Day2Day Friday

We bought Mary a rug for her bedroom. It is pink (surprise) and has a hopscotch design on. She decided she wanted it in the lounge instead -more room to hopscotch.

For my day2day yesterday (Friday) I took a photo of our cat, Maisy sitting on the rug. I had taken a close-up but rather liked the one with her sitting on number 10, with other numbers in the foreground.

100 Books

The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
Here's how it works.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series JK Rowling
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
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 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 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' 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
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. 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
If I have counted correctly, I have read 55 of the list. So that is not bad - more than half. I was pleased to see Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree collection as I loved these as a child. I must get a copy for my daughter.
Many thanks to Sallers where I found this list; Made By Melissa where Sallers found it and A Cozy Life for originally putting this on their blogs.

Mary Mary Quite Contrary!!

My daughter Mary is obsessed with money and make-up.

But the scary thing is she is only 4!

She wants money so she can buy magazines. You know the ones which come with a free toy. She likes it especially if it has a lip gloss or similar with it. Aaagh!! I am now restricting her use of make-up. It is stupid, she is 4. This shouldn't be happening now!

I know it is all just part of dressing up to her, like putting on her Cinderella dress. I really don't want to make a big thing of it but it is a bit embarrassing when she asks her 3 year old nursery school friend if she has any make-up (in front of the other mothers).

Maybe I should just let her play with it. After all it is only very light pink colours.

The other morning I woke up and Mary came to see me. 'Your hair looks nice' I said. And it did. Mary has that sort of hair that just looks great even if it isn't brushed. She has that sort of hippy chic look then. Well, this time it turns out she has been doing a bit of trimming during the night. She had cut the sides.

Her grandmother remarked on her hair today. She didn't realise Mary had done it herself.

I think I might have a hairdresser in the family which is good.

The picture is my photo for the flickr group Self Portrait Thursday.

Day2Day & Challenge

I missed out on the day2day yesterday as I had a bad headache. I had put it off until the evening but then did not feel well enough! There is a lesson - never put of for another time what you can do right away!!

Here it is for today

Each month the UK Etsy group put forward a challenge for anyone who wants to submit a piece of work. I thought I would have a go. The challenge for July is Mushrooms. I have been making curved purses for a while. They are a lovely shape and just the right size to carry your money and also your cards, and then pop the purse in your pocket or bag. I also wanted to do a bit of embroidery again. So I combined the two and here it is:

The lining of the purse is the fabric it is on, and it does up with a pink zip. I enjoyed making it. It was dark when I took the photo so I might try again in the daylight tomorrow.

Day2Day on flickr

I have joined a group called Day2Day on flickr. The aim is to take a photo each day for 5 days that show the beauty of ordinary things.

Due to my lack of brains, I haven't managed to do a whole 5 days in a row. But from tomorrow not only do I intend to keep up with this but also devote more time to this poorly neglected blog.

This is the last photo I took for Day2Day