Wed Dec 01 2004 20:38 Big Crowd: My 8 a.m. English 60 class was full of registered students on November 28, and since then a slew of people have added themselves to the waiting list. Many of the students on the waitlist are people I would just love to have in class again. Class starts January 24, so you can see that the situation is desperate. There really are not enough English classes offered, and anyone who decides to come to school for their New Years Resolution is up a creek, as far as I can tell. I imagine I will have 50 or 60 students crowding into my room the first day of class.

Thu Dec 02 2004 12:46 Over The Top: A student is walking around here (near my desk) wearing a Santa hat and reindeer antlers. AND jingle bells.

(2) Fri Dec 03 2004 10:25 Oh, oh, oh, It's Magic!: A sprinkler pipe on the back patio came loose and was making floods. I've had it on my RoundTuit list for a while. As I woke up this morning I decided that today was the day. Go to Home Depot, buy glue, dry the pipe off, sand it, glue it, and while I am at it, cap off the extention that is not being used.

Then I went outside to pick lemons and noticed the pipe had been glued! It was my Fairy Godfather!

Ohhhhh, Godfather! I have a whole list for you! Come back!

(1) Fri Dec 03 2004 20:15 Maybe Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow: I didn't get a whole lot done today. I really need to get out and clean out the frostbitten stuff out of the front garden, but spent most of the day sleeping instead. Yesterday and last night were rough. I did check several pages of names and go to the grocery store.

I really do have so many things I need to do, and I wish I could get with it.

(2) Sat Dec 04 2004 16:16 Whack! Whack!: I slept most of the day, but got out this afternoon and started trimming the frostbitten plants anyway. I filled both waste bins with just the lantana and the eggplant, and now I am exhausted. Those eggplant roots were really hard to dig up. And the rotten eggplants were slimy and nasty.

The Mexican sage will have to wait until later because I am out of steam, out of room in the trash can, and nearly out of daylight. At any rate, it's still purple! and looks okay from a distance! if you squint! Perhaps I should install a sign in my front yard that says "Please squint as you drive by," and that would take care of some of my guilt over how unkempt it gets. Not.

Sorry news items are (a) the bougainvilla froze at the tips, way up on top of the patio cover, and (b)the big nasty orange tree that we took out has made a comeback. Up from the rootstock, I suppose. I need to decide whether to dig it up or kill it with chemicals.

People ought to do gardening just for the sheer joy of killing. Who needs video games?

(4) Sat Dec 04 2004 18:21 QUAKE!: A few minutes ago, 4.3, near Eureka. I hope no Victorian homes are damaged.

The USGS has added a feature to their quake site--color coded shake maps, showing severity of damage from the epicenter on out. Pretty neat. USGS claims these shake maps will be posted within ten minutes after the event. In case you ever wondered just how anal those geologists are, here is a suggestion of proof.

I LOVE IT!

Sun Dec 05 2004 20:44 Workin': No news today, just workin'. Went to church, no news there. Paid bills, no news there. Did work for next semester, no news there. Played with dog, no news there. It's been a quiet week at Lake Bank Street, my hometown.

(1) Tue Dec 07 2004 10:55 This Just In From The Whitney Research Group:: Dear WRG: We all hope for royal blood in the Whitney family. Sure enough, there is: 1. John-1 WHITNEY (1592-1673), m.(1) Elinor ----- 2. John-2 WHITNEY (1621-1692), m. Ruth REYNOLDS 3. Ruth-3 WHITNEY (1645-1718), m. John SHATTUCK 4. William SHATTUCK (1670-1744), m. Hannah UNDERWOOD 5. Hannah SHATTUCK (ca1690- ), m. Nathaniel BLOOD 6. Hannah BLOOD (1721-1796), m. Joseph BLOOD 7. Royal BLOOD (1758-1825), m. Rachel GILSON, res. Groton, MA Reference: Groton Vital Records. Regards, Robert Mr. Robert L. Ward rlward@whitneygen.org http://www.whitneygen.org/home.html

Wed Dec 08 2004 11:12 Fruther News on Mr. Blood: I played around with Royal Blood a little bit, and I found a couple of things. One, he named his kid Royal Blood also. The nerve of the guy. The other is that the Call line ties into these Shattucks who married into Royal Blood.

