Dallying along in the country

My first few days have been very nice. Up early with the cat, I always plan to head back to bed but I find getting up and feeding the cat just wakes me up. I have been working through my thesis, making good progress at the moment, though I know the later chapter need more work. I have been wondering around the garden a lot. Being in the country was meant to be less distracting but instead I find myself outside looking at flowers or checking the raspberry patch.

 Breakfast on the deck, toast, coffee, figs and the Times Literary Supplement.

 Behold my fig!

Behold my breakfast view.

 Yesterday I bought a new scarf at a junk shop, I like it a lot.

Sleeping in the sun. (This is fake, the sun is quite strong and I am very pale and have already got a little burnt, after I took this I put my enormous hat and sunglasses back on.

 Flowers, I like the orange a lot.

 Arty flower shot.

 Pink roses, I have been making some nice vases of fresh flowers.

 Lunch and reading, I finished that book today, so I am off to a good start on my plan to read more.

 Gin and Tonic time! I have made a delicious pesto from the cookbook underneath, capers and walnuts. I am going to have some more now. Yum.

My 2011 to do list...

I have always been a list writer, I blame my Dad, he is a list-a-holic, he often has several different lists running, a long term one, a short term and a daily one, usually written on the backs of old envelopes (which has also led to me being almost unable to throw out old envelopes, I found about 50 cluttering up my cupboard the other day). Sometimes when I pop over now as a grown up (more-or-less) he will have a list of things for me to do (usually along lines of 'fix computer', 'find me an email backup program', 'fix mum's computer'). I do it too, I always have them for my thesis work and for round-the-house and just general lists of desires.

I was de-cluttering the other day and found a stack of old notebooks, I was flicking through them to see if they had spaec in them and I found a list from my teenage years, I am guessing probably for summer '96 or '97. I should have taken a snap of it but I didn't and now it is down in Melbs and I am in the country. It was funny though, amongst more mundane stuff like reading certain books I had written 'Learn the Internet', which I guess I can tick off now. It is funny to think of actually learning the internet, nowadays I feel more like I need to learn to not be on the internet. We had the internet at home quite early on as Mum was a masters student and the uni let her have a free dial up connection. I would sit there trying to find info and things to read, I remember I used to have to use a whole range of search engines to try and find something that was relevant.

Anyhoo that is by the by, I am writing a list for 2011 now. I read somewhere recently that resolutions are silly because they aren't really resolutions, they are desires and most  people won't actually act on them. I think that is true, however, I also think the act of writing down or vocalising your desires can often lead you to think about how to achieve them and can shift you from the just desire stage to the 'doing something about it stage' (or even realise it was a silly desire and you should stop worrying about it). I often find myself stuck in a rut and I lack the mental energy to pull myself out, so I sit forlornly at the end of another day or week or month thinking 'oh why have I not read any of those interesting books/ cooked any different meals/gone to the art exhibition etc' This is not really meant to be a list of resolutions though, more a to do list for 2011 that I can check back on and slowly cross off.

• Read more books. My reading has been terrible lately, I read for study, but even then I really just dash into books, read a few pages or a chapter, read footnotes and dash out again. To get me started I want to read the following fiction and non fiction books cover to cover:
• Enigma - Robert Harris
• Arcadian Friends - Tim Richardson
• My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
• Istanbul - Orhan Pamuk
• The Roman Forum - David Watkin
• The Venetian City Garden - John Dixon Hunt

• Go running again. I never completely stopped but I am quite sporadic now, maybe once a week. I like being able to run 5km, it made me feel special, I also found it good for mental health.
• Try some harder yoga. I did yoga all last year after being more of a pilates person (which I still do as well). I love my class but it is a general level class and I feel ready for a bit more of a challenge.
• Watch more movies. I have hardly seen any movies lately, I think I went to the cinema all of about 3 times last year. I think I can make a good start on this while house sitting as I can see 5 shelves of dvds.
• Be inventive and positive about ways to get work. I am applying for some postdoc things and maybe I will get lucky, but if not I must not mope and I must look for something other than sessional teaching, which drives me up the wall and stresses me out.
• Cook some new things. I love to cook but I have been in a bit of a rut lately, cooking much the same things on rotation. I always buy the same vegies from the market too. Maybe if I choose one recipe a week to try that will get me back into being inventive.
• Finish some sewing projects. I always plan to borrow mum's machine, perhaps post-thesis (handing in Feb 14 yay!) I will and set it up on my desk.
• Declutter cupboards and properly file all my articles and notes. I am generally OK at this but there is a lot that can be thrown out - old drafts and old notes I won't read again - and a lot that needs to be filed and entered into endnote so I know I have it and know where to find it.

I think that is all for now, it doesn't seem like a very long list. Perhaps I could add to it when I think of things or come up with other books to read. In other news I just made a list for today and tomorrow and I actually included two items that involved making more lists. I think I have a problem...

Caramelised Garlic tart I made for Christmas, a start on my plan to try new recipes.

BBC 100 books you should read

I was going through tidying up some old posts and found this draft from August last year and thought I would share it. I know the list got posted around the net a bit so you may have seen it before.

Any lists of things you should read/do always get my hackles up. I think everyone should read art history books, but they don't. Fools. Also why 'should' we have read them? To be able to pass ourselves off as clever? To be able to laugh at the right literary jokes? Anyhow to top it off the BBC reckons most people will have only read about six of these. Patronising much? Possibly as someone who wasn't allowed to watch much television and grew up in a house filled with books and loves reading I am not a very good 'average person'. To prove them super dooper wrong I have bolded what I have read and italicised a few I never intend to read unless locked in a room with nothing but that book for a few days. But then it also looks like I don't much care for Russian books because I haven't read any Dostoyevsky, but I did recently enjoy reading Turgenev and also went through a stage at uni when I only read Bulgakov. I also have to confess that going through it a lot of the books I haven't read are ones I would really like to read when I get the chance. Anyway, feel free to take the list and compare what you have read, or scoff at it or scoff at me if you like!

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 - (half bolded as i have probably read about half).
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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 - (attempted and DEEPLY disliked so never finished)
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 - (FFS why the hell should I read this?)
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 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. 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