Making up for lost time (or blogs)

I stole this from Marie who stole it from some one else.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

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 (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x) one of my favorites
6 The Bible - (x)
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 ( ) not all of them
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
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 ( ) I need to, I know
34 Emma - Jane Austen ( ) I have tried about 6 times and I just can't get into it.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ( )
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - (x)
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 (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (x)
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 (x)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( ) I have this one at my house right now
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 Nighttime-Mark Haddon (x)
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 (x)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( )
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76 The Inferno - Dante ( )
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 ( ) Does that children's book Mickey Mouse version count?
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (x)
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 (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x) I have read some of them but I don't remember which
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 (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl ( )
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

I love to read but apparently not what I should be reading with only 19 out of the 100. I will have to add these to books I need to read.

BEEHIVE BAZAAR!!!

I have been going to the Beehive Bazaar for the last couple of years and I always find many many things that I love. It is a smorgasbord of wonderful unique items all by local artists/crafters. I think every time I have gone I come home with jelly, a hair accessory, a pair of earrings, some other random item, and lots of business cards. I would recommend everyone goes!

Music and Batles LOVE Show!!

I have added some new music to the player! I hope you enjoy.

So I have been trying to decide what to blog about for a while now. Since I hadn't posted anything for a long time I felt like when I did come back it needed to be something awesome. Then I realized I hadn't said anything on here about the Cirque du Soleil Beatles Love show I went to in February, which is really sad because I LOVED it!!!

I went to Vegas to watch Cassie's tennis tournament and decided that while I was in Vegas I needed to see a show. I love the Beatles and I had watched a few documentaries on this show and have been wanting to see it. Luckily Cassie also wanted to see it so I didn't have to go alone ;)

The performance is in the Love Theatre in the Mirage and they have made everything look amazing. Everyone is dressed up in British/Beatles outfits and the lobby and gift shop look awesome. Here are a few pictures of Cassie and I before we went into the show.

We then went and settled into our wonderful seats. With this Theatre the stage is in the center and the audience is then all the way around the stage. This made it so that you see everything and every seat in the house is a good seat just a different perspective. I look forward to watching it from a different perspective.

When we were waiting for the show to start I was a little disappointed because the stage looked so small and I had some pretty large expectations for the show and didn't think that it was going to live up to them. Boy was I wrong!! I think the stage itself was one of the best aspects of the performance. With each number the stage completely changed and some would rise up and make it larger and multilevel or some would go down (I can only assume that it has to go really far down because people are jumping down into it and you can't see where they go) I really wish I could have taken some pictures but I know they wouldn't have done it justice and I my camera would have been confiscated.

All of the performers were amazing and they had small children up to what appeared to be pretty old performers. There were screens all along the wall above the audience and this would have some video playing. There were also some fabric separators between the sections of the stage and these would be lowered or dropped so that video could also be played on them. The acrobatics were awesome. All of the costumes were all really amazing and they went all out with some of them. They did a really good job of making each peace of music come alive. Each seat also has individual speakers so the music itself was wonderful but also it was nice that each person was hearing the same thing.

I don't want to give it all away so I would recommend that if you are looking for a good show in Vegas this is good or all ages. I look forward to going as many times as I can! Here are a few more pictures from the evening.

Cassie really wanted this shirt until she saw the price and then I think she wanted it even more!

Ghost Town

I had received the movie Ghost Town from Netflix and I wasn't really in the mood to watch it but there wasn't anything on last night and I had busy work to do and needed something to watch while I was productive so I finally decided I would just watch it. I LOVED IT!! I laughed out loud multiple times, I cried multiple times, and a few times I was doing both at the same time. There were a few times I would have probably been uncomfortable if my mother would have been sitting next to me but since I was by myself I laughed all the louder. And I now have a crush on a 47 year old British man (Ricky Gervais), haha. Also, the music was wonderful (you really cant go wrong with an awesome John Mayer song during a really important scene, lets be honest) and I plan to purchase the soundtrack.

Time For Change

I hate change, it just never seems to be for the better but as 2009 approaches I feel I need to reevaluate my life and make some serious changes! I don't love the idea but nevertheless it needs to be done. I am going to try and put a lot of thought into my resolutions this year but I have already decided a couple of things and think I had better share. First, I need to move. I have really liked my apartment and my ward but it is time, I have had mostly really good roommates in this apartment but it only takes one for me to take drastic measures (moving my large amount of belongings to a new home). I have made some wonderful friends in my ward but this semester just hasn't quite felt right and I don't know why really. I am looking for something a little more homey, so not an apartment, hopefully a home ;) Second, I have been lazy long enough I am need to be working on going back to school. Yesterday I signed up for an independent study course through Weber for a ridiculously large amount of money. RIDICULOUSLY LARGE! but if it gets me where I need to be I guess it will be worth it, right? Third, ... Fourth, ... Fifth, ... Sixth, ... Seventh, ... Eighth, ... Ninth, ... Tenth, ... and so and so forth TBD!!! One of those resolutions will include being a better blogger!!!!!

Seasonal Music

I LOVE Christmas music, or as I prefer seasonal music, as I mentioned yesterday and I just wanted to share some with you. I have put up a new music player that has a variety of different songs of the season, I wouldn't say these are my favorites but I feel like they are a good portrayal of my music tastes this season. I love everything from traditional, alternative, commercial, instrumental, etc. I hope you will take a minute to listen and enjoy.

Most Wonderful Time of the YEAR!!!

Twelve of the reasons I love the months of November and December!!!

First, there is snow and I have been assured by the weather man that today I will see the first flakes of the season!

Second, there is Thanksgiving and who doesn't love to eat and hang out with loved ones!
Third, everyone is more thoughtful this time of year!
Fourth, everything is more beautiful, little white lights make the world look better!
Fifth, you are given the opportunity to really think about what could make people happy, this is why I love presents and do not think of them as commercial at all! You don't have to spend tons of money, you just have to put some thought into what would make that person smile. I have had my list of gifts to give made for over a month now I love when I am able to pull it out and add a gift that has come to mind for someone. Keeps family and friends in my thoughts!Sixth, most everyone takes the time to think about what is important to them. This reflection puts life back into perspective.

Seventh, decorating for Christmas. This is one of my favorite things in the world to do!

Eighth, seeing family twice in almost the space of one month where usually it takes around 4-5 months to see those that aren't close!

Ninth, CHRISTMAS MUSIC!!! I love it, in all varieties, and this year I plan to spread the joy ;)

Tenth, celebrating Christ's, Payton's and my birthdays and soon Rolene's little boy's birthday. All of these fall into these two months!!

Eleventh, going home to NEBRASKA!!! No place in the world can feel like being home!
Twelfth, CHRISTMAS and everything else that encompasses!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope you share the joy of the season with me and have a wonderful November and December!!