I’m a generalist, or maybe just undecided.
OK, I’m not that surprised that the IRS is auditing our 2005 return. But if they think the medical expenses that year were too high, I can’t wait till they see the itemized deductions for 2006 (two ivf/pgd cycles instead of just one).
A recent gift of clothes for Zebediah included a tag with an announcement of a “Most Adorable” baby contest.
I briefly considered sending in a photo. After all, he is adorable, and a free trip to New York City would be nice. I think some of his hand-me-downs were B.T. Kids brand, so I might even have a photo of him in the brand somewhere.
Keep in mind that I think beauty contests are silly, and infant/child ones even more so. A photo contest doesn’t seem as bad, but one prize is a photo shoot and appearance in a magazine ad, so it would still be a bit stage-motherish. Not to mention introducing the kid to modeling, a career not known for contributing to mental and physical health.
I can only conclude that either motherhood has warped my mind even more than I thought, or I have been living in the South too long.
I saw this meme at Jody’s. I’ve got a catalog for Zebediah at Library Thing, but I haven’t used the unread tag myself.
The rules, from Penguin Unearthed.
What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded [or were bookclub choices that you never read that month]. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Below is the unread list as of June 20, 12:33 am. It’s got 200 books at this point. This is the raw ranking. The numbers in parentheses give an idea of how the weighted ranking differs.
I should add another way to mark the books I have taught.
It is sad that I cannot remember whether I read some of these for classes. I was so sleep deprived in college that even when I had time to finish the reading, I apparently did not remember it well. My husband has all the Jane Austin novels, so one summer I read them. I was sure that I had been assigned Sense and Sensibility, but not read it. When I found my own copy, though, it had all sorts of marginal notes in my handwriting, so there you are.
I disliked Foucault’s Pendulum intensely. I’m fairly sure I haven’t picked up anything by Eco since then.
I have read the Silmarillion more than once, but I find it so much less satisfying than Lord of he Rings that I have never been interested in reading any other posthumous Tolkein works.
I read Moll Flanders in college. According to the professor, I was the only one in the class who liked it.
I bought the Satanic Verses when I was traveling. I realized later that it must have been an unauthorized copy, since the book had not come out in paperback yet officially. It got lost (left in the taxi) along with my backpack (and eight weeks’ worth of undeveloped film) the day I returned to Old Colony from that trip.
Lisa V. recently (or not so recently) had a post about imagining where you want to be in 5/10/15 years. [I can't find the post now, either because I'm too tired or it's one of the ones she took down.]
I’m not ready to do that quite yet, but as I am heading off to my 20th college reunion, I can look back.
I did not attend the 15th reunion, because between a wedding planned shortly afterwards and my husband’s recent job loss, we didn’t have the time or money. 2003: We got married. My husband got his diagnosis. I stopped being vegetarian.
At the 10th reunion, I had recently defended my dissertation, but had not yet landed my tenure track job. After I got the tt job the next year, I attended my 11th reunion before driving cross country, since it would be the last time I’d be within driving distance of the college. What? Your college doesn’t have a reunion for every class every year? Your reunion probably hasn’t been on the cover of Psychology Today either. Anyway, I really only stopped by for part of a day, and mainly spent the weekend with a friend nearby.
At the 5th reunion, I had recently been discharged from the “behavioral sciences unit” of a hospital. I was about to take a year off from graduate school for full-time language study in Taipei.
20 years ago, I was finishing up my last semester of college. My senior thesis had been handed in in April, but I had comprehensive exams and term papers to write. I didn’t get the offer of the internship in Old Colony until sometime in May, so I was deciding between that and a position in the Peace Corps.
I only go to the reunions when I am sure a couple of my closest remaining college friends will be there, because I tend to get flashbacks to feeling like a complete social misfit freshman year. The people I know best tend to have a love/hate relationship with our college. When we arrived on campus for the 5th reunion, as we were parking the car, both the people with me said they got stomach aches every time they came back, yet one of them had been back every year since graduation and the other had been to a couple of reunions already. In my case, I think I got an excellent education, but I was also very unhappy a lot of the time. It is where I first ended up in therapy, though I didn’t get the big Major Depression diagnosis till graduate school.
To announce that the Luo family has survived the spring 2008 academic semester, more or less.
It is rather sad, though, that I couldn’t even pay enough attention to the blog to publish a couple of posts that were 95% written already.
I have 3085 posts waiting to read on bloglines, but if you are reading this, then yours is probably one of the few blogs I have managed to keep up with.
We closed on our new house a couple of weeks ago.
At the time I started writing this post, a couple of days after closing, it didn’t seem quite real yet.
I hired a chimney sweep first. It made me feel all Mary Poppinish. He wore a chimney sweep hat, which distracted nicely from his old t-shirt (from my university!) and jeans. His two assistants didn’t get into the Victorian vibe.
We found our mailbox by the method of trying the key in every box in the set. Don’t get me started on mailboxes (Mr. Luo says, “really, DON’T get her started) but this is the kind where the little locked mailboxes for a bunch of houses are all in one place.
Homeownership has already changed us. Despite the fact that the small lot (teeny-tiny backyard) was a selling point for us, we perused at length a brochure about local plants that I picked up at the library. Hey, it was partly written by the Botanical Center Named after Famous Recently Deceased Former First Lady, and who can say no to her?
I have not quite decided whether the tub in the second bathroom is damaged and in need of replacement or just not well scrubbed. I got it a little cleaner today while waiting for the chimney sweep. I can’t be the only person in the world who uses some elbow grease on a tub, can I? Based on a sample of my husband and the seller of this house, yes. (It’s at times like this that I worry about turning into my step-mother.)
I’m glad I did a lot of de-cluttering before Zebediah was born, because I don’t have time for it now. We haven’t even started packing. Since we have the apartment until the end of the month, we were waiting till the things that need fixing are done before moving, but now our moving date seems very close.
1. Music from my youth playing in the supermarket or other such places. I always wonder how annoying it is to people who are fans of music from a more recent decade. I should note that anything I recognize from my high school years has to have been very popular, since I didn’t listen to the radio much, so what I remember is from dances, parties, and the radios in friends’ cars.
Junkfood science weighs in on the issue.
I missed my NaBloPoMo post on day 9. How embarrassing.
I was so tired that I couldn’t think of anything to write, and thought I’d come back to it, but then I was so tired I forgot.
Probably the post would have said, “I’m so tired.” And perhaps, “Is it bad that we are making all our major home-buying decisions after Zebediah goes to bed, when I am always so tired?”
