Leaving Blogger open while I putter tonight...

You know how sometimes or all the time you can't sit down and read your Bible unless you hear the dishwasher, washer and dryer going?  What's with that?
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If you were me and you challenged yourself to get rid of 100 things, where would you start? Top kitchen cupboard above the fridge? Under the bathroom sink? Linen closet? Garage? Overwhelming, isn't it? I was going to start tonight. Ten things in ten nights. Break the project into bite sized pieces and it's a piece of cake. (Or brownie as the case may be.)

Unfortunately I don't have a box. Or a spare rubbermaid container. Funny how fast enthusiasm for an idea can get dampened if you don't have all the necessary tools and equipment right at hand.

Like, tonight, for instance. I was going to do the dishes. ALL the dishes. (Clint wanted some homemade vegetable beef soup, which I make from scratch - just call me MarthaO - so I made a double-ish batch looking forward to the next time he stops by so I can send along a bunch of single-serving-size containers and be a hero, but Drew doesn't like it so I made a double batch of Chicken Tetrazinni except with no mushrooms because everyone would pick them off anyways - and put the leftovers in containers for Clint as well because I will rock at being a mom to children who don't live with her. And then there was just a little bit of ice cream left and what it needed was some warm gooey brownies so I made those as well and now my kitchen looks exactly like you'd imagine it to. So I loaded the dishwasher and turned it on and started to fill the sink, and by the way, I have a 268 gallon sink - seventy hundred dishes fit in it, and then I remembered that I am out of dishwashing detergent.) And that little detail deflated my zeal and I think I'll just move to another room in the house.

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Do you believe in love at first sight? I came across a website today that was made up entirely of lists and I asked it to marry me. We're working out a prenup tomorrow.
The list I'd like to talk about right now is: 30 Books Everyone Should Read Before They Turn 30.
I've read 4 of them. Maybe 5. I can't remember.
*hangs head in shame, hoping she doesn't get kicked off the planet for not being adequately prepared for middle age*

How many have you read?
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 
1984 by George Orwell 
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The Rights of Man by Tom Paine 

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez 

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell 

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The Republic by Plato

Lolita 

Getting Things Done by David Allen

How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Lord of the Flies by William Golding 

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

1. BONUS:  How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman – 900 pages of simple instructions on how to cook everything you could ever dream of eating.  Pretty much the greatest cookbook ever written.  Get through a few recipes each week, and you’ll be a master chef by the time you’re 30.
2. BONUS:  Honeymoon with My Brother by Franz Wisner – Franz Wisner had it all… a great job and a beautiful fiancée.  Life was good.  But then his fiancée dumped him days before their wedding, and his boss basically fired him.  So he dragged his younger brother to Costa Rica for his already-scheduled honeymoon and they never turned back… around the world they went for two full years.  This is a fun, heartfelt adventure story about life, relationships, and self discovery.

How'd you do? 

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Red lights are really starting to bug me. 

This week has been especially bad. Many bad words were said in my head. 

Seriously. My hatred for red lights is out of proportion to my love of the convenience of having a vehicle. (Shannon was over last week, or maybe it was the week before, and she took the bus and it took hours and don't get me started.) I don't think I've approached a single intersection in the past 7 days where I have been able to just keep on driving through. I think I've hit nothing but red lights all **&^% week.  And it feels like someone is laughing at my expense. So I take out my anger on Seth Green, because he's probably responsible. I think I'll go have a bath now.

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(One hour later)


Three things I'm thankful for:
1. Babies
2. Birthdays
3. Boys


Shalom,