Saturday - work, work, work

I must have misplaced a couple of days in my year of blogging about Socializing the Incredibly Unsocialized Dog.  Day 1 was on October 31, but day 365 didn't come until November 2.  It's all I can do to keep myself from going back and figuring out where the missing days went.


Luckily I have better things to do.  Like reading the Girl Detective blog.  She managed to read 100 books in one year.  And blog about them.  I couldn't do that--that's like a book every 3.5 days and I don't manage one book a month.  Even if I included an occasional graphic novel--like she does--I couldn't do it.  Maybe I should set a goal of my own...24?  No, not "round" enough.  How about 10?

I could make a list of all the books I've already purchased and plan to read, then add in the ones on my amazon.com wishlist...that would probably be a nice round fifty.  But...no.  She's a stay-at-home writer and mom, so I'll let her win this challenge.  Right now I've got a garden to uncover.

Later.  The garden plans got cancelled.  See:



Almost 80 degrees and not even noon yet.  Sunny and sticky.

Beside, why did I think I could defrost a huge upright freezer crammed full of food and still have time to work in the garden?  I'll be lucky to get the freezer done and all of the wasted food hauled to the garbage can.
The things I'm throwing away are mostly those of indeterminate age, like bowls of homemade turkey broth and chili and chicken soup.  They're probably only a year old, but who knows?  I typically put dates on vegetables from the garden, but the homemade foods used to get rotated pretty well.

But they're all scary now.  The freezer door wasn't closing right, so anything near the door has been thawed out. 

Back to the book list.  I was afraid of this...the recently-added, unread books on my shelf adds up to 21.  There's at least one unread book on the Kindle and another 18 on the amazon.com wishlist.  That doesn't leave much wiggle room.  I didn't count the uncounted number of books I bought several years ago, which got mixed in the bookshelf when Ed rearranged my books.  I had carefully separated "read" and "unread" books--but he didn't know that.  He put them all in alphabetical order.

So here's the top of the list, my bookshelf.

 1. Farm City by Novella Carpenter
 2. Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan
 3. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
 4. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
 5. High Tide in Tuscon, Barbara Kingsolver
 6. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
 7. The Cain Saga #3, Kaori Yuki
 8. The Cain Saga #4, Kaori Yuki
 9. Louisa May Alcott, by Harriet Reisen
10. Fractured Fairy Tales by A. J. Jacobs
11. 1776, David McCollough
12. Reaching the Animal Mind, Karen Pryor
13. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith
14. 11/22/63, Stephen King
15. Asimov's Guide to the Bible, Isaac Asimov
16. The Year of Living Biblically, A. J. Jacobs
17. The Pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman
18. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
19. Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
20. Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
21. The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs

But first, a movie review.

Wreck-it Ralph

How did they manage to cram so much sensory overload onto one 98-minute movie screen? 
plot: good. Surprising at times.
special effects: not excessively stomach churning but not worth the 3-D premium
characters: superb
overall: remarkably good but don't take a little kid to it.  It's a little dark at times and they've never heard of Q*BERT.
I did hear some scattered applause at the end.

[jogging: turn plus 7 telephone poles]