What happened to the libray?

I went to my local library yesterday to renew my library card.  I used to have one in this county about a million years ago, but thankfully they no longer have me in the system.  I fear I would have had some 15 year overdue book fine!  I decided to use the library for as many as my 100 books as possible.  I thought for sure I would at least be able to grab the classics off the list.  Wrong!  How does a library not have a single copy of Pride & Prejudice?  They did have 4 copies of Pride & Prejudice and Zombies! Say what now!!  Utter insanity.  So from there I moved on to Les Miserables.  Nope.  I managed to find one copy of Wuthering Heights, so that will be my next read.  I know I can get a lot of these for free on my Kindle, but I just feel really weird about reading a book that was written in like 1846 on my ereader.  Seems disrespectful or something.  Now, any of these that I fall in love with, I will more than likely add to my kindle for rereading purposes.  But as a first go round, I am sticking with paper.  I had no idea it was going to be such a tricky task though!

So far I have checked 3 books off of my 100 Books to Read Before You Die list:

1.  The Stand by Stephen King.  This was good! I tend to read a little faster through the parts that are scary, so I never find books as freaky as movies.  In a movie the scary scenes last forever, with background music and slow walking and such.  I could immediately tell which scenes would have scary music behind them, but I just kept reading.  If you don't know, this book is about what happens after a killer virus is released into the world, and spreads.  It was so fascinating because it really took the time to start from the first person who was infected, and how it spread from there, and eventually killed I think like 98% of the population.  I have been using much more hand sanitizer, and I get a little jumpy when people around me start to cough or sneeze!  From there, it becomes about survival and rebuilding "society", and eventually a battle between good and evil.  It definitely made me think a lot!

2.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  I read this at some point in school, so I remembered the story, but not necessarily a good chunk of the smaller parts.  I forgot how amazing this book is. 

3.  Blubber by Judy Blume.  I am sure I read this one growing up.  But I do not really remember much of it.  Its basically about bullying.  Its sad how relevant it still is after all of this time.  Is there ever going to be a time when we aren't being mean to other people?  I wish I remember reading this one when I was younger to see if my immediate feelings about the characters were the same.  Did I pick up right away that the "popular" girls were picking on someone else for no good reason?  Or did it take until the end of the book when the tables really turn around for me to see it? 

Wuthering Heights and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe are next up!

Weekly Recap: April 15 - 28

Ahh yes, another 2 week recap :-)  Its alright this time, because there is one pretty good week, and one insanely lame week, so they balance out into two decent weeks.  At least that is the math I am going to use in this instance!

Monday:
Yoga

Wednesday:
3.03 miles
43:22 minutes
14:18 pace
This was a run with mom - so it was a 30/40

Thursday:
3 miles
41:05 minutes
13:41 pace
Yay for faster! Today I went back to 40/40
Yoga

Saturday:
6.12 miles
1:24:00
13:47 pace
This is the first "longer than 3 mile" run that I have managed to keep under a 14 min mile pace.  I am not anywhere near as fast as I hope to be by Tower of Terror, but I am excited that I can actually see progress! Hooray!

Now for last week:
I did nothing.  Nada.  Not one single mile.  My sinuses were bothering me on Tuesday and Wednesday.  They were all clogged up and pressure-y.  I was so clogged up that it was throwing my equilibrium off! I tripped going up the stairs to my apartment every time during those two days.  While I am not exactly a picture of grace, I am also not that clumsy, so I figured running may not be the greatest idea.  Plus in addition to being clogged my head was nice and poundy, so all in all I just was not feeling the whole run thing.  And then on Thursday I went out of town for the weekend, so there was no running for me all week. 

The good news is that my yoga studio started a "Yoga for Runners" class and I went to the first one on Sunday.  At 7am!  It was packed.  And we did a lot of leg stretching which will definitely be helpful.  And I ran this morning.  So I am already back on track.  This morning was a tough run, so there will be no more skipping weeks for me (at least I am going to try my best to make sure of it anyway). 

In other related news.  I am like 50% of the way through The Stand.  At this rate it is going to take me forty forevers to get through those 100 books.  I need to speed things up.  Its pretty good so far though.  I am not sure what I am going to make my second choice.  I need to renew my library card and see what I can find!

:-)

100 Books to Read Before You Die

I came across this list the other day when I was trying to decide what book I wanted to read next.  It is now my mission to read every book on the list!  There are a bunch of different versions of this floating around, but I chose this one because it seemed pretty well-rounded, and I also liked that there are not multiple books for one author on it.  This list came from bookstove.com.  I have already read some of these (although not nearly as many as I should have) but since when I read them, they were required reading for school, I am going to reread them.  This is definitely when having a Kindle makes things easy, especially since I live on the third floor and will not be hauling all of these crazy books up and down the stairs :-)  Actually I will probably become good friends with my local library as well, and then if I come across anything I feel like I want to read again, I can pick up a copy.  I thought about just going down the list in order, but I am going to have to jump around and pick and choose what I am in the mood for, otherwise this project will take ten times longer than it already will!  And just for the record, the books are not in any particular order. 

100 Books to Read Before You Die

1.    The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
2.    The Road Less Traveled - Dr. Scott M. Peck
3.    Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
4.    In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
5.    To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6.    War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
7.    The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
8.    The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
9.    Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
10.  World War Z - Max Brooks
11.  Education of a Wandering Man - Louis L'Amour
12.  Watership Down - Richard Adams
13.  The Illiad - Homer
14.  The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
15.  The Color Purple - Alice Walker
16.  Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
17.  Paradise Lost - John Milton
18.  Ulysses - James Joyce
19.  Dracula - Bram Stoker
20.  Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
21.  A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
22.  Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
23.  1984 - George Orwell
24.  Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
25.  Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
26.  Shogun - James Clavell
27.  For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
28.  The Stand - Stephen King
29.  Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
30.  Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
31.  The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
32.  War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
33.  A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
34.  The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
35.  The Art of War - Sun Tzu
36.  The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
37.  Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
38.  Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
39.  Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein
40.  Deliverance - James Dickey
41.  Lord of the Flies - William Golding
42.  The Dark Night Returns - Frank Miller
43.  Season of Mists - Neil Gaiman
44.  The Princess Bride - William Goldman
45.  Eaters of the Dead - Michael Crichton
46.  The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
47.  Night - Eli Wiesel
48.  Exodus - Leon Uris
49.  Contact - Carl Sagan
50.  You Can't Go Home Again - Thomas Wolfe
51.  On The Road - Jack Kerouac
52.  Blubber - Judy Blume
53.  Foundation - Isaac Asimov
54.  The Stranger - Albert Camus
55.  The Trial - Franz Kafka
56.  Rabbit, Run - John Updike
57.  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
58.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
59.  The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
60.  Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
61.  Grendel - John Gardner
62.  Hour of the Dragon - Robert E. Howard
63.  The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
64.  Cop Hater - Ed McBain
65.  Moby Dick - Herman Melville
66.  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
67.  McTeague - Frank Norris
68.  A Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin
69.  Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
70.  Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
71.  Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
72.  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
73.  The Divine Comedy - Dante
74.  Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
75.  Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
76.  Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
77.  The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
78.  Charlotte's Web - E. B. White
79.  One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
80.  The Magus - John Fowles
81.  Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
82.  Middlemarch - George Eliot
83.  Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
84.  The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
85.  The Complete Shakespeare - William Shakespeare
86.  Rosemary's Baby - Ira Levin
87.  I am Legend - Richard Matheson
88.  The Complete Plays of Aristophanes - Aristophanes
89.  The Science of God - Gerald L. Schroeder
90.  The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
91.  No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre
92.  Alexander of Macedon - Harold Lamb
93.  Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
94.  We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
95.  Band of Brothers - Stephen Ambrose
96.  Ancient Inventions - Peter James and Nick Thorpe
97.  The Telltale Heart and Other Writings - Edgar Allen Poe
98.  The Call of the Wild - Jack London
99.  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Frank Baum
100. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

I am not sure if I will be able to make it through all of these.  But I do want to make at least a good faith effort.  I am already somewhat nervous about The Illiad and Shakespeare...they will probably be towards the end of the list :-) 

The first one I chose was The Stand by Stephen King.  I have had this one on my list of books to read for a while, but just have not gotten to it.  Since I already had it, I figured it was as good a place to start as any.  Luckily it has not given me nightmares yet, but I am only 20% of the way through!


 

Weekly Recap: April 8-14

I cannot believe how fast the weeks are flying by! January will seriously be here before I know it.  I would not be disappointed if things just slowed down a teeny tiny bit though.  Its hard to believe its already the middle of April.  Wasn't Christmas just yesterday? Craziness!

Last week was a busy running week!  Since I moved my Saturday run to Sunday, it gave me 5 days of running.  Surprisingly I felt really good through every run.  None of them were longer than 4 miles, but at least I made it out of bed every morning.  So I will take that for now.  But I do have an 8 miler on the calendar for Saturday!

Sunday:
4.01 miles
59:17 minutes
14:48 average pace

Monday:
3.05 miles
43:52 minutes
14:23 average pace
This was the first day I went to 40/40 intervals.  No joke, adding 10 seconds of running feels like an hour!

