping the reading 2010 was a crazy year what with the stress of trying nearly the whole year to sell my house in my attempt to declutter and stage my house for potential buyers i wound up packing up books that i was intending to read more stress according to goodreads stats far more accurate than my count your reading journal pages method i read 91 books this year 9 more than last year but i only read 28 809 pages compared with 29 709 pages last year this probably reflects my attempts to infuse a little young adult into my reading repertoire i had intended to try and break the 100 book barrier but the craziness of december put the kibosh on that if i had to choose my favorite book from the year it would be a tie between jasper fforde s shades of grey the road to high saffron an author i have an obvious favorable bias towards and laurie halse anderson s speak i read both at the beginning of the year and they are still with me least favorite book was vixen it wasn t so bad i wanted to light it on fire but it really got under my skin with the cliches and seemingly poor research i participated in a few challenges this year the women unbound challenge was the one i completed even reading one book beyond what i d planned sadly i didn t get the complete booker challenge 2010 finished i got three of six booker winning novels read but just never got to the other three i did read one booker short list so not a complete bust i m going to have to think on the future of challenges in 2011 my nostalgia project stalled out with its initial subject flowers in the attic too intense the booker project and newbery project are coming along swimmingly the newbery especially but the best american project had to go on hold when i had to pack all my best american books in order to how the house i didn t make much reading progress on the nobel project but i did acquire more books to help me in the endeavor and i can t quite decide with vargas llosa to read too many good choices there in honor of the international year of chemistry in 2011 i started a blog specifically for reading chemistry related books readingchemistry blogspot com i cross posted a few science chemistry posts from this blog and will probably continue to cross post in the future this year i also made my first foray into requesting review copies which added a whole new level of stress because now i feel obligated to read and finish the book i ve requested thank goodness i didn t go nuts and ask for many more review copies packing and moving has gotten me far far behind on the ones i have right now that s it for 2010 bye bye and so long posted by melissa ward at 1 30 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels bbaw bnbc booker project bookspotting chemistry complete booker challenge i read banned books newbery project nobel project nostalgia project women unbound challenge 01 january 2011 happy new year happy new house hello 2011 hello new house i spent my new year s holiday moving from my old poorly managed condo seemed great when i bought it 7 years ago but no to a zero lot line for those who don t have this legal designation it s like a duplex that you own i closed on the purchase december 30 the movers came december 31 and whew it was crazy for a little while i m working on getting a blog 2010 review post done a blog 2011 goals post done one more book review from 2010 and a post about the new house that new camera got a workout i tell ya happy reading in the new year many thanks to my parents who helped out tremendously with the move story about my mom and the kitchen later posted by melissa ward at 4 11 pm 0 comments email this blogthis share to x share to 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