Happy Christmas!

We had a lovely Christmas!  On Christmas Eve Day, we arrived down in Mankato at about 1:00pm and had a relaxed afternoon hanging out, chatting, snacking, and playing a little Trivial Pursuit (Team Treetie-Meredith won both games!).  People did an excellent job with gift-giving and we both go very nice gifts.  Ian, was perhaps, most happy with his gifts.

Yes...yes...it's more little metal men.  Ken and Mary Jo gave Ian a collection of beautiful Revolutionary War pieces and as soon as we got home, Ian immediately set them up.  Of course, things didn't stop there. Next we set about setting up the diarama of the battle of Waterloo in the coffee table.  This was made easier due to the book give to Ian by Margaret.

Look at how happy he looks!  It's pretty cool.

Chris Kluwe - Punter for the Vikings

Last night Ian and I drove up to Anoka, to the Courtside Bar and Grill so that Ian could be taped to the "MIAC Minute" to be shown on Fox News 9 on Sunday. 

It was a pretty interesting evening, as it turned out.  Also there for the show was Chris Kluwe, the punter for the Minnesota Vikings football team and he was a really nice guy.  I, being a doorknob, insisted that Mr. Barker stand for a couple photos.

I forget that Ian is a big guy.  Chris Kluwe, as a punter, is clearly not the biggest Viking, but he positively dwarfed most of the guys in the bar last night---except Ian, who was pretty comparably sized.

Not only was it nice to meet Chris Kluwe, but it was interesting to see how they film these things.  They film in 2.5 minute segments and the host Ron is very adept at taking just a few bits on information and building them into a conversation that flows.  He gets a lot of information and a little rapport-building chatter packed into those two minutes and still makes it seem unrushed.

BBC Book List

Rumor has it that the BBC put together this list of "classic" books and estimates that most people will only have read 6 of them. 

Ha!  I showed them...I've read 59.  The ones in bold are the ones I have read, the ones in italics I have only read part of or started but never finished.

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 Faulk
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 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’s 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 - Kazu 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

New Kitchen Remodel Pictures

So a few people have asked me to post new pictures of the new kitchen so here you go.  It's not completely done--the tv will be installed on the wall next week and I still have to tile the marble backsplash:

I also painted the living room and got a new couch so here's how that is looking now.

The glass-topped table is where Ian is going to recreate the Battle of Waterloo with is 300 tiny metal soldiers.

Finally, here are a couple photos of Attila looking pensive...or looking like he wants to crash through the window to attack (and eat) some poor defenseless squirrel: