The three winners of the Office giveaway are allthewine, CDP, and j*amy.
Email me at lady.luck.05(@)gmail.com with your address by Sunday. Congrats!
And now...a meme! This one comes tagged from Stephanie Perkins. I've just recently started reading this blog and she's so hilarious and insightful. Plus, she's a librarian and a writer, so naturally we're friends.
1. What are your nicknames?
I've answered this before. But since you asked so nicely... Gretch-a-sketch, Gretch, Gretcher, Gretchie, Fetchin' Gretchen, GretchieGAL, Gretchizzle, and Hen.
2. What was the first movie you bought in VHS or DVD?
My mom probably bought The Lion King for me, but it's the first one I can consciously remember waiting for. I was eight and I knew the exact release date. Some things never change.
3. What is your favorite scent?
If I had access to Amorententia, I'd smell laundry soap, brownies, and rain on the desert dirt.
4. What one place have you visited that you can't forget and want to go back to?
Either Chicago or Seattle. Probably Chi-town. Chicago bloggers, I love your city. I just needed you to know, once.
5. Do you trust easily?
Why are you asking me all of these questions?
(In all seriousness, I don't trust easily, but once I do, it's unwavering.)
6. Do you generally think before you act, or act before you think?
I'm a thinker. I try not to be sometimes, but I can't help it.
7. Is there anything that has made you unhappy these days?
Oh jeez. You don't really want me to unload right now. Uncertainty sums it up pretty well.
8. Do you have a good body image?
I'm female. Enough said. ("It's as if the Dove commercials never happened!")
9. What is your favorite fruit?
Fresh peaches, strawberries, clementine oranges, and Asian pears.
10. What websites do you visit daily?
It's ridiculous how many. But I couldn't live without twitter.
11. What have you been seriously addicted to lately?
Window shopping for boots online, buying STUFF, and banana peppers.
12. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
She appreciates the Hot British Man, which I think is enough to vouch for the character of a person. Stephanie's the kind of person I meet on the internet and think, "Wow, we'd so be friends in real life."
13. What's the last song that got stuck in your head?
OneRepublic's "Apologize" (Getitoutgetitoutgetitout)
14. What's your favorite item of clothing?
Pac-Man pajama pants represent!
15. Do you think Rice Krispies are yummy?
Oh man, that sounds good right now. Yes. Yes, I do.
16. What would you do if you saw $100 lying on the ground?
Turn it in. I'm a good girl, I am! (But for fun, let's just say I didn't have to turn it in. I've got this ever-growing bookmarked list of "Things I Want" and it would go towards a magical pair of boots.)
17. What items could you not go without during the day?
I get the shakes when I don't have access to the internet.
18. What should you be doing right now?
So, so many other things than this. At this exact moment, I should be cleaning the bathroom, which is the bane of my existence. We have guests tonight, so I can't procrastinate either. Boo!
*obligatory tagging*
I'd like to see this from Melissa, Melina, Carla, Q, Alishka, and Ashley.
Happy first weekend of Rocktober! (And thanks to Maxie for introducing me to the term "Rocktober.")
My cousin Samantha tagged me for the 8 things meme. It's pretty low-key, but this is all I can manage for an early Monday morning.
1. I played Rock Band for the first time on Saturday. I now get what all the fuss is about.
2. The other day, I hit 1,000 tweets on my twitter page.
3. I'm an amazing editor/proofreader if I'm evaluating someone else's work. When it comes to my own stuff, though, I'm utterly hopeless.
4. I'm getting restless without new tv. Two weeks...
5. I may be a music snob, but I'm the kind of music snob that really truly loves listening to the radio.
6. I keep my tickets from everything--movie passes, TRAX stubs, and plays. I have saved every single fortune I get from fortune cookies.
7. Speaking of fortune cookies, I think they taste delicious. I also eat the entire fortune cookie before reading the fortune, because I believe that's the only way it will come true. ("I'm not superstitious, but I'm...I am a little stitious.")
8. Fall Semester at my alma mater starts today. It's the first September in over sixteen years where I haven't gone to school, and while this makes me mostly overjoyed, it also makes me more sad than I anticipated.
I don't know how well this will work as a meme, but I'm curious to see how it goes.
Summer Senses Meme
List the things you love about summer for each of the five senses and tag five people at the end. Simple!
Taste: Charred burgers with American cheese, gnawing on a grape popsicle stick long after the popsicle is gone, ripe summer fruit (watermelon, peaches, strawberries, grapes), chewing on the ice from a cherry limeade, hot dogs covered in ketchup and relish, potato salad with olives, pistachio ice cream in sugar cones
Touch: Warm grass, air-conditioned movie theaters, sand so hot it burns your feet, evening breezes, catching a Frisbee between your fingers, grasping ribs slick with barbecue sauce, t-shirts softer than down, flipping the pages of a brand-new chick lit book
Sight: Cherry-stained lips, lime green toenails, corn-on-the-cob dripping with butter, fireflies sparking on and off, parade floats, antique roses, tan lines from flip-flops
Smell: A fired-up grill, chlorine, sulfur from fireworks, lilacs, rain on dirt, the tang of salty ocean water, fresh hay, movie popcorn
Auditory: Neighbor kids playing at the park, the Beach Boys, thunder outside your window, over-played radio hits like Pocketful of Sunshine, sandals on pavement, the whirr of the homemade ice cream machine, the Grease soundtrack
I tag: Edge, Elisabeth, Srah, Dr. Bolte, Q, Chilly, Jamie, Jenn, Cuileann, EP, Erin, Heather, Megan, and Megan.
(Okay, so I cheated there and tagged a random butt-load of you. I figured it couldn't hurt in getting it off the ground. If I didn't tag you and you're struck by some summer adoration, I'd also be delighted to see what you love about summer.)
(50 cool points to me for referencing Belle & Sebastian in the title. Also, sorry for the font size issues. Blogger won't let me fix it and needs 15 minutes in time-out. At least Twitter will be there to keep it company.)
The Big Read 100
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Confession: The only Austen I've ever read. I want to read the others, I just...haven't.)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I'm kind of a LOTR geek.)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (Liked it, didn't love it.)
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (On a fanatical level. Seriously.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (In my top five.)
6. The Bible (I got an award in Seminary for reading ALL of the standard works.)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I read these and I still have my faith! Wow!)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (This is my forever Number One book.)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (The entire works? No way. But I have read a fair amount, so I'm counting it.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Fun fact: Gandalf and I both have INTJ personalities.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I wanted to move to NY desperately after reading this.)
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 (I don't feel strongly about this book one way or the other.)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (DON'T PANIC.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (This book is psycho.)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Not all, but most.)
34. Emma - Jane Austen (Actually, Jane Austen had an INTJ personality as well. Cool, no?)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (I will always have an age-inappropriate crush on Peter.)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (All I know about this is that it looked like a really crappy Nicolas Cage movie.)
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (Adorable!)
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (This is just a cool book.)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (It's poorly written and sensationalized, but it's still a fun read.)
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 (Oh, Gil!)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I was the ONLY girl in my 12th grade English class to like this book.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (This is actually first on my list of things to read after I graduate.)
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I need to re-read this.)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (I tried reading a few of the sequels, but they just didn't work for me.)
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 (Ugh.)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Awesome, awesome book.)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Danged depressing, that's what.)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov (I'm currently working on Reading Lolita in Tehran.)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Edmund is a totally hot book character. He should have been on my list.)
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 (I was going to mark this as a to-read, but I really don't like Dickens. Not gonna bother.)
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (Great book, good movie, not that crazy about the musical.)
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 (Maybe the only Dickens I can tolerate.)
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 (I'm currently working on a list of my favorite kid's books. This is on there.)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Eh. Frankly, I thought it was a tad trite.)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (If you want to almost ruin reading for high school kids, make them read this.)
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Love it.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (Because women love that sensitive nautical.)
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 (Roald Dahl is mostly responsible for my weird sense of humor.)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
(What, no Huck Finn? I'm sure there are many others left out, but that's the first that came to mind.)
Read count: 31--which is decent, but I can do better. (I guess the average adult has only read 6 or something, so in that regard I'm doing great.)
To be read: 28--I've got my work cut out for me. The prospect of so many books to read makes me happy and tingly.
Edge tagged me for the Seven Songs meme. Since I'm all about getting good music noticed, this is right up my alley.
List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to. (...or not. If you want to play, be my guest.)
1. Strawberry Swing; Coldplay
Really, this whole album is insanely good. And I realize listing this makes me even whiter, according to Christian Lander.
2. It's Oh So Quiet; Björk
This chick is certifiably psycho, but I'm crazy about her.
3. Hummingbird; Wilco
This song speaks so many things to me about summer. It's probably my summer anthem.
4. Sugar Magnolia, Grateful Dead
Gah, I'm such a hippie sometimes.
5. You Don't Make It Easy Babe; Josh Ritter
"I'm trying hard to love you/But you don't make it easy, babe." Swoon!
6. Superstar; Tegan and Sara
Angry girl rock at its absolute finest.
7. Start Wearing Purple; Gogal Bordello
Totally bizarre. I love it.
Bonus: If I Never See Your Face Again; Maroon 5 featuring Rihanna
Pop perfection! This song is to summer music as snow cones are to summer carnivals.
Heard anything good lately?
This easily qualifies for the Best. Meme. EVER. Be sure to check out the answers from srah, Jennie!, and Heather Anne.
You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon.
2. One song blasting on the speakers.
3. One famous person to fight alongside you.
Weapon can be real or fictional; you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.
1. A lightsaber, hot pink--Just like Princess Leia's. That's not in the movies, but it is in the books. coughShutup!cough
2. Killer Queen, Queen--Dynamite with a laser beam, baby.
3. Veronica Mars, hands down. Those zombies are TOAST.
Also, the title comes from the most amazing song about zombies. Jonathan Coulton is at least nine different levels of awesome.
