Easter Monday

Tomorrow the kids go back to school and I'll be glad for it too! The weather has been lousy mostly rain these past two weeks and the Wyldman is about totally bored. Not much knitting gets done when you have a bored kiddo on yer hands. However, I have to admit that when one mentions taking a nap littles find really fun ways to entertain themselves.

Let me tell you folks, I have THEE MOST WONDERFUL SECRET PAL in the whole world! Not only has she sent me totally wonderful gifts but in the most latest package I received, she had even spun up some beautiful yarn for me. To me, that's like giving blood! I am so touched. Thank you thank you thank you!! I had just used up the last of the Easter egg dye to color some locks I had tucked away for a rainy day and was wondering where I was going to get some dark yarn to knit some thrummed mittens and there in the box was this lovely dark brown/black shetland. Perfect!

Also in the package was a knitted face cloth in a cool cotton with a diamond pattern; some yummy chocolates (very yoummy); a tangerine creme air freshener (already in the bathroom); some orange spice wax melts; and hand made knitting needles with little gold fish at the tops. Too cute! They are currently sharing the vase with the fake pussy willow and paper flowers the Wyldman gave me for Easter. The enclosed card is a true gem! I do really love fishes (I keep beta fish - currently have 9). Thank you thank you, Secret Pal.

Now for this month's meme:

List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#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 Niccolo 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 Misrables 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 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 Francois 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 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile 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

In Like a Lion out Like a Lamb

Ever wonder who comes up with these little sayings that seem to be passed around from generation to generation? My folks had a neighbor who has since passed but was full of the most wonderful little tidbits (like never hang a salted ham to cure on a crescent moon). He was an elderly gentleman, called himself a Gentleman Farmer. That's someone who's retired but still works because if he didn't do it, it didn't get done. And he loved his garden which in turn was beautiful.

But back to his sayings. Mr. Reilly seemed to have a quip for every eventually and funny thing is as odd as some of them sounded they were true. One that I watch for every year is "If we have a green Christmas, then we'll have a white snow." I don't know that we'll have snow here, but I'm pretty sure we'll have the rain to make up for it! I'm afraid if we get snow, my daffodils won't bloom and I expect lots of blooms on Easter.

Lots happening in the knitting department of late. I've just about completed the third of the Flower Basket Shawls. This one is done using Cruz from Wool in the Woods in the color Bashful. Not the easiest yarn to use as I have to keep an eye on it when knitting. And even so I'm using bamboo kneedles, it still manages to slip off if I let down my guard. But the shawl is quite lovely and I can't wait to see it blocking. I've also completed two little cotton hats to be sent to Daisy Fields in Baltimore. And the sweater for the Princess Hurricane is close to completion.

Anyone have any idea of what's going on with Lion Brand? Seems some of their yarns have been coming off the shelves not to be replenished. Like Cotton-Ease and Woolese. These have always been good basic yarns especially for kiddie stuff and I would really hate to see them removed.

So, for now to all who celebrate -- Happy Easter!