More From the Pig Roast

You can get the food end of the Pig Roast we attended at Pinehold Gardens this past weekend over at BURP! But, here's some additional photos that tell a little bit more of the story.

After all, there were free range chickens!
And a muddy little swine...
Who lived in a hut...
... that turned out to be a happy little OINK! hut...
And there were artistic scenes that revealed themselves in black & white...
...succulent grapes on the vine, so ripe that they filled the air with their sticky-sweet fragrance as we were walking past.There were bees... which we found out later are kept by the farmers at Pinehold to assist in the pollination of their fields.
There were bunches of garlic hanging up to dry.
And a nice man named Orlando (on the right), who tapped the beer kegs for us when we arrived.
In this photo, you'll spy a ghostly apparition in the background... looking remarkably like Peef.
Oh, wait. That was Peef. :)

How Many Have YOU Read?

So, Jess got me interested in trying out this "books thingy."
Apparently, the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below. I simply don't believe it.

So, let's see how I fare.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog.

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 (most)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (it's truly amazing I've gotten this far w/o having read it)
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
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 Meany - 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
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
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 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
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


*whew*
Well, that was relatively painless! Now it's your turn.
What are some of YOUR favorite books?

ARRRrrrr.....

As you may recall, International Talk Like a Pirate Day is one of our favorite holidays of the year. It is a day when our innate silliness is condoned and our only concern is to have a little bit of fun. And we all know we can never have enough of that in our lives.

Since we look forward to the celebration soooo much, and I love to bring the Booty in for my co-workers, I planned ahead.

This was mistake #1. The past few years, we have bought the Booty the night before or the morning of TLaPD and it isn't a problem. Well, this year we bought 2 HUGE bags from Costco and I stored them in the pantry. We left in a hurry this morning, and what do you think I left in the pantry? If you guessed soup, you would be correct. But not all together on the right subject. If you guessed Booty, you would be absolutely correct!

This is how it played out... I drop Lo off at work. I cranked up the tunes and race off to work. At 16 minutes after 8, I pull into the parking lot. I park the car. And that's when I start feeling a little bit empty-handed. I am not taking anything into the office. This is odd. I usually have a messenger bag or lunch or something with me. But that wasn't all I was missing. I knew there was something else. I approached the door when it hit me like a ship hitting shore on a foggy night. I FORGOT ME BOOTY!!!!! ARRRRRRRGH!!!!

I was not a happy pirate. I stormed into the office and told the landlubbers to leave me alone. When some of the local wenches tried to calm my spirits with rum, I pushed it aside and told them that I was not a worthy pirate. How on earth could a pirate by the name of Cap'n Jack Bloodbucket forget that it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day??? And how on earth could this pirate forget to bring in the booty for his horde? Aye, it was quite the fright.

I decided instead of walking the plank, I would try to redeem myself. I would raise the Jolly Roger flag and be proud of the day. I could make this right. My heart was still in it afterall. I started calling my co-workers by their new pirate names (which I found for them at this handy-dandy site). The Jolly Roger (which I hung using tape and staples like any good office pirate would) flew proudly from the ceiling over my cube! This Will Be the Best TLaPD EVER! Turns out, this is Mistake #2.

Now, it just so happens that I had to leave me post on me ship to run home and meet the roofers who have yet to fix our leaky roof. As I drive home on my speed boat, I practice ways to tell them to "Walk the plank!" while still maintaining some sense of me dignity. After much adieu, I decide that it might be safest if I suppress me pirate persona for an hour or so. After all, I already missed a few perfectly good pirate hours this morning. So, another hour of talking like a "normal" adult might be the best thing at this point. (The good thing about all of this is that while I was at home talking normally with the roofers, I could capture the missing booty I spoke of earlier, and bring it back with me to the office.)

Once I finished me business with the blasted roofers, I get back on board me ship with me Booty firmly in tow. All of a sudden, I see a blinky light on me telephone (This is the 21st cent. and I have a very high tech ship). Curses. Cap'n Poopypants says -- since he is in command -- I can't hang my flag in these parts. I can either accept his challange and fight, or I can simply take down the flag and hang it on my ship's wall where it will be less obvious.

After much thought, and a bit of pirate frustration, I choose the easy (and less bloody) path. I take me flag and I hang it up in me cube. After all, I've fought me enough battles today already!!

Whew! What a day to be a pirate! I hope ye all have a splendid day! And don't forget the Booty or the bottle of Rum!







Cap'n Jack Bloodbucket

Crazy Stuff About Peef

Here's a pseudo-meme inspired by MTP over at Floor 22 (but this time, from the female of the house).

15 things about Peef that I think most other people wouldn't know.

