Being Pulled Here and There

Lately, I've been pulled in many directions, and lately, it seems to be moving me towards inertia. That is not good. I had things all planned out for our wedding anniversary next week (#31) but those plans are in the process of being canceled. DH's 91-year-old father fell and broke his hip. Because of his age and other health problems he was not a candidate for the traditional 3-4 hour surgery for hip replacement.A repair was done instead. Originally scheduled for transfer to the rehab facility today, I think that may not happen either. This is what life in limbo is like! Wait and see.

On a brighter note, I joined the mailing list for ScrappingTable and got my first newsletter today. For those of you with Cricut cutters, this is very important. There is a program out there call Sure-Cuts-A-Lot that you can purchase through Michelle at ScrappingTable at a really good price. I did this at the beginning of the month and was able to download my program and then get access to lots of free fonts, shapes, templates, etc on her site. You don't have to purchase the program from her, you could just purchase access to her extras. Well worth it. Also Michelle has some helpful videos and some step-by-step instructions to help with SCAL (version 2.) Michelle has secure purchasing through Pay-Pal and you do not need an account with them. I downloaded my program and at a later date received the disk.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that you could use this program instead of buying lots of cartridges. Really, for the cost of about one cartridge, you can buy this program. If that isn't a deal, I don't know what is. Sure Cricut has their Design Studio, but it is really only meant to be used with their cartridges. With SCAL2 the only thing you need a cartridge for is to get the Cricut to cut anything. My Cricut (George) came with the Georges & Basic Shapes cartridge. I don't ever plan on buying another one. One of the things I like best about it - after playing with the software and George for a couple weeks is the ability to manipulate words and phrases to get them to look the way I want them to look. Also, there are so many free fonts out there, it's wonderful to be able to  easily change the look of something. The other thing you can do - and this is one of my favorites - is to trace a .jpg image and change it to a scut2 file for use with your program. This has been a lot of fun for me. The only thing I need is to make sure the dot runners don't run out!

Copyright 2010, ACK, for Generational

Stealing the BBC Book List - Thanks to Unmitigated

Thanks to Unmitigated for Sharing. Here's my list:

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here (My count is 38, and a good number of them are due to my English lit and American lit teacher in high school,Cathy Guinan. The Dickens are from elementary school. I got my love of reading from my mom. I was reading the same novels she was when I was 11 and 12 and she began to censor my reading. I didn't count the ones I started and never finished - David Copperfield and Les Miserables, Pride & Prejudice, etc.)

BOLD THE ONES YOU’VE READ!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
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 - (What can I say? At one time I was interested?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell  - Actually the title is 1984 in numerals, not spelled out.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - This is one of my all time faves, along with Little Men and Jo's Boys.
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
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
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
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
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
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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
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
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
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
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
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - I read both of them. Insane laughter followed.
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - It only made the BBC list because it's about Great Britain.
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
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 Sorry, but that is a novelette, not a book.
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
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
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Copyright 2010, ACK, for Generational