From my blog page I clicked on "Next Blog." I was taken aback by the page I saw. The first thing I thought of was Lauren Face. To experience this for yourself, visit http://palomasrio4to.blogspot.com/.

On a side note, as a result of this, I am slightly disgusted at my past. A certain spanish speaking fella used to call me dove, or paloma.

A Novel

One of the biggest reasons that I am so excited to graduate this May is that instead of spending my evenings studying or doing homework that time will be open for my own personal reading. I love to read. Read read read. I have been swept away by all kinds of books: I love historical fictions, sci-fi is so cool, I can’t draw myself out of love stories, I live in fantasy, and some of my favorite books are the retellings of old adventures and fairy tales. Nearly every book I have read I have read more than once (my favorites many times more), and, something Mike can attest to, I analyze them to pieces. I finish every book I read, with few exceptions (like Wicked, for example. It got so offensive/pornographic halfway through that I threw it away). I have a difficult time thinking of a book I read that I didn’t like or get something out of.

I’m pretty sure I can attribute my love of reading in part to my sisters. For the first eleven years of my life I was the youngest of six sister readers, which left quite a library at my disposal. Mandy (ten years my senior) would pass a book she had finished onto Julia (three years) who would pass it on to me. This is how I had already read books like Les Miserables before middle school. I realize now that even then I was analyzing the literature. I remember running to the dictionary for help on words and meanings, sometimes just reading the encyclopedias for a day for context, and of course Julia, Valerie, and I would discuss with each other (when we weren’t putting on light shows with out light-up shoes on the top bunk). I also remember how we would be grounded from our bedrooms and from our books because our mom “wanted to see our faces.”

So I’m a reader.

Apparently the BBC believes that most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed below. That surprises me, and I kinda don’t believe it. I have read thirty-seven and a half from the list. Half because one of them is the Complete Works of Shakespeare, and I’m pretty sure I’m still short some. I noticed that the majority of the ones I've read are in the first 50. I can’t really say if this is an inclusive list, but how many have you 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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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 (a bunch)
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 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
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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 Alborn
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-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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

HAIRCUTS

After checking in at Robert and Heidi's reception,

(what a shame we missed this part) Mike and I got to spend a couple hours with Tyler, Hannah, and Rachel (nephew and nieces), though Rachel was asleep for most of it. Not too long into the night Tyler called on a dance competition to his favorite song, Let's Get It Started (Black Eyed Peas). Now, picture these two throwing down the dance moves:

Quite the show. I guess that some kind of close bond develops between dancers on the same floor, because Tyler soon felt comfortable enough with Mike to start the following conversation:

T: Did you get a haircut?
M: Yeah, Shirley did it. Didn't she do a good job?
T: Oh. Well, did she cut a lot off?
M: yeah...
T: ...and just leave it around here (as he traces Mike's horseshoe with his finger).
M: Uh, yeah.
T: Yeah 'cause there's not a lot here. See, feel it (and after rubbing the top of Mike's head brings Mike's own hand up).

I guess I should have been more careful with the cleavers!

Check it.

Nothing got done at my office today before lunch.

This is why:

aw he's waving.

stuck

Everyday my husband takes the opportunity to tell me, "You're crazy. You are absolutely nuts."

It's okay, though, because I threaten his life expectancy just as often, or more.

Moses was an avatar.

Disclosure

Last night I stayed up till way super early this morning working on an audit project. I'm pretty sure I dominated it, which is needed for passing the class and always makes me feel good (I gain life-substance from writing killer papers). Currently, though, I am dying due to lack of the sleeping-substance (and a random unfulfilled morning craving for green beans). This is all my fault. Most often when I stay up all night studying or working on a paper it is not because I put it off forever, but really because it just took me that long to feel good about it. This time: not so.

So what was I doing instead in all that time that I could have analyzed the company and written it up? Here is my list:

• (I love green)
• Thursday after classes in the hours that I had just waiting for Mike I...blogged, browsed the nets, and watchedd an episode of the Office (but Mike would kill me if he knew!)
• Friday after work I bought fruitsnacks for $1 at Safeway (I think that sale is on till tonight) and watched a movie with Mike. Didn't even think of the paper.
• Saturday morning I slept in. Mike woke up, put my adorable shelf liner in my kitchen drawers (!!! I love it! It's still a surprise every time I open one!), went and helped people move, and then played basketball. I finally woke up, scrubbed the bathroom and the kitchen (bing!), did all the laundry (really, laundry takes up so much time. a perfect procrastination-time-filler), and started one of my favorite books again, A Tale of Two Cities. Mike says I read everything that's not my text book. Could be true.
• Sunday was the Sabbath (BUT we did go to my parents and score major shopping in their pantries!)
• So comes Monday. The day before it's due (at 7:30am). I have work all day, but get off way early. Perfect time to get to school work! But no. I invite Natalie over and we chat (hopefully this becomes something of a regular thing), and, since I have no willpower when caught up in a story, turn again to my Charles Dickens.
• At about 9:00 Mike opened pinball on his computer. He played some games, and after totally sucking I had to take over. I played one game (without having played before) and beat all of his high scores by about three million. It took him about two hours to beat it. I rule. Disclosing this is the sole reson for my blogging today.

After trashing him, Mike made me start my project. I stayed up till the way early in the morning and am now very tired.