1. Peef really objected to the nickname "Peef" at first.
2. Peef hated asparagus until about 1999 when he tried it roasted.
3. Peef did not graduate from college in 1998 as many suspected.
4. Peef is a great deal smarter than he thinks he is.
5. Peef will graduate from college in 2008. YAY!
   
6. Peef's arms and legs shed profusely.
7. Coincidentally, Peef's favorite word lately is hirsute.
8. Peef sometimes avoids returning phone calls.
9. If you try to steal the covers away from Peef at 5 am, he will get up rather than steal them back.
10. Peef uses the words shallot, scallion, and scallop interchangeably.
11. Peef likes to eat mustard on everything. Or at least that's how it seems.
12. Peef is a clothes horse.
13. Peef can be sneaky at times.
14. Peef has the ability to buy the best Christmas presents EVER.
15. If you hand Peef two wooden paint stir sticks in the home improvement store, he can't help but snap them together all the way to the car.

Feel free to tell the world about someone you know well!

What's new? Peef Spills the Beans on Life & Home Ownership

We haven't talked in awhile. Sorry about that. I'll get you up to date since we have been a bit busy...

First off, we've been watching political conventions for what seems like weeks on end. FINALLY, this week we have a reprieve and can return to our usual schedule. Well, sort of.

Lo is back in school. She is taking a class on early American Lit. Not super exciting (she's reading Benjamin Franklin, for goodness sake!), but I think she is enjoying it more than she lets on. Since she has reading to get done most nights, we've struck up an agreement of sorts for how we operate on weeknights. We start off cooking together; but, after most of the preparations are completed, she goes off to start her reading and I finish things off. After we eat, she finishes up her reading while I handle the clean-up. It makes for a fairly quiet life most nights, but we're getting on pretty well. As you can see from our posts over there at Burp!, we're still cooking up quite the storm.

On my end, things are settling back down a bit. Having finished off all of my summer school business in August (I made the grade in both Accounting AND Macroeconomics!), I'm looking forward to starting my fall traveling for work. Well, maybe "looking forward" is a bit of an exaggeration. But, a boy has to make plans, or nothing gets done! So, next month, I'm scheduling my semi-annual trip to Seattle, and then maybe another one to New York following that. I might also sneak in a trip to Minneapolis as well, but since I would probably turn that into a weekend adventure, it seems less like a work trip (and that's the sort of thing I like).

In other news, even after five years, I'm still floored by how much work is involved in home ownership. It seems that, despite all of the work we put in over the past few months, we still seem to have a few unfinished projects around the house that we need to finish before the cold winter snow starts blowing. First, we still need to finish painting the garage (we managed to primer it back in July, but we tired of painting in the heat and humidity, so we put the project off for cooler days). In conjunction with that project, I need to take some measurements and make a trip over to the local door shop and get a new wooden service door, which we've been needing for a while. Last winter, a gap in the lower portion of the door got so bad that we had snow blowing right underneath the garage door and drifting into lovely little piles right inside the garage! Finally, we'll soon be looking forward to clearing out the gardens, winterizing the lawn, and digging up and splitting up the perennials. I'm getting tired just thinking about it!

I'd like to think that once winter hits, we'll be through with the household projects. But, it seems they never really end. Once the cold weather hits, we'll simply take to the inside projects! We've got some painting we'd like to do. And the basement could use a bit of cleaning out. Looks like another one of the things we'll be considering this winter is a small renovation to the bedroom as well. We've both been waking up feeling pretty creaky lately... and we're starting to suspect that our 10-year-old mattress is to blame. I think we might be leaning towards a sleep number bed... we ran into one at the State Fair this year, laid down on it, and pretty much fell in love. But, we'll take any suggestions you might want to offer!

Alright, it's getting late. So, I'll let this suffice for now.
But, let's try not to let so much time get between us. It really is good to talk to you...

What you don't know about the Lo

Here's another pseudo-meme inspired by MTP over at Floor 22: 15 things about Lo that I think most other people wouldn't know.

1. Lo is funnier, quirkier, and more whimsical than she may seem
2. Lo is a blanket thief. In the middle of the night, she puts her mask on and takes all of the blankets and tucks them all around her body and refuses to give them up.
   
3. Lo worries more than she should, or maybe just more than me
4. Lo is almost always cold (probably why she likes to steal the blankets)
   
5. Lo is happier staying at home than a night out
   
6. Lo falls asleep after eating sugar
7. Lo can move heavy objects like nobody I know
8. Lo would let you rub her feet or hands for hours
9. If stuck, Lo always finds a way out
10. Lo can sleep longer than you
11. Lo would rather drive. Otherwise she will be out like a light the minute you hit the highway.
12. Lo has a collection of food magazines that go back 10 years or more
    
13. Lo has a hard time sitting still
14. Lo loves a good challenge
    
15. Lo remembers EVERYTHING

Feel free to tell the world about someone you know well!