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I’m rather pleased with the Summer book list I was able to form, thanks to friends recommendations.
I should be receiving the following books in the mail anytime now:

• Another Roadside Attraction – Tom Robbins
• The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
• Fraction of the Whole – Steve Holtz
• Paradise – Toni Morrison
• Beneath the Wheel – Herman Hesse
• Outsider – Albert Camus
• Killing Pablo – Mark Bowden
• Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

I’ll also be re-reading a few Vonneguts, because it’s been a while.

Thanks to those who indulged me with recommendations- I’m insanely excited to get my hands on these books. I love getting things in the post too, and am tickled knowing that most of these books will arrive at random times from independent sellers. It makes my office day all the more exciting, wondering if a package will be on my porch when I get home.

I was rather delighted to find that I own and cherish a number of books that were recommended to me by people whose literary tastes I respect highly. I was also amused by Quinn listing the Wizards of Earthsea – he’s now the second person I know in the whole world who has read that book. Before I load up the moving crate next week, I’m going to drag that book, and a couple other classics out of the boxes currently labeled “BOOKS! STUPID HEAVY!” to add to my collection of Summer reads.

While the amount of time I’ll get to spend reading this Summer remains constant, our Summer travel plans seem to evolve on a weekly basis. I fantasise about travel a lot and as a consequence I regularly come home sprouting new & wild plans to Andy about what we should do with August; the month we realise our wildest dreams. Kind of. Dreams on a budget. Curse you, reality. As I was saying, I daydream about travelling a great deal and I would bet that I spend at least an hour a week researching random flight routes, checking the price of tickets from London to Goa, what the best way to get from Bangkok to Rangoon is, what there is to see in somewhere like Iowa, or how long it takes to process Ghanaian visas (the only places I don’t care to visit include central India and anywhere where the majority of landmass resembles ice). So far, all we have booked are return flights from New York to Manchester, leaving on the 28th July, and returning on the 1st September. Not to sound desperate, but in between school, education debts and all that, this looks like our last shot at international fun for quite some time so we want to make it count.

My dad wanted someone to go to Burma for him to find relatives and go over some property issues on his behalf. On his behalf, because his name is Ne Win, ill-fatedly like the Burmese ‘politician’s’, which would cause a port-of-entry stir my dad could do without. After some conversation, my dad decided that he wanted to go on this quest himself, and so will wait until things settle down after the re-election this year. There’s little point us going to Burma right now if it’s not for family business, so we turned our plans back toward Europe. While trying to work out where we’d backpack around, we realised that hostels are increasingly expensive and have to be booked so far in advance to secure a spot that it take all the spontaneity out of having a rail-pass. The alternative, sleeping on a rail station floor, would be fine on occasion, but a month of doing that doesn’t really appeal to me as I’m partial to a good shower now and again. Long story short, we looked at other options and now we’re going to spend the first two weeks of our holiday staying in Corsavy, France with ‘Jeremy and Michael’. We’ll be working their vegetable patches and gardens, doing whatever chores they need doing (laying driveways, breaking up concrete, picking fruit, painting rooms, whatever) for twenty hours a week, in return for free board and meals (and plenteous red wine apparently, although that doesn’t do us any favours ha). Seriously though, twenty hours a week, for free room and board in their little self-contained annex in Corsavy, France, by a house that looks like this:

(That’s Jeremy and Michael’s house apparently). They have good reviews from other helpers they’ve had stay there, and apparently have two large dogs and a number of cats. They live about 2.5 miles from Arles-sur-Tech which appears to be the loveliest town, a 1 Euro bus ride away from Perpignan, and the Mediterranean. After two weeks staying there, we’ll move on and bop around to a couple other places, we haven’t decided where yet but Rome, Munich, and Amsterdam might make the list. Free room and board for half the trip is welcome relief for our budget and will make me less stressed about paying $33 a night for a shady hostel beds we’ll sleep in during the last leg of the trip.

