Some books I've read, and some I haven't

Got this from PT - seemed like a diverting way to spend a Wednesday late evening...


1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven't finished.
3) Place an asterisk by those you intend to read/finish someday.


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 May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy*
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
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 Meany - 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 Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
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


Well, I've started 45% and finished 32%. I'll rarely persevere with a book I'm not enjoying. The one I tried hardest with is probably Catch 22. The film was on the other day and I couldn't make it through the whole of that either...

Laundromatters

The big news is that I've done all my laundry. All of it. Not only that - I've also put it all away. All of it. Putting away is my most least favourite thing in domestic life. I'd rather clean the toilet and the oven than put away clean laundry. But I've done it all. All the clothes, the towels and the bedding, plus the cosy blankets that live on the sofas for chilly evenings.

I've even washed the 'handwash only' stuff that's been loitering at the bottom of the laundry basket for ever. I decided to risk my (Tesco) cashmere jumper in my washing machine's wool cycle. After all, it's been scrunched up and unworn for about a year, so how much would I miss it if it was ruined. Anyway, it wasn't ruined and now I've got a lovely cashmere jumper to wear, now the weather's getting hot!

Though you know the problem with doing all the washing? The minute you finish, there's always more. I didn't even get a day with an empty laundry basket.

It's only taken me 5 months of unemployment to get my act together, laundry-wise...

Purchasing power

Despite my unemployment, or perhaps because of it, I have only been buying essentials lately, but I've still managed to get some nice new stuff...

Vacuum Cleaner
It was a bargain at £29.99. I'd been thinking for a while of replacing my Dyson cylinder cleaner (never loses suction, my foot!), but it was just an expense I couldn't justify. However, whilst browsing the Brita jugs with PT's LYW, I noticed a VAX upright cleaner for a penny short of 30 quid. I looked at it a lot to make sure I hadn't been mistaken, then I took the plunge and bought it. I'm telling you - best thing I ever bought ever. It actually cleaned the carpet in my bedroom. Like it's supposed to. Not like my rubbishy Dyson. Hurrah!

Cable
A couple of weeks ago I had my first Sky+ failure. The series finale of Chuck (on Virgin One) was actually something called Amsterdam Nights (you can guess the content). We'd enjoyed the whole series, and missing the final episode was crushing! Every other programme seems to be on at least 5 times a week, but not this one episode... So, thanks to iTunes I downloaded it onto my PC. Now all I had to do was figure out how to watch it on the TV. So I popped into the Sony Centre in Staines to ask for their advice. Much patronising later (grrr...) I was the proud owner of an HDMI cable. Simple! Plug it in and watch the PC on the TV, right? Well, sort of. Just an hour's tweaking to get the screen resolution, colour and sound right... But it's done now and so I can download to my heart's content. BBC iPlayer, Sky Player, iTunes - the digital world is my virtual oyster.

Books
I really should join the library. But I bought the next in the Agatha Raisin series (now I've read them all), A Thousand Splendid Suns (the follow-up to The Kite Runner), and something called One Red Paperclip: The Story of How One Man Changed His Life One Swap at a Time. The latter is the true story of a chap who decided to make a series of swaps, getting bigger and better each time, in the hope of swapping the original red paper clip for a house (obviously not in one swap, but a series of bigger and better trades). I like the book (just as I like all those 'mini adventures' like Round Ireland With a Fridge, Join Me, I Am Dave Gorman, etc.) but it was slightly spoilt for me by the self development/management handbook type paragraphs at the end of each chapter. Things like "Today is tomorrow's yesterday". That kind of thing. I just stopped reading them...

Tomato plants
I'm a bit late, but I had a pot to fill, so I thought I'd see if I could get any tomatoes. I've been feeding them and everything, and now they've got 3 flowers, so I should be in for at least 3 tomatoes. Hurrah!

That's the extent of my shopping over the last month or so (apart from household essentials like food, of course). Quite self controlled for me, I thought...

Flying Ant Day

It's here! Only it's not even a day, it's usually just about an hour. What's it all about? I left the house 45 minutes ago - nothing. I've just got back and the air is full of the horrid critters. Where are they all going, and why do they all grow wings and suddenly take flight all at once?

I suppose I ought to look it up on t'internet and tell you, oughtn't I...?

Sh... ampoo happens

So now that I know that Thomas doesn't have anything terrible going on, I feel able to blog properly about what happened...

Last Sunday he got shampoo in his eye. It stung a bit. Made his vision blurry. You know...

Well, come Tuesday, his vision was still blurry, so I suggested getting an eye bath so he could wash his eye out a bit and help with the 'getting his sight back to normal' process. As the chemist was right by the optician, he suggested we ask them to check his eye just in case. (I know, I should have thought of that. I'm a terrible mother, what can I say?)

So the optician fits us in, asks Thomas to read the chart with his bad eye, and he can't see it. At all. Now, when he said his vision was blurry, I thought he meant a bit blurry. If it was me, and I couldn't see out of one of my eyes, I'd be sure to make that clear...! Still, the optician had a good look, couldn't see any damage, didn't sound particularly perturbed, but suggested we go to the Opthalmic A&E at St Peter's Hospital (just up the road). Up we go (always fun) and ask for the Opthalmic A&E at least 3 times, but go through the usual A&E procedure, now familiar to us after many knee-twisting, ankle-nearly-breaking, head-banging incidents. Eventually we see the doctor who has a very brief look, wiggles his fingers around a bit, and tells us that actually the optician is the expert and he doesn't have the right equipment, so suggests we go back to her. "But she sent us here" I explain. Well, there's nothing he can do. "She's the specialist, not me. Sorry." (Except he didn't say "Sorry".)

Next stop our GP. I manage to get to see her at 5pm on Wednesday. 5pm being, incidentally, the magic time when all on-call Opthalmologists are on the road between Chertsey and Guildford and therefore off-call. The doctor told me this, sighed a bit, ummed and ahhed a bit, then decided to try calling anyway. He was there. He suggested calling the eye clinic at the hospital in the morning and getting an appointment for that day. That's Thursday (are you keeping up?).

Thursday morning. 9am. I call the hospital and ask for the eye clinic. There is no direct number for the eye clinic that I can find, so I need to listen to all the recordings trying to dissuade me from calling the hospital before I get to speak to a person who can put me through. When I do eventually get through the phone just rings and rings. Sigh. I try again 10 minutes later. Same rigmarole, but I finally get through to an answerphone. One more discouraging recording later I am asked to leave a message and they will call me back (there were actually italics...). I leave a wonderfully concise message, repeating my number to be on the safe side, and then I wait. Now there's the dilemma of how long to wait. Don't want to be pushy - they said they'd call me back - but time's getting on and the clinic will be over. I wait an hour and call back, but just get the ringing phone. I wait another hour and try again. This time I get a person. A helpful person. A Staff Nurse no less. I explain the situation and she goes off and checks with a doctor. She comes back and tells me to come in at 9am the next day. Not today then. No. Tomorrow. OK.

So there we have it, an appointment at the eye clinic at 9am on Friday. We get there early, casually look at all the posters telling us not to be surprised if we're there a long time, and settle down for a wait. Two minutes later we're called in and a nurse checks Thomas's vision. Another 5 minutes and we see an Optometrist, who does another bunch of tests. Another 10 minutes and we see an Opthalmologist who tortures Thomas with dye and drops and litmus paper and cotton buds. Everyone says the same - his eye is completely healthy, apart from the fact he can't see anything out of it. Apparently that's not a problem. It'll get better. Apparently shampoo can do that. Not often, but it happens. It should be better within a week. Should.

So that was my week. I have learned the following:-

• If you're going to get shampoo in your eye, best only get it in one eye otherwise you might actually go blind.
• There is not an Opthalmic A&E at St Peter's Hospital, but that's sort of a secret.
• When Thomas says "blurry", he actually means "can't see a single thing".

Gotta get a message to me

My email inbox is telling me I have 5 unread messages. Except I don't. At least, I can't see them. I'm now convinced that these messages contain news of the perfect job, the lottery win, the surprise inheritance and the unexpected declaration of love. And one of them is spam. Something offering me a date with a lonely married woman, which seems to be what I get spammed with most these days.

As someone who checks her mail very frequently (and clicks the 'Check Mail' button at least 5 times in quick succession in case that life-changing email is tucked behind the virtual sofa cushion) these unseeable unread mails are driving me mad.

Keeping it together

I'm in the middle of a minor panic over Thomas's health. I won't go into details because the more I think about the details, the more palpitations I get. Rest assured, he's feeling OK and is oblivious to my worry, and I'm sure everything will be just fine and dandy. However, I would just like to say that I'm less than impressed with the healthcare professionals I've dealt with over the last couple of weeks, and I'm steeling myself for another frustrating experience tomorrow. I'll update you when I know more and when everything's confirmed as being just fine and dandy. Which it will be.

What am I doing right now? Who cares?

I've just signed up to Twitter. Just because PT did, I thought I'd have a look. I think I get the point - I can quickly update everybody I know (all 3 of you) on what I'm doing right this minute - but I don't see that it's going to be very enlightening/interesting for my 'followers'.

Now, I'm sure there are people who live their lives doing exciting things every half hour of their day, but not me. I try to update my Facebook status quite often, but I don't really have a lot to say there. And what I do tend to do is check everyone else's status on Facebook. However, I'm going to try to get into the spirit of Twitter and update it every time (more or less) I'm doing something significantly different to the last update.

So, if you're not on Twitter and you don't know, let me tell you that I'm currently writing a blog post. In case you were wondering...

Recommendation

It's been quite a while since I read a book that got me totally engrossed, but I've just finished The Kite Runner and I couldn't put it down. In fact, I read the second half in one sitting. I know I'm a bit behind the times with this one (it's already been made into a film!), but if you haven't read it, you should give it a go.

It follows the story of Amir, a young boy growing up in Afghanistan, and then his later life having escaped to America following the Russian invasion. Something happens in Amir's childhood that colours the rest of his life and when, years later, he is called back to his homeland, it's a chance to put things right.

It's difficult to describe the plot in much detail without giving too much away, but it's a great story and gives an enlightening insight into the recent turbulent history of Afghanistan. Oh, and it made me cry twice, which may or may not serve as an endorsement...

Giant Dad

I was going to write this one on Father's Day, but I didn't.

Father's Day this year fell on my birthday (as it did the day I was born). Dad was having a lovely time on holiday and I was having a lovely time doing absolutely nothing, so we didn't celebrate. However, to belatedly mark the ocassion, I'd like to share with you my absolute favourite photo of me and my Dad.

That's me in the natty red number. Peter had a similar outfit in brown. Mine was nicer. Pete's cardigan was brown tartan.

I like to think that Dad also had a contrasting section to the bottom of his trousers, just out of shot. Mum too. Like a British Partridge Family maybe. But they didn't. Not really.

We're standing on Hadrian's Wall and it was a long time ago. Since this picture was taken Dad has shaved off the sideburns, I've given up wearing natty trouser suits and Hadrian's Wall has been re-pointed, decorated in neutral tones and had an ensuite added.

We don't have too many actual photos from our young childhood because everything mostly was on slides. That probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's been many years since we had a working slide viewer or projector, so it's a rare treat to find a picture like this one. There are a few others in existence, but other members of my family might not thank me for publishing them on the interweb...

Digital photography is one of those things that is so new, but is so hard to imagine how we'd now manage without. Remember getting your film developed? The anticipation as you opened the envelope full of brand new pictures? The disappointment when you realised that only one of them came out how you wanted it and all the rest had those little 'over exposed' stickers on them? The current generation of children will have a very different view when they look back in years to come. Now we can have hundreds of pictures of everything. Even the second baby! (No - I'm not bitter!)

I'm sure I have a point here. Maybe it's that I think the rare treat is something special. That finding a picture of a time or place I'd completely forgotten is a bit magical. That seeing pictures of myself as an unfamiliar child gives me goosebumps (in a good way). Now that we can catalogue every moment, every stage, every expression and include it in a screensaver, perhaps we've lost something. Or perhaps we've really gained something. Maybe it's just me...

I'm sure you're wondering...

...what's with all the little posts all of a sudden.

Well... I often think of little trivial things that I could post about, then think they're too trivial, or I forget, or I think they won't make a 'meaty' enough post. So I thought I'd try just posting what I'm thinking about and what's been going on. I'll see if I can do that for a few days and see how it works out.

Bin there. Done that.

My dustbin emptying day has changed from Friday to Tuesday. Since that happened I have less rubbish, it being practically the beginning of the week. Obviously I'd have more rubbish on a Friday because I've got everything I've thrown away through the week. Clearly the council is trying to force us to reduce our waste. This is a good thing, of course, but will they reduce our council tax? I don't think so...

On a positive note, the bin men now return my bin to where they get it from, rather than leaving it by the street for me to collect. Tuesday bin men are therefore much nicer that Friday bin men.

First shake

Today I had 2 large cups of proper coffee-shop coffee and I got the shakes an hour later. This has never happened to me before and happened because I don't have a job and therefore don't have enough caffeine in my life.

P.S. The title of this post sounds like it should be a pun, but I'm not sure that it is. If you recognise the intended pun, please explain it to me... Thank you.

Tooth hurty

I'm having problems with my teeth. This is only because I have no money, no job and no dental insurance.

Bah!

* delete as appropriate

I'm sure that somewhere in the blogosphere (on the blogosphere?) there is a handy template to be used in the event of posting after not posting for a long while. It'll be something like this...

Sorry I haven't posted for a day/a week/a month/ages* but I have been away/busy/tired/drunk/in prison/enjoying myself*. I will/won't* try harder to post more often - I find it hard to get inspiration/ideas/up in the morning*.

So, here's what I've been doing:-

• Not finding a job
• Putting on a bit of weight (aargh!)
• Having lunch (see above)
• Enjoying the sunshine and getting slightly tanned for the first time ever
• Getting older

I'm sure there's plenty more - I haven't been too idle - but I won't bore you with my domestic tedium (for a change!).

Back soon with a proper post... Possibly...