odo

11:51 pm: the meme that's sweeping the nation
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment BEST BOOK I EVER READ!!!
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 MOST OVERRATED PIECE OF CRAP EVARRR!!!
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods NEIL GAIMAN RULES!!!!!!!
Atlas Shrugged LOVE IT!!!
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha TOTAL P.O.S.
Middlesex
Quicksilver WOW!!! GREAT SERIES
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 SHRUG
Brave New World FOR ITS TIME, IT'S BRILLIANT
The Fountainhead BETTER THAN ATLAS SHRUGGED
Foucault’s Pendulum I LOVE CONSPIRACY NOVELS! 1000x BETTER THAN DAVINCI CODE
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys AGAIN, NEIL GAIMAN RULES!!!
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons MUST READ FOR ALL AMERICANS
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility CRAP!!!!
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest FOR ONCE, THE MOVIE WAS BETTER
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels RACY FOR AN 11-YEAR-OLD, LIKE ME :)
Les Misérables STILL CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHICH GUY WAS LES :)
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time BEST NOVEL OF THE PAST 10 YEARS. READ IT!!!!
Dune DID THIS IN ONE READING SESSION WHEN I WAS 14
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury "ABSOLAM, ABSOLAM!" AND "AS I LAY DYING" ARE BETTER
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir [SHRUG] CHICK BOOK
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon GLORIOUS!!!!!!!!!
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being FORGETTABLE
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five I OWN THREE FIRST EDITIONS
The Scarlet Letter 8th GRADE...
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita THE BOOK JACKET IS STEAMIER THAN THE BOOK
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye WHINER!!! READ 'FRANNIE & ZOOEY' INSTEAD
On the Road THE MOST OVERRATED BOOK IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
The Hunchback of Notre Dame I LAUGHED, I CRIED, IT BECAME A PART OF ME
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values FUN!!!
The Aeneid
Watership Down FUN WITH BUNNIES! 'PLAGUE DOGS' IS AT LEAST AS GOOD
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield GAWD I HATE DICKENS!!!
The Three Musketeers

08:52 pm: alas, poor Rosarius...
Ferrets do not make good gardeners. But what they lack in skill they more than make up for in enthusiasm. Sigh.

I've got, or rather had, two rugosas and an apothecary rose potted and getting ready to emigrate to Roaring Waste. I faithfully put them out on the deck every morning and pull them inside in the evening. Today was especially cool, so I left them inside. Our little miss Chaos decided that she'd try her hand at gardening. [head in hands] Soil everywhere, and roses dragged by their roots behind the drapes. The apothecary might still have a chance, but "Adios, rugosas!" I'll try again this summer with a green-stem or root propogation.

03:12 pm: Stuff around the yard
We've got a female indigo bunting hanging around the feeder. Haven't seen a male yet, so she might get tempted away. It'd be nifty to have a nesting pair around.

Saw a presumably migrating Northern shrike yesterday. They so much put me in mind of Dulci. Kind of like ferrets with wings.

The jonquils are blooming. The hops are just poking through. The miniature irises are just *so* cute! Lilies and daylilies are back, thicker than ever. The valerian is getting pretty uppity; there're sprouts everywhere. Lily-of-the-valley is poking through the spruce needles. They're a sentimental favorite of mine, since my dad grew them when I was a child, then gave a bunch to my grandma, who then gave a bunch to Dulci and me when we married--the same 35+ year-old gals are getting ready to blossom :)

I potted two rosa rugosas for Iasmin, so that my minions in Rosarius might have nice neighbors. Still pretty iffy, but the new leaves are out an inch or two and there was definitely some root growth on both. [cross fingers] I'll prolly take a couple shoots up to HE Ailikn [sp?] this weekend. These are absolutely wonderful old roses. The blossoms look like heraldic roses and they've got hips that would make a Middle Eastern dancer jealous.

01:35 pm: Scrabble
We had one of those horrible games where one person draws all consonants and the other draws all vowels. Near the end, it was 265-298, both of us hoping to salvage at least 300, yet nowhere near our goal of 700 points combined.

Then lightning struck. On my second to last turn, I slapped down "SHACKING" across two triple-word squares. Total: 194 points! Yippee!

I win 506-311. Over 800 points combined. Wow.

09:51 pm: I live in a world of yellow
Last week, we got a great tip from quaintessimal about fresh turmeric root available locally for cheap. Great, wonderful, happy dyeing days ahead and all that. We bought 2.5 lbs.

