Jennifer’s blog

Live-action fake trailer for a Thundercats movie. How many snips of movies can you recognize?

What's your favorite scent? 

Cinnamon and cloves (with a little white pepper), something like this...followed closely by apple pie and my mom's chicken and dumplings. And oranges. Not all at the same time, of course ;)

And I love the scent of fall. Crisp, burning, woodsmoke and water. Makes me remember the place where my grandparents lived when I was young.

What’s a simple thing you could do to save money, but are unwilling (or unable) to put to practice?
Sponsored by Microsoft Small Business.

You know that bit about bringing your own coffee to work instead of buy the SBux brand that can save you hundreds of dollars a year? Yeah. I don't drink coffee, so that tip really doesn't work for me.

Something I really *should* do is get one of the high-interest savings accounts. It's very simple to set up, I'm sure, I just need to get a round tuit.

Quite a few of my younger relatives have been doing fantastic things in their lives and living through some tough times, and I am jealous, even of the awful events. I want what they have. I want to be engaged, to have a house, to move around the country, to write something (anything) and have it published by something that is not a print on demand publisher. I think, they're younger than me, what am I doing wrong? I feel like I should have done it first. Stupid, I know, but that's how it is. I used to be first in so much, then I got into college where everyone was first, and I fell behind. I'm status quo. I work and I think of how someday I could be more. I think about finishing a story and have to date never really done it. Everyone sounds suitably impressed when they find out what I do, but if they had to sit through a day...no one needs a college degree to do my job. I'm not even taking classes, because it's 'taking time from my writing.' Someone call ballocks on me.

I get all motivated for a while and then it just disappears. I have big events, sure. But I guess not the ones I really want. I support myself, I have a great boyfriend, a reliable means of transportation and parents that love me, but I feel like more, and I don't see how I'm going to get it.

And it's sad to find out how much I don't know about my family. We used to be so close. I'm the only one that never left.

stupid, to make myself feel this way. Guess I need to keep working on the novel. (I am perilously close to not being able to say the novel. I have three unfinished NaNoWriMo manuscripts, which must, to satisfy my anal self, be finished, one day. One day.) No day but today.

I know, I know, you're surprised that such things exist. But I haven't read every book out there. Maybe some day I'll get around to this.

Grabbed from Kelly McCullough over at Wyrdsmiths.

A list of the books most often listed as "unread" on librarything. The original instructions say italicize books started but not finished, bold books read, and bold and underline books read for school.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (four times)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences*
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

*I borrowed this one from my aunt ages ago and pick it up every so often. I fully intend to finish it.

Huh. Didn't have a lot of required reading in high school, it appears.

http://capwiz.com/rif/issues/alert/?alertid=11150206

Visit this link to send a letter to your congressman/woman, senator, and state representatives about continuing funding for Reading Is Fundamental, a program that, among other things, provides free books for low-income children.

From Jonathan Lyon's journal:

George Bush's $3.1 trillion budget proposal for 2009 eliminates the funding for the Reading is Fundamental book distribution program. This program, which would cost 26 million dollars next year, has provided more than 300 million books to over 30 million underprivileged children since its founding in 1966.

Instead, Bush has proposed to raise military-spending to levels not seen since World War II. He proposes $515 billion for Pentagon's day to day operations, higher than the total combined military spending of every other country in the world (and this doesn't include supplemental requests).

We're spending enough to make the Pentagon the 10th richest country in the world, but we can't spend what amounts to 0.005% of this on a program that distributed books to nearly 4.5 million children last year?

If you could travel back in time, which era would you visit and why?

I'm a sucker for the Middle Ages, lack of hygiene and all. I'd just like to see what it would be like to be a medieval person, and have a reason to wear a sword (oh, I'd totally do the disguise bit and learn swordfighting). It's the simplicity of the time, I think. There needs to be more of a reason to know archery, blacksmithing, actual sewing...I'm sure I'd hate it after a while, but it would be fun.

I'd be happy for the 1600s too...France, with the Musketeers, or with pirates. Oh yes, I would be a female pirate. As long as we were only liberating ill-won spoils from the other guys.

I played with this stuff when I was in middle school. It's a lot of fun, very messy, and completely natural. Makes me want to build a big pit and make my own "magic water" ;)

What have you lost that you wish you still had?
Submitted by gunderson bee.

artist charcoal

In 7th grade, I was really into the Phantom of the Opera musical. I had the soundtrack (on tape, natch) and the tie-in book, and the sheet music (yes, I could actually play that DAH! DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH! beginning of the eponymous song). I don't know if I did most of them during spanish class or that just happens to be the class that got stuck in my head, but I drew a bunch of pictures from the photos in the tie-in book and the sheet music, not directly copying Sarah Brightman as Christine, but doing my own take on them. They were pretty good, for a 7th grader, and I was very proud of them. I colored some of them, but most were just heavy pencil with shading, contouring, the works.

And I don't know where they are. I wish I did, so I could look at them and say, huh, they aren't as bad as I thought/these are actually quite hideous. I just wish I knew, either way. I remember that for the longest time I thought they were in my portfolio from art class in middle school, and I looked in there one day and they weren't, and I was flummoxed. I hate losing art.

If you were independently wealthy, where in the world would you live?
Submitted by Eileen.

I'd probably live in a few different places. Paris, for one. It's just too pretty there. And maybe take a flat in London. I'd like to try living in New York and Los Angeles, but I doubt I'd stay long. Denver sounds better and better as I read about it for Worldcon, though it's awfully far away from my parents.

I like it here in St. Louis though. Maybe I'd stay. :)