The Quiet Takes My Breath Away

Even though my kids have their "domain" in the basement, and they are pretty quiet kids, there is something so very soothing about having nobody here right now. George (the sweetheart) is taking his lunch break to take them to the orthodontist and on an errand. So, I am here for a bit by myself in the quietness of the morning.

I love it.

TWEM Classics: 103 out of 154 (67%)

I FINISHED THE ANCIENTS!!!!!

Chronology of Classics in The Well-Educated Mind

Ancients (15 out of 15)

BC
2000 Epic of Gilgamesh/Ferry/Poetry
800 Iliad (*+ T)/ Homer/Lattimore/ Poetry
800 Odyssey(*+ T) /Homer/Lattimore/Poetry
600 Greek Lyrics/ Lattimore/Poetry
458 Agamemnon(*+ T)/ Aeschylus/Drama
450 Oedipus Rex(*+ T)/ Sophocles/Drama
441 Histories/ Herodotus/ History
431 Medea/ Euripedes/ Drama
400 Birds/ (Clouds – T) /Aristophanes/ Drama
400 Peloponnesian War(*+ )/Thucydides/ History
375 Republic(*+)/ Plato/ History
330 Poetics(+)/ Aristotle/Drama
65 Odes of Horace/Poetry
AD
100 Greek Lives/Roman Lives by Plutarch

Medieval Times (15 out of 19)

400 Confessions*+ T Augustine Fitzgerald Autobio
426 City of God+ Augustine History
731 Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede History
1000 Beowulf* Poetry
1300 Inferno*+ Poetry
1300's Everyman Drama
1350 Sir Gawain & the Green Knight* Poetry
1386 Canterbury Tales* Chaucer Poetry
1430 The Book of Margery Kempe Autobio
1513 Prince*+ Machiavelli History
1516 Utopia* Sir Thomas More History
1564 Sonnets Shakespeare Poetry
1580 Essays+ Montaigne Autobio
1588 Life of Teresa of Avila Autobio
1588 Doctor Faustus Marlowe Drama
1592 Richard III Shakespeare Drama
1594 Midsummer's Nights Dream* Shakespeare Drama
1600 Hamlet* Shakespeare Drama

1600 Poems* Donne Poetry (British)

Early Modern -1600-1850 (23 out of 33)

1605 Don Quixote*+ Cervantes Penguin Novel

1611 Psalms KJV Poetry

1641 Meditations+ Descartes Autobio
1667 Paradise Lost*+ Milton Poetry

1666 Grace Abounding Bunyon Autobio
1669 Tartuffe Moliere Drama
1679 Pilgrim's Progress* Bunyon Novel
1682 Narrative of Captivity & Restoration(T) Rowlandson Autobio
1690 True End Civil Government Locke History
1700 Way of the World Congreve Drama
1726 Gulliver's Travels* Swift Novel
1754 History of England, V.5 Hume History
1757 Songs of Innocence and Experience by Blake/Poetry (British)
1762 Social Contract+ Rousseau History
1773 She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith Drama
1776 Common Sense (T) Paine Dover History
1776 Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire Gibbon Wormsley(Ab) History
1777 School of Scandal Sheridan Drama

1781 Confessions* Rousseau Autobio
1791 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (T)
1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women+ Wollstonecraft History (British)
1798 Lyrical Ballads* Wordsworth, Cooleridge Poetry (British)
1813 Pride & Prejudice*+ Austen Novel
1819 Odes* & Poems Keats Poetry (British)
Longfellow Poetry (American)
Tennyson Poetry (British)
Whitman Poetry (American)
1835 Democracy in America* Tocqueville History
1838 Oliver Twist Dickens Novel
1847 Jane Eyre Bronte Novel
1848 The Comunist Manifesto+ Marx&Engel History
1850 The Scarlet Letter* Hawthorne Novel

Modern History (1850 to present) ( 50 out of 87)

Rossetti Poetry (British)
1851 Moby-Dick/Melville/Novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin/Stowe/Novel
1854 Walden/Thoreau/Autobio
1857 Madame Bovary* Flaubert Novel
1860 Civilization of Renaissance Burckhardt History
1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jacobs Autobio
1866 Crime & Punishment Dostoyevsky Novel

