Soul Mates...

Do I believe that soul mates exist?

Yes. And here is why:

World's heaviest man marries in Mexico
Monday, October 27, 2008 7:13 AM EDT
The Associated Press By MARK WALSH Associated Press Writer
MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) — The world's heaviest man has tied the knot. Manuel Uribe, who hasn't left his bed in six years, married his longtime girlfriend Claudia Solis Sunday in northern Mexico.
Wearing a white silk shirt with a sheet wrapped around his legs, Uribe smiled as Solis, 38, walked down a flight of stairs wearing a strapless ivory dress, a tiara and hot-pink lipstick.
He later broke into tears as a notary declared the couple husband and wife in a civil ceremony attended by more than 400 guests. For the traditional first dance as newlyweds, Uribe and Solis held hands and swayed to a romantic ballad.
A popular local norteno band played accordion-heavy tunes at the reception, which featured a banquet of meat and buttered vegetables.
Uribe's mother, Orquedia Garza, said the groom steered clear of the five-tier wedding cake.
"He didn't break his diet," she told The Associated Press. "His doctors are here and they are watching him very closely."
The wedding, which was closed to most media, will be featured in an upcoming Discovery Channel documentary on Uribe, the 43-year-old former mechanic said.
"I have a wife and will form a new family and live a happy life," Uribe told hordes of reporters earlier as they followed him through the streets of Monterrey.
A flatbed truck was brought in to tow his custom-made bed decorated with a canopy, flowers and gold-trimmed bows to the wedding at a local event hall. Two police patrol cars escorted him ahead of a long line of traffic.
Uribe tipped the scales in 2006 at 1,230 pounds (560 kilograms), earning him the Guinness World Record as the world's heaviest man.
He has since shed about 550 pounds (250 kilograms) with the help of Solis, whom he met four years ago.
Uribe said he's gunning for a new title: world's greatest weight loser.

Sundays....

The website I use to complete and submit my algebra homework was down yesterday (yeah!!) so I used Sunday for what it was meant for: Cooking!

I began by tossing together a homemade sweet and sour sauce. I coated some country style pork ribs and put them in the slow cooker for 6 hours. They turned out great!

While the ribs were cooking, I decided to try out a new recipe for apple butter. My father-in-law brought me 6-7 pounds of courtland apples that I needed to use! I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'll let you know how it turned out.

Finally, I pickled some banana peppers that I had. I love banana peppers! They are great on veggie sandwiches and I can't wait to find new ways to use them.

After spending the morning cooking, Josh, Taylor and I finally carved our pumpkins.

Josh made a super scary pumpkin. I think it looks a lot like
Voldemort from the Harry Potter movies.

Mine was simple, with the words "Trick or Treat" carved in it. Unfortunately, the letters have somewhat disintegrated.

Finally, Taylor's pumpkin took the longest as she had to have the largest one she could carry.

We also assembled Taylor's Halloween gifts for her second grade class. A few weekends ago, we wandered in to Archiver's in Middleton, WI and of course I can't leave without spending way too much money. We purchased 40 sheets of orange paper which we cut into bag shape with the die-cutters in the rear room. We also purchased some stamps, ink, stickers and ribbon for the bags.

It took us several days to stamp the bags, doing a little each day. Taylor manages to get more ink on herself than on the paper! Last night it took all three of us to assemble the bags. Tonight we will finish them off with some stickers and ribbon. Finally we will fill the bags with candy and other Halloween goodies!

Countdown to NaNoWriMo! - 7 days to go

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to hunker down, drink ungodly amounts of coffee and write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.


From scratch.


In 30 days.

What am I thinking?

I've been thinking about participating in NaNoWriMo for the past year now and I have decided to do it this year. Because I need even more stuff to do.


I received my copy of the NaNoWriMo yesterday and am getting rather excited about writing my first draft of a novel. I've always wanted to write one but I hate my writing. I figured that this would be a good chance to just do it. Even though I don't have a plot, storyline, characters or any of those other things that one would expect in a novel. I do have lots of coffee and not so much free time though.



But, as Ernest Hemingway once said, "The first draft of anything is shit."


Wish me luck!

First Real Post!

Ok, well anyone who knows me well will understand the significance of my first post to be about books. I keep seeing this list posted on several blogs and, while I don't know what the original source of the list is, I thought I would post it here as well. As you can tell, I have read quite a few of these.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

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
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - this one is sitting in by to-be-read pile on my bookcase.
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 Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
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 - 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 – I have absolutely no plans to read this one.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One of my all-time favorites!
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - Also, one of the best books ever written!
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery- as a child
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
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 - Feel free to skip this one.
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 - I had this one read to me as a child.
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 - Only good if you like warring bunnies.
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

*The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest.