Christmas in July

Hubby got a new camera last weekend and has been taking pictures of our local flora and fauna(fauna to follow). This reminds me of Christmas because of the bright red berries. I've never seen so many berries on the bushes, but we've never had such a mild, rainy spring before either. It's called a Skunk Bush, also a Fragrant Sumac, Lemon Sumac, Polecat Bush, Rhus trilobata, take your pick. You'll probably be seeing the picture again in late December along with wishes for a Merry Christmas.

It Works Again

I changed a setting in our browser's security setting and it works now. Not sure if it was something I did or a coincidence. Thanks.

Now I can't think of anything to write.

This coming Friday is the last day of my online summer school class. It's getting harder and harder to complete the assignments. The assignments are harder, my attention is wandering to stuff at my new job and because it's summer and I'm usually doing some heavy duty housecleaning this time of year and it's not getting done and there are video games not being played and books not being read.

Anyhoo, I'm sure glad I aced the easy stuff cause I ain't acing anything now. Just counting down the days 'til "School's OUT for SUMMER!"

Top 100 Books

Stole this right off of Philipa's blog.

What books have you read? Bold the ones you have read, italicize the ones you are planning on reading and underline the ones you loved: Some of the children's books I read over the summer when I worked with the Missoula Library Summer Bookmobile program. The quality of the books is part of why I became a chilren's librarian. Other of the children's books I read to my son when he was little. I think he enjoyed most of them or at least knew that a good book would delay bedtime!

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 - Read 1 1/2 of the books. Does that count?
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Read many, many times.
6. The Bible -Bits and pieces, but not the whole thing.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell-
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -Loved the first two of the series. I was reading these when everyone else was reading Harry Potter.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Of course!
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller- Don't remember too much. Read it in college.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare – Most of them anyway.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – I think so. Read some of her books, probably read this one.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – Read aloud to my young son. Probably to delay bedtime.
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 - Hated the movie!
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Read recently to teach to high school students. Yuck, didn't waste their time.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens- Read in college. Remember that at the end of one chapter the heroine was blinded and the next time we read about her, a few chapters later, she was sighted and no mention was made of her blindness. I figured that it was a serialized novel and he just forgot because he had to make a deadline.
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy- I remember being confused by all the names. Everyone had 4 or 5 names. Yesh!
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – LOL
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 Probably. I never cared for Austen, but my English teacher assured me the author was great so a read a bunch of them to see if I could figure out why. Never did.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini-
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres –
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden-
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne-
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - Terrific Victorian Mystery
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding-
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen-
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley-
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez-
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck-
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Tried to read several times. Never could.
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath-
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt -
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker-
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - REad the complete collection while in junior high.
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute-
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
99. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain - I taught this to 8th graders.

Sailing in a sea of grass

So at the beginning of spring, late Friday afternoon, a guy drives down our road towing a boat. He parks it in the field across from our house and leaves it. The next weekend it's the same thing and the following weekend it's an old truck. It seems a guy who lives in Billings owns the lot and just figured it would be a good place to park his junk. I'm guessing it's junk because he's never been out to get the boats to take them to a lake or resevoir. Of course he's not allowed to park junk on the streets of Billings. They have laws against doing things like that. But those of us out here in the country don't mind at all, do we? Just bring your old dogs, cats, kids , trucks, anything that doesn't fit in a city will look better and act better in the country, right? Of course if he'd take care of his property and mow the grass to keep it from drying out and becoming a fire hazard, it wouldn't look like they were floating in a sea of grass. Isn't that nice?

Week End Visit

I had a great visit in Billings this weekend. I arrived just in time to get to visit with cousins who were also visiting dad and bro and then spent a relaxing day that ended in a father / daughter dinner. Sunday morning I got the pleasure of going to church with dad and bro and getting to hear a sermon delivered by said dad. I remember being a little kid and seeing my dad in the pulpit. It made me feel kinda special. It still does. After church I finished up some shopping and enjoyed a grilled salmon steak and some homemade pasta salad and yummy salsa.


The Wimbleton tennis finals were on TV and was called to a halt because of rain. I jokingly said I'd better hit the road before I ran into a storm myself. I shoulda left sooner. I drove into a horrible storm complete with hail and blinding sheets of rain. The hill on the way home was a stream of red water as it poured down and washed the dirt away. I made it home safely and it continued to rain for 2 more hours. 2 inches of rain in less than 3 hours. Anywhere else and we'd have a flood, but in SE Montana, where 2 inches of rain in a season is a lot, it just soaked up the water and the next day was bright and green again.

If it means anything to you at all, you know who won the tennis match. If it doesn't, why should I tell you?

Happy 4th of July

Click on the title and answer some of the questions from the new "Citizenship Test."