1850- 1866 * Dickinson Poetry (American)
1872 Dunbar Poetry (American)
1877 Anna Karenina* Tolstoy Novel
1878 Return of the Native Hardy Novel
1878 Sandburg Poetry (American)
1879 Doll's House Ibsen Drama
1881 Life & Times/Narrative of Frederick Douglass * T Autobio
1881 The Portrait of a Lady* James Novel
1883 Williams Poetry (American)
1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* Twain
1895 The Red Badge of Courage Crane Novel
1899 Importance of Being Earnest Wilde Drama
1901 Up From Slavery Washington Autobio
1902 Heart of Darkness* Conrad Novel
1902 Hughes Poetry (American)
1903 Souls of Black Folk DuBois History (American)
1904 Cherry Orchard Chekov Drama
1904 The Protestant Ethic & the Spirit of Capitalism Weber History (German)
1905 House of Mirth Wharton Novel
1907 Auden Poetry (American)
1908 Ecce Homo Nietzsche Autobio (German)
1913 Poems* Frost Poetry (American)
1921 Queen Victoria Stachey History
1922 Larkin Poetry (British)
1924 St. Joan Shaw Drama
1925 Mein Kampf Hitler Autobio
The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald Novel
Mrs. Dolloway Woolf Novel
The Trial* Kafka Novel
1929 An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth Gandhi Autobio
1932-1963 Sylvia Plath Poetry (American)

(1865-1939) William Butler Yeats (Irish)
Auto of Alice B. Toklas Stein Autobio
Born 1934 Mark Strand Poetry (American)
Born 1929 Adrienne Rich Poetry (American)
1935 Murder in Cathedral T.S. Eliot Drama
1937 The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell History
1938 Our Town Wilder Drama
Born 1939 Seamus Heaney Poetry (Irish)
The New England Mind Miller History *

1940 Long Day's Journey into Night O'Neill Drama
Native Son Wright Novel
Born 1940 Robert Pinsky Poetry (American)

1942 Stranger Camus Novel
1944 No Exit Sartre Drama
1947 A Streetcar Named Desire Williams Drama
1948 Seven Story Mountain Merton Autobio
1949 1984 Orwell Novel
Death of a Salesman Miller Drama
1952 Invisible Man Ellison Novel
Waiting for Godot Beckett Drama

1955 The Great Crash Galbraith History
Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis Autobio
1956 Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) Poetry (American)

1956 Seize the Day Bellow Novel
1959 The Longest Day Ryan History
1960 A Man for All Seasons Bolt Drama
1963 The Feminine Mystique Frieden History
1965 The Autobiography of + Malcolm X Autobio
1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude Marquez Novel
Rosencrantz & Guildenstein Stoppard Drama
1972 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Calvino Novel
1973 Journal of Solitude Sarton Autobio
Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn Autobio
1974 Roll, Jordan, Roll Genovese History

1974 Equus Shaffer Drama
1977 Born Again Colson Autobio
Song of Solomon Morrison Novel
1978 Distant Mirror Tuchman History

1978 Jan Kenyon (1947-1975) Poetry (American)
1982 Hunger of Memory Rodriguez Autobio
1985 White Noise Delillo Novel

1985 Rita Dove (1952- )Poetry (American)
1987 All the President's Men Woodward & Bernstein History
1988 Battle Cry of Freedom McPherson History
1989 Road from Coorain Conway Autobio
1990 Possession Byatt Novel

A Midwife's Tale Ballard Autobio
1992 The End of History & the Last Man Fukuyama History
1995 All Rivers Run to the Sea Wiesel Autobio

(*ITC, +D overlap, T)

ITC= Invitation to the Classics D=Denby's Great Books T = Thelma's Library

The Shaped Up Summer

Well, it is a FREE summer for me, but I did sign the boys up for some fun things this summer:

Corvallis Community Television Video Production Course - actually, George is doing it with them. It will be a fun time for me to have Monday nights free and clear. :)

Realistic Drawing - Benton Center course with Mark Allison

Tennis - two weeks in July

So, why am I awake at 12:45 am?

Maybe I drank Lady Grey to late in the day

Or maybe the movie premiere has caused me to stay

Awake until now and cleaning up things

Browsing collectible my inheritance did bring

OK, that is enough with the rhyming. This is enough! The movie premiere was really great. I was very impressed with Bethany's editing and sound on The Road to Freedom.