Tuesday:
3.06 miles
43:48 minutes
14:19 average pace

Wednesday:
Yoga

Thursday:
3.07 miles
42:28 minutes
13:50 average pace
Yoga
I have no idea what happened today, but I may have found my inner "almost speedster"!  This was the best run I have had in such a long time, and the running segments were much much faster than usual.  I don't know if it was my awesome Italian dinner the night before, or the fact that I had a chocolate peanut butter bear waiting for me at the office, or just a fluke...but I hope it sticks around :-)

Saturday:
4.01 miles
59:15 minutes
14:46 average pace
I ran this one with mom and we ran 30/40 intervals.  And I forgot my Garmin.  That dumb thing will be the death of me! And I am way too analytical to be able to just run like a regular person and enjoy it, I want to study the numbers when I finish.  Total nerd I know :-)

17.20 total miles this week! I have been paying myself $1 for every mile that I run, so that I will have money to shop at all these expos!  I am already looking forward to all of the shopping I will be doing :-)

Motivational Monday!

Mondays are the devil!! Seriously, I do not understand why they even have to exist?? The world would be a better place if we just went straight to Tuesday.  I guess if the week went from Sunday to Tuesday, then Tuesday would get the bad rap...so its probably an impossible feat.  Oh well. 

This was my breakfast today! (Don't worry, this isn't the motivational part :-) )

For the record, I do not really care much for white chocolate, but this white chocolate is another story!  Thankfully this is the only one I have, so I can go back to regular breakfast foods tomorrow!  No good ever comes from holiday candy :-)

I love finding cool motivational quotes and such, so I am going to add some here...it will make Monday seem less horrid (well it should anyway...I can always resort to more candy pictures if it doesn't work!)

This is my favorite one of the day.  I am crazy impatient, and tend to get frustrated very easily, so its almost as if this was written just for me.  I will probably have to print it out and tape it all around the house.  Yes I am nerdy like that!  Ohh actually it may need its own page in my scrapbook attempt!

Happy Monday :-)

Let the Nightmares Begin!

So there are about 279 days until WDW Marathon weekend.  And I have already had my first race dream!  This does not bode well for the rest of the year...

I was running the Goofy Challenge and decided that in order to save my legs for the full marathon, I would have a faster runner pull me in a wagon for the half marathon.  Which is actually a brilliant idea!  I don't know why I haven't considered it before :-)  Well we got through the castle and decided to stop and eat cheeseburgers before leaving Magic Kingdom.  Sadly, I eat even slower than I run (if that is even possible) and by the time we got ready to get back on the course, the balloon ladies and the end of the race passed right by!  I do not know why I did not just get my cheeseburger to go, I mean I could have just eaten it while I was riding. 

Moral of the story: No cheeseburgers until AFTER the finish line :-)

I also started one of those Smash books to keep through training.  Scrapbooking is one of those things that I always intend to do, but can never get creative enough to actually do.  So I end up with shoe boxes of the things that I would put in my scrapbook if I ever made it.  This Smash thing seems much more up my alley.  No order, no decorating, just find something cool and shove it in the book!  It will likely be the common place that I shove all the random notes that I put with recipes and running ideas, but its a start :-)  Maybe I will throw some stickers in there and really get crazy!  Honestly, the "order" thing is not my issue with scrapbooking, as I have already been mentally organizing how I am going to work this book...its the "decorating".  I am not exactly creative...way too much of a left brain for that.  I love the way elaborate scrapbooks look, but its just not my strength.  This is really just kind of a journal with some fun stuff thrown in :-)

Weekly Recap - March 25 - April 7

Errr technically this should be called Multiple Weeks of Recap because I am a slacker.  The good new is that I am only slacking in recaping, not the running :-)

So here it is:

Tuesday 3/27
3.07 miles
44:12 minutes
14:22 average pace

Thursday 3/29
3.07 miles
44:35 minutes
14:30 average pace

Saturday 3/31
6.10 miles
1:29:43
14:42 average pace

Monday 4/2
Yoga

Tuesday 4/3
3.05 miles
45:00 minutes
14:46 average pace

Wednesday 4/4
3.02 miles
44:06
14:37 average pace

Thursday 4/5
3.07 miles
44:17
14:27 average pace

I kept 30/40 for the last two weeks.  I managed to run them all even during my not-all-that-long run, although I did slow down a little bit, but not too bad.  I am going to increase the run to 40 seconds starting next week. 


In other related news...

This is my Publix

That smoke you see is where an airplane crashed into it and fell through the roof!  Yep, you read that right, I said airplane! Pretty insane.  Thankfully no one was killed.  The pilot and copilot were pretty badly burned and are still in the hospital, and 3 customers had some injuries, but I think only one is still in the hospital.  Luckily it happened a little after 7pm, so a good chunk of the after work rush was already finished.  Sadly, Publix is a disaster.  Who knows when it will open back up.  Boo.  Pretty crazy for a Monday though...especially in a small town, nothing ever happens here.  Hopefully it goes back to being that way now!