Quickly since the last update:
1. sold my new sewing machine - didn't like it. especially the reverse button.
2. old trustworthy machine is broken - need to take it somewhere to be serviced.
3. got engaged... officially, I guess. the jerk bought me a ring too - even though I told him not to :P
4. we're trying to move up to the Burlington, VT area. right now we're applying for jobs without too much luck... well, I'm not having too much luck. Ryan pretty much has a job once the employer has more money roll in with some anticipated contracts.
ok, and now since I'm bored:
Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series- J.K. 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'Ubervilles-Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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
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 - 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 (though I'm not sure if it was the abridged version or not)
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 Inferno - Dante
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 Madam 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 (I read the French version!)
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
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I haven't updated this in a while
I've been busy... kind of.
Our office has officially moved to Waltham. It's a very nice building but the downside (which we all knew it would be) is the commute. I leave the house at 5:30am to get in at 6:30... assuming there are no major accidents shutting down both sides of 128 (like there was yesterday. twice.). There are now two other people in my dept close to my age (meaning they're not old enough to be my father) so that's nice. I don't feel like it's me vs the old men anymore when it comes to brining them into the 21st century with updated software programs.
I got a new motorcycle! A Honda Shadow Spirit (750cc). It's so much nicer than the Honda Rebel (250cc) I had before. So. much. nicer.
But... it's been raining. A LOT. There are usually around 8 days of rain in the month of June for New England. This year I think we had (no joke) 25 days with rain. [[This article confirms the ridiculous amount of rain]]
And July hasn't started off too well either. Today's downpours/heavy thunderstorms are flooding a lot of roads and causing a lot of power outages.
All this rain means I haven't been able to ride my new motorcycle. :(
hmm... what else...
I'm making a circus jacket thing for QueenVanna. :) It'll be red and sparkly.
aaaaand I've been trying to go to the gym and get back in shape. No change on the scale so far, but the muscles in my left leg are finally starting to return, so I'll count that as progress.
Our office has officially moved to Waltham. It's a very nice building but the downside (which we all knew it would be) is the commute. I leave the house at 5:30am to get in at 6:30... assuming there are no major accidents shutting down both sides of 128 (like there was yesterday. twice.). There are now two other people in my dept close to my age (meaning they're not old enough to be my father) so that's nice. I don't feel like it's me vs the old men anymore when it comes to brining them into the 21st century with updated software programs.
I got a new motorcycle! A Honda Shadow Spirit (750cc). It's so much nicer than the Honda Rebel (250cc) I had before. So. much. nicer.
But... it's been raining. A LOT. There are usually around 8 days of rain in the month of June for New England. This year I think we had (no joke) 25 days with rain. [[This article confirms the ridiculous amount of rain]]
And July hasn't started off too well either. Today's downpours/heavy thunderstorms are flooding a lot of roads and causing a lot of power outages.
All this rain means I haven't been able to ride my new motorcycle. :(
hmm... what else...
I'm making a circus jacket thing for QueenVanna. :) It'll be red and sparkly.
aaaaand I've been trying to go to the gym and get back in shape. No change on the scale so far, but the muscles in my left leg are finally starting to return, so I'll count that as progress.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
more lights!
Every time I turn on the lights for my sewing area, I still think this looks a little weird - having recessed lighting plus pendant lamps. Especially where the pendants over my cutting table are kinda close to the recessed lights.
Oh well. It works.
Oh well. It works.
Friday, January 16, 2009
What I'd Rather Be Doing
What I'd rather be doing than sitting at my desk:
We went to Ikea last night. The intention was to get tables/desks. For the basement. Ryan wanted a table/desk primarily for soldering stuff. He's been playing around with electronics lately... for the grill. The desk in the office is too small and gets too cluttered if he tries to work up there. We still have an unused corner of the basement, so he wanted a table/desk to put down there so he wouldn't have to play mad scientist in the office.
Okay, so that's table/desk #1.
I kind of had an idea that I should get another table for my sewing area to use under my cutting mat. The problem is that my cutting mat is huge. I love it, but it doesn't fit on the table that I had which is now home to my sewing machine and eventually my serger once I move it over there. I was eyeing the Ikea dining room table that is the same style as the sewing machine table and my (custom!) ironing board. But then as we went through the desk/office area, I found a table that was on sale... if I bought 2 of those tables it would a) be cheaper than the dining room table I looked at and b) be larger than the dining room table I looked at. I'm hoping the cutting mat will fit on it. If not, then I'll use one of these tables for the sewing machines, and use the older table for the cutting mat again. Why is it so difficult to find appropriately-sized sewing room furniture? :P
So there's table/desk #2 and #3.
