The Infinite 8: Because Hightouch is the Boss of Me

8 Shows I watch

• 30 Rock
• The Office
• Battlestar Galatica
  
• Dexter
  
• Weeds
  
• American Idol
  
• Samantha Who?
  
• Entourage
  

8 Restaurants I love

• Big City Soup
• Martine
  
• Em's
  
• Mazza
  
• Thai Siam
  
• Tsunami
  
• Lone Star
• Eggs in the City
  

8 Things I did yesterday

• "Taught" in the loosest sense of the word
  
• Worked out (again "loosely")
  
• Made Curried Pumpkin soup
  
• Talked to my mom on the phone
  
• Did some Facebook stuff (read: "wasted time")
  
• Hung out with Son
  
• Drank coffee, then some beer
  
• Blogged (of course!)

8 things I'm looking forward to

• Christmas
• Thanksgiving
• Any movie I might be able to see again, ever, in the theater
  
• My fortieth in Vegas (baby!)
  
• AWP
  
• Waking up in the morning
  
• Swimming
  
• My next overseas trip (London? Maybe.)
  

8 Things on my wish list

• Live in Ireland or Scotland with Son and MB
• "In The House" 2010: The eco-tour in our retooled VW bus: a family trip and reading tour all rolled into one great big van!
  
• Finish a fucking novel!
  
• A Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, light blue, and, while we're at it, a kitchen it will fit in!
  
• An amazing digital camera
  
• A room of one's own
  
• A YA novel (written by me)
  
• Another 10 years (at least!) with MB, including another $50 bottle of wine
  

8 things I love, in no particular order

• My wonderful, adorable husband
• My gifted, artistic Son
  
• Food (right now, mostly pie)
  
• Wine
  
• Gus!
  
• My family
  
• Reading
  
• Trashy TV
  

8 things I can’t stand, in no particular order

• Anything involving Vampires of any kind, type or form
  
• Pompous blowhards of any stripe (takes one to know one, though) (ditto!)
  
• Bad service. Don't they know we're in a recession? Be nice to me.
  
• Bad restaurants. There is just no reason. (and why are the bad ones so expensive? idiots!)
  
• Cynicism
  
• Self-congraulatory meta-style. You know what I'm talking about.
  
• Popular writing that's so bad it makes you want to give up language (see number one)
  
• Working (talk to me in one month, though)
  

8 people I'm tagging: Everyone i know, which might not equal eight. You're it!!

Movies or Just Another Way for me to Waste Time

Favorite Movies A to Z
I saw this meme on-line and I thought, "I don't have anything that HAS to be done right now..."
Some of these are actually my favorite movies, some are just the movie I could think of that started with that letter. I'll buy coffee and/or wine for anyone who can tell the difference. There's a surprising number of Woody Allen movies on this list.

Annie Hall
Big Lebowski
Croupier
Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Friends with Money
Grease
Hannah and Her Sisters
Iris
Juno
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Ladyhawke
Madness of King George
Notes on a Scandal
Once
Paris, Texas
Quiz Show
Raising Arizona
Stranger Than Fiction
Tootsie
Until the End of the World
Victor/Victoria
Wall-E
Xanadu
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Zelig

I tag Hightouch, because it should be easy for her!, Otterbutt, Erin Alice, Middlebrow and Lis.
I look forward to your lists.

Got Tagged

Little Hands tagged me to answer these questions with only one word. One word? Has she met me? I'll try!

Where is your cell phone? Non-existent
Where is your significant other? there
Your hair color? brownish
Your mother? Phoenix
Your father? Inkom
Your favorite thing? books
Your dream last night? gaggy
Your dream/goal? writing
The room you’re in? living room
Your hobby? exercise
Your fear? Spiders
Where do you want to be in 6 years? here (SLC)
Where were you last night? book club
What you’re not? well-rested
One of your wish-list items? bigger house
Where you grew up? Oregon/Colorado/Iowa/Idaho
The last thing you did? ate breakfast
What are you wearing? smart wool sweater
Your TV? hulu.com
Your pet? sleeping
Your computer? dying
Your mood? early fall pessimism (TM)
Missing someone? Nik
Your car? Saturn
Something you’re not wearing? earrings
Favorite store? TJ Maxx
Your summer? active
Love someone? Many
Your favorite color? blue
When is the last time you laughed? last night (John Stewart!!)
Last time you cried? Yesterday (listening to NPR Obama rally)

It's hard to limit oneself to one word: impossible!!
I tag Hightouch, Cold North, Slimy Six, and Erin Alice.

Memory Meme & I'm Off on Vacation

Thursday, MB, Son and I are heading south to the cool mountains of Northern Arizona. I'm not sure what adventures we will have there, but we're meeting ErinAlice & Co, and my mom and her husband. So it's sure to involve meat, some fishing, and some hiking. Perhaps some tennis? I bid you farewell until the end of July. (yikes!!! the summer is almost over! I'm having an anxiety attack!)

And, thanks to High Touch Mega Store, this meme.

1. As a comment on my blog, leave a memory that you and I shared. It doesn't matter if you know me a little or a lot, anything you remember! If we're only blogging friends, write about a post that is most memorable. If you don't have a blog and don't know how to sign in, please comment as anonymous.

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your own blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's a lot of fun to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I promise to write one about you... either on your blog, in my comment box, or I will email you back!

and . . .

3. If you can't say something nice, shh! Say nothing.
(just as a highlight: this song reminds me of music class in Morning Sun, Iowa, when I was in kindergarten. We sang this song, and even then it gave me the heebie jeebies. I think I foresaw my future of hostile silence wherein I said nothing and seethed. As you all know, that didn't come to pass)

Books

Since all I seem to be doing is reading or making lists, this meme from Otterbutt, who is somewhere close by, but whom I haven't seen in at least a week!!
Some of these wouldn't let me bold & underline, so you have to take what you can get.
So, I bolded ones I read, underlined ones read for school, and italicized ones I started but did not finish. Some I question why I read in the first place. Memoirs of a Geisha? Though I know why. I told people that I thought it was bad, then I got taken to task for saying that because I hadn't read it. So I read it. And you know what? It was bad. Some books you just know are bad without reading them. Why read them and waste your time?

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
The 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
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
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
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
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
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

I Like This One

I like this little quiz, and was thinking about it earlier, so I decided to do it. Plus, HighTouch and I were talking about the general lack of blogging, so I thought I'd contribute something for you to read, and it goes a little something like this:

What’s your ringtone?
What's a ringtone? Oh, you mean for the cellphone I don't have? Oh. My ringtone is "MMBop," if that exists as a ringtone. If not, it's probably "My Humps" because I think that's hilarious for a flat-ish chested woman with no butt.

What’s the most incongruous song on your MP3 player?
It's a pair really, "Home" by Michael Buble (when I played it for him MB said, "You like that song?") and "History of My Future" by 7 Year Bitch. Please. I'm at least a 10 Year Bitch.

What is the one genre of music you cannot stand?
That new kind of country that sounds like Pop. I like the old country (Willie, Johnny, etc.). I also dislike that rap stuff.

What’s your desert island disc? Right now it's Neko Case, "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood." She rocks.

What’s your musical weakness? Pop that is ridiculous, I know it's ridiculous, but I can't help myself, I like it. (see: Shakira, Justin Timberlake, Hansen)

Do you play a music instrument? In a past life, I played the flute. I was forced to be in the marching band and I never played, I just marched and faked it.

Best make out song ever? What's making out? (Umm, Peaches and Herb? Captain and Tenille? Barry Manilow? Bread? Styx? The only time I remember making out it was to "Monty Python." Or it was quiet. Or was it the soundtrack to "St. Elmo's Fire"?)

Best driving song?
Anything by the B-52s. "Private Idaho" works, especially if you are driving in Idaho.

One song that you think everyone should read the lyrics of?
"Sunday, Bloody Sunday" by U2

Is downloading music for free a sin?
No, it's an effect of the whole corporate music scam. But I think the artists deserve your money, so it is a quandry isn't it?

Do you karaoke? Do I karaoke? Right now I'm singing "Love Shack." But I'm pretending I'm Hightouchmegastore.

One musician you would happily whore yourself to?
Rufus Wainwright, but that probably wouldn't work. Bruce Springsteen. I don't care if he's old, he's sexy. And David Byrne.

First album you ever bought? I don't really remember, but I remember most vividly receiving Billy Joel's "Glass Houses" as a gift. Oh, it was probably Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."

Most recent album you bought? Pink Martini, "Hey Eugene!"

Favorite Beatles song?
No question, "Norwegian Wood."

One song that represents your teenage years?
Def Leppard, "Pyromania."

One song that represents your 20s?
Tori Amos, "Crucify."

One song that represents where you are right now?
Neko Case, "Margaret vs. Pauline" (which, if you haven't heard it, begins "Everything is so easy for Pauline.")

One song that represents your blog?
"I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" by Wilco