latter day bohemian

It’s been raining since Wednesday, with few interruptions. My poor garden is taking a beating, but I think it’ll survive. Another red, ripe strawberry is waiting for me to brave the rain to retrieve it.

One week off from coursework, and then I start my two summer classes: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, both taken at GW. I should also be starting my thesis research, but I’m giving myself a few more weeks before tackling that beast.

Today we slept in and skipped church, instead running errands and making brunch for friends out of mostly-local ingredients. I feel a little ick now, but for the most part I’ve been feeling way better with less food guilt (physically and otherwise).

Many congrats to my GSLIS friends who graduated today! I meant to tune in to virtual graduation, but we got busy with brunch and forgot. My apologies.

On Wednesday I fly to Chicago for four days for a meeting. I’m hoping to catch up with Keem and El while I’m there. Too many friends, not enough time, as always.

LibraryThing meme

(From Sonya and Kasia, and I think I might have done this before.)

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing. The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (three times!)
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
88. Beowulf by Anonymous
89. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide by Voltaire
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Happy birthday, Gram!

My grandma turned 90 today. I couldn’t be there, but I did get to talk to her this morning, and damn, she sounds great for a 90 year old.

Walk for the Animals

In a little over a week, Shane and I will be participating in the Animal Welfare League of Arlington’s annual Walk for the Animals. The Animal Welfare League is where we adopted Mina, and where we took Sid when she was too sick to wait for the vet. We’re walking and raising money in honor of Sid, who we miss dearly, despite the wonderful friend we’ve found in Mina.

I’m not going to try to do some hard sell here - but if you’re so inclined, I’d love to have your sponsorship for this walk. They’ve set up a super-easy donation page, which lets you do all the donating online - no need to send me money, etc. There’s no need for us to even know where it’s coming from. My fundraising goal is $150.

Thank you for your support!

Spring has arrived!

And I am sunburned.

Briefly

It’s the last weekend in April, and things seem to be getting crazy busy.

We spent last weekend in New York, celebrating SB’s 28th birthday. Happy birthday, SB! We had a great time, saw lots of friends, and ate lots of things that are bad for us.

Thursday was the last day of metadata. I should be hard at work on my final project, but instead I just planted our balcony garden - herbs, lettuce, two kinds of tomatoes, strawberries, and maybe some onions.

I’ve been taking advantage of the nice weather to take 2-3 mile walks on my lunch, which this week resulted in my first sunburn of the season. It is very weird to already have so much color!

Tonight and tomorrow SB and I are going to see the CUBS vs the Nationals. I’ll be cheering for the former, SB for the latter. There’s a chance of rain, but that can’t dampen my enthusiasm.

UNINTENTIONAL ASPIC

Courtesy of Jenny B, who I hope to see while we’re in NYC for the weekend.

Grandpa Update

Grandpa came home from the hospital yesterday. Mom reports that he’s up and around - but very weak, so things like walking downstairs for breakfast, then back upstairs to shower are wearing him out. I guess this week they’re really trying to assess whether he’ll get stronger as a result of the activity necessary to live at home - or if the time has finally come for my grandparents to move out of their house. They’ve been guilt-tripping us with that threat for the last decade - but at this point I think we’d all be relieved, not sad, if they followed through on it.

Thank you all for your thoughts and encouragement.

Things I haven’t had in way too long:

• sushi (although I’m still a wuss and can’t really do the fresh fish deal)
• Kopi’s tuna salad salad
• curry that didn’t come out of a microwaveable packet
• guacamole from Taco Loco
• Passover dinner with Hannah and Sarah

Music recommendations?

I’ve been reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise and have realized that I need more classical music in my life. There’s just so much, though, that I don’t know where to start. Any recommendations, friends?