Death and Taxes

My spring break trip was really fun, but I fell sick upon my return.  A real nasty flu-like mess. I felt like death.

And since there are only two certain things in life, I decided to conquer the other one as well. I filed my taxes. I always feel like I am doing something wrong, that I am inadvertently leaving something out and will be audited. But really, I have nothing. There’s not a whole lot to put down.

Anyway, I will get a couple hundred dollars back.

Not that it will make any difference since I just spent all of that money online shopping for some very cute retro style dresses.

Oops.

Spring Break!

I am heading down South for a few days.

Happy Spring Break!

Sneeze the Day!

I have no clue what is going on, but this week I have been absolutely miserable with allergies. I have all the classic symptoms: itchy, red, watery eyes, runny nose, sneezing constantly, headache.

What is going on? Is this a particularly bad year for pollen or whatever it is that causes allergies?According to pollen.com, today is a medium-high day, but I have felt like this for a week.

If things don’t improve, I’m going to leave this state on Friday and see if it gets better.

Domestic Travel

Things are about to get really busy for me. I have never attempted to travel so much during the semester!  I suppose going to conferences is part of the job description so I should get used to it.

Unfortunately, I won’t have the opportunity to travel outside of the U.S. this year, but I will be hopping around this great country a lot. Here’s the plan so far:

March 13-18  Spring Break Roadtrip to New Orleans, Florida, and Nashville

April 2-4   Tucson, Arizona

April 16-18   Detroit, Michigan

July   Madison, WI

August   San Franciso (?)

That time of the semester…

This evening, I accidentally fell asleep after dinner.

And I had a napmare in which I showed up to class unprepared and in a rage, I began telling off my students.

Yep, it’s about mid-semester. Things are going exactly as can be expected.

The Movie Strategy for Entertaining Guests

My mom came to visit me this weekend.  Even though it is technically a short visit (only 3 full days), I am such a terrible host that it felt like much longer. Don’t get me wrong,  I love my mom. But I do feel pressured to have a list of activities or at least to make some attempt to entertain her.

We shopped and dined together. She cooked and cleaned for me. I feel kind of guilty about that, but I think she enjoys the nurturing. And I’m not going to lie, I love my sparkling clean apartment and the new TV that she bought me. I probably should be too old to be accepting goods and services from my mother, but I plead Poor Grad Student and promise to repay someday when she is old and feeble and destitute.

Anyway, the best that I could come up with is to take her to the movies. Every day. We watched 4 movies in 3 days! I finally got to see Slumdog Millionaire which was pretty good, but a little forgettable to have won Best Picture.   I will remember the basic Who Wants to Be A Millionaire storyline, but beyond that, I was not moved to tears (which I believe is the mark of a great movie). I guess every once in awhile, they need to break things up and honor a Shakespeare in Love type movie.

Movies are great for dates because they provide togetherness without talking, the potential for a shared emotional experience, and automatic conversation after it is over. Turns out that movies are great for entertaining mothers for very similar reasons.

Putting My English Minor To Work

Here is one of those blogtastic things that is going around. Since I was an English minor back in the day, I thought it might be fun to see how I would fare against the BBC’s list.

I have read 30 of them. Worse, I don’t even recognize the titles of 15 of them. I blame it on the British. Perhaps I would do better if the NYT came up with a list. Perhaps not.

—————————————————————————————————————————————–

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

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – X
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 (New Testament) – X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens  X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
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 – X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald  X
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 – X
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy  X
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 – X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne -
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – X
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 X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding  X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens  X
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   X
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck  X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov  X
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac  X
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville  X
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce  X
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  X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert  X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X
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  X
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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 -  X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo