Bravo here. I wanted to tell you all about this park near our house. It has a really big green thing and a playground and other stuff. Julie takes me up there sometimes, but not very often. A long time ago (Julie says it was months ago, whatever that means. I don't really do time well), we went up there and since there was no one else around, she let me off lead. She doesn't do that very often, let me tell you.
Well, I ran across the field and there was a fence and a BIG patch of dirt and right by the fence there was a box with a ball next to it. Naturally I picked up the ball. It was different from the ones at home, though - heavier and not at all squishy. But still, it was a ball and I'd found it and I was going to have a lot of fun with it! Except, of course, Julie took it away from me and left it there. She can be a real spoil-sport sometimes.
Then not quite so long ago, Julie let me run at the park again. As soon as I got off lead, I went straight to the box and looked for the ball she made me leave there. I sniffed all around the box, but couldn't find it anywhere. Julie was really surprised that I found the same box so fast! So then she called me and we went to where there was another space completely surrounded by a tall fence. I'd seen a place like that before, and it had been covered with tennis balls. This one didn't have any balls inside the fence, but I did manage to find one under a tree nearby. It was nice and light and squishy, just right to chomp on. Julie threw it for me a few times, and then I carried it all the way home.
This morning we walked in that same park again. But this time, I didn't get to go off lead. And there were no balls to be found anywhere. Found balls are my favorite thing! Well, except food. And getting to meet new people.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
New toy
I haven't been posting much lately. But for the last several days, I have an excuse. On Tuesday, I my laptop arrived! No, I didn't really NEED a laptop. But my Dell desktop was pretty old (I checked - we got it in 2001). It was making funny noises, especially at startup, that made me worry about the hard drive. And it was slow! The last straw was when Jason checked it out and found out the memory was at 512MB, and it was MAXED OUT, and the processor was running at under 1 GHz. Of course, I do have a Mac desktop as well, that I was actually using for most things. But I liked my Windows version of Quicken, and I had one or two other programs that had no Mac equivalent. Yes, I could put Windows on the Mac. But frankly, I just wanted a laptop. My excuse is, now I can do the bills while watching television, so it won't be such a horrible chore.
Anyway, it's a shiny new Dell with 3 MB RAM, 2 GHz processor speed, and a 250 GB hard drive. (Well, not actually shiny on the outside; shiny in the Firefly sense. I got the blue color. Which is a little dark, but it's cool that it looks different when it's in the light.)
And I've spent tons of time this last week getting it set up. Loading the programs I want or need (which does not include most of the programs that were on the desktop, actually!) Transferring data from the old Dell and the Mac. Which was easy from the Dell (I had an external hard drive to use), but much more difficult from the Mac (couldn't connect the external drive too it, and for a long time, couldn't find it on the network). I'm proud that I was able to do all of that on my own. Of course, my tech support person was (IS) in Nicaragua, so I had to either do it myself or wait. And I don't do waiting well.
Now all my photos and music are nicely organized on the new computer. I have all the programs I need, and most of the ones I want, set up and ready to go. And have tried out all the important ones. I'm still using the Mac, but it is fun to play on the computer during commercial breaks, or like now, just sitting on the couch with the computer on my lap.
Yes, it was self-indulgent and unnecessary. I don't care. Another instance when I am not acting like an adult. (Oh yeah, I haven't actually posted the entry about being an adult yet. Maybe soon. Not sure it's ready for publication.)
I'm having fun with it. It's a new toy!
Anyway, it's a shiny new Dell with 3 MB RAM, 2 GHz processor speed, and a 250 GB hard drive. (Well, not actually shiny on the outside; shiny in the Firefly sense. I got the blue color. Which is a little dark, but it's cool that it looks different when it's in the light.)
And I've spent tons of time this last week getting it set up. Loading the programs I want or need (which does not include most of the programs that were on the desktop, actually!) Transferring data from the old Dell and the Mac. Which was easy from the Dell (I had an external hard drive to use), but much more difficult from the Mac (couldn't connect the external drive too it, and for a long time, couldn't find it on the network). I'm proud that I was able to do all of that on my own. Of course, my tech support person was (IS) in Nicaragua, so I had to either do it myself or wait. And I don't do waiting well.
Now all my photos and music are nicely organized on the new computer. I have all the programs I need, and most of the ones I want, set up and ready to go. And have tried out all the important ones. I'm still using the Mac, but it is fun to play on the computer during commercial breaks, or like now, just sitting on the couch with the computer on my lap.
Yes, it was self-indulgent and unnecessary. I don't care. Another instance when I am not acting like an adult. (Oh yeah, I haven't actually posted the entry about being an adult yet. Maybe soon. Not sure it's ready for publication.)
I'm having fun with it. It's a new toy!
Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Big Read
Saw this on Deb's blog, and of course I had to do it.
“The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. Of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.” (I couldn't find the list at either of these links, but I just copied and pasted this.)
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 - parts if it
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 - Most of the comedies and tragedies, some of the histories
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
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - the first 3 or so
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
So there’s my list. I've read 53, and parts of 3 others. Some of them (like the Austen novels) I have read multiple times.
I do think it's strange that they list "complete works of Shakespeare" and also "Hamlet", and "Chronicles of Narnia" and also "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". I have never heard of some of these books, and don't want to read some of the others, but I've added quite a few books to my "to-read" list. Just what I needed - as if it wasn't already a really long list!
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Elect Obama -- I need a break
I started this post a while ago, and decided to hold it until shortly before the election. So here you go:
I was having a small political exchange with a friend, and she came up with the slogan that furnishes this post title. It perfectly expresses how I feel after so many years of "43" in the White House. We need a break from the war in Iraq. We need a break from the handouts, favors and tax breaks for big business. But most of all, we need a break from the endless attacks on our freedoms and rights - the right to choose, the rights of gays, the right to privacy, etc. We need someone in the White House who does not believe that torture is a valid interrogation technique, or that 9/11 justifies random intrusions into our privacy. And we need someone who will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will uphold those rights far beyond a White House term or two.
I also find it interesting that Senator Obama, in the prime of life, chose a running mate who has knowledge and experience, while Senator McCain, a cancer patient past retirement age, chose someone who is basically window dressing. The idea of Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the White House scares me senseless. And the idea that some women see this as a reason to vote for the Republican ticket horrifies me.
Some of the best articles I have seen on this election are on the website of Elizabeth George, one of my favorite authors. She has written a series on various topics that are well-thought-out and thoroughly researched. I read the first few some time ago, and just read her article on being Pro-Life, which was excellent. (A definition of Pro-Life that I can support, as opposed to those people who call themselves Pro-Life, but are actually Anti-Choice.) I look forward to reading the rest of them. She is far more eloquent than I could ever be - I think you will enjoy the articles, and would be glad to hear your comments on them.
I was having a small political exchange with a friend, and she came up with the slogan that furnishes this post title. It perfectly expresses how I feel after so many years of "43" in the White House. We need a break from the war in Iraq. We need a break from the handouts, favors and tax breaks for big business. But most of all, we need a break from the endless attacks on our freedoms and rights - the right to choose, the rights of gays, the right to privacy, etc. We need someone in the White House who does not believe that torture is a valid interrogation technique, or that 9/11 justifies random intrusions into our privacy. And we need someone who will appoint Supreme Court Justices who will uphold those rights far beyond a White House term or two.
I also find it interesting that Senator Obama, in the prime of life, chose a running mate who has knowledge and experience, while Senator McCain, a cancer patient past retirement age, chose someone who is basically window dressing. The idea of Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the White House scares me senseless. And the idea that some women see this as a reason to vote for the Republican ticket horrifies me.
Some of the best articles I have seen on this election are on the website of Elizabeth George, one of my favorite authors. She has written a series on various topics that are well-thought-out and thoroughly researched. I read the first few some time ago, and just read her article on being Pro-Life, which was excellent. (A definition of Pro-Life that I can support, as opposed to those people who call themselves Pro-Life, but are actually Anti-Choice.) I look forward to reading the rest of them. She is far more eloquent than I could ever be - I think you will enjoy the articles, and would be glad to hear your comments on them.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Eva
I am reading a very intriguing book called Eva, by Peter Dickinson. I found it via a booklist that is posted on Robin McKinley's blog. (Peter Dickinson is Robin McKinley's husband.) Robin and her blog readers have all posted to this booklist. WARNING: if you like fantasy, you are liable to find hundreds of books to interest you on this list. You may never dig yourself out of the pile of books-to-be-read...
Anyway, back to the book, which was written in 1988. It is set in the future, when the world is grossly overpopulated, and there are very few animals left. Eva is very badly injured in an automobile accident, and to save her, they implant her consciousness into the body of a chimpanzee.
I haven't gotten very far in the book, but there are a wide variety of themes here: the definition of "self"; ethics of medical experimentation, especially on animals; corporate sponsorship and exploitation (yep, that's how they paid for her treatment); etc. I'm looking forward to finding out how these themes develop.
