Lazy post; Banned book meme

I got this from Mary Poppins; if you’re into such things you can trace back from there. Sometimes you find interesting new-to-you bloggers that way.

Apparently the following 110 books have all been banned for some reason at some time and place. The idea is to indicate which you have read, etc. I’ve bolded those I’ve read all the way through, italicized those I’ve partially read. I had to decide where to draw the line for “partially read”–there are books I’ve read one or two pages of and then set down. I decided to not call them partially read, but I did asterisk** a couple of them.

On the road again, or Car tents part II

I’m outta here today (yay!), but only for a couple of weeks this time. I’m headed north until I hit Bellingham, WA; I’ll decide where to go from there when I get there.

Made some refinements to my car camping setup. First, I decided last fall that I need a privacy screen or anteroom out back for–ahem, private nighttime use. I used a plastic tarp, which was functional but noisy–I don’t really want the neighbors to know every time I visit my private space. So I made the following:

Br’er Rabbit

The neighborhood jackrabbit showed up on the berm outside my back yard last night. CJ alerted me by barking at him, and I caught this picture–the best I’ve gotten of him:

CJ and namesake

We encountered a coyote on our walk this morning. As you can see from this picture, CJ (Miss Coyote Jane) doesn’t look much like her namesake these days.

Animals in trees

Of two kinds.

Does anyone but me see a face here?

Agnosticism as a form of faith?

I wrote the folowing in a comment I made on another blog, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since:

We often hear that it’s the journey that’s the point, and maybe that’s true. I know my own persistent underlying agnosticism is oddly comforting to me at times. It’s as though I’m searching for something, I know not what, but something in me is sure it’s there and that I’ll recognize it if/when I find it. Which, if you think about it, is faith of a kind.

The reason is stuck in my head is because of the combination of facts that

All new, never-before-posted TREES!

Do not be deceived by the fact that these trees look just like dozens of other trees previously posted. They are, I can promise, BRAND NEW. To me, that is.

After more than ten years of walking dogs around here, this morning I managed to wander into some trails I hadn’t found before, and the photos posted below were all taken in the new territory.

I know they look like all the other tree pictures I post. I just can’t help myself. They always look new to me.

Must-see/must-experience links

I’ve run across a couple of sites I strongly encourage everyone to go check out. Each is beautiful, in a different way.

This one has some amazing photography set to music. My excuse for tagging this with “spiritual”.

This is the site of an artist, Peter Callesen. I recommend clicking on “A4 papercut” and browsing slowly. Not only is his stuff amazing and incredible and beautiful, I can’t even imagine how he does it. I mean, what kind of fine-motor skills would it take? Superhuman, if you ask me.

Go! Go! Click away from here!

Dog at rest

I decided to give up on catching a good shot of CJ next to one of the other dogs out on a walk to show how much she’s grown. Instead, I’m going to return to a previous picture of her I posted less than a week after I picked her up, lying on one of the dog beds I took along.

Dogs in motion

I keep trying to get shots of the dogs when we’re out on the walks. I want to do a post about how CJ has grown, and I’m trying for the perfect picture to show this. What I get instead are shots like this:

Coming up for air, and It’s and ill wind

Just a quick gulp of air. Finally got the last of my work from last semester done! Only a month late!! So now I can take a moment–just a moment, mind you–for more frivolous stuff, like writing a post. Tomorrow, it’s back to the grindstone.

Since Christmas I’ve

The moss is back

If you’ve browsed amongst my pictures much at all, you have already realized that I love the moss we have around here. It’s been very dry this fall–a couple of early rains, then nothing for months–but recently we had a good, soaky rainstorm that lasted a couple of days, and THE MOSS IS BACK!

There are a couple of different kinds of moss–the kind that drapes from the branches, and the kind that grows on the trunks of the trees. First, some pictures of the former. This one shows some young oaks tipped off by some moss. You can see the why oaks are in the same family as birch trees here.

Here’s a lone tree (with moss, of course).

Ya think maybe I’m a Democrat?

Took that “match yourself to the candidates” quiz. Results came out like this:

92% Dennis Kucinich
91% Mike Gravel
86% Chris Dodd
84% Barack Obama
83% Hillary Clinton
82% John Edwards
80% Joe Biden
73% Bill Richardson
36% Rudy Giuliani
26% Ron Paul
24% John McCain
18% Tom Tancredo
17% Mike Huckabee
16% Mitt Romney
7% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

I took it once before, and got a high match to Ron Paul (he’s still high on the list of Republicans for me.) Scary. I’d never heard of Mike Gravel, and when I checked him out–nope, I actually wouldn’t vote for him out of this bunch. So altogether I’m not all that sure how good their matching algorithm is. But interesting, nonetheless.

Paying attention (or not)

(For the full effect–do not click on the thumbnail yet.)

Yesterday the dogs and I took a nice long Christmas walk, and I captured this picture, thinking perhaps I’d write a post on shadows. Gradually, the way memories do these days, the memory of this post seeped back into my forebrain–so I won’t repeat myself.

But I will comment on that blue whatever-it-is in the upper left corner. I was totally unaware of it until I looked at the picture in my camera back home.

New book meme

It’s been a very long time since I posted anything, and I’m not even sure why. Nor when I may post again. That said, here’s a new book meme I got from Mary Poppins.

The below listed books are the top 106 books most often marked as being “unread” by LibraryThing users.
The instructions are simple:

Bold those you’ve read.

Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.

Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.

Underline those on your TBR list. (I can’t figure out how to underline, so I just added TBR. Life is too short. If someone wants to enlighten me re: underlining, I’ll appreciate it.)

(I added a ? for those I’ve never heard of. Also couldn’t resist a few personal comments.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Anna Karenina (Got almost all the way through it when I was 16. Then I asked my mon—who loved it—whether anything was ever going to actually happen, and she said, after thinking about it—“Not really.” So I never finished it.)

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22***

One Hundred Years of Solitude
***
Wuthering Heights 

The Silmarillion ?

Life of Pi: A Novel

The Name of the Rose (I think I finished it, but I wouldn’t swear to it. A bit high-flown for me.)
Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses I think I got 3 pages into this, and figured out it was never going to make any sense to me. Word salad. I’ll just have to take other people’s word for it that it’s a great book.

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey (a high school requirement)
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 (I can still hardly believe I got all the way through it. And by the end, I even understood why it’s considered a great novel.)

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife ?
The Iliad (another high school requirement)

Emma
The Blind Assassin ?

The Kite Runner TBR

Mrs. Dalloway**
Great Expectations

American Gods ?

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ?

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver ?
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
 (Hated it—don’t know why I finished it.)
The Canterbury Tales

The Historian ?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

The Fountainhead (Read this and Atlas Shrugged one right after the other in late adolescence—went from love to hate in the course of reading them. In fact, it’s not too much to say that they moved me a step toward adulthood as I got over my initial blind infatuation with her heroes.)
Foucault’s Pendulum ?

Middlemarch** 

Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange (Hated it, but read it as an adolescent—it was reputed to be “cool”, so I persisted to the end.)

Anansi 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 Night-Time

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 TBR

Cloud Atlas ?

The Confusion ?

Lolita

Persuasion*

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics ?

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

Trip update: Yellowstone to Tetons to Salmon, Idaho

I did go to Hamilton the day after my last update, and spent Sunday evening to Wednesday morning with my friends there. Again, it was HOT–unusually so for Hamilton, hitting 100 each day. I’m seriously looking forward to getting back to the west coast–though the way things are going, Portland will get one of its annual heat waves just about the time we arrive.

Wednesday I picked my brother up in Missoula and we headed toward Yellowstone. He had a liver transplant a year ago (terminal cirrhosis of the liver, and he’s a lifelong teetotaler–go figure, it’s a mystery to all of us), and his strength is limited, but he held up pretty well to riding most of the day and camping at night in Yellowstone and in Teton National Park.

First Yellowstone.

Camping stories (tents, dogs, and all)

Today (7/1 is the first time I’ve had access to the internet in a week and a half. I wrote some “posts” while in camps, and I could post them separately, but I’m going to be lazy and do them all here.

Socorro

I ran out of blogging steam before I said anything about Socorro, NM, or why I was there. Because of the episode with the Shiba boy (here and here), Socorro seems like a long time ago now, so this will be brief.

I went to Socorro to see this young man, S.

Counting my blessings

Written at a motel in Ridgefield, Utah, the evening of 7/9/07

(This post will mean more to you if you’ve read the previous post first.)

So what am I grateful for tonight?

Losing My Shiba boy

Written in camp, evening of 7/8/07

I’m going to have to start being really careful what I wish for, or even appear to wish for—the universe is taking me too seriously. I’m back to three dogs. I’ve lost my Shiba boy, the really pretty one. What I know is that he disappeared. What I’m pretty sure of is that coyotes got him, about 3 AM Sunday the 8th of July, somewhere in southeast Utah.