Spin around 10 times and stamp very precisely! Judge Karen determined the winners. Green Frontcounterland is in the lead with a gold medal and 10 points.

Hi everyone,

Yet another week and weekend has gone by! I can't believe how time is flying these days.

I have only a few more short Fridays left. This past one consisted of the long drive out to Fry's to return a memory card. I think I'm going to have to buy a new camera so that I can have a memory card capable of holding all our photos from our upcoming trip to Britain and Ireland. Our current camera can only work with a memory card of up to 512 MB. Not good! I spent the afternoon napping and watching Soylent Green. That evening, Ric and I went out with Rob and Dee. We went to the Spaghetti Factory for dinner, then had mudslides and Rob's home brew while watching Nicolas Cage's beautiful weave in Next.

Saturday I slept in, worked out, and got straight to work with paint. I did a lot of touch up, tape removal, and more touch up, as well as another coat of paint on the trim. Ric installed a new faucet in our downstairs bathroom and changed out a bunch of our electrical outlet faces from almond to white. It looks so much more crisp! That night we went to see a late showing of Pineapple Express. I think it brought out the relaxed part of both of us, and we decided to stay out for a while. We went to the train station to chat a while, walked a bit, got a 2am snack at a drive thru, got some cash from the bank, and finally went home to go to bed.

Sunday we went to church, had a bite at Arby's, and I watched the Olympics for a couple of hours. We had dinner over at Ric's parents' house and checked out Todd's new wine-colored Accord. I gave the Mini a good washing, and then we went home. I must have spent several more hours watching Olympics and Beyond the Planet of the Apes.

Up this week: shopping tonight, Ric's got a brewing meeting with Rob on Tuesday, we've got movie night on Wednesday, and Friday we're celebrating my sister's birthday. I guess we'll be keeping busy!

I arrived safely home from our Tomfest trip yesterday evening. I promptly showered (I'd been in a car for 21 hours), watched an episode of My So Called Life, then fell asleep. The trip was great, the drive was beautiful, much fun was had. We had a great time at the festival. We saw a ton of bands and met some really cool folks. My favorite of the new bands we discovered was definitely Quitet by Ten. If I had to compare them to anything I would compare them to Havalina Rail Co., which is one of my favorite bands ever.

The last band we saw before we left was MxPx, who I hadn't seen live since Warped Tour at least 8 years ago. I used to see them all the time at the old Soma Live in San Diego when I was in high school. They sounded pretty much the same and put on a really great show. I felt like I was 14 again, especially when Phil, Dave, and I, in a crazed fit of nostalgia, all pushed up to the front of the stage and got in the mosh pit. I was quickly reminded of my advancing years when, during "Punk Rock Show", I got kicked in the face by a stage diver and nearly blacked out. Things like that didn't use to phase me at all. I got my first battle scar in years, a bloody lip, and I wore it proudly as we headed back to the car. It was totally worth it.

The story is that apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. Here are the markup guidelines:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Mark in red the books you LOVE.
4. Reprint this list in your blog

The List:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
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
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. The 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
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 - read to me
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 Meany - 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 Marte
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
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