I’m having a hard time concentrating on my work since Jeremy emailed me to confirm us staying with him, so I’ve been googling Arles-sur-Tech, Perpignan and Corsavy quite a bit this morning. Twenty hours of work a week is nothing, that’s four hours every weekday, which leaves weekends free for trips up the Pyrenees, or to the seaside, and evenings hanging out in local villages or walking the dogs. Two weeks doesn’t seem long. I imagine the fun it would be to spend the rest of my life just roaming the world with Andy, picking up jobs in new countries every few months. Then reality kicks in and I realise that I don’t want to be a nomad, and I want to have a job that contributes to a community and helps people. At any rate, I’m excited to spend two weeks in Corsavy, and can’t wait for Summer to begin. Andy and I have spent so many Summers rotting in offices that we’re determined to make the most of our freedom this year. Eleven days until we leave Provo, and Summer begins. Let’s hang out before we skip town. Eat pizza or something.

Oh yes; if anyone’s interested in a working-holiday, you can go to helpX.net to cruise through options. You need a premier account to view contact details and photos though. It’s $28 for a two year membership, which is worth it if you’re serious.

A combination of being tagged a lot on facebook for this feature, and not wanting to work on Check Requsitions any longer has driven me to complete this self-centered list of “25 Things”.

• I am the kind of person who, in the event I forgot to make the bed in the morning, would make the bed at midnight, even when I planned on getting back into it in another half hour.
• I’m scared of falling up escalators, lest my shins become impaled on the jagged metal of the next step. Maybe the fear originated from that time in Year 10 when someone tackled David Dyer with football boots on and ripped half his shin off. Either way, I’m wary of shin-accidents.
• I’m not sure that ‘guilty-pleasure’ is a genre of music, even though I most certainly own and listen to what other people probably think is terrible pop music.
• I read a lot of articles and blogs online, and generally refrain from judging the author harshly since I know that it’s easy to misrepresent yourself online. However, the minute the writer starts to tYpE LiKe tHiS, or center their font and significantly enlarge a random word or two, I somehow feel justified in making a pretty vicious judgment call on the author’s personality.
• I know it’s old news, but I still don’t understand why Ninjas and Pirates can’t be friends. Can’t we all just get along?
• It irks me when girls (because in my experience it’s usually girls) refer to themselves with the label of “total geek”, and list their qualifications as “liking to read” or “being at home”. Since their qualifications don’t include the ability to write Elvish, having a wardrobe dedicated to the accurate costumes worn for the last 20 Comic Con’s, or speaking condescendingly to others who profess to love Halo but can’t remember the name of some obscure character featured momentarily in the third level of the first game, I’m pretty sure they’re not geeks.
• I’d sky dive before I bungee jumped. Squirrel Suiting is not an option for me.
• Those heated towel rails you sometimes see in pictures of hotels, are a symbol of luxury to me.
• I hate all slang words for ‘pregnant’. I’m not sure why. Just grosses me out.
• I can get pretty impatient sometimes. Impatient enough to curse the CLOSE DOOR button on the elevator for not having an effect on the time it takes for the doors to close. Precious four seconds, wasted?
• This might come as a surprise to anyone who knows that I owned a pair of thin, gold, Chav-Nation, over-sized hoop earrings when I was fifteen, but my engagement ring was the first, and remains the only, piece of jewelry that I’m actually into. I wear necklaces on occasion, but it’s usually to try and detract from unwashed hair, or some other exhibition of laziness. I appreciate jewelry for what it is, and of course I treasure my Grandma Win’s jewelry for sentimental reasons, but I just don’t like wearing jewelry all that much.
• I like it when people are geographically correct when referring to where someone’s coming from or where they’re going. Someone going from Salt Lake to Provo would be going Down to Provo, and someone going from London to Manchester would be going Up to Manchester.
• I always assumed I’d be mid-to-late-thirties when/if I got married.
• I can both admire and get frustrated with people who are perma-content with all aspects of life.
• I’ve never felt the need to sway like a lunatic when I play the violin, or flap my arms like wings if I play the piano. It must make me look kind of impassive about music, which isn’t necessarily accