phantomchic

5 hours of work (4:30 of mixing and dipping plus about 30 minutes of set-up and clean-up) and I have quadruple batches of white chocolate pretzels with green and red sugar (~360) and peanut clusters (~260). Plus this year I tried making about a cup of chocolate covered raisins for Mom with the some chocolate mixture left over from the clusters.

I am exhausted and my legs and back are sore from standing for 5 hours straight and bending over to dip the candy out. My fridge and freezer are full of containers of clusters. But I feel so accomplished. Now I just have to not eat it before it's time to put it all in the individual packages and take it to work to give out.

Just got home from a show. Now for the Opening Ceremony! I'm going to try sort of live-blogging my reactions to this.

( Cut for O.C. ramblings and a little ranting )

The cracky opening was fun but no Sherlock in any incarnation, no Arthurian references, and no Dr Who references at all? That is ridiculous given all the crap they showed in the music/teen lust/social media montage-that-wouldn't-end. Plus I read that they licensed the Dr Who theme for the ceremony but I never heard it.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Noises Off, Clue, or Princess Bride.

Amazon Rank

Last week made me so happy about the shifting zeitgeist with Iowa (yay!) and Vermont. This corporate homophobia annoys even more in light of that.

This is the email I sent them (through my account so they can see I'm a customer who ordered from them just last week):

I was appalled to learn today of your new policy censoring gay books by stripping them of their sales rankings and removing them from search
results. Especially given the transparently hypocritical "explanation" for these actions that automatically classes gay content as "adult" while
explicitly sexual heterosexual materials are not so labeled. Please tell me in what possible way "Heather Has Two Mommies" or "The Filly"
are more Adult than books of Playboy centerfolds?

As a straight woman who believes in civil rights, I cannot in good conscience order further from your company until this policy is reversed
and rankings/search-ability restored to all products on your site.

I loved the calendar I made last year, so I'm doing it again this year. Once again, I'd love help narrowing it down. And there's a lot more to narrow this year because my obsessive-compulsive streak kicked in and I got on a roll that led to staying up to 4:30 last night making motivators. Hence the 49 motivators vying for 12 calendar spots.

There are 12 shows represented, but I'm not married to having all 12. I could have 2 from 1 or 2 of the shows. There are multiple picture choices for some of the sayings, sometimes from different shows. If you're wondering, the shows are: Buffy, Firefly, Stargate SG1, Doctor Who, Farscape, Stargate Atlantis, Lost, Torchwood, Battlestar Galactica, Dr Horrible, West Wing, and Psych. It's a little sad how many of the shows have either gone off the air (5) or are in their final season(2) And funny that a quarter of them are Joss shows.

So help me, friends!

King of the internet musicals! With bonus Allison Janney!

to deliver this to our Kris Kringle tomorrow just to confuse him.

Dear Santa... Dear Santa, This year I've been busy! In September I pulled over and changed lanning's flat tire (15 points). In June I broke alyburns's X-Box (-12 points). In May maniac64 and I donated clothes to the needy (11 points). Last Sunday on a flight to Vancouver, I stole the emergency flight information card (-40 points). In July I ruled Duluth, Minnesota as a kind and benevolent dictator (700 points). Overall, I've been nice (674 points). For Christmas I deserve a Sony Playstation 3! Sincerely, phantmchic

Write your letter to Santa! Enter your LJ username:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you read for school, underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week).

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 : a novel
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
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables – But I have the musical memorized!
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
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
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The 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 want credit for having read 80% of the works of Shakespeare and a ton of plays (especially Greek classics).

So watching tonight's episode of Sanctuary, the biggest impact for me was in watching Edward draw while they scanned his eyes.  Because all I could think was "this kid is like the secret weapon of Cranium teams; perfect sensosketches in less than a minute."

I have not yet been able to bring myself to watch Atlantis.  A whole McKeller episode?   A love Rodney, but he needs tempering and that's not something Keller does well with him.  Why would they waste one of the last eps of the series on this?  Is the Bill Nye stuff cool enough to make it worth it?  I saw the last 10 seconds before Sanctuary and the first minute or so of the reairing, if that's really all the John and Ronon in the ep I'm not feeling motivated.