Everyone Says Hi’s blog

Apparently the BBC reckons that most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Copy and paste - put an X next to the ones you have 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. (x) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. (x) The Bible
7. ( ) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. (x) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. ( ) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. (x) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. (x) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. (x) 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. (x) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. (x) The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. ( ) Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. ( ) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. (x) 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. (x) 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. (x) Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. ( ) Emma - Jane Austen
35. ( ) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. (x) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. (x) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. ( ) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. (x) Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. (x) Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. ( ) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. (x) 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. (x) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. ( ) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. ( ) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. (x) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. (x) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. ( ) Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. (x) 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. (x) 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. (x) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. ( ) The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. (x) 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. (x) Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. ( ) Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. ( ) Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. (x) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. (x) Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. (x) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. ( ) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
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
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. (x) 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. (x) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. ( ) The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint
93. ( ) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. (x) 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. (x) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. (x) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. ( ) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

31. Not too bad. I should make it a life goal to read all of these. Unfortunately, I know I've started and stopped reading some because I found them very uninteresting (like Jane Austin...I can't read anything Jane Austin, I just fall asleep). I think I'll at least make the effort.

Over the weekend, Andy and I were in San Jose, celebrating his grandmother's 80th birthday. I got to meet a lot of his mom's side of the family, including his favorite cousin Lisa. I like Lisa, she's very opinionated and will give the cold, hard facts to you. Lisa immediately wanted to know about all the wedding details, and while she didn't seem impressed with my dress (again, I refuse to wear a white, poofy dress on GRASS! Let's think about this people. Grass stains on expensive dress? Not fun), was OK with my Asian-influence (I'm part Asian, of course my wedding is going to have some influence from my culture), and absolutely hated my wedding colors and the fact that Andy's best man is actually a girl.

Originally, I wanted to have very neutral colors, to kind of match the setting that David Walley's already has. But Andy and several other people cringed at the thought of the bridesmaids wearing champagne while I am wearing an ivory dress. So I let Andy pick the colors and he settled on a deep teal and black. Lisa HATED this and asked if we were doing an 80's theme. Then, come to find out, everyone dislikes the teal and black idea. So I decided to go back to my idea of neutrals and will have the bridesmaids in a light brown (think latte) dress with a champagne sash. The guys will wear black tuxes with a champagne vest, and we'll have splashes of pink and light green in there (from the flowers, I'm thinking orchids, lilies, and cherry blossoms). I really got it put together when I found this picture and realized "Yes! This is what I've been trying to come up with all along!"

Anyway, I'm sticking with this because it's what I originally wanted and I finally realized that this is MY wedding and if you don't like the colors, then don't come.

Our other problem is trying to trim down the attendants. While Andy doesn't have a problem with this because he hasn't officially asked anyone except Erin, I made the mistake of asking people and then realizing that I only asked them because I felt obligated to (for example, I asked my crazy friend Melissa and now we don't even talk, so I hope she knows that she's no longer part of wedding, especially after she did some crazy things to me). So right now I have 6 attendats: Kim (good friend that I made through my graduate program, she's a life saver), Julie (have known through high school and is one I'm still not sure about but I can't go back on her), my sister (obligated), my cousin Jee-Young from Korea (obligated, and was informed of this by my mother as she made the decision to add her), Katie (partially obligated but it makes her so happy to be included so I'm glad she is part of the wedding), and my "man" of honor Zander. However...Zander is one that we WILL cut. I love Zander but I'm not close enough to him to call him my man of honor and plus...he kind of made himself my man of honor. We were having lunch one day and when I told him that Andy's best man was a girl, he just made himself part of my bridal party and at the time, I didn't think too much about it, but now I realize that not only is my party huge, but that he can't really fulfill the role of maid of honor.

So Andy and I are going to talk to him when he comes into town (yes, he doesn't even live in the same town as us) and will instead ask him to be an usher, and to read one of our wedding prayers. Speaking of which, we also met with the priest that will marry us while we were down in California and I absolutely love him! He's Andy's godfather and is an Episcopalian (sp?) priest who also works with Sudanese refugees. Although I know that I love Andy and want to be with him for the rest of my life, Jerry helped me realize WHY I feel that way. I'm looking forward to attending pre-marital counseling with him and having him marry us. He also walked us through what his ceremony will be like:

-Andy and I won't see each other before the ceremony; we already spoke with the photographer about this (will explain later) and she is fine with it. Many people like to do their wedding photos before the actual wedding to save time, so that people aren't waiting around for the reception to start, but I'm traditional and want Andy to see me with fresh eyes as I walk down the aisle.

-There will be a series of 9 prayers that we will ask family members or friends to recite for us during the ceremony. Jerry's idea and I like it. We can involve people in the wedding that we originally thought we couldn't. So in this case we'll probably have our parents read a prayer, have Zander read a prayer, etc.

We also met with the photographer yesterday. Her name is Emily Main and I LOVE her photos. She's relatively new but has been doing photography for many years. You check out her blog here . Plus, her price is pretty unbeatable for everything that you get and the quality of the photos. $1800 gets us 8 hours of photography (and she said that even if it goes on longer than that, she won't charge us), a 10x10 hardcover wedding book with 30 pages and 100 images, an album with 200 5x7 photos, all of the photos printed on 4x6, all the images on a cd, 5 8x10s and some other stuff plus a free engagement session with her. We hinted at using her but didn't really say much because I wanted to discuss it with Andy but he really liked her. So now we're waiting on Andy's parents to write us a check for the deposit and we will book her.

Anyway, there's the most recent wedding update. I just had to get it out of my system. Andy was ready to kill me last night because I wouldn't stop talking about it. 

1. Candles. Especially scented votive candles. If I leave them anywhere, he will gnaw on them.

2. Door stoppers. Yes, those things on the door that prevent them from slamming into the wall. He's ingested two of them.

3. Knit moccassins that I made for a Native American art class. I even sewed tiny little turquoise beads on them.

4. Andy's phone charger

5. My phone charger

6. Socks

7. Andy's old shirts (which I'm actually grateful for because I've been nagging him to through away old clothes like those).

8. Bags we put our recycling in. We need to invest in a bin to put under the sink and child-proof the kitchen cabinets so he can't get inside of them.

9. Old childhood stuffed cat that was my precursor to Nabi. It was one of those toys that purred when you moved it's head side to side, and had a water ballon inside of it to make it seem real.

10. Nabi

11. Our fingers

12. Any sort of jewelry that I possess

13. Did I mention he ate a candle?

I think we mistakingly adopted a dog wearing a cat suit. 

Last week of freedom

Yes, that is my cat, snorgling my butt as I update on Vox. My ass looks huge. I swear, it's because he's a small kitty, so he MAKES my ass look huge. 

Last week before school starts. I am NOT looking forward to this semester at all. I just want to be done. Damn you higher education! I shake my fist at you. Although it was purely my idea to go and get my Master's, so really I have no one to blame but myself.

So the plans for this week include working, getting an oil change tomorrow after work, clothes shopping with Julie on Wednesday, and then free drinks and dancing with Julie Friday night. I started a new diet, and I already know I'm going to blow it Friday evening. Maybe I can just starve myself the entire day. That'll make up for it, right?

Sunday is a wedding fair that I'll be attending with Andy's mom and sister. My mom totally ditched me on this one. Which is okay, because the last time she came to one with me, she rushed through the entire thing, and wanted to leave after 30 minutes. Really? She didn't bother looking at anything, just walked the perimeter of the fair and then demanded to leave. Andy's mom will be the complete opposite. I'm kind of glad someone is excited about this wedding.

Anyhoo, I'm hoping Andy and I can go to Disneyland again this year. Julie is going to Disneyworld and I hate her for it. I so want to go back but it's not within my budget at the moment. Weddings are expensive, as I'm slowly finding out.

I totally caved in yesterday and let Andy get a cat so now we have Mochi. He's about 6 months old and loves to eat Nabi's food. She's not too fond of him but is determined to keep her place in the household. She's eating and still sleeping with us, so I'm not too concerned. She's just been kind of grumpy and hissy at him when he gets too close. Hopefully she gets used to him.

Mochi

All right guys. Here's all the juicy details of the proposal.

For the longest time, Andy has been plotting to do something special for our one year anniversary. Yes, we've only been together one year, have known each other for 2. Don't judge us. I knew he was planning to take me somewhere nice, especially when he told me that I would "need to bring my fanciest dress and pack an overnighter."

So this past Sunday, we leave the house and my precious kitty behind and head up towards....LAKE TAHOE! Interesting, as this is where we got together last year. He pulls into the parking lot of the Montbleu. Even more interesting as this was the exact hotel where we got together (for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, please refer to a post in my blog that was made exactly one year ago).

We go to check in and found out that we had gotten there about an hour before check in, so we decided to walk around the various casinos and shops. After about 30 minutes of that, he suggests that we walk down to the beach. I immediately get grumpy with this idea because, Hello! It was 55 and windy that day. I don't do windy. I tell him that I would rather not because of the weather. He kind of pushes for it but gives up when he realizes that I'm not budging (this is a rather bad mistake on my part. For once I wish I hadn't been so stubborn).

We decide to go back to the room and go swimming at the pool, which is AMAZING by the way. Aside from some minor distractions (I opened my bedside table's drawer and found USED CONDOM WRAPPERS. Gross. Andy called the front desk and they sent someone in with rubber gloves and TONGS to pick up the wrappers), I started changing into my bikini. Andy, obviously nervous, asked me to wait and keep my clothes on. Again, instant irritation.

Me: Why?!

Andy: Because I have something. I want to give you your anniversary present.

Me: Well...give it to me then.

Andy: (hugs me a little too long, sparks more irritation on my part) I just wanted to say that you're the best thing that has ever happened to me and I love you so very much and I wanted to know if you (pulls out the ring, I start hyperventilating) would marry me?

I just started crying and laughing, and pushing him away and hitting him all at the same time. He puts the ring on my finger and then realizes that he didn't get down on one knee, and asks me if I'd like him to do it again because he forgot. I really don't care that he didn't. I just feel awful because his initial plan was to propose to me on the beach but I had to be a raging bitch and say no.

So there you have it. He proposed to me while I was in my bikini. He did say that he wants me to not plan the wedding right away because he's concerned about my school work and my work in general. We decided that the wedding will probably be in June of 2010, when I will be done with grad school (latest date that I will graduate is December of '09). I still can't help but do some planning. I just would like to find a ceremony and reception location and maybe get a contract going so that we don't have to worry about it a year from now.

Anyway, here are some crappy photos of the ring, taken with my Palm Centro. The ring is currently at the jeweler's being resized because I have itty-bitty fingers. Enjoy!

Andy is up at band camp for a week so its just me and the cat. I really really miss him. However, Nabi really really doesn't because now she has his side of everything to herself, including the couch. Notice the blue blanket, which is Nabi's blanket that she's suppose to lie on so she doesn't get cat fur on the couch. Glad to see that's working out.

What are five qualities you value in your closest relationships?

1. Honesty.

Whether its being honest about not liking a place that we are planning to eat at, or answering the "Do I look fat" question  that every person is bound to ask, or being honest when I ask for your opinion about a new boyfriend/new job/new whatever, I value honesty above everything else. This is mainly because people have been so dishonest with me in the past.

2. Passion.

I don't care who you are, if you don't have a passion for SOMETHING in your life, I don't want to associate with you. I can't stand people who don't have a passion for anything, it's like dealing with a newt.

3. Trust.

I have a hard time trusting people, and sometimes, they have a hard time trusting me too. So when I finally build up trust with the other person, I value it like no other. How can I have a relationship, whether its a friendship or a romantic relationship with someone that I don't trust and who doesn't trust me? It just doesn't make sense.

4. Respect.

I respect you, you respect me. It's easy. Calling me names because you think it'll make other people view you as "cool" is not respecting me and it makes you look like a bitch. In fact, it makes you look like MY bitch. And if you don't want to be MY bitch, then calm the eff down and refer to me as "Sarah" not "dumbass" or "ass" or any type of buttock.

5. Attitude and outlook.

I hate people that ALWAYS have a poor attitude/outlook. I know people go through phases, but there are just some people (for a good example, see any post I've made about Devin) who are ALWAYS negative and in lousy spirits. It's not fun to be around people like that. Now, if you've gone through a bad breakup, had a bad day, or you're just not feeling as well as you normally do, then its fine. But for those that ALWAYS see the bad in EVERYTHING, I make SURE that they are not a part of my life. I'm no longer like that, and I never want to go back to being like that because I was an unpleasant person to be around.  

My mom bought me an early xmas present...KOREAN SOAP OPERAS!!!!! Granted, I bought them myself and she has yet to pay me back but once she does, it will officially be her present to me.

Early Xmas present

1 comment

Originally saw this on Cuteoverload.com and could NOT stop laughing.