Yesterday was a lovely day:

Up early to spend two hours of solid time in the Word

Morning walk with Michelle

Prayer processing after walk

Iszler's clan over for movies downstairs with the kids and talking and prayer with Kim

Took kids to Haberman party for four hours of birthday and water fight fun!

Returned microscope to Barb

Went to Jamocha Jo's

Prayed, processed in the promises of the Word, and listened to poetry as I drifted off to sleep

News as George fixed me hummus and flatbread (Have I mentioned I have the best husband in the world?)

Premiere

Cleaned out closet! A goal achieved!

Looked up collectibles I acquired because no one wanted my mom's stuff, and I am sentimental. Now, I have NO IDEA what some of these things are. What is HALL China? What is Strombergshyttan Thick Walled Scandinavian Glass Vase?

Who knows. I think I am finally getting tired.

I loved yesterday. I really and truly loved yesterday. :)

Poems, Prayers, and Promises

This John Denver song wafted through my head as I sat down and thought about what I would like to do with the next three hours of silence while my kids are out of the house for a birthday party. I did come down to three things I want to do:

Poems - Listen to some more of "Song of Myself" a massive poem in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

Prayers - This really is what I will do first. I just prayed with one friend an hour and a half ago, but there is so much on my heart after a conversation with her mid-day and a walk with another friend this morning. Sometimes all you can do is pray and hope that wickedness will not prevail and to remember God's desire:

"“Say to them, ‘As I live!’ declares the Lord God, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel?’" (Ezekiel 33:11, NASB95)

I can pray that wicked people will see the light and LIVE rather than spreading their wickedness.

Promises - More time in the Word is always a good thing! I am LOVING Isaiah and getting so much more out of it than I have ever gotten before. Praise be to God for His gift to me of the Bible Book Club that keeps me accountable and learning daily.

So, off to Poem, Prayers, and Promises!

Summer Reading List

This is possibly overly ambitious, but why not?

(Finished ones in RED)

AD

100 Greek Lives/Roman Lives by Plutarch

426 City of God by Augustine

731 Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede

1580 Selected Essays by Montaigne

(This will complete the Ancient and Medieval Time periods)

1835 Democracy in America by Tocqueville (not Am Lit but related)

1850 Whitman Poetry (American)

1872 Dunbar Poetry (American)

1878 Sandburg Poetry (American)

1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Autobiography

1883 Williams Poetry (American)

1902 Hughes Poetry (American)

1903 Souls of Black Folk by DuBois

1907 Auden Poetry (American)

1913 Frost Poetry (American)

Book club:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Selkirk’s Island by Diana Souhami

That is it! My Amazon Kindle 2 makes this so FUN too!!!! I can read with large print while I am working out! I can switch it to text-to-speech when I need to run an errand too.

Feeling No Hope for Days Gone By

That sounds so deeply sad, but I guess I should elaborate.

I went to Lamppost today, and I was the last person to post there early last night. Gone are the days of Trapdoor Society where you would leave a post and ten people would respond to what you had said and the dialogue went on for days. Now, I think there are eleven people there where there had been probably 50 regular posters and another 50 occasional posters and another 50 lurkers!

It makes me sad, but you know what? It is peaceful! Gone are the days of provocative posting that always ended in a big conflict, lots of tears, and people calling me on the phone. Gone are the days when people would post a "zinger" to me that would sting me to the core and make me sad because I felt very misunderstood. Gone are the nasty emails! In fact, I got my last "nasty" one (from that person who was usually nasty to me, but now is very nice because the drama in her marriage is now known) the night before we left our church. We got all the drama out of our life in less than 24 hours between June 15 at 8 pm & 16 at 3 pm (when we walked out the doors of our church for the last time!).

No more drama in both areas is a very good thing.

There was so much drama in that online community. Now, everyone gets along, but they aren't very committed to the group.

In looking at the 17 people in the retreat picture from seven years ago in South Carolina (before everything hit the fan), we have:

5 divorces

2 separations (One of which is already headed to divorce. The other is hopeful)

1 separation but back together and rocky

3 undetermined, but rocky, at best

6 still together and strong

I asked one friend, who is separated, whether she thought that some of her marriage difficulties played into her posting, and she said, "Most definitely."

So, all that to say is that there was a ton of drama on the board, but it had much to do with the drama playing out in their homes that we could not see.

