Thanksgiving Eve

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I've been trying to decide why this is, and I've come up with a couple of reasons (over-analyzing yet again).

1. Growing up it was the most "drama-free" of the major holidays, at least in my child-like perception. Christmas always had bigger hopes and bigger let-downs, but Thanksgiving was almost always good. We always ate the exact same things- it wouldn't be Turkey Day without cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes... so of course I'll be bringing them tomorrow. Did you know I crave tradition?
2. Thanksgiving marks the beginning of party season, and being an avid party thrower, I like that I can savor the day and still look forward to more, since boring ol' January is still eons away.
3. Thanksgiving is a more unassuming holiday that often is almost overlooked, and as a fighter of injustice, I like to champion its cause. I will not put up my tree until the fourth Friday in November.
4. It is a good reminder to be thankful for the many blessings the LORD has given to Eric and to me. Because they're a lot. And really, if we're being thankful- which means, as I teach my kindergarteners, "We are happy to have it, and we want to say thank you."- it's all kind of meaningless with out having Someone to be saying thank you too.

Tomorrow, I will not be playing football to wet my appetite- can I get a shout-out for 10 degrees Fahrenheit!- but I will be joining friends and friends of friends for a Thanksgiving feast of epic proportions.

What am I thankful for? That Eric agreed to get up and watch the Macy's parade with me in the morning!

No Blog November

And just like that one month and 3 days later, I'm back with a mediocre blog post. Where have I been, you either faithful checker or person who has me on their blog roll asks. Well, folks I have been here. I thought November would be a lovely, relaxing month but the answer to that was... well No. This month shall hereafter be called Vember.

Unless you are a literary person, you might want to skip the rest of this post... but reading books has been something I've been wanting to do more of... and so I will do "one of those posts." Because after a somewhat exhausting month, thinking of books makes me feel happy... and pine for a fireplace.

So here's the BBC book list- let's see how I fare- in the spirit of this exercise I will bold ones read, italicize ones started, and do nothing (but perhaps read) to the rest.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Liked the second movie better-
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - We can thank Eric for this-
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Used to be my favorite book in HS-
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - umm YES! On book five- yes I'm running late for the movie-
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Absolutely favorite book of all time-
6 The Bible - Though the answer should be yes, I'm pretty sure it's no... book supersedes a favorite list-
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Yes, long long ago-
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Nope, but that was a great year-
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Haha... collective freshman English groan-
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Loved it as a girl-
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - Thanks to Ms. Love my Senior HS English teacher, I can expound on the roads motif in this quite depressing novel-
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I prefer the abridged ones... -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - See Eric note-
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Odd huh-
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - I loved this book! But really disliked her 2nd novel.-
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - So funny story- I've read this twice. The first time was in 6th grade. I found it on my parents' bookshelf. It went way over my head. Made more sense in HS-
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - 42-
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Who never take a bath...-
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Weird, weird, weird, weird, weird. -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - But I love the Disney ride! -
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -This might be my favorite one-
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Smiling with fondness-
34 Emma - Jane Austen - I don't know? Sometimes they run together in the mind-
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -See book 34-
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -Sweet! Two for the price of one!-
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - Loved Thousand Splendid Suns even better-
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - Just the movie-
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Just the movie-
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - I always like Paddington better-
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Oink!-
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 - ahh... Gilbert-
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 -Gosh, I hated the ending of this movie!-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Just finished for October's bookclub!-
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - but of course-
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Nah, this might be my favorite one-
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Excellent-
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 -Actually, I have-
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 - Not gonna happen-
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Eric does a great impression-
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - I can thank my prolific childhood reading for this-
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 - Started once. Finished with the movie-
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - I think we might be reading this for bookclub-
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 - But of course. Trumpet of the Swans, even better-
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -I heart S.H.-
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - I detest this book.-
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - Thanks to my parents' bookshelf-
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 - A certain HS cram session comes back to me-
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl - I really have never loved this book. Is that odd?-
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - Love. love. love. love. love.-

So, what should I read next?