Kivus’ Neighborhood

Things I LOVE:

• MY NEW HOUSE! Last night I started to unpack. Let me just say that built-in bookshelves are a dream! I'll start posting pics soon.
• WALL-E. I'm not kidding. This movie was absolutely spectacular. A million billion stars and thumbs up. (And note this comes from the girl whose jerkface ex works for Pixar -- I wanted to put the movie in the "loathe" column. But I can't. It was phenomenal.)
• Organizing stuff in my new house.
• Being slow at work so I can blog and read Go Fug Yourself.
• AT&T's U-Verse service. It's light years ahead of Comcast.
• My new commute not being all that bad so far.

Things I LOATHE:

• It's 107 here today. Combined with the choking smoke coming off the charbroiled mountains into the valley, I'm considering moving to Hades because it's probably a little more refreshing.
• The forecast of 100+ temps for the rest of the week.
• Spending my slow day at work wishing I was at home unpacking and getting settled.
• Carrying unwieldy empty boxes downstairs. Or through doorways. Or down hallways. Or loading them into cars. Or whatever. I hate empty boxes.
• Not having bathmats. I need to get some ASAP.
• Leaving my phone charger in Iowa which meant that I had to buy a new one in Chicago which means that I now have FIVE chargers. It's a trifle excessive.

I arrived home much later than scheduled last night and immediately fell asleep for the first time in my new house. As I was drifting off, I thought, "this is like being in an oddly familiar hotel." Then I got up and came to work.

I have SOOO much to write about my vacation. I'm going to attempt to find my camera cord this evening, so hopefully I'll have photos to post. I did eleventy billion things and I'm exhausted and all I want is to be home, unpacking my books, instead of here at work. Que sera sera...

Oh. And I am going to do my darndest to go back and read through everyone's posts. :)

ETA: All done. It's weird to see only one post on this site after two years (in August) of blogging pretty much 4-5 times (or more) a week, but I've finally finished moving the bulk of the stuff over to my new blog. Yeah. I know. It was supposed to take me a few weeks of leisurely adding a couple posts each day. But when have I ever done anything leisurely?

So those of you who have erin*carly in your neighborhoods probably saw her post yesterday about possibly making her new WordPress blog her main blog.

That post is finally the catalyst that motivated me to do what I've been wanting to do for a while -- namely, move to a different blogging format.

It's not that I don't like Vox. Of course I like Vox. It's just that in addition to some irritating technical issues I've been having with what seems to be only Vox, I have felt rather pigeon-holed. Basically I've done it to myself by setting out to have just one type of blog when I probably should've just structured it a bit more freely in the beginning.

Plus, with WordPress, anyone can comment, and you don't have to have a WP account (or sign up for one) in order to do so.

So yeah. If you are so inclined, feel free to check out the new blog: as told by jen. It's still a work in progress, obviously, but I have gotten about 60 posts moved over so far and hope to finish in the next couple of days. I really like the categorization options -- that really appeals to my OCD, I tell you what, and it really makes finding a certain post or type of post a lot easier -- and I also like the fact that I can set up as many different pages as I'd like to.

I resurrected my Flickr and Facebook accounts because I decided I needed some personal blogrolling-type stuff, so again, if you're so inclined, click on the links and add me.

(Oh. And as far as Vox goes, I'm going to keep my user name/profile so I can still keep up with all of you, and nothing changes where my other Vox blog is concerned. I will still be maintaining/updating that as usual.)

A giant Catholic Basilica. I mean, it's enormous.

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They built it. We came.

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2 comments

Is to sit in your plane on the tarmac for an hour and a half. Stupid thunderstorms.

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“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

6) I'm going to add a step - gray out those you are unfamiliar with.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I own)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I own & have started and put down)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read most. I'm going to count it.) 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (I own)
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (I own)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I own & have started and put down)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (loved the miniseries!)
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 (I own) 
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (started in HS and hated it)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I own & have started and put down)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (I own)
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 (I own)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (currently reading!)
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
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I own)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I own)
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 (I own)
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 (currently reading!)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
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 (I own. Also, I've read every other DM book. Does that count for anything?)
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 St. Exupery (I own)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (I own)
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Question: wouldn't this fall under his "Complete Works"? It's not like it's "The Complete Works of Shakespeare...oh, and Hamlet.")
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Books I've read: 37

Books I'm currently reading: 2

Books I don't want to read: 5

Books I own and want to read: 15

Books I don't own and want to read: 29

Books I'm mostly or all unfamiliar with: 10  

Books that belong in one of the above six catecories but I am too lazy to figure out where they go: 2

Not too shabby. I need to get reading those that I own. I have far too many unread books on my shelves!

Tennis Lessons

Last night was my final tennis lesson (at least for this class). It was by far my favorite of the class, mostly because someone brought margaritas to the potluck and somehow that made my useless serve a little better. I am going to take the beginner lessons one more time along with a few other girls in the class. I would have liked to move up, but my serve isn't good enough to put me in the advanced beginner class. But I'm fine with taking the first class again, mostly because I'm making friends and having a good time.

Condo

I get my keys tomorrow for sure! Everything is all set, they just have to go on record with the county and then the house is mine all mine! To celebrate, my parents and my new roommate Sheena and I are having dinner at the condo tomorrow night, since, if you recall, I got the dining table with the place so there's already somewhere for us to eat. Plus, this gives my parents a chance to meet Sheena so that when they are moving my stuff in on Saturday, it's not all awkward.

Vacation

My trip is still on. Apparently I can get to my friends in Iowa despite the flooding, although I have a feeling I'm going to see some devistation like I've never seen before since I'm going right through Cedar Rapids. After Iowa I am visiting Chicago to see two friends I went to grad school with -- Kate and Hillary. Kate, however, will only be there for Thursday night because on Friday she is flying to San Francisco with her fiance. PUNK. We're totally doing a switcheroo! I wish she'd come a different weekend -- I'll take any excuse to drive out to the City for dinner! Oh well. It will be nice to see her for that one day.

Other Things In Life

• I'm mildly obsessed with So You Think You Can Dance. I don't watch a lot of reality TV, but dang, those kids have some serious talent.
• I'm also watching the Mole, which was the first reality show that I ever really watched and loved. Don't tell, but I still love it.
• Because I cannot turn my brain off, I've been getting between five and six hours of sleep instead of my usual eight. My deed of trust for my house now says, Cori Ashley, a zombie woman.
• I have too many things to do before I leave on my vacation, but I can't do any of them at my office even though we have nothing to do. It's frustrating to sit here doing nothing when I have so much to do!
• I hate to fly. I mean, I HATE TO FLY. While I'm super-excited about my vacation, I am not excited about getting on a plane on Saturday. Any advice on making it any easier?

This first sentence is to inform you that a while back I posted this. The antipenultimate sentence of this post serves to tell you that it's imperative that you read the link that is posted in the first sentence. The final sentence in this particular paragraph notes that when I entered the text from the link in the first sentence into Wordle, this is what I got:

This is the Title of this Word Cloud

(This parenthetical statement tells you that I am completely addicted to Wordle.) This is the sentence that closes this post.