Happy Birthday Moxie Baer!

Today is my dog's birthday. For anyone who doesn't know (again, pretending I have people who read my blog who aren't family), I am slightly obsessed with Moxie. I have been seen doing all of the following at some point because I love my dog SO much:

1. Letting her lick my plate when I am finished eating.
2. Letting her lick my plate while I am still eating.
3. Dressing her in Penn State attire for football games.
4. Standing out in the cold while she does her business, so she won't have to suffer the cold very long.
5. Cleaning up after her when she does her business where she is not supposed to.
6. Knitting her a sweater with an "m" on it.
7. Changing her collar to match whatever the next holiday is.
8. Making her special treats for her birthday.
9. Having birthday parties for her to which the ENTIRE family is invited. (However, this was only done once, because it was her 21st. It had to be done right)
10. Allowing her to sleep under the covers in my bed with me so she isn't cold.
11. Actually keeping a bed on my bed with me so she can sleep with me when she isn't cold.
12. Breaking all her treats up every time we buy a new bag so they are bite-sized for her little teeth.
13. Carrying her up the stairs when she was incapacitated (surgery on her leg).
14. Playing her protector during fireworks or thunderstorms (actually this is really cute- she follows me around the house and then squishes herself up next to me when I'm sitting down).
15. Writing blogs about how spoiled she is.

As you can see, there are a lot of things that make my dog spoiled. But she deserves to be spoiled on her birthday, so I must go spoil her further!

For the Love of... Books

My sister posted this same list to her blog a while ago, and I came across it again today on a friend's facebook page. So, because I am already copying her post, I may as well do it all the way. The boldface titles are the ones I have read, and the boldface underlined ones are books I would read again. The italicized ones are books I would like to read someday. And to be slightly different, I made the ones I disliked red, and my favorites are in blue.

Tagline: The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

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 - If I said I read the Bible, it would mean I read the whole thing, but I have read some of it. J
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Interesting, but I couldn’t sit through reading it again)
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 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 - again, I have read some of this, but I couldn’t sit through the whole thing.
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 - Technically, this is redundant, because it is one of the chronicles of Narnia. Albeit, the most famous one, but if you put one of them in separate, shouldn’t they all be in separate?
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 - Don’t get me started on how much I HATE this book.
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 - biggest book I have ever seen- I debated reading it, but decided with that many pages, there’s probably a lot of work involved in reading it…
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 Nighttime - 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 – another “parts of it” book. Really descriptive, to the point it was hard to read.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett – Love this story, but I have never read the book.
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante - read parts of it for school. I would like to read the whole thing just because it is such a foundational literary masterpiece.
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 - Like my sister, this movie (a cartoon we picked out because we thought it was about cute little bunnies) scared me to death as a child…
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

I have read 47 of these in their entirety. Therefore, I believe the BBC is wrong. Most people have probably had more than 6 of them just in school, and a lot of them are popular so most people have probably read more than 6.

A few books that I have read that are not on the list, but that I liked a lot, were :

1 The Giver- Lois Lowry

2 The Scarlett Letter

3 Anything by Jen Lancaster, although I am sure her books would not be considered “Literature”

4 Anything by Jodi Picoult. My favorite so far was The Pact, though it is incredibly sad and hard to get through at some points. Second I guess would be the newest one, Handle With Care.

So like I said, the ones in italics are books I would like to read, so if anyone wants to let me borrow their copies, I could trade one of the ones I have read.

Just Another Weekend

I am told that I do not write on my blog enough, so here is an update with many stories. As I stated in a previous entry, a lot is expected of the Baer children in the way of outside housework. So for those of you who do not know (this is me assuming people may read my blog who are not in my family), my parents are building onto their house, where I still live. Therefore, it is unofficially my job to do all the outside stuff that was once a collective effort of all my siblings (notice I did not say me AND my siblings, unless you count it "effort" when you complain enough for everyone combined- then I would have done my part). Such jobs include removing siding, crawling around on the ground underneath, and moving heavy pieces of rejected materials to other parts of the yard solely to look pretty there. (Because we all know dad will never actually do anything with it.) Though I must say that the addition is looking progressively more like a room, I miss the collective help that would get the odd jobs done faster.
Here is the latest view of the new room, where the last completed task was attaching the wood part of the roof to the trusses. Monday, they will be gluing down the rubber part of the roof.

Other outside jobs are much more fun, such as picking blueberries. I made a blueberry crumb dessert last week, which was gone in two days, and we had blueberry pancakes for breakfast today :) Fortunately, the season is long enough that we get our fill of blueberries during the season, so the thought of them throughout the rest of the year is not sickening, as it always was for other fruits and vegetables. To this day, my sisters refuse to eat corn because of the amount they were forced to eat as children.

In other news, my mom, sister, and I went to Penn State on Thursday for the Festival of the Arts. The main agenda was to find decorations for the new room, however we also strayed to the jewelry stands and kitchen utensils. The morning was spent at the Boalsberg festival, where the prices are lower, and the stuff for sale is just as nice. Unfortunately, there are no buildings or trees surrounding the stands there, so we did have a slight episode of sun stroke, but nothing requiring medical attention, so we looked at it as a successful trip. Then we headed over to the Penn State festival, where we met up with my cousins and looked around some more, but this was more for leisure than for purchasing. Afterwards, we had a little Creamery ice cream treat, because no trip to Penn State is complete without some overindulgence. So aside from the sun stroke, the minor bumping of bumpers, and the overexcited GPS navigation by Mr. T, we had a fun day.

Coloring Eggs

A long established childhood pastime took place in our house last night: Coloring eggs for Easter. The kit, as always, sucked. The crayons, as always, were broken. But the spirit of the activity was as high as it always is. There were the traditional dirty eggs included, as well as the pretty ones, the ones with names on, and the Easter-themed ones.

So I'd just like to say that I wish everyone a happy Easter!

P.S. I was informed that I forgot to mention what the free gift in the previous entry was, and it apparently is causing anticipation in the minds of my constant readers. All it was, was a large bag of samples. Alas, the effort was not worth it in my mind...

Free Gift Syndrome

Today I woke up at 9:30 am by my mom who said, "Want to go to Sam's?" Little did I know that the real reason for the trip was not the fact that we were preparing for Easter. It was a little yellow piece of paper stating that Muhlenberg School Employees would get a free gift if they were among the first fifty people in line. We were there at approximately 10:18, and the paper said 10:30, but of course all the other people who had said yellow paper in hand, were there early as well.

Unfortunately, my mom, who is the Muhlenberg Employee, neglected to read the part that said you were required to register ahead of time. But no, this did not stop us. As we approached the front of the line, we heard that the person behind us failed to register as well. So my mom, with all her Gill whit, got to the front of the line and told them that she "tried to call, but it kept ringing and ringing, and when someone finally answered, they said we didn't need to register." Well then the people behind us told the same story, and instead of not believing us, the people from the store said, "They did the same thing to them!"

So we got our free gift in the end. Then we proceeded to walk all around Sam's collecting various free samples (and, I should add, buying almost ALL of them-- Everything in excess!!) along with the things we needed for Easter, all adding up to a mere 200 something dollars.

But, we left our beloved Sammy's with all the things on our list, full tummies, and yes, our free gift.

Pagoda Express

Ahh the Pagoda... What can be said about Reading's famous monument? In general the Pagoda causes a feeling of dread for me every time someone mentions trekking up Mount Penn to see the landmark, as the road is very steep, meaning it has to twist and turn so you don't lose control of your car when there is a sheet of ice on it during the winter. Meaning there have been many moments of carsickness associated with the Pagoda.

If you don't know, the Pagoda is a building that sits on top of Mount Penn in Reading PA, and its general look is reminiscent of Japanese / Asian structures of the same name. Generally, they are towers which have multiple tiers sticking out and were used for religious purposes (for the record, Wikipedia has an entry with similar wording...) When it was built here in Reading, it was meant to be a hotel with a restaurant, but that didn't last long. So now it is recognizable as our city's landmark, and from most places in Reading and the surrounding areas, you can see its red lights shining in the nighttime, but other than that pretty much nothing happens there.

The most prominent memory that sticks in my mind about the pagoda is that every time we would go there, my dad mentioned the fact that my great grandmother was always up there as a child and as she grew up. It served as a place of socializing and meditation for her. So much so that her dying wish was that she be cremated and have her ashes thrown over the sides of the Pagoda.

Today when I picked up the newspaper, the front cover stated that a movie is going to be shot at the Pagoda in the next few weeks, which is what brought on this little entry of mine. I got pretty excited when I heard about it, so I thought I would share.
If you click here you can read the article yourself. :)

Stretchin the Kooza

I've never been one to enjoy exercising, but recently my outlook on the whole thing has changed drastically. I was beginning to see the light when I was at Penn State Main Campus and had to walk everywhere, but that was out of pure necessity. For a while, I was going to the gym regularly, because I could go with friends which made it a little more motivating, but I didn't keep up with it. Basically the physically fit made me feel awkward.

The past few weekends have been more active for me now that it's starting to get nicer out. We are adding onto our house, and there was a tree that created a mess all summer that we decided to cut down, next to the house. So my dad cut the tree down and then I had to help him carry the logs and sticks to various locations in the yard, and found that when we were finished I felt this rush of exhilaration. I felt really good, both physically and mentally and I thought, "I should do some exercising more often."

Then the parents decided the front of the house had too many leaves along the sidewalk so I raked all those up and again felt really good. (I should add that it was really fun to make a gigantic pile and then jump into it... with the dog... except that when you do that, you wind up with poison ivy despite the fact that no vegetation has grown there in months.)

So I have decided to begin taking daily walks with my fat dog so that we will both get some exercise.

Now that brings me to the other significant recent event. For Christmas, my sister got me and my mom tickets to a Cirque du Soleil show that was playing in Baltimore this past weekend, called "Kooza". It was really cool because it combined the amazing physical acts they do, and it also included a clown side, which made it more like a circus than any of the other ones I saw or heard about.

My little goal to start exercising got a whole new spin when I saw the things they could do: In the beginning, there were contortionists, who I have to admit were slightly creepy even though what they did was very cool (Just because the stretched their bodies in ways I would think would break them- makes your skin tingle). Then there was an act called "The Wheel of Death" where these two guys did jumps and stuff in these two wheels- and then one of them started doing things on the outside of the wheel. It was pretty scary, not to mention it reminded me exactly of when I had a hamster and it would go in its little wheel to exercise. Those were the two I thought were coolest, although there was a lot more in the show that was very cool.

So despite my never being able to astound people with my phsical activities, I will give exercise my best shot, and keep you posted on the progress.