I love to read. Besides knitting it is the one thing I could do almost all the time. I think that reading has kept me sane… so, when I saw this meme at http://knitv.com/ I decided to fill it out just to see how many I had read. Keep in mind these books are the top unrad books…

Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in Librarything.

The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, underline those on you read for school.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (and watched every movie version!)
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange (I couldn’t get through the vocabulary in the book but I saw the movie fully.)
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

This is just a small list… I know there are many more books that I have read in my lifetime. I really wish I had kept a list of all of them. Just to know! I don’t think I could ever just remember all the books, but with a list I know which I have and which I haven’t read at some point in time.

So, a few weeks back my son had a screening with a childhood development person from here in town. I called them because when we got back from our Christmas vacation I realized that something was different about my son and his cousins. He didn’t really play with them – didn’t really want to and didn’t really pick up on how to. His verbal, and conversation skills were far behind what his cousins were. There were other things as well. His paranoia at the vacuum cleaner or the dryer buzzer. The way he echoed whatever we asked him – the way he can count to twenty (but only when he sings) knows the alphabet, and can read some words, the fact that he is almost four and has no interest (and for a long time was scared) in toilet training.

  Oh right, the screening – yes, we had the screening. From that play session they think he has PDD-NOS, it is on the autistic spectrum. Next Wednesday, the 20th, he has his official assessment with 4-5 evaluators in our home. Then on the Wednesday after that they will meet with us again to let us know the official outcome. They will let us know about speech therapy, and who knows what else. I haven’t really been knitting. Everytime I do my mind drifts and ponders my son, and I feel like my heart is breaking. I know that it could be worse, but this is something that I don’t know how to handle. I keep reading all that I can, and wondering, and waiting for what will come next. I have my own appointment on Thursday with a psychiatrist. Yeah, I am not dealing well with this at all. Nope… I think I am losing it.

You’re the time of day right around sunrise, when the sky is still a pale bluish gray. The streets are empty, and the grass and leaves are a little bit sparkly with dew. You are the sound of a few chirpy birds outside the window. You are quiet, peaceful, and contemplative. If you move slowly, it’s not because you’re lazy – it’s because you know there’s no reason to rush. You move like a relaxed cat, pausing for deep stretches that make your muscles feel alive. You are long sips of tea or coffee (out of a mug that’s held with both hands) that slowly warm your insides just as the sun is brightening the sky.

I got my yarn for the Secret of the Stole ii!!!

Yep, for the past week I have been to ill to knit. It is all I could manage to get my butt to work, and keep myself going for a bit after I got home to spend some time with my little schmoo. I suppose I am feeling a bit better today, and I have some hopes of finding some time to knit. Have to clean up the house first though!!!

 Last night Russell and I did actually go on a date. Little schmoo’s adopted Grammie really wanted to babysit, and we really wanted to let her! Well, we went to dinner. After that I felt too ill to do anything else and we came home and I crawled into our bed. I felt so old, but where we went to eat was more like a pub than a nice quiet restaurant…. it was just way too loud in there! By the time we left I really felt like I was getting a migraine, and I was right. I woke up at 4:30 this morning, and it hurt sooo much I thought I was going to pass out. Russell got me some meds, and let me lay there. Then he even made me coffee and breakfast this morning!!! I feel soooo special!

Knitting update soon, hopefully!!!

So, after posting all those WIP I thought I should list what they are… Just couldn’t seem to do it in the same post…

• The blue scarf is the stitch pattern of My So-Called Scarf on the Sheep in the City blog
• Square cake from the current issue of knitty.com (I just started this on the 4th)
• Almost finished brown sock in worsted weight Malabrigo
• Hedgehog from Crafyalien on etsy… needs felted, stuffed and face sewn on.

Secret of the Stole II is about to start up on January 18th. I just joined yesterday, and I am ordering my yarn today from knitpicks.com. Love that place.

I decided last night that I wanted to start a blog since I like reading them so much… Never realized how much thought could be put into a title for the darn thing. I still don’t know if I am happy with this one, but it will do for now. How does anyone come up with a title for a blog? I think it might be harder than coming up with a title for a book. Because really, you can wait until you are done with the book before you pick a title… by the end you know what the book is all about, and what the overall theme is. With starting a blog I know that I want it to be about knitting, but I also just want to let people know that I am going to talk about whatever I feel like on any given day depending on what is running through my thoughts.

 Last night I also got an urge to make a cell phone sock. A little bamboo yarn, and about an hour and there it was… Picture to follow when I get home and upload a photo. It was the quickest knit ever!!!

I have a few other things still on the needles from 2007 – maybe next Wednesday I will do a WIP day. Will see how that goes. Very good possibility since I got a spiffy new camera for Christmas.

 Since it is the beginning of a brand new year I will share my resolutions.

• Start doing yoga again
• Lose 10-15 pounds
• Quit smoking
• Read at least two books a month
• Finish at least two knitted items a month
• Spend more time with my son
• Laugh more with my Chicken
• Work on getting my son ready for school (& potty-trained)