Wednesday, I decided that it would be easiest to just grind it into paste, then dry it until we have an opportunity to use it. All went well. There I was with 2.5 lbs. of turmeric root paste in my blender, ready to pour it onto baking pans to dry.

I twisted the blender and the whole bottom assembly came off, spilling the contents everywhere. Two and a half pounds of highly, highly saturated yellow dye. On my countertops, my appliances, my cabinets, my floor, my clothes, and myself.

It's been two days of cleaning and bleaching. And this afternoon when I was leaving the gym after splitting sets of raquetball with Dulci, the desk attendant asked about the bright yellow spot in my beard.

10:49 pm: This sucks
"BOSTON - A student touring Fenway Park was attacked by a resident red-tailed hawk that drew blood from a girl's scalp Thursday.
The girl was taken by ambulance to a hospital, but wasn't seriously injured. The hawk was perched on a railing in the upper deck behind home plate while the group from Memorial Boulevard Middle School in Bristol, Conn., toured the stadium. The hawk flew at the girl and swooper with its talons extended, scratching her scalp.
A single egg lay in the hawk's nearby nest in an overhang near the stadium's press booth.
The nest and egg were removed at the direction of state wildlife officials."

Uh, yeah. If you clear out a couple of acres into a nice field surrounded by lots of pigeons and gulls and provide hundreds of nesting sites, you're going to get a hawk moving in. And if she tries to protect her nest and egg, it must be her fault. GRRR! Couldn't they have discouraged her from building a nest there in the first place so she'd at least have a chance at raising her kid without it being killed because she was trying to protect it? Duh?

And the hawk involved is so young she still has juvenile spots on her back and wings:

http://www.dailymotion.com/country:us/video/x4y7sj_fenway-hawk_news

04:54 pm: Sigh. I suck...

	I received 79 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Quiz by SheGoddess: Encouragement for Losing Weight

08:38 pm: Meanwhile:

Having loads of fun watching "Primeval" via the Web. Can't wait til it premieres on BBC America so I can see it larger than 17". It's a hoot!

Li'l Missy Chaos is doing wonderfully. She's back to stealing our treasures, such as fresh McDonald's bags that still smell like French fries and anything crinkly.

3 out of 5 stem cuttings I took from the rugosa last week are now opening their leaf buds! Yay! I'll look for more from the other rose tomorrow. Place your orders now! :)

I'm still in the hunt for March Madness greatness. Well, 70th percentile, anyway. But if the cards fall right, who knows?

05:16 pm: Yay!! Disease free!
Last Thursday, I did the stupidest thing a computer user could ever do. Okay, apart from the cop who downloaded kiddie porn on his departmental computer.

I opened a file-shared .exe without scanning it first! Yeah, baby, how stupid was that?!? Like lancing a bubo in a feast kitchen, man. Within a coupla minutes, I had literally thousands of files infected with 20+ different viruses, worms, and Trojans.

While they didn't wipe my hard drive or anything horrible like that, they did things like knock out my anti-virus stuff and prevent me from re-installing it or any other AV stuff; disguising themselves as friendly processes (I know having a few svchost.exe's running is okay, but 30+? Using 99% of CPU? How you going to know which one to stop?); writing reg keys to perpetuate themselves on every re-boot; blocking online scans and updates, limiting my modem speed down to a hundred bauds or so, etc.

I finally was able to make a Linux boot CD and use the Linux version of Antivir to clean out the system. Then some registry clean-up, followed by several scans by a couple different vendors to confirm my sanitary status.

Took time and effort, sure, but I didn't pay a dime! :) And I am surely no IT expert. I love the folks at Avira, BitDefender, and AVG for putting good tools out there free of charge.

09:05 pm: I like being a grown-up married to a sometimes-little-girl. If I want to have strawberry blintzes for dinner at 9:00 at night, then by gum, I get out the crepe-maker and mix up batter while Dulci starts slicing strawberries.

Life's fun.

09:23 pm: Shaved ferret
A pic of Miss Kay's tummy. Dang that incision looks long in this view!

http://flickr.com/photos/24126461@N00/

10:49 am: Sigh, Ivan Dixon passed away. You know, "Hogan's Heroes", "Raisin in the Sun", etc. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0228853/

The thing that twangs my heart the most is that he and his wife were married for 53 years. How many other successful actor/directors in 70s & 80s can say that?