I also do have to add how Mike let me sleep till 6:45 and set up the printer so I could print my assignment and made lunch and breakfast for himself and me and pointed the space heater towards my side of the bed so it'd be warmer when I got up and even started packing my gym bag for me.

“I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.” -Stephen King

The sole purpose of this post is to express my disappointment in Burger King fries. If you don't care about that, you may move on.

I'm not at all a fast-food person. Mike got a gift card to Pete's Fish & Chips so we used that the other week, but besides that I really can't remember the last time I got fast-food. Except for freedom fries. For some reason at the end of the day I crave -- hard core craving -- salt. Salt and ice, but not together. Very often this translates into a craving for freedom fries. I honestly only give into this craving every couple months (although when I was going crazy with work, school, and wedding prep Mike was very kind to me and turned his head when I indulged a little more).

Yesterday Mike had class till nine. My last class ends after 4:00. One thing I love about a schedule like this is that it gives me an opportunity to hit up the SRC every Tuesday and Thursday. After I had finished there I mosied over to the MU to set up camp for the evening. And then the craving struck. I turned the idea over in my mind.

I had only $10 in my account since Mike and I have been putting all our monies into his.

Neither of us were going to get any form of dinner till we returned home at 9:30 or later.

Freedom fries isn't much of a dinner.

I had just swam over a quarter mile and then run about four, dropping on the field every four minutes to do 60 crunches (I think up interesting workouts for myself. but it works for me. I used to do cartwheels every time I turned around when I would do speed runs on the canal). I could afford it.

Unhealthy is unhealthy no matter how you say it.

I can convince myself I lack the willpower.

Pansy.

I walked downstairs and got two orders of fries from Burger King. I was really excited about this, because I love freedom fries and because now I had an excuse to pack up and visit Mike during his ten minute break from class. Seeing Mike is always the most fun of anything. As we ate and visited I became increasingly saddenned by my freedom fries. My taste buds and stomach told me that these definitely were NOT worth it. The clincher was when we found an onion ring in Mike's freedom (which explained the overall onion ring taste). In that moment I remembered the last time I ate Burger King. It was High School. Freshman year. In between the Saturday matinee and evening showings of the play I was in. A tater-tot showed up in my fries. I was surprised. It was the nastiest thing ever.

And so, the moral of yesterday evening, and of this post, is that I will never again indulge in BK fries. I guess you can't expect freedom worth eating from any kind of monarch.


AND.
Last night Mike told me I have the cutest tush ever :-).

It's February 6th, 2009

Where did you begin 2008?
I think at home. Which at the time was Joseph and Mary's house. Natalie had just gotten married and I was very into Tyson at the time.

What was your status by Valentine's Day?
Ha. Single? I think it was right after Valentine's that Hayden started.

Did you have to go to the hospital?
Never.

Did you have any encounters with the police?
So I got a ticket for running a red light I didn't even know I ran. I was pretty sure it had turned green. But he said no. I think it was just 'cause I was delirious driving home late from Mike's.

Where did you go on vacation?
Payson. to mountain bike. Greer area. to snowboard. and Mexico!!

What did you purchase that was over $500?
a laptop. summer school.

Did you know anybody who got married?
no one I can think of. who does that anyway?

Did you know anybody who passed away?
yeah. but part of life deaths.

What sporting events did you attend?
ASU football!

What concerts/shows did you go to?
....Love You Long Time. small show. fun show. an unfortunate night.

Where do you live now?
In Mesa. Weird, huh?

Describe your birthday.
Well, I kinda had two birthdays, from two boys. There were many happy feelings and many scary I don't know feelings.
Tyson sent me the cutest little birthday package from Argentina. He told his sister he really felt like he needed to do something great to hold onto me, to remind me.
Mike wasn't supposed to get me anything. It was against the rules. I came home to a basket full of my favorite things in my room, a vase of flowers, and a beautiful framed picture of the temple that he had taken. That night he had told me to dress in a formal, and he picked me up and brought me back to his house where he had a candle-lit, three course dinner set up (made me cry) and Singing in the Rain afterward. The entire night I was certain and terrified that he was going to propose to me (which was also against the rules. I had a lot of rules.)

What's the one thing you thought you would never do but did in 2008?
Marry someone that wasn't Tyson.

Any new additions to your family?
YES. Six new nieces and nephews and Mike.

What was your best month?
definitely not September.

Made new friends?
Mike's friends talk to me now?

Have any life changes in 2008?
Yes. Very much so. Major much so. And it's all Mike's fault. I really hated him for winning. Really. Probably more than he knows. Then again, he knows me pretty well.

Change your hairstyle?
Ha. Not by choice. It burned off.

Get a new job?
Why, yes. At the beginning of the year I was a nanny. Over the summer I was an EFY counselor, and then I started at TLW as an accounting person. sometimes i'm called an Accounts Payable Clerk. sometimes Assistant to the Controller.

How old did you turn this year?
21

Get married or divorced?
MARRIED

Be honest - did you watch American Idol?
Not once. Mike tried out for it though. Fag.

Start a new hobby?
Yes, but that's between Mike and I. Oh and I guess mountain biking could count. If we ever find time to go again. Oh and swimming! I swim now. Natalie got me started. Oh and I guess doing crunches is new too. Is that a hobby?

Been snowboarding?
Not since Jan, but boy do I miss it.

Are you happy to see 2008 go?
Too late. It's already gone.