Jolie Guillebeau

“Though new her name, grey be her fame…**

Also known as Liberia, Libby is our new roommate. Her job is mostly to keep me company while Chris is away, and to distract Chris from his computer when he’s home. So far, she’s done pretty well on both counts.

We adopted her last week from a local animal rescue shelter. She was a bit timid for the first few days, but she’s quickly found her stride. Last night I came home to find her perched on top of the tall bathroom cabinet. She’s playful, but gentle and she loves to lay on my lap and purr as I type.

This picture above shows her color more accurately, but the picture below demonstrates her personality. Obviously, it took a while to get a decent picture.

**Brownie points for anyone who can tell me what I’m referencing in the quote. I’ll reveal the answer in the next post, but you can leave your guesses in the comments.

A request from a friend…

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
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 : a memoir
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 : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Really? Wednesday?
And I haven’t posted yet? Well, I better get on that.

So this week…

Well, I made the Rainbow Jello that I linked to last week. Here’s what I learned. It’s really pretty, but it’s a lot of work for something that still just tastes like Jello. I don’t really like Jello.

I also made oven-dried tomatoes. That was easy and satisfying. I am all about things that are easy and satisfying.

And I painted. I still can’t show you what I’ve done, but I think I’ve cleared a new hurdle with my work. I’ve talked before about how I seem to hit a wall, when I’m ninety percent finished with a painting. Last week, Gary offered a cumulative critique of my work from the year. As we talked about my work as a whole, I was able to see the consistent weaknesses and, more importantly, how I could fix them. So since then, I’ve been working on details. Straightening edges, smoothing transitions, sharpening perspective lines, adjusting value shapes… it makes for a better painting, but boring blogging–especially without a camera. Sorry.

oh, my! How complicated– but it’s soooo pretty.

http://adventuresofafoodslut.blogspot.com/2008/04/rainbow-jello.html

and I’ve spent a bit too much time goofing off on the computer today, so instead of painting progress, you get my attempt at Cubism .