07:41 pm: online poker humor
So I'm playing in an online poker tourney hosted in Germany. I laughed very loudly and said, "I just went all in with this guy and we ended up splitting a 60 euro pot!"

What Dulci heard: "I just went along with this guy and we ended up splitting a 60-year-old's butt."

11:14 pm: Pets and Paddy's
Li'l Miss Chaos comes home in the morning! Whee! Her sister Anarchy ("Annie") who is usually a spoiled brat has been really clingy and loving all evening.

In other news, the St. Pat's Day was a hoot. The parade had over forty floats, an Irish dance company, and two pipe-and-drum bands, one of which came all the way from Ontario.
We got to embarass my niece by getting everyone around us to cheer for "Kobe" when the gymnastics float came by.
Fun time in the bar, too. Both pipe-and-drum bands converged there to have a pint or two before their concert. Turned into a very friendly yet full-blown bagpipe-driven Battle of the Bands in a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar. And it was the same bar that was hosting the Irish stew cook-off. We actually had a tipsy woman wearing a "Have you hugged an Episcopalian today?" apron throw up her hands and swear when we declined her stew on the basis of our not eating meat. Maybe there's an Irish stew recipe out there calling for corned tofu? :)

08:13 pm: Blecch
The "something" in Kay's tummy was a lump of food. She'd eaten a bunch and drunk plenty of water when she shocked herself. Seems her digestive system is taking a while to reboot.

$3000 and rising...

11:34 am: Stoopid little furbutt also had something in her stomach. So, surgery and another thousand dollars. :(

09:49 pm: 2.5 pounds of evil vs. 110 volts
It's always scary to see your pet lying motionless and drooling on the kitchen floor, barely holding her head up and not responding to sounds, motions or paw-pinching.

But after an emergency trip to the vet, then another trip out to MSU's Small Animal Clinic, 4 hours and >$800, it looks like she'll be reasonably okay.

Apparently our little angel-demon Kay ("Mistress of Chaos") electrocuted herself biting a wire under the fridge. Kinda caused a Ctrl-Alt-Del to her system and a burn on her gum just behind her incisor. Gotta keep her on supplemental oxygen and observation overnight, but she's alert and moving around, if somewhat woozy.

We try and try and try to keep the little buggers safe, but I guess there's some reason behind the verb "to ferret" something out. Nothing is ever truly ferret-proof.

12:46 am: Grand Ledge's darlings:

http://noise.typepad.com/get_prepped/2008/03/champs-in-more.html

My god-daughter is the second girl to the right of the trophy. The one who's hunching at knees, hips, and shoulders. Pffff...Amazon genes...

11:31 pm: St. Pat's parade
Always a fun time, but this year extra special. My hometown, Grand Ledge, has like 5 parades a year, which is kinda parade-happy for a town of less than 10,000. But these cheesy parades just look so cool going through a sort of "Main Street,USA" downtown which hasn't changed substantially in a hundred years.

This year's parade is going to include four pipe-and-drum bands, a couple of trad Irish dance troupes, and [fanfare] the state champion Grand Ledge gymnastic team! Yay!

Okay, there'll be the usual Scottish folks there too, for some reason, and of course the local Michigan National Guard units. Like I always say, "Nothing says 'Ireland' like having troops and military vehicles parade through the streets!" :)

But after the parade, the bagpipes and drum folks will do some concerts at the 120-year-old Opera House, and that should be lots o'fun.

All are welcome, and you can't beat the price! You really don't see this kind of Americana much anymore. Especially when we really don't care if the rest of the state/country/world sees it or not. We're just a bunch of small-towners putting on a party for each other.

Oh, and there's a pub-crawl in the evening! :)

10:56 pm: The power of prayer :)
So last night I went out to the barn to visit the cats, clean the boxes, give 'em food & water, yaddah-yaddah, same as every night.

But when I got to the barn door, I heard a huge grizzly bear roar out from like four feet away, threatening me and my family! I was afraid for my life!

"Jesus H&K Christ on a crutch," I prayed, as I opened the barn door and hit switch for the floodlights.

Lo and behold! my prayer was answered! God had transfigured that grizzly bear into a bigass 40-lb. raccoon. No harm done to my family or pets. I just need a new pair of boxers.

Sure, yeah, go ahead and get a big chuckle at my wussiness. Let's see how YOU react to a 40# raccoon that close in pitch darkness!