1. Bob Jackson Super Vigorelli Track: 001, 2. Elbows with Homemade Low Fat Spinach Alfredo Sauce, Chicken, and Diced Tomatoes, 3. Jordan: Senior 2008 - Flare!, 4. Parasol, 5. Lee Pace Comic Con 07, 6. ginger ale, 7. Milan Train Station at Midnight, 8. green tea, 9. Madame de Remusat by Paul Delaroche, 10. The Old Library, 11. Cute cat alert!, 12. Walking Ginger
Note: There was this really awesome and disgusting picture of a gutted chicken I thought about putting for #2, but it just didn't jive with the rest of it. Otherwise, I'm pleased with how it turned out.
I never liked playing tag in elementary school, because I am the opposite of a fast runner. I'd always get tagged first and then spend for-EV-er [/Squints] trying to get close enough to the other kids so I could end the misery and maybe catch my breath, if I was lucky to last that long. But blog tagging? Everyone wins! I believe what it says on the Alamodome--we are all winners! [/Miss Texas]
Elisabeth tagged me for the six random things meme, which I've always kinda wanted to do, so yay!
Post the rulez on your blog:
- Write six random things about yourself in a blog post
- Tag six however many people you want in your post
- Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
- Let the tagger know your entry is up.
(Intro: In a fit of brilliance and/or boredom, I decided to do this Six Degrees style, a la Ken Jennings.)
1. For all the post-strike episodes, Office Tally has arranged for fans to ask questions of the writers. Brent Forrester and Justin Spitzer wrote "Did I Stutter?" and actually answered my question! How cool is that? I have had semi-contact with the writers of The Office. I'll let you guys figure out which question was mine... Also, am I the only who thinks it's weird that Dwight keeps putting odd substances on Michael's head? Last week it was vaseline and the week before it was peanut butter. Oh, Dwight! You need to get back with Angela STAT.
2. In second grade, we had a writing prompt about what we would do if we opened a brand new jar of peanut butter and "HELP!" was scratched into the otherwise shiny top? My story involved using a recliner-turned-rocket to go into space to save the aliens. (The aliens were the ones in distress, natch.) To this day, every time I break out a new jar I wonder if this will be the time I find the call for help.
3. Help! is an incredible Beatles album, but it's not my favorite. That honor goes to the one and only Abbey Road. It's so tightly-crafted from start to finish, which is ironic given that the band was so not tight at that period. George Harrison is at his absolute peak and John and Paul aren't half-bad, either. Maybe someday I'll do a full review of what I love about it...there is so much I could write. From the opening shoop of "Come Together" to the bizarre and yet somehow apropos finish of "Her Majesty," Abbey Road will forever hold a place in my musical heart.
4. While other girls dreamed of being the long-lost daughters of Her Majesty the Queen, I dreamed of being the long-lost daughter of Tim and Jill Taylor. Yes, I wanted desparately to be the fourth child on Home Improvement. This show was my first taste into traditional sitcoms and it was the one show we would watch as a family on a weekly basis. Remember when the NASA astronauts visited and Gothic Mark and jokes about Al's mother? Amazing.
5. I had this astronaut uniform as a young'un that I'd decorate with badges from the Forest Service and my grandpa's old Army pins. I wanted so bad to go into space. That dream turned into deciding to be an aerospace engineer in high school and that dream turned into one day of engineering classes in college. Yeah, not for me. I liked the idea of it, but the thought of actually doing that for the rest of my freaking life had me a little keyed up and not in a good way. I dropped those classes like they were hotter than Ben Affleck in Armageddon and moved on.
6. I keep a keychain of Malibu Barbie on my keys. The reasoning behind this is tri-fold. 1) It's really easy to grab out of my purse. 2) It reminds me of my time at the toy store and also of high school, when a few friends called me "Barbie." Blond and skinny will get you that. 3) Depending on my mood, it signifies that a) I can be a strong, capable, multi-talented woman, because Barbie's an awesome girl power symbol or b) I don't want to be conformist (see: high school) and Barbie's the ideal symbol of people who need distraction from the pathetic emptiness of their meaningless, consumer-driven lives. [/Kat Stratford] Plus, she's also super cute and probably has a slew of hot boyfriends, named Brent or Justin.
Tag! The Roommate Edition: Marlayna, KK, and Elise! You're it!
Q tagged me for her book title meme, which goes as follows...
"Write the first word in the title of the book you’re reading right now (if you’re reading several, please just choose one). Then format the first word so that the letters have a separate line (yes, you’re right: an acrostic poem type thing). Choose a phrase for each letter that describes the book. Characters, places, and even types of food is fine. It just has to be something from the book."
So, I choose "The Power of Logic, 3rd Edition" by C. Stephen Layman himself!
Proofs
O statments = particular negatives
Well-crafted argument (cue Law and Order sound)
Equivocation is an ambiguous fallacy.
Really don't want to do my 85 question assignment for this class, hence the procrastination!
P.S. I'm really proud of my logic/blog (blogic!) pun in the title.
P.P.S. I tag Chilly, if she feels so inclined.
Oh yeah, I'd shell out thirteen bucks for that.
