Catching Up, Part 1

Okay, so no one has said anything, but I know what you're all thinking. "I haven't talked to you in x number of years, what's going on" or "Where are the pictures of my cousins/grandkids" or "Man this is a boring blog, I wish there were some cute baby pictures." Right? So we got a new camera for Christmas this past year. It doesn't use a removable memory card so I haven't yet figured out how to get the image onto the laptop (Dan has the cable somewhere and he mentioned something about software). I do have some pictures for you, but they're a year old or older. Eventually I want to do some comparisons, but for now I'll just add photos and let you see them all.

As far as explination... The top two are from Halloween of 2007. We went to our ward's Trunk or Treat party. The first four below are from Valerie's birth earlier that same year. Dan loves the first one. I love the fourth. After that are miscelaneous pictures from 2007. The last is from his cousin Aiden's birthday party. Gabriel gets his first taste of sour candy! LOL! Hope you enjoy these. Post comments or send emails suggesting things you'd like to see in future posts.

Father-In-Law's Truck

My father-in-law sent me these photos. I thought they were cool and wanted to share them with you. He got bored with his truck's interior so he took some sarapes and put them in his truck. He says the original color was grey. This is much more interesting. Plus, he says it's cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

National Endowment for the Arts Book List

I found this list on a friend's blog and thought I'd snag her idea of marking the ones I've read and the ones I want to read. In general, most of the books I want to read come from recommendations from friends, ratings from friends, "similar reads" lists for books I enjoy, and the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die group on GoodReads. Several of the books on this list I know are in that last one. So here goes: blue=read, green=want to read, underline=favorite.

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 - Tried several times and just can't finish it
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
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler'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 - I've read Through the Looking Glass though
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 Albom
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

Now the "to read" list may not be complete for the simple fact that I haven't heard of all of these, but I would say that my "read" list isn't too shabby at 33.

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet was my first exposure to Jane Austen. I have now seen at least one film version of every Jane Austen except Lady Susan and own three of them. Having said that, the book is a little hard to get into. If you're just starting out on Jane, you might want to start with Pride and Prejudice if for no other reason than the book starts in witty dialog. Sense and Sensibility is an interesting story that follows two sisters in surprisingly similar circumstances with regards to their love lives and how they handle said situations in their very different manner. One with great sense and the other with overly dramatic sensibility (hence the title). I think what I loved about this book was the same thing I loved about the movie, Brandon and Palmer. While Edward is Elinor's choice and for all intents and purposes the lead male, his character is dutiful to a fault. Brandon, on the other hand, is calm, reserved, and yet has a fire inside of him that longs to get out. In the movie, it is one of my favorite roles for Alan Rickman. As for my preference of Mr. Palmer, his sardonic wit has always appealed to me. The fact that Hugh Laurie plays him in the movie makes it that much more fun. Love it or leave it, Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen to a tee. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Complete Austen... Intro

Recently, for my birthday, we went to Borders. I had a combination of Borders Bucks and coupons that we were planning on using to get the special edition of Iron Man. It turned out that the special edition my husband wanted was at a different store. Since one of the coupons expired the next day my husband stated that I should look around and find something as a present for myself. That's when I decided to look for something I'd been wanting: a complete Jane Austen. I found what I was looking for and with the combination of Bucks and coupon managed to secure a $25 book for $2.67 out of pocket. Not a bad deal :)

On the way home I glanced through the introduction, but didn't actually start reading it since I was still reading a couple of books I'd picked up from the library (both of which are for young readers and both of which I would highly recommend). The first is Chalice. The second is Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. Then I started into Sense and Sensibility. It was then that I realized that I hadn't read it before. That made me think that maybe I hadn't read as many of the Austen books as I originally thought. After carefully examining my memory to decide which of the books I've actually read instead of assuming I'd read because I've seen a film of it, I determined that the actual number was one: Pride and Prejudice. I know that I've read this one because I decided to (after reading it) read the "sequels" that others have written "in her style." These I would highly recommend....against. This necessitated a revision of my GoodReads list at which point I decided to remove them all even from my To_Read list and just show my birthday present.

This brought up another problem. I cannot possibly assume that I will like all the books equally and therefore have no way of rating them individually this way. So I came up with the plan of rating the version of the book based on presentation and such and I would list each book individually in my review as I completed it. Great! Except that I needed a place to explain all this without making my review ten pages long. Hence this blog entry. I haven't made a final decision yet, but I'm actually thinking of reviewing them individually here and just linking to the reviews in the review section on GoodReads. Either way, I'll be reading the books in order and wanted to list the order here so that anyone can follow along with where I am in the big book. Here then is the Table of Contents:

Sense and Sensibility 1
Pride and Prejudice 209
Mansfield Park 423
Emma 687
Northanger Abbey 959
Persuasion 1091
Lady Susan 1233

Hobbies

I got to thinking about the comment my friend made on my last entry about hobbies and the first thing that came to mind was puzzle video games. That passed quickly, thankfully, and was replaced by one of the things that has been consuming a lot of my time (other than my kids), namely Family History.

Many people are familiar with the fact that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has a large hand in helping people to research and preserve their family's histories. As a member who was born into an LDS family this has been in my background for years. It has, however, been in all of my family's background and when I found a desire to do research it was met with years and years of information that has already been found at least twice (if not more). It was then that I turned to my husband's family and found that I could help with the small projects here and there that have already been started and help to expand and suppliment what has already been found. While I cannot claim great success, the few small things that I have been able to dig up have had a profound effect on my understanding of my research.

Names and dates are important. This cannot be argued, because armed with this information you are able to track down and expand what you have. This pales in comparison with finding the stories. True, I haven't found many of the stories, but some of the names and dates I've found have made me want to know them. Siblings who have married siblings. Siblings who have married people with the same last name who aren't even related. A possible marriage between one man's grandson and his great-granddaughter. A census record that lists a step-daughter for an individual who happens to have the same name and age of that individual's possible granddaughter. Another set of cousins who married, had two (possibly three) children and then a definate separation when the wife returns to her parents and the man moves across the country to follow his religion. And these are the recent records. What about the Gmyr name which is relatively rare even in the original country of Poland (also known as Austria and Galicia depending on the time period). How many of these people are related to my husband? Are they willing to share their stories?

Oh how I wish I had those stories. Oh how I wish those who had them were willing to share.

Keep or Give?

I'm beginning to wonder if I should restart this blog (which was originally on the AOL Journal site). The primary reasons for keeping a blog are: keep people informed about yourself and your life, having a place to vent (only a good idea on a blog site if that blog is kept private... at which point it would probably be better to have a journal instead), comment on life, the universe, and everything for money and the hell of it, or to promote things. Let me address these one by one and see if I can answer my question of Keep or Give (up).

Keep people informed: I really should do this, but I honestly find my life fairly boring for the most part and cannot see why anyone would want to know much more than a few lines a week or even month. Other people's lives I find fascinating and I love reading what they post on a regular basis. The other problem is that I wouldn't have a clue what people would like to know more about... kids, hobbies, or day to day mush. Any comments would be nice.

Having a place to vent: I've already mentioned that in most cases this would be best kept in a private journal, but I will mention that sometimes it's nice to get feedback on the little things that are piling up on you if for no other reason than to be reminded that they are little things. So venting is an option as long as it's nothing overly personal.

Commenting on life, the universe....: This has worked great for a couple of friends, but my opinions are too fluid to make a huge difference in things. If I were to keep this blog it definately wouldn't be for this reason. Having said that, I won't promise not to comment since I do have some opinions... sometimes :P

Promotional: As with the above, it wouldn't be a primary reason, but sometimes I find products or places that I really do have to praise. My kids wouldn't care less (not that I would have (m)any readers that would care more) about these things and this might be a good place to mention them.

All in all the balance appears to be in favor. The next question becomes, would it be worth it. A journal is personal and friends, family and most specifically posterity would find value in it... when it is eventually read. A blog is only really worth it if there are readers. So I put the question to you.... Keep or Give?