I am not very bold

“What we have here is 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, Underline the ones you read for school, Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.” [via]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion [listened to audio book]
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
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
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma [this is on my PDA and I read it at odd times when I'm stuck somewhere without anything else to do]
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 Miserables
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 [read this in the evenings to Fiona before she was born]
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

Backpack! Backpack!

My old Iron Horse Singer sewing machine is ready to be picked up from the repair shop. It ended up needing a new motor and that’s not surprising. I will pick it up this Friday and this weekend I will work on a little backpack for Fiona. I modified a pattern out of Lotta Jansdotter’s Simple Sewing so that it will fit the bee’s smaller size. I just need to figure out how to set up the tiling on the Illustrator file with the pattern so that my husband can print it out at work. He tried once but it came out willy-nilly on too many pages. I am tempted to go to his office and try printing it with him. Next big wishlist purchase: a home printer.

Actually, we did once have an ink jet printer but we used it so irregularly the ink would always dry out. We even kept the cartridges in a humidor-like container designed for storing them. I am wondering if we should try an ink jet printer again now that I can visualize us using it a lot more or if we should try a toner printer. I worry about the health effects of toner dust, though.

In the mean time, the bee’s backpack will be made of some nice pink canvas I found at Hancock Fabrics‘ Lincoln Avenue store. (Contrary to the jovial man at the store who spun a nice tale about the store losing its 30-year lease after it was up, it looks like Hancock Fabrics is having some financial trouble. Well, maybe both are true.) Before I put it all together, I will have to think of some sort of embellishment for the outer pocket. Maybe I can have Fiona do a drawing with fabric crayons or I could make an applique out of one of her drawings.

Sticky Buns

A few days ago, I suddenly realized I could make sweet roll dough in the bread machine. Friday, the bee and I put the ingredients in the machine. When it was done, we prepared the pan, rolled out the dough and rolled up the buns then cut them apart. I covered up the pan and let it rise overnight in the refrigerator. In the morning, I let them sit for 20 minutes then preheated the oven and baked them.

We don’t usually eat such rich breakfasts here but I have been looking for ways to convert foods with corn in them into foods that Fiona can eat since she is sensitive to corn. She does love spirals, though for her spirals are really cinnamon rolls. I have been working on coming up with a substitute for powdered sugar but in the mean time, I have some rice syrup–to use in place of corn syrup–in the pantry. So I decided to make the sticky buns and they were very successful. So successful I can only make them once in a while in good conscience.

In the mean time, I’ve searched online and found that powdered sugar can be made from granulated sugar by grinding it (by itself or with a bit of potato starch) in a blender. A coffee grinder (one devoted to sugar) supposedly works even better. Commercial powdered sugar is cut with corn starch to keep it from clumping. Another commercial product cut with corn starch is baking powder. According to several websites, baking powder is easy to make at home by mixing 1 part baking soda to 1 or 2 parts cream of tartar and, optionally, 1 part tapioca starch or arrowroot. It struck me as so odd to find that commercial baking powder has corn starch in it but commercial baking soda does not. I am still not quite convinced! As I sort through the pantry and muddle through the grocery store, trying to eliminate more corn ingredients from our diet, I have found the cornallergens.com website to be very helpful. The list of ingredients that potentially contain corn is certainly daunting, though.

Every day I think about getting most of our food from a CSA and a meat share and give up on processed foods entirely. What an exhausting prospect, though. Reading Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters is certainly encouraging the idea. Last night Fiona was acting kind of crazy. We finally figured out that she was having a reaction and, from all the signs, it looks a lot like she was reacting to almonds. Eating fresh, simple food made from unprocessed or nearly unprocessed ingredients wouldn’t solve our problems or cure our food sensitivities but I have a feeling it would bring a greater clarity to managing them.