how many books have you read?

I was looking at a friend's blog and saw this, apparently most people will only have read up to 6 of this list I know it is more books for me, and some in German and english. Let's see how I fare.
If you want to do this, too ... here are the Instructions:

Look at the list and bold those you have read.

Bullet those you intend to read.

Italicise the books you LOVE.

Post your list so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4. 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 - J D 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 Hitch Hiker'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

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

crazy, chaotic, cantankerous

Life can be so challenging.

I have had pollen allergise for more than 20 years now, and the last testing revealed a dust mite allergy now, too.
I am supposed to have someone vacuum my place every day, but who will do this?
Hubby can not since he only sees cluttered spaces and can not vacuum around if he has to shift too many things.
I need to declutter, or reorganize. Clear floor space.
This is nothing new, I am working on that for so many years already, and am more failing than winning so far.

A year has passed since I was in hospital with the first brain surgery.
It seems the inner chaos will not budge as much effort I put into it as I can.
Energy levels are nowhere near as high as I wish for them to be.

Today we went to the home builders store to get some shelve boards for my room.
Now I have to wait till the mid day rest and quiet time in the house is over before I can rummage around, setting the hooks on the right place, putting the boards up and take the clear storage bins up onto the new shelve.
Some room on the floor shoul be clearable this way.

I really do not like the fact that I seem to get everything messy.
I never happened to keep food or something like it in my room to make it buggy, icky, but the stuff I have, needs to be put away in an orderly fashion so I can still have visual clues what is where.
I tend to forget what is behind doors and in view proof containers, so I tend to have 'important to me' stuff lying around everywhere.
There has got to be a way of achieving this without it laying around in heaps. Chronological heaps of documents, stuff I am working on in those nifty foldable basket containers, books I am reading, things and clothes that wait for the sewing machine to be fit again for altering (losing weight is fun, but not if all trousers are 'low bum' style afterwards. Not very flattering.
It plain is really chaotic and collects dust like no other thing.

Inner chaos was with me from the start, not being advised as a kid what it means to 'pick up' things, just the expectation to do it and no believing me if I whined I did not know how to start or where to start and how to prioritize or categorize did not help me to set up any routine whatsoever.
Cleaning as in mopping floors or keeping the kitchen counter
cleared to be able to prepare meals only works if it is no galley type kitchen.
I grew up in a kind of combined kitchen/every day living room type where there is enough room for a table, chairs and people were meeting there all the time and mom was struggling to keep it orderly. I had no role model, dad coming home from working in shifts and being angry all the time and expecting without showing or telling how, thrashing around stuff and destroying it has left me with a high level of uneasyness if someone only mentions tidying up.
When I was at UNI I had a room with a one plate heating unit and nothing else, so I had one shelf for my two plates, mugs and drinking glasses and the silverware was upright in one of the mugs.
Since I did not have many things to have standing around, it was no problem to keep order there.
Then, moving to a one room apartment with a non window hole for kitchen, the doom began, I did not like being in there, so I just kind of went in, got what I needed and went into the room with the window, for eating, drinking tea and such activities, the washing of the dishes could not be done out there, I had to go to this hole to do it.
So I did not do it at all, amassing lots of dishes before I felt like having to do it now. Not being able to because it was too much, and no space to put the clean dripping wet stuff for towel drying later.
My stuff in the room was rather easy to manage, since I only had the basics there, driving home over the weekend to do laundry and backpacking everything back and forth. The dirty clothes went into the backpack, and the books and papers were on the seven boards of a bookshelf together with the stereo unit.
Still it happened that it got more and more chaotic.

Unhappy but helplessness once more.

"I do not know how to do it" is still present, and no help or ideas near anywhere.
I very seldom feel the urge to start tidying up, and if I do it happens to always be a time where I am really alone for a certain ammount of time which very seldomly happens since hubby works from home and is very seldomly away for more than an hour.

We do have the rather biggish kitchen, no room for a table for sitting there. Still the cupboard space seems to be not enough.
Maybe restructuring would help there.
I try this with my craft and kittie room right now and really hope I am no helpless case.

And nobody say, I am supposed to get rid of the kitties or my creative stuff, It is as essential to me as are the glowing, cough inducing sticks, the ethanole and TV set for others.
We do not use either one of them in this household.

Lots of time for reading, spinning, playing with the kitties, painting, drawing, wet felting and other creative activities.
They all need preparation time and room.
So I want to have a nice area to do all that in.


Maybe some day I manage to find my inner eqilibrium and it starts shining through on the outside, too.
Untill then it will be a neverending fight against entropy.

symtomatic Epilepsy

On December 19. I had two ocurrences of seizures. I was running a temperature from a winter infection and while resting on the couch, it started down in the little toe and spread upwards to the stomach area. It fortunately stopped there both times and I did not lose consciousness in the whole process.

Neurologist wanted to upp the Gabapentine I took for nerve pains and I tried it, but the side effects were too much. We agreed that I can lower them again and we will watch closely.

Nothing happened till yesterday evening.
I had some twitching in the leg again which went on for 15 minutes and then went away. I kept having this unreal feeling that the leg was mine but not really there. In addition I had strange feelings in my throat and my mood is all over the place.
Will have an EEG to check out what this is all about, and really hope this does not generalize.

barely alive

All started in the middle of April somehow and came to a climax around a month later. Having excruciating headache, visual apparitions which were mistaken as auras of a migraine and the radiologist having me get an appointment three weeks later.
I probably would not have made it till then, and we managed to get an appointment at another radiologist the next day. He found this 4.2 cm big thing in the left brain hemisphere, and called an ambulance to take me to the clinic right away.

On May 23. I had a brain surgery and it was a really scary experience for the others around me.
At the time it was not for me, I felt strangely taken care of and just took everything in as it was.
My right side was paralyzed by the time they did the surgery and it was not feeling anything out of order for me.
I even fell and could not judge how severe the paralysis had become untill I was on the floor in the bathroom and could not get up on my own.
Nothing was hurt except the pride ... needing help getting up and back into bed.

I had to spend 14 days in hospital untill the histological results were there, no parasitic cyst, as they suspected, just old bleeding of unclear genesis.

Then I was home for a whopping 5 days, and in that time the paralysis started to get worese again, and a fever developed, so back to the hospital, new CT, MRI and emergency surgery to remove the newly built up cyst. They suspected infection but the histological samples did not prove it right, it was called abcess, and I was given a course of antibiotics IV and released after another 14 days on a Friday.

Then I had to go back on Monday morning to have the stitches removed.

After getting home from that, big yellow goop oozed out of the wound and I had to go back the same afternoon and the third surgery was necessary to remove the infected bone part and clean out the wound to make sure nothing of it went into the brain. Though it seemed to be limited to the surface, they still told me there would be a 4 week IV treatment with Vancomycin and Cephtacidim.
This time was the worst of all this, seven IV treatments covered over 24 hours, meaning every nightsleep was disrupted with the very painful vanco treatment. For a total of six weeks then.
It still happens very often that I can not get to sleep before 1 in the morning since this was the time of the last Vanco of the day.

Physically I have survived everything and the scars have healed. My veins are brittle from the aggressive IV treatment and it is hard to find a vessel for drawing blood now without causing the vessels to pop.
I have to go in for regular checkups and so far everything is ok from the Neurosurgeons point of view.
Mentally this was a really hard time and I dont know how I will deal with it, it still is not over yet.
It also affects our partnership and is a strain on all of us.

dandelion and easter egg colours

dandelion and easter egg colours
Originally uploaded by nanawoolf.

I dyed a skein of sock yarn with dandelion, trying to attempt a yellow.

The palest parts on this skein are the dandelion dyed which resemble an ecru colour.
I guess I have used too little dye material for the 100 grams yarn, so it did not get that intense.

So I stirred up some yellow and orange easter egg colours and spiced up parts of the skein.

It looks very summery now, just like fruit sherbet.

Hope the socks will be looking nice, I plan to knit up from this.

Right now there are washcloths and cat toys on the needles and the occasional spin on sock yarn out of the 95 grams of black and white roving I was given by Holly.

On my CD spindle there is a light brown and green with blue roving, I try to spin as thin as the spindle allows.

I try to ply it with a still to be spun cotton to make a not so warm thin thread for a summer scarf for biking.

Any Ideas on spinning cotton? I have never done it and the fluff in the bad terrifies me a little, I wonder wether there will be success in turning it into string :-)

sweet liddle tidietat has new blankie

PICT0004
Originally uploaded by nanawoolf.

I knitted a blanket for Siri out of the first wheelspun and she likes it a lot, snoozing on it at present.
She barely looked up for the picture :-)

It is strange to be working from the own spun yarn, and the thick and thin texture made me worry it will not lay flat, but the loose gauge on a 6 mm needle and the finish of double crochet on a 7 mm needle made a nice little blankie out of the string.

second wheel

3duisburggarn
Originally uploaded by nanawoolf.

This is me, trying out the wheel in Duisburg.
We were not sure if it was functional, but it proved to be just that.

It is pretty fast, and I was able to produce the most even string on it so far.

Now to more practise on the borrowed Louet.
It is a S10 by the way, and It is fun to hear the clicks of the joinend driveband and see the thread forming and the twist wandering up.

Very soothing to the senses.
If it is the same for the people living under us, I can not tell, but I sure hope they would come tell me if it was too annoying.