2 weeks off? Yeah, right

So, I had two weeks off from work scheduled. I'd planned to work on my teaching for bible study, catch up on knitting and TiVo, working on items for the Women's Retreat and just enjoying myself.

Instead, I'm in Chicago, without knitting (I know!), watching very few shows I would normally watch (change can be good), wrapping up my teaching notes, trying to remember the time change so I can call people regarding the retreat and trying to stay well.

Sis Kim put out an SOS last week; she had strep and a cold and Gigi was getting out from under a cold bad enough to have them worry about pneumonia. Tony had his hands full with them and work so Mom went first and then I went out and took her place.

Gigi has been a sweetheart. Sure, we battled by the River of Endless Tears one afternoon (hers, not mine!) but we've managed to bump along just fine. She has the sweetest smile that I can't seem to capture on camera. And she's started rolling from her back to her tummy. When she rolls to her right side, her arm gets trapped under her. But for some reason rolling to her left worked better.

She's a drool bomb. Good gravy! She woke up from a nap one day and the entire side of her face was wet - even her hair!

I've got pictures I'll upload later. In the meantime, I'm glad I had the opportunity to come out.

The Big Read

Taken from Steph's blog.

The Big Read said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list.

(It's interesting to see collections as a single work and then specific works within the collection called out. Have I read the complete works of Shakespeare? No. Different plays and sonnets? Yes. From what I understand, the list is a compilation from a poll which is why both collections and singular works are both listed.)

So ... copy this list, mark the ones you've read and see how you compare to the average.

I've made the ones I've read bold and italicized the ones on my to-read list.

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 (I've read parts, but not all. The begats and the laws drag me down)
7 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
8 1984 (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 Traveller'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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
26 Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
27 Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
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 The Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis)
34 Emma (Jane Austen)
35 Persuasion (Jane Austen)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

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-Exupe)
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 (Shakespeare)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
100 Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)

It appears I've read 18 of the 100. Better than average.