Anyway, back to the book, which was written in 1988. It is set in the future, when the world is grossly overpopulated, and there are very few animals left. Eva is very badly injured in an automobile accident, and to save her, they implant her consciousness into the body of a chimpanzee.
I haven't gotten very far in the book, but there are a wide variety of themes here: the definition of "self"; ethics of medical experimentation, especially on animals; corporate sponsorship and exploitation (yep, that's how they paid for her treatment); etc. I'm looking forward to finding out how these themes develop.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
We interrupt this blog for a political message
Yes, I voted in the primary yesterday. I can't say that I am truly excited about Al Franken, and I'm not exactly sure why not. So I guess I need to learn more about his stance on issues.
In the meantime, however, I have to plug my district's terrific candidate for the House, Ashwin Madia. Yes, he's a lawyer, a Marine, and a former Republican. BUT he saw the light on the party issue, and while in the military, he successfully defended a homosexual man against discrimination. He has served in Iraq. He's a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. He's pro-choice and supports full GLBT rights including marriage. His top issues:
You may not be able to vote for him in the general election, but you can vote for him now:
J-Street PAC is having an online contest. People can visit a website and vote for their favorite house challenger. The candidate who receives the most votes will receive a check for FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Please click this link and vote for Ash. Then send the link to some of your friends and ask them to vote for Ash.
In the meantime, however, I have to plug my district's terrific candidate for the House, Ashwin Madia. Yes, he's a lawyer, a Marine, and a former Republican. BUT he saw the light on the party issue, and while in the military, he successfully defended a homosexual man against discrimination. He has served in Iraq. He's a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. He's pro-choice and supports full GLBT rights including marriage. His top issues:
- End the Iraq war responsibly
- Create and implement solutions to global warming
- Balance the budget
- Expand access to health care
- Renew federal commitment to education
- Safeguard our fundamental freedoms
You may not be able to vote for him in the general election, but you can vote for him now:
J-Street PAC is having an online contest. People can visit a website and vote for their favorite house challenger. The candidate who receives the most votes will receive a check for FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Please click this link and vote for Ash. Then send the link to some of your friends and ask them to vote for Ash.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Bravo's latest obsession
Bravo is now obsessed with tomatoes. I discovered this one day when I realized he'd been out for quite some time while I played on the computer, and he hadn't yet appeared on the deck asking to come back in. Usually this takes only a couple of minutes - 5 at the most. So I went out to look for him and found him digging at the fence line. Apparently, a squirrel had been eating a tomato and left it in full view on the other side of the fence. Fortunately, our neighbors had installed edging, so the only damage was a little depression on our side.
A couple of days later, we found he was digging a little to one side of the first location. Yes, there was another tomato looking very tantalizing on the other side of the fence. And then yesterday, he had a new location and I realized that the neighbor's tomato plant is right next to the fence. It seems Bravo didn't really notice them until they turned bright red. Though since he is supposed to be color-blind, perhaps it is their scent as they ripen that he notices, rather than the color. In any event, it is driving him crazy to see (smell) them practically touching the fence, and the spaces in the chain link are too small for him to bite them.
The neighbors came to sell gift wrap for the school tonight, and the mom said that Bravo could have the tomatoes. I'm not sure that's a good idea. Russ doesn't think he'll like them, but I'm not so sure.
So now I watch him when I let him out. He always goes directly to the fence, and if he appears too intent, I bang on the door or make my "admonishing" sound. He stops immediately. Though he usually moves behind the tree, then, and I can't tell if he's digging or not. If he is, it can't be much, because I don't let him stay out too long. OOPS, he's still out - I'd better go let him in!
A couple of days later, we found he was digging a little to one side of the first location. Yes, there was another tomato looking very tantalizing on the other side of the fence. And then yesterday, he had a new location and I realized that the neighbor's tomato plant is right next to the fence. It seems Bravo didn't really notice them until they turned bright red. Though since he is supposed to be color-blind, perhaps it is their scent as they ripen that he notices, rather than the color. In any event, it is driving him crazy to see (smell) them practically touching the fence, and the spaces in the chain link are too small for him to bite them.
The neighbors came to sell gift wrap for the school tonight, and the mom said that Bravo could have the tomatoes. I'm not sure that's a good idea. Russ doesn't think he'll like them, but I'm not so sure.
So now I watch him when I let him out. He always goes directly to the fence, and if he appears too intent, I bang on the door or make my "admonishing" sound. He stops immediately. Though he usually moves behind the tree, then, and I can't tell if he's digging or not. If he is, it can't be much, because I don't let him stay out too long. OOPS, he's still out - I'd better go let him in!
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