THEN as we went through the bedroom section, we start looking at bed frames. We totally did not go in there to look at bedroom stuff, but you know how Ikea is. You have to look at everything. Right now, with the frame we're currently using, the bed shakes if someone rolls over or gets out of bed. It shakes a lot. It bothers me more than it bothers Ryan, but I think he was getting tired of hearing me complain about it, so we ended up getting a new bed frame. This new one should be a lot sturdier than the one we're using, plus it'll allow the mattress to be lower (we won't have to use the box springs anymore). Aaaand it'll fit under the window. Right now the top of the frame is above the window sill, so the sill is getting a little beat up.
Everything is still in the boxes, sitting on our dining room floor.... which eventually I'd like to get a new dining room table too, but that'll have to wait. :)
My stupid foot is doing well. 3 1/2 weeks after surgery, I went for an xray. I expected to have another cast put on after the xrays were taken, but my doctor walked into the exam room and said, "Well, it's been less than 4 weeks... but you're completely healed already. I don't know how but I'm not going to torture you by putting another cast on." Yay! So she kept the back half of the cast on, wrapped it in an ace bandage, and then sent me on my way (back) home to get my clonky velcro boot. I can already walk around the house fairly well without the boot, but to make sure my doctor will still be happy, I'm wearing it whenever I leave the house.
- setting up my new tables in my sewing room
- reading my book
- sewing
- buried under the blankets in bed watching a movie
- scanning old pictures
We went to Ikea last night. The intention was to get tables/desks. For the basement. Ryan wanted a table/desk primarily for soldering stuff. He's been playing around with electronics lately... for the grill. The desk in the office is too small and gets too cluttered if he tries to work up there. We still have an unused corner of the basement, so he wanted a table/desk to put down there so he wouldn't have to play mad scientist in the office.
Okay, so that's table/desk #1.
I kind of had an idea that I should get another table for my sewing area to use under my cutting mat. The problem is that my cutting mat is huge. I love it, but it doesn't fit on the table that I had which is now home to my sewing machine and eventually my serger once I move it over there. I was eyeing the Ikea dining room table that is the same style as the sewing machine table and my (custom!) ironing board. But then as we went through the desk/office area, I found a table that was on sale... if I bought 2 of those tables it would a) be cheaper than the dining room table I looked at and b) be larger than the dining room table I looked at. I'm hoping the cutting mat will fit on it. If not, then I'll use one of these tables for the sewing machines, and use the older table for the cutting mat again. Why is it so difficult to find appropriately-sized sewing room furniture? :P
So there's table/desk #2 and #3.
THEN as we went through the bedroom section, we start looking at bed frames. We totally did not go in there to look at bedroom stuff, but you know how Ikea is. You have to look at everything. Right now, with the frame we're currently using, the bed shakes if someone rolls over or gets out of bed. It shakes a lot. It bothers me more than it bothers Ryan, but I think he was getting tired of hearing me complain about it, so we ended up getting a new bed frame. This new one should be a lot sturdier than the one we're using, plus it'll allow the mattress to be lower (we won't have to use the box springs anymore). Aaaand it'll fit under the window. Right now the top of the frame is above the window sill, so the sill is getting a little beat up.
Everything is still in the boxes, sitting on our dining room floor.... which eventually I'd like to get a new dining room table too, but that'll have to wait. :)
My stupid foot is doing well. 3 1/2 weeks after surgery, I went for an xray. I expected to have another cast put on after the xrays were taken, but my doctor walked into the exam room and said, "Well, it's been less than 4 weeks... but you're completely healed already. I don't know how but I'm not going to torture you by putting another cast on." Yay! So she kept the back half of the cast on, wrapped it in an ace bandage, and then sent me on my way (back) home to get my clonky velcro boot. I can already walk around the house fairly well without the boot, but to make sure my doctor will still be happy, I'm wearing it whenever I leave the house.
Friday, January 2, 2009
yay, Artfire!
I set up an Artfire shop a few weeks ago, but hadn't put anything in it... until today. I was very impressed with the listing process. It's all on one page, none of this 4 or 5-pg crap that Etsy has you go through so it's easy to look everything over and edit something before submitting the item.
Ryan and I *were* in the process of setting up my own shop at kcroteau.com but we've both been a little busy so I'm just going to have that redirect to the Artfire shop for now.
Ryan and I *were* in the process of setting up my own shop at kcroteau.com but we've both been a little busy so I'm just going to have that redirect to the Artfire shop for now.
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