Simple Things for Simple Minds

I'm totally amused by the results of this little internet game.


1. Go to Wikipedia and click on random article. The title of the first article that comes up is your band name.
2. Go to quotationspage.com and click on random quotes. The last 4-5 words of the last quote on the page is your album title.
3. Go to flickr and click on explore last 7 days. The third picture is your album cover.

Surprisingly, I can actually see a lot of these as real band/album combos, and I'm having an entertaining evening making up back stories to go along with them. Examples:

Former 80s star Peter Sidorkiewicz is out of rehab and back in the recording studio with his latest, "People Get What They Want".

Emo band Parade Lap will release "The Greater the Conceit" as soon as they are done navel-gazing.

New age instrumentalists Predeal's "Not to Polluted Eyes" comes in an all-organic CD case.

French punk rockers Côtes de Duras are not selling out and remain true to their roots in "Lies We Tell Ourselves".

1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10

10 Random things about me
1. I have a pirate rubber duckie in my bathroom. He's black with an eyepatch and a skull-and-crossbones on him.
2. I hated going to summer camp as a kid.
3. And yet I still kept signing up for it. 3 years at overnight camp and 2 years of daycamp.
4. On the other hand, I loved loved loved ski camp during Feb. vacation.
5. I volunteered to be a Girl Scout leader this year.
6. I like it, but am a little overwhelmed, and am scared of being the "boring leader".
7. I would really like to learn how to shoot a gun but I have no idea who to ask to show me.
8. Which is odd, given the fact that I come from a family of hunter and the only person who doesn't have multiple guns in their house is my aunt in Florida.
9. I fantasize about winning the lottery so I can quit my job.
10. I miss being involved in theatre.

9 Ways to win my heart
1. Read
2. Recommend books to me
3. Read aloud to me when I am sick.
4. Meet my family.
5. Introduce me to yours.
6. Bring toys for my cats.
7. Cook dinner with me.
8. Dance with me.
9. Have a killer smile and a voice that makes me all quivery inside.

8 Of my favorite TV shows
1. How I Met Your Mother
2. Alias
3. NCIS
4. M*A*S*H
5. Jeopardy
6. Monarch of the Glen (before all the original cast left)
7. The Amazing Race
8. Friday Night Lights

7 Things that annoy me
1. Stepping in water puddles from snow melting off shoes and winding up with wet socks. There's a doormat there for a reason, people.
2. Wet socks and cold feet in general.
3. When the cats wake me up 75 minutes before my alarm goes off. Way too early to get up, not enough time to get any more quality sleep in.
4. My own lack of motivation and tendency to procrastinate.
5. Over protective parents. Your daughter is 10 and this is the Girl Scouts for heaven's sake. We've all been background checked and have safety training up the wazoo. You can let her spend the night away from home. Really.
6. People who automatically say "Oh, that explains it" when they find out I'm an only child. As if the fact that my parents didn't provide me with siblings means I'm completely incapable of relating to people.
7. The lack of "left turn on green after yielding" left turn lanes around here. Actually, the majority of the traffic lights around here. I'm half convinced they were programmed by ferrets on acid.

6 Things I want to do before I die
1. Have a better understanding of my own faith and a better relationship with God.
2. Get at least one more degree in something that has nothing to do with engineering.
3. Be a wife.
4. Travel more outside the US.
5. Trace my family history.
6. Run a marathon.

5 Things I am afraid of
1. Fire
2. Spiders and other crawly buggy things.
3. Alarms and other unexpected loud noises. Waking up to an alarm clock every morning is hell, but if I don't have the alarm, I won't wake up until 9:30.
4. That I've become too selective and too comfortable with my own independence and thus will never find anyone I even want to date, let alone marry.
5. Losing my family.

4 Of my favorite items in this room
I am in the guest room/office
1. Penobscot
2. Books!
3. Digital camera
4. The antique ladies' toiletry kit we found when cleaning out my Grammie's house.

3 Things I do every day
1. Check email
2. Read something, even if it's just the back of the cereal box.
3. Eat

2 Things I want to do right now
1. Write up this week's meal plan and then go have dinner.
2. Email my parents and Sandra the pictures from last weekend.

1 Person I want to see right now
I have no idea....

A Book Meme

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.

48.5 out of 100. Or maybe only 47.5 out of 100 (obviously Heller didn't make a huge impression on me)

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 (some of it anyway, the talking points)
7 Wuthering Heights - E. 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 (reading right now)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (or did I read Something Happened?)
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 Traveller'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
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (also reading right now)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this part of #33?)
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
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