Tod's photos

L.A. Arboretum

Tod and I went to the Arboretum this morning.
We each had a camera and between us we took over 75 shots during the 90 minutes we were there. Here are a few of the photos I took with the Canon PowerShot:






Tomorrow, I hope to post some of the shots Tod took with the Panasonic.

A knitting post!!!

I know, I know, it's been ages since I posted about my knitting.
I haven't been doing much. Firstly because it has been so hot for the past while, and secondly because I hadn't been feeling terribly well.
Thankfully, it finally cooled down a couple of days ago, and I'm feeling much better.

My sister's birthday is coming up awfully soon, and although I have a couple of things to send her, I really wanted to include something hand-knit. So I'm quickly whipping up a little lace scarf.

I've got about 6" done already:


I'm using Lily Sugar'n'Cream in Cornflower blue. Because it's a worsted weight yarn I'm getting on quickly, and hope to have it done in time to put it in the mail by Wednesday or Thursday.

Summer - my favourite things...

On her blog, Ridiculous Obsession, Laverna is asking her readers what we like about summer. Here's my list:


1. Eating dinner al-fresco. There's just something so elegant about it.
2. Wearing open-toed shoes so I can show off my pedicure.
3. Summer fruit, especially cherries.
4. My birthday !!!!!!!!!

Ten on Tuesday

Ten movies I'm excited to see
(Thankfully, they don't have to be new/upcoming releases.)

1. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
3. Get Smart
4. The X-files: I want to believe
5. Mamma Mia
6. Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2
7. How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer
8. Juno
9. Cranford (The BBC drama series adapted from Mary Gaskells classic novels.)
10. Young at Heart

Your brain on hope

In January, In January, MoveOn members voted on which candidate the organization should endorse, and Barack Obama won. Some time ago, they had a contest for people to make a 30-second pro-Obama political ad. The judges, a panel of top filmmakers, artists, musicians, and progressive heroes, chose a winner called Obamacam, but my favourite is one of the runners-up:

Happy Mother's Day!

I sent my ma a blooming tea sampler. I thought it was a clever play on flowers. When I talked to her a while ago, she said she "was quite excited" when she opened the package. She loves blooming teas, and the ones in the sampler are pretty fancy.

Tod sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers in a purple glass jug.

My step-son Sean called to wish me a Happy Mother's Day. He's working and studying and finishing up school projects so I won't see him today, but I was really touched that he remembered to call.

Katy gave me some beautiful rosebuds made of wood (!) that look like real roses, and an IOU for a Fullerton parent t-shirt.

My very meek and shy friend Virginia, who is overseas in Afghanistan, sent me a lovely Mother's Day/Thank You card for being so supportive.

We'll be having dinner at Kyle (Tod's brother) and Betsy's house. My MIL, Bonnie will be there, as will Betsy's mom, Mary. And Tod's sister Monica and daughter Meg, and Meg's friend Diana are visiting from Texas for the week, so along with Great-Aunt Annie, and Betsy's brother and sister and Michael (Kyle & Betsy's son) we'll have quite a crowd.

Added Monday morning:
It was a wonderful evening. I came very late to being a parent-figure, but it seems I'm doing okay.

My Brain

The Scrabblequeen had this on her blog, and I decided to give it a shot.
It's eerily accurate, especially the right-brain part.

You Are 45% Left Brained, 55% Right Brained

The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning. Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others. If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic. Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet. The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility. Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way. If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art. Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Are You Right or Left Brained?

Just finished reading...

Mummy Dearest by Joan Hess.

Claire Malloy and Peter Rosen are finally married. They've headed to Egypt for their honeymoon -- sort of.
Peter went ahead to take care of some mysterious business in connection with his new mysterious government job. Claire, her daughter Caron, and Caron's friend Inez follow, and check into the Winter Palace hotel in Luxor.
When they arrive, Claire is greeted by the resident expatriate contingent, mostly Britons, who are thrilled to meet such a famous sleuth. (Once they found out the name of the new arrival, they Googled it to find out all about her.)

Although Claire's intent is to have as relaxing and romantic a honeymoon as she can with two teenagers around and her new husband working, of course it doesn't turn out that way.

Joan Hess accompanied Elizabeth Peters (author of the Amelia Peabody mysteries) to Egypt in 2005 and this book is the result. It's one of the best I've read in this series, as Hess pays tribute some classic mystery writers such as Agatha Christie.

LibraryThing meme

There's a meme circulating amongst LibraryThing users consisting of a list of the top 106 books marked "unread" on LT.

The rules (according to None of this Matters): bold the books you have read, italicize books you’ve started bu not finished, strike the books you read but hated (likely for school), add an asterisk to books you’ve read more than once, and underline those you own but still haven’t read yourself.

I'm just going to bold the ones I've read and asterisk the ones I've read more than once, because I just can't remember the other details.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte *
6. Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte *
15. A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
16. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen *
20. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
24. Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen *
25. The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The time traveler’s wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
30. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault’s pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen *
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas *
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
46. American gods : a novel by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West… by Gregory Maguire
50. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
51. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen *
56. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas *
57. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen *
66. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey
67. The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi boys : a novel by Neil Gaiman
70. The once and future king by T. H. White *
71. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
72. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
73. A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s ashes : a memoir by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
80. The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its… by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A confederacy of dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les misérables by Victor Hugo
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams *
86. The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf : a new verse translation by Anonymous
(I have read a translation; don't know if it's the same one.)
89. A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into… by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt
97. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
98. The book thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
101. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire
103. Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold mountain by Charles Frazier

If I've counted correctly, I've read 36 out of 106, or approximately 34%.

Nacht is a LoL Cat!

Garden photos

Taken earlier this afternoon.


St. Patrick - note the greenish tinge around the edges of the petals


Perfect Moment


Convolvulus, Creeping Morning glory, Creeping Jenny, whichever you prefer


Alstromeria