History of Reading

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. I've bolded the ones I've read and the ones Jeremiah read are in italic

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter - 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'Urbervilles
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 - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
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 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 - Alice Sebold
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 - 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

If you're reading this consider yourself "tagged"! I'm curious to see what you've read.

Before

Here is a picture of my hair before I cut off about 9 inches.

Good bye Childhood

These pictures to you make look like hills of dirt, but let me tell you what they really are. As a child we spent hours upon hours in these hills, we called them "the fields" We had many adventures in the "fields" . One time my sister Carrie, a friend of ours and I went out seeking an adventure in the "field". We found a large puddle of muddy water. Some how we ended up in this puddle and played in it for hours. We went home dripping with mud and laughing with the memory we just made. Another time Carrie, another friend Mike and Laura and I went out sledding on the "Hill". Well some how Laura sat on a cactus. So we decided it was time to head home. One the way Laura was in so much pain and tired she decided to sit down and sat on another cactus. By the time we made it home Laura had sat in 3 different cactus and was in much pain. We had a chocolate factory ( a wall of dirt we used to make mud pies and other treats), we went mountain biking and had an amazing childhood in the "fields" But now they are making way for the future. They are in the mist of taking down all the hills to make room for a new Jr. High and a 600 unit apartment complex. Though parts of this is really good for Casper, I am sad to say goodbye to the most amazing hill you will ever sled on. One side of this hill was very steep and had a big ditch at the bottom. And you had to hope to get enough speed to jump the ditch or you might end up like one of my friend who broke her leg when she landed in the ditch( I was to chicken ever to go down that side). So Goodbye Childhood. I loved the memories I made in the "fields". I think that saddest part for me is I was looking forward to my children going out and having their own adventures in the "fields".

One Tired Girl

The other day Isabelle was being very whinny so Jeremiah tried giving her a horsey ride. Well she ended up falling asleep on him .

Then he decided he needed a nap too.

Jackson Hole

A couple weekends ago I got to go to Jackson hole to see my cousin get married. I brought along Joseph and Isabelle since Jeremiah was staying at home taking care of my Dad. Here are just a few things we did.

The horse (Freckles) Isabelle is on she rode around for about an hour. Everytime I tried to get her off she refused. The man was very nice and let her keep on riding. He even gave her a little stuffed horse that looked like Freckles, whick Isabelle now sleeps with every night.

Squirrel Problems

Well we finally got a new camera and this is the first picture I took.

The funniest part is that the bird feeder laying on the porch is suppose to be squirrel proof. My brother Jacob and I had witnessed this squirrel trying to get at the bird feeder on Thursday with no success. On Friday I was passing the kitchen doors when I saw this sight and hurried and grabbed the camera so I could show my mom when she got home from work. My mom, brother and I left town Friday evening and got home Sunday to find out the squirrel with a buddy had knocked it down again plus Jeremiah had witnessed it eating a bird. I didn't know Wyoming had such crazy squirrels.