Whenever I see the name Shattuck I think of the street in Berkeley.

Wed Dec 08 2004 21:25 Whew!: Hooray! I am all ready for next semester! (Or as ready as I can be until I get my new overheads back from Media Services and my syllabi back from Graphics.) It's going to be a nice, nice vacation, and I am not going to think about grammar for one minute. (She says.)

Now, I need to start panicking about Christmas.

(1) Thu Dec 09 2004 19:13 No Sweat: I've decided I just can't panic over Christmas. I'm just too sick. What gets done, will get done, and what doesn't, I'll give good intentions.

(2) Fri Dec 10 2004 20:08 Dost Thou Love Life? Then Neither Squander Time: Today was a waste. I didn't even take the trash out. Stayed in bed sleeping all day, temp bouncing up and down. I hope that at least I'll be rested up for the relatives tomorrow.

(2) Fri Dec 17 2004 16:32 yes its broken: my finger. broken. smashed on doorframe. hutrz. no cmas sewing. bah. robert visited we went to sf. one day w/2 brothers one day w/son. drove back alone today threw up pea soup, lovely lovely trip zoo museum greens used bookstore what fun.

Sat Dec 18 2004 17:12 is it armageddon yet?: sick sick sick

Sun Dec 19 2004 20:42 Not Over Yet: Some better today. Refrigerator has been shorting out. I called Andy Smith; he had just driven to Youtaaa. Mark Handy came but couldn't find the prob in the dark. Will return tomorrow. Meanwhile, orange ext cords. I am embarassed because didn't think of ext cords myself. must discard contents of freezer. Mark will cost me $40/hour. finger still hurtz.

(1) Sun Dec 19 2004 20:43 Not Over Yet: Some better today. Refrigerator has been shorting out. I called Andy Smith; he had just driven to Youtaaa. Mark Handy came but couldn't find the prob in the dark. Will return tomorrow. Meanwhile, orange ext cords. I am embarassed because didn't think of ext cords myself. must discard contents of freezer. Mark will cost me $40/hour. finger still hurtz.

(3) Mon Dec 20 2004 22:14 still no fingr: bad time today fainting/seizure/stroke or something don't worry about m3 though reading women& children in georgian country house interesting historical treatise

Tue Dec 21 2004 11:54 me and doug: i'm as bad as doug or getting that way. gretel and i went white forest nursery to get rhubarb for front. I got a pitcher plant. it will sit in the kitchen and eat spiders and flies. yummers. way cool looking plant. feeling better poor fingrr.

(2) Tue Dec 21 2004 16:48 oh the poor tummy: i had a plant like this before when i taught 7th grade. The kids all became mighty hunters and trapped prey for it to eat. they stuffed it so full of spiders and flies that it died.

(4) Thu Dec 23 2004 21:10 In celebration of banned books:: A list of the top 110 banned books. Bold what you've read, italicize what you've read part of.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli 
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
 #13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
 #14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
 #15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
 #16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo 
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker 
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin 
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding 
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne

#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon 
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy 
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce 
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio 
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell 
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 
#29 Candide by Voltaire 
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

#31 Analects by Confucius 
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce 
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal 
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx 
#37 Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du Mal) by Charles Baudelaire 
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
 #39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence 
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser 
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
 #43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair 
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque 
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx 
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding 
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys #48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
 #52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant 
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus 
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X 
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker 
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger 
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke 
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe 
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck 
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau #67 
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais 
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes 
#69 The Talmud 
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau

#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson 
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence 
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser 
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler 
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles 
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath 
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck 
#78 Popol Vuh 
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith 
#80 Satyricon by Petronius

#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl 
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov 
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright 
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu #85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut 
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George 
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle 
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
 #89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin 
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner 
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner 
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin 
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig 
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud 
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown 
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines 
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola 
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier 
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin 
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein 
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck 
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark 
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes