Barbara's blog

Amazing!

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These flowers are growing on a vine on a fence around a vacant lot in Culver City, CA.

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Holy crazy stamens, Batman!

And then there was one....

I'm sorry to report that Huggy passed away on April 25, 2009.

 

Huggy (that's Miss Huggums to you!)

Leaving me in a house with only one cat, a situation I haven't been in for about 15 years.  Here is the only one left...

 

Solomon and wtf turkeys?

Carefully protecting us from the wild turkeys.

The Oz! (aka, my Ozzie)

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Okay, fellow Voxers, this is a test.  Find the "period" objects in the picture.  I'll start, if you look to the right of Ozzie's head, you'll notice a pair of clogs.

Here we go....

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High School Graduation!!!!!1!!!1

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nuff said.

Why do we do it?

As I sit here trying to work, I wonder about all the animals I've loved and lost.  My Ozzie, dog from growing up.  I loved him so much.  When he died, I couldn't speak of him for months, until finally my BFF had to ask me if he was dead because I just couldn't speak of it.  I said yes, but I can't talk about it now.

And now, my Huggy.  I'm waiting to hear if she has congestive heart failure or cancer.  Not very good choices for a seventeen year old cat.  Congestive heart failure killed Ozzie.  I've never had a vet suggest I put an animal down, just like that.  Of course I said no, I'll take her home to die.

Was it worth it?  This pain, this heartbreak.  Yes, it was.  But it hurts so much.

 

 

Huggy

 

Rotten, uncooperative fluffness!

So you know how it is.  You need to sort out some papers and the cats want to help by sitting on them.  Solly might even attack one in case it's trying to escape.  So I want to get my daughter's student loan papers in date order and put them in a looseleaf.  Huggy keeps lying on the looseleaf.  But determination and perseverance pay off.  I have the papers in single year piles and I am highlighting the dates so organizing them will be easy.  I get up to get the looseleaf dividers and the cats are sleeping in perfect parallelness right down to the curve of their tails.  It's adorable.  All the paper shenanigans are forgiven.  I run to get the camera.  By the time I get back I see this...

 

 

Solomon and Huggy

They have moved...rotten, uncooperative fluffness.  (Awfully cute though!)

Cecil the talking sea serpent

As I lay in bed this morning, I looked around my bedroom and thought of the stuff I had to do today.  I was not working today, due to amazingly being caught up at work.  I work per diem, so I can not work if I'm caught up, I just don't get paid.  Marc was painting the bedroom today and being I was home I was going to get to help moving stuff.  Yay.  My eyes fell upon a companion I've had most of my life...Cecil the talking sea serpent.  I got him when I was about three and we've been together ever since.  He didn't go away to college with me, but rather did what most family pets do, waited at home with mom and dad for vacations.

 

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As you can see, he has a string to pull so he talks, however the only thing he has said for a long time is a hissing fuzzy sound and "I'm coming Beanie".  Beanie was his companion on the Beanie and Cecil show, a favorite cartoon.  I thought, I can do this, I'm ready.

Me- "I'm going to throw out Cecil today, it's time."

Marc- "Good put him in the trash."

Me- "Well I want to take some pictures, I can't just let him go.  I've had him since I'm three."

Marc- "Fine, take some pictures and get rid of him."

Me- "Okay."

Now I'm cleaning up some more and taking pictures off the wall.  Marc comes in.

Marc- "Is he gone?"

Me- "No, he's in the living room, I want to take some pictures."

Marc- "Okay."

Now I'm in the living room looking at Cecil.  He's filthy beyond belief and I am allergic to dust.  It's time. 

I think about the beautiful blue stuffed poodle I had, with the shiny diamond eyes that my cousin Ellen gave to me.  One of the eyes got dull, but I still loved her.  Ellen won her at a carnival.  Ellen was probably about 16, so I was six.  Then, if my memory serves me correctly, something got on her and she had to be washed and mom put her in the washing machine.  This was before polyester and acrylic was the norm.  Those items were just being developed and not in every one's home yet.  The poodle didn't make it.

Cecil is falling apart.  His felt trimming is almost gone.  I have to wash my hands everytime I touch him.

 

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He's curved like that so you can wear him on the shoulders.  I did that a lot as a kid.  I feel ready, but what if I'm wrong.  What if it isn't time?  Marc walks in the living room.  "Just put him in the attic", he says.

I don't know what to do.

Sunflowers continued...

As if the sunflowers weren't beautiful enough growing in the garden, it seems that the seeds make a gorgeous pattern

 

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It reminds me of the designs I used to make with a compass.  If you look at the shapes it is so similar.

 

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The Big Read

When reposting, please link to http://www.neabigread.org/ ]
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.

 

 

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
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 (way too upsetting)
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 Hitchhiker'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
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 (too boring)
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 Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (started it, too upsetting)
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (too drawn out)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac .
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' 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 Horrible, horrible, horrible. Couldn't finish it.
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

 

 

Okay, I also highlighted the books I started and never finished and put the reason why next to them.  I think life is too short to read a book you don't like.  I finished the Kite Runner because it was for book group.