Pamela's House of Blues

P.O.E.M.

The perfect T-shirt for an English Major, as well as the perfect meme:

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

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
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D 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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John SteinbeckAlice
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’dolin - Louis De Bernieres Mans
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-time - 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
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
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

80/100 - not bad!  Miss Sackett of High March School in Beaconsfield, who taught me to read, would be proud!

Leaving sleeve island ...

While I enjoyed the mindless increases, it feels good to be able to leave sleeve island after only a week on its balmy beach ...

Finishing the sleeves marks the halfway point on this sweater.  Next, the sleeves and body get joined in the round.  Then we begin the raglan decreases -- after all the sleeve increases every 4 rows, we now reverse the process and start decreasing every 4th row.  After a few rows, the center steek is created with the opening at the bottom for the button placket and then we knit round and round until the neck shaping (and the intarsia sheep on the back) is reached.  This means that today I need to finish the aborted trip to the button shop -- I hope the owner doesn't have another unannounced airport run on the schedule!

Puppy Stuff

All of our hard work last weekend really paid off  -- today, Ghillea is Lonetree Turn Back Time HT, JHD! He earned his Junior Herding Dog title at TASK Farms' first AHBA trial.  He had extraordinarily nice sheep on Saturday so it was a nice way to start out.  He held his downs consistently and was not overly pushy.  The sheep thanked him for his nice manners and I thanked the sheep for a nice walk in the park.

Today, he really had to work for it since the sheep really were not happy about leaving the flock to be worked by the hairy beast.  But he did a nice job, again held his downs, changed direction easily to balance the sheep so we could go where we needed to and did a very nice job of holding the sheep off of the gate for the re-pen -- something we had never practiced.

Changing direction ...

The long march ...

Coming around ...

Eye on the prize ...
 

Putting the toys back in the toybox ...

and that makes herding title number 3!

A bonus for the weekend was getting to see Joker again.  This not-so-little baby was born on April 1 and I first saw her when she was about 10 days old.  Now, she is weaned and out on her own with the big horses.  She reached her nose through the fence to meet Ghil and got a Beardie kiss.

Struttin' your stuff

So this weekend was all about the critters -- Ghil and me trying to learn to be a better team ...

He has what it takes  but, unfortunately, he also has me as a handler and I am struggling -- but not giving up on this.  My legs gave out long before Ghil's or the sheep's did.

Just to put a little fiber content into this post, this is the flock from which I got a lovely Dorset fleece this spring -- the sample spun up much softer than I expected and it will make a great pair of gloves and some mittens. 

And the ranch was filled with critters -- not only sheep and ducks and Rottweilers and Australian Cattle Dogs and Border Collies and the cutest 8 week old Border Collie puppies ever, but lots of lovely chickens who function not as potential meals, but as the insect eradication squad.  I loved these great yellow legs and speckled feathers ...

The San Pasqual Valley is an agriculture preserve with palm tree nurseries, vineyards, sod farms AND it seems quite a few Ostrich ranches.  Now, I knew that birds regularly molt, but this has to be the UGLIEST bare butt in Mother Nature's collection. Imagine tootling down the lovely winding road to my friend's ranch and rounding the curve to be confronted by this -- I don't think I will ever look at an Ostrich feather boa in quite the same way again ...

Moving right along ...

Just 2 more inches on the main body and then I am off for at least a week (probably longer) on "sleeve island." 

Then the sleeves will join the body to form the yoke and we will be on the home stretch.

My visit to the button shop last Sunday did not go well -- as I walked in, the owner was preparing to tape a note to the door stating that the shop was closing early (as in RIGHT NOW!) so he could pick up family at the airport.  BUMMER!  now I have to try to find time for a return trip.  The question is pewter buttons, sheep buttons, something else entirely?  Fortunately, or unfortunately, this shop has way too many options to consider -- all of them fabulous.

Ghil and I are taking the sweater with us to "sheep camp" this weekend -- 3 days of non-stop work to get his little fuzzy brain on the right track for our AHBA trial next weekend.  The goal is nice, calm slow work so the sheep think they are just out for a Sunday stroll, rather than becoming a menu item for Sunday dinner!

Now we are 4

The Fawn and Brown panel is done ...

and here are all four Beardies, ready to join into the round

but first I have to weave in all those ends!

It is going to be mindless stockinette knitting for about the next 2 weeds until the sleeves are joined and the steek for for the button placket is created, so there won't be many photos until then.  But I still have to find just the right buttons so I think I will go over to fabulous button shop on Third Street and start the hunt. Unfortunately, the buttons there are so alluring and unique that it is quite easy to spend more on buttons than on the rest of the sweater.

Since it has been more than a year since the "youngster" made an appearance here, this is his last foray onto the Beauty Pageant circuit where he went Best of Winners in the "please let it be over soon" quest for that final major and his conformation Champion title. We won't even speak about SOME PEOPLE who break majors ...