help. my husband is addicted to watching Scare Tactics. ugh.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. For a few days I was able to complete my work early in the afternoon and then I cleaned and organized the place for the rest of the day. I got to a couple movies and ate that really-good-but-bad-for-you popcorn. We even went to the shore, where I walked (well, teetered around) on the beach, ate boardwalk ice cream and pizza, got crushed in air hockey, and then made two holes-in-one at mini-golf and won the free game for a perfect shot at the end. :)

Now I am back to a full workload, so there goes that. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be busy. But in comes the careful breakdown schedule, where I map out every minute of my day, actually get up before 8, and stay up as late as possible (which is hardly late these days). I've even decided to cast off my morning routine for now: my typical trip on the net from advice columns to job sites to publishing news to entertainment pages to other blogs. This takes more time than I've got. Bugger.

The problem is, no matter how much work I have, some things will not wait. The organizing must proceed. Garbage bags must be filled. Web sites must be visited and shopping must be completed. Houses must be walked through and considered. Dinner must be cooked. (Sadly, I've taken over this duty for now as the real writer in the family works on multiple real projects for real publication with real due dates.)

What is that sound? Ghastly.

Oh. That's just me hyperventilating.

I'm not going to become a consumer site, but these things really piss me off, if you haven't noticed.

Huge thanks to Schizohedron for pointing out this great site that I did not know about.

The Consumerist: Grocery Shrink Ray

If any other readers know really good sites that are professional and discuss consistently the screwing over of products, sizes, and prices that is going on, let me know.

Thanks to Work at Home Mom Revolution blog for pointing me to this great site ... so up my alley!! My top pet peeve right now is how so many merchants, supermarkets, restaurants are being cheap in this economy! You have to watch everything!

I Spy Restaurant Tricks

Reporting on what restaurants are shrinking, screwing with, and trying to get away with!

We finally got outside after work yesterday, took a long walk in the county park, went on the shaded path by the river, me with my water bottle, so frustratingly slow and too quickly out of breath, so much so that I had to take to a bench for a few minutes. Soon after we sat we saw a small fawn in the woods behind us, a rich caramel color, and then it seemed that taking a break was the right thing.

I've made a deadline for writing and sending out some more poetry, and the walks will help with that, among other things. It's been too long since I've been inspired and taken the time to try verse. The time when Sundays were devoted to picking out a few potential magazines, revising my poems, sending out submissions seems ages ago. I'm not thinking in poetry anymore, but I have to move toward that again. I just read that Kay Ryan is new poet laureate. She seems to have my sensibilities, the short poem, that tight, intense image. I'll have to pick up one of her books and hope to gain momentum.

Okay, this is it. Seriously. I have just decided that I will shower and dress immediately when I get up from now on and start acting like clients are going to come over! Typically I wear bum clothes or PJs (as I've posted before) and don't shower until later in the afternoon so that I can get a jump on work right away, but just now I had two policemen at the door looking for a neighbor, and it was terribly embarrassing to look like this. [Well, you can imagine me in sweat cutoffs, a T that is short and rising up the belly, and flip-flops. Ugh.] So no more. Even if it means getting a few more comfy shorts, then so be it!

Cool. I'm in. I got this from Lori Cates Hand's blog Publishing Careers.

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the Web site, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

For fun, let's see how many of the top 100 books we've actually read. My list is below. How well did you do? Have you read more than 6?Here's what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

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 (I know ... so flog me)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 [Wuthering Heights] - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 [Great Expectations] - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (please ... just not some of the historical ones)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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 Hitchhiker'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's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 [[[Anna Karenina]]] - Leo Tolstoy (FAVORITE BOOK!!!)
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
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
MISSING 51
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
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
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (actually I may have and completely blocked it out ...)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. 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 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Seriously? this book is on here?)
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 (Why include this if complete works is above? Not sure)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (the play rocked, though)

My score: 39/99