etc.

Bought some begonias for the garden today. I mostly dislike gardening, but then I start doing it and it usually turns out being OK. Not big fun, but, you know, fine.

Thought I’d pop in before June fizzled away entirely. If I visited my own blog once in a while, I might have actually been prompted to post sooner, given that I’ve had a raccoon at the top of this page for, oh, weeks. Oh, sure, he’s a cute raccoon, but his cuteness is ever so slightly tempered by the knowledge that the Humane Society undoubtedly fattened him & his brothers up and brought them right back to our neighbourhood to settle in, find some mates, and have more cute raccoon babies in our walls. Ah, circle of life.

So, here we are with half the year gone. You know how time seems to speed up as you get older? Well, a colleague speculated the other day that it’s because time is relative, and when you’re young, every day occupies a larger percentage of your life, compared to when you’re older. Best explanation I’ve heard yet. Summers felt like they lasted forever when I was younger, but that’s probably because when you’re 13, you’ve only really known 13 summers, and you actually remember fewer.

The mister and I have been trying to make the very most of this summer (“Summer of Us”, we’re calling it), which means we’re doing a lot more than our usual home-body selves are used to. For us, this means less couch surfing/movie watching and more getting out into the world and seeing people. It’s remarkably enriching and makes me feel like we’ve already had a very full summer, and there’s still 2 months of it to go. I feel younger just thinking about it.

Oh, and? I’ve perked things up around here with a little redesign. I finally tired of the minimal sidebar and added some content (current blog reads coming soon!). I’ve only tested it on Mac/FF3, so let me know if anything looks broken on your end.

I can think of a few other things I’d rather do, but there you have it.

Lean in close and inhale deeply for full effect.

I have this on-going dream of an imaginary vacation that consists of 2 weeks in a remote cabin on a lake, a bag full of yarn, no TV, a stack of books, fine crisp air, and no commitments. I recently stumbled upon this meme at Not an Artist and I’ve since seen it in a bunch of other places, and for some reason, my imaginary lakeside vacation springs to mind every time I see it. Must be something about the indulgence of having the time to read all those books I’ve never read or started but didn’t finish.

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Pop a note in the comments if you’ve done this one (and help me keep the dream alive).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers