A parade walked by my house today...

...and I slept through it. I actually didn't wake up until Danielle broke into the house and started talking to me. I was having a dream that, if I remember correctly, involved a German prince from two hundred years ago, a daytime job at a diner, with said prince, and three wishes.

I was a little sad to miss out on my three wishes.

Here's what I would have wished for:

1. A German prince
2. The ability to fly
3. That fashions circa 1985-1995 would never make a comeback.

I was going to take a picture, but I thought it would gross you out.

So, in my little community, there is an interesting method of taking care of the many potholes that plague our little dirt roads: debris. Plant clippings? Just throw them in the middle of the road. Extra rocks? Likewise. Sometimes, where there was once a harmless dip in the road, it has been made treacherous by the sudden presence of broken cinder blocks (which, by the way, are not that effective as 'road-filler), and I have needed to swerve crazily to save my poor little tires.

Personally, I have nothing against this tradition. I feel like it gives our roads a unique, Picasso-esque flair, and it gives me something to blog about.

But, friends, I believe that our road maintenance has achieved a new low, and I am here to quejar.

I am housesitting for my friends, and, Friday night, I left my windows cracked a teeny bit in my van, so that it doesn't get that hot smelliness of closed in spaces. Well, I woke up Saturday, and was climbing into said van, when I noticed an obscene amount of flies congregating on my dashboard. "This is not okay" I said to myself, and proceeded to clean out my van, in order to discover the source of this shocking debacle. Well, van was clean, flies evicted, and I found nothing sinister, so I forgot about it.

Until this morning! I was walking home from exercising (Yay me), and I heard a suspicious buzzing sound coming from a pile of clippings that were-yes- filling the pothole in the road right in front of the house, so I looked a little closer. Tossed into the road, with the clippings was a whole lot of rotten meat. Yes, rotten meat. Raw. Meat. In the middle of the road. What, do these people think that all the tires rolling over it will make it less raw and rotten? I don't know. All I know is that I am keeping all of my windows firmly shut for the next while, smelly hotness or not.

The Unreadables

So I totally pirated this from Raych, and I know that this is going to give all of you who think I'm a nerd a really big laugh at how right you were, but I simply couldn't resist. So there.

This is the top 106 most unreadable books, or at least one of those lists.

What to do:
Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you started but couldn't finish, use red text on the ones you really sort of hated, put an asterisk* next to the ones you really sort of loved, and use blue text on the ones on your own personal To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’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
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
The Anasai Boys*
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
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 Nighttime*
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
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
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
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

My conclusion? I guess I'm averagely literary. I guess I prefer the books that entertain to those that educate.

Chrismon Tree

I'm sitting in a sweet recliner, listening to Josh Groban sing sweetly about the first Noel, dreamily entering into the Christmas spirit.

Did I mention that it is 75 degree beach weather outside? Lovely, but not Christmas.

Also, I looked and looked for that little 'degree' sign on my little laptop keyboard. Nowhere to be found. Which is why I had to resign myself to writing it out, like a dolt.

Also, my parents were thinking of getting one of these:

It's upside down. My mom waxed eloquent on saving floor space etc. 'But it's upside down' I patiently explained. I think she maybe got my point. I have heard nothing with 'tree' and any forms of the word 'inverted' strung together in any conversation we have had of late.