I do miss the stimulating dialogue, but I do not miss the drama.

The online community has also dispersed to things like Facebook, and I don't mind. Facebook is friendly. I like the occasional "hi" on Facebook with those old and dear friends, but I also like how Facebook integrates my local friends. They even interact with each other, and that makes me smile.

Some of those online people still congregate on Facebook in the form of "tagged" notes. Last week, one of them had a tagged note with a great quote. I wasn't included, and it stung a bit, but I guess there was a reason for it. It seems like there are little splinters of people in the group maybe based on their life changes. While walking on the beach with Julie, she told me about someone's "guy" like I already knew, and I knew nothing about it. This was my rhetorics partner from the TWEM classics, and we had shared deep things. Now, she doesn't even tell me there is a "guy" in her life after her divorce (maybe because she told me that this guy was out of the picture when she was separated from her husband, but I guess he really wasn't).

So, a part of me is out of the loop, but a part of me doesn't mind not being a part of the drama anymore. Nobody reads this blog anymore either. I am not part of most of their "blog rolls" either, but I think they all still like me. So, I think I have good individual relationships with all of them. I am just not "in the group loop," and that is OK.

Just musing on a Thursday morning! Off to Isaiah.

How Many of These Classics Have You Read?

I've only read 20 out of these 100

This is based on the Penguin Classic's list of "100 Classic Books You Must Read Before You Die". http://www.listsofbests.com/list/11632. Its for people reading them, wanting to read them or wishing they hadn't read them LOL.

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
2. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - Nikolai Gogol
3. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
4. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky YES
5. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6. Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille
7. Spy In House Of Love: V4 In Nin'S Continuous Novel - Anais Nin
8. Lady Chatterly's Lover - D.H.Lawrence
9. Venus in Furs - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
10. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer YES
11. The Karamazov Brothers - Fyodor Dostoevsky YES
12. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad YES
13. Diamonds Are Forever - Ian Fleming
14. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
15. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
16. A Room With a View - E. M. Forster YES
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Don Juan - Lord George Gordon Byron
19. Love in a Cold Climate- Nancy Mitford
20. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
21. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
22. Middlemarch - George Eliot
23. She: A History of Adventure - H. Rider Haggard
24. The Fight - by Norman Mailer
25. No Easy Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
28. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) - Victor Hugo
29. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
30. The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens
31. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
32. Bram Stoker's Dracula - Bram Stoker
33. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley YES
34. The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole
35. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
36. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
37. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
38. Baby doll - Tennessee Williams
39. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
40. Emma - Jane Austen YES
41. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
42. The Odyssey - Homer YES
43. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck YES
44. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
45. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll YES
46. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald YES
47. Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
48. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
49. The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
50. Against Nature - Joris-Karl Huysmans
51. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
52. The Outsider - Albert Camus
53. Animal Farm - George Orwell
54. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
55. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
56. The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
57. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
58. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
59. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
60. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
61. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
62. Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga - Hunter S. Thompson
63. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens YES
64. Another Country - James Baldwin
65. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
66. Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk - William S. Burroughs
67. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
68. Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas De Quincey
69. Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac
70. Monsieur Monde Vanishes - Georges Simenon
71. Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell YES
72. The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey
73. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli YES
74. Bound for Glory - Arthur Miller
75. Death of a Salesman - Georges Simenon YES ? (Author?)
76. Maigret and the Ghost - Georges Simenon
77. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
78. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
79. A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan, Sir Doyle
80. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
81. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert YES
82. Therese Raquin - Ãmile Zola
83. Les Liaisons dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
84. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne YES
85. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy YES
86. I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 - Robert Graves
87. Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
88. The Beggar's Opera - John Gay
89. The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius
90. Guys and Dolls - Hal Leonard Corporation
91. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
92. The Iliad of Homer - Homer YES
93. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas YES
94. From Russia with Love - Ian Fleming
95. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
96. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
97. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
98. Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
99. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
100. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

Chip Ross Park Loop Trail

We did another trail today to Chip Ross Park, but Sheri and Adam knew a longer route to take. It was very nice. It took 1 hour 4 minutes, and we burned 500 calories! WOOOHOOO!

Silver Creeks Falls Trail of Ten Falls

Silver Creeks Falls Mosaic, originally uploaded by carolfoasia.

What I did last Friday. I love living in Oregon!