This was fun...and quicker than I though it would be

I found this on someone elses blog and copied it

What we have here 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, italicize the ones you read for school, underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week). I'm assuming they don't mean underline those ones you've always meant to go out and get a copy of...

Also of course, I could bold more if they let you do it for watching the movie :)


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
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
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 - maybe, i went through a classics stage and this might have been read all the way through
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
Inferno
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 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
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 (reviewed, new,for Baltimore Sun!)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed

sleepy, cold-ridden, sore knees and needles

I have a cold...I got it thursday. It didn't stop me climbing Castle hill on Saturday (hence the sore knees that make me clutch the stair rail for grim death while going up). Nor did it stop me shopping for cool t-shirts and sale priced dresses $40 down from $160 also on saturday. Of course with all that I'm now tired. Oh, the needle is due to the flu-vax i got today. Apparently having a cold doesn't stop you from having the needle (you need a fever to stop you...or the first stages of pregnancy, neither of which I have).
Tomorrow I will be supervising an exam from 8am and then toddling off to get some blood sucked for serology -stage two to confirm I have an atypical infection of the lungs - possibly not related to the cold. After that I go on antibiotics

Hmm, its almost like this is my old lady outlet for telling people whats wrong with me. Never ask me how I am to my face. You'll never get away.

champagne tastes

I have discovered the china I would collect if I collected china. I even looked it up online to find out how much it cost..
Since I could buy a new computer for less than the price of a single piece, maybe I won't be doing any collecting...However, if any of my long time fans out there are looking for a gifty for me, my favourite pieces from the 2008 collection are ADORNMENT and FLEUR-DE-LUCE

who has time to blog?

Not me.

day 10 -britain again

This was a relatively short day. I realised I'd been pounding pavements and cobblestones for at least 8 hours a day each day. My feet were starting to hurt. I visited the Jorvik centre (which had a sit down train like tour, Barley hall - which was a hands on museum - I put my butt on seats to read up on the rooms and went to the train museum to stroll around and eat dinner. They have an inside picnic area.
For lunch I had pork and crackling sandwich & viennese truffles from Thorntons chocolates for dessert. This is my most favourite chocolate of all time - or almost - they don't make the dark chocolate one anymore :(
There were some heavy downpours that i missed by being indoors during all of them. I did walk home in drizzle though (5:30pm)

one of the royal carriages - through a window

Jorvik centre. apparently they found fossilized human faeces while digging for viking archeology

these passageways are normal - not just a "didn't join the buildings" they are designed for foot passage

Barley hall...seats mmm

The river had risen somewhat - no sitting for me

The ruins of one of the church/monastery's that had been sacked. Probably by Henry the eighth - though I don't quite recall

I'm not the only one!

It's nice to see someone else had the same response to seeing the Mona Lisa as I did. I'd also like to complain about the 50 other tourists gathered round desperately trying to take photos in spite of the conditions & spoiling my already terrible view.

LOTRO is cheaper

I just installed a piece of equipment that cost the school over $18000. Its a spectrophotometer about half the size of a slimline computer. While browsing through the functions I found a section entitled "games" I then played tetris on this machine for 5 minutes. I resisted sudoku.

I would say that this was the most expensive computer game I've ever played, but I remember playing patience on an atomic absorbtion spectrophotometer that cost the company I worked for over $20000 at least ten years ago. At least that machine had the excuse of being attached to a windows based computer. The new one is a little unit with it's own screen and numeric keyboard.

a real academic

On Monday my business cards arrived. This morning I got a rejection letter for the first paper that I wrote myself. I am now a real academic.
It's one of those "deal with the critiques and you're welcome to resubmit" rejections. Since the critiques were mainly about things I thought were weaknesses in the paper, I'm happy to work on them - but it may take some time :P
I'm choosing to see it as a sign that my instincts about what makes an acceptable paper may actually be right. I submitted because the lab time I had to do this work was over, so I worked with what I had found. Must find more lab time (I do have some funds to do it in).

havent blogged in a while

I've been designing new curriculum (ok, sitting in the room and asking questions while other people design curriculum), writing lectures and pracs - new subject...I'm writing bird lectures and bee lectures and designing a project for a student to do. So lots of things I've never done before. I just came back from holidays and got sick enough to stay in bed for 4 days, then I came back to work, while still convalescing and so I'm quite tired. Things are only going to get busier, so i really should get back on anyway. But those are all my excuses.

I still have to finish the Britain holiday stuff on my blog and I've since been on another holiday. Even my recreation is getting on top of me.

BTW, while looking for a journal article to use as a statistics example for vet students, I came across a paper on measuring dog flatulence on different soy based diets....soooo tempted to use this one.

Shades of British travel

I was on Holidays in Kentucky and Sydney for a week and got home today. My flight from Sydney was delayed due to technical difficulties, resulting in a new plane, a missed connection in Brisbane and my luggage has not arrived with me. They may get it to me tonight some time...I hope.
Anyone want to fly with me ?

so cold

I am training for a trip to the coldest part of NSW in a couple of weeks by doing a walk in Freezer clean up. I'm spending about 2 hours a day in there. My nose goes numb, my fingers go numb, the cold seems through my shoes. And boy, is there a lot of old rubbish in there. I'll probably end up with a cold from the rapid fluctuations in temperature.

back to the Britain trip - day 9

Yup, frightened of spiral staircases. After doing some sales shopping at The Edinburgh Woolen Mill, I went for a hike around Clifford Castle. I felt terrified and dizzy on the spiral staircases. It didn't help that Clifford Castle was built on a large mound of earth that couldn't support the weight of the walls properly. This meant that one wall slumped sideways (big crack in wall) and the spiral staircases, as well as being spiral, are on an angle. The mound of dirt had been put there for an earlier fort and the stone castle walls were an upgrade if I remember rightly. Clifford Castle was also the site of a massacre of Jews during a dark period in York History. There is a memorial to it at the front of the castle. This was one of the periods that the castle burned down (only the stone walls remain).
After this i went to the merchant adventurers hall. This is an impressive example of how the earth build to bury stuff. the hall which was used at one point as a hospice, is much lower than the gardens outside - they have flooding issues and have had for hundreds of years. But I think it used to be much higher up. The gardens just got higher over time. I also had coffee in the oldest Coffee house in York (very tall skinny cafe restaurant now, about 3 or 4 floors and the staircase was not quite spiral)
Next on my quest to do everything was, in order; Visit to the treasurers house, the railway museum and high tea at Betty's - very posh & I have photos (i am such a tourist). After that I did a 2 hour walking tour. I got home at 9pm and planned the next day for maximum efficiency. My feet were very sore, but the skies had been lovely and blue so I took advantage of it.

Clifford Castle spiral staircase

Merchant Adventurers Guild

High tea

Roman fort tower wall (with more recent wall - medieval - on top)

christmas presents

This morning when I got in, I had an email from GenBank informing me my sequence would be released to the public on the 25th of December. How's that for a christmas present, my first sequence data. :)
Then after I had coffee, I had another email informing me I now had access to an account code for discretionary spending (read research and conferences and business cards etc).
Of course, this is money I should have had access to in August, and the statement online says it is 2007 money (I get more next year & this should roll over) and since it arrived today, on the last day of work, after all the supply businesses, ordering system and printery has closed, I can't spend any of it till next year anyway.
However, I was expecting to still be fighting for access to the money in six months.
I wonder if I can get business cards printed before I get to Sydney in January?

here tis...or at least the close up

I haven't found a full shot I like yet...I may go with the official one on the stage recieving the certificate. I look insufferably smug in it though.

three days and counting

I got my PhD gown yesterday. I've tried it on - its very heavy and the sleeves drop to mid-calf level. Now I have to buy an outfit to go under it

floppy hats away!

I will definitely be going to the graduation ceremony on the 15th December 2007. I will definitely be wearing a blue floppy hat :)
I was talking to someone yesterday who will be graduating at the next graduation in april 2008. She also wants to wear the blue floppy hat & claims a large part of doing the PhD was to wear the hat. It's not just me who did my PhD so I could play dress-ups. Anyone else do the time to wear the gown?

my head hurts

I finally had time to do some admin stuff, sent it away and both lots came back with: please update/change certain things. None of these fixes are easy, I'm not sure if they are relevant or correct either, so I'll have to think about it, ascertain the validity of the change and then either spend much time doing the changes or penning a coherent reply explaining why I think I shouldn't do changes. I also have an eyestrain headache from all the reading I've been doing, without glasses, bad jenny.

Anyone else have issues wearing glasses while lying down to read? I don't like the way they squish and move when I roll onto my side. Maybe I need contacts.

not playing, reading

My temporary surge of energy has gone...once again i have no enthusiasm for anything that requires thought. There sits LOTRO, all paid up and all I want to do is reread some of my old favourite novels. I have decided this is because I know I will enjoy them without having to invest any mental energy in them. Aha! I'm brain tired. Maybe its the post PhD brain shut-down. My brain has said "you don't need me any more" and gone for a walk...it may be some time.

Day 8

BTW my parents came home today from their Scotland trip. Their flights home were apparently quite lovely. A combination of flying Qantas and much prayer.

On the 8th day of my Scotland trip,
I went to castle Howard;
1.5hr bus trip from york
8 pound 80p return
long walks on the grounds
tame peacocks everywhere!
a really cool fountain
roman statues and mosaics
Gainsborough's on the wall
and some weslydale cheese

I know it doesn't scan...but I would have had to make something up for it to fit.
BTW they were also filming the new version of brideshead revisited there (same place the first one was filmed).

The banks of the river Ouze were overflowing on this day too...I couldn't walk the paths.

wearing a floppy hat

I am 99% sure I will be "presenting" at the graduation ceremony in December. This is what you do if the PhD has already been conferred but you want to attend the ceremony in full gear and shake somebody's hand. I've always said I did the PhD so I could wear a blue velvet floppy hat...so I'm not missing out on it. I've sent in my paperwork. Now to keep a finger on the pulse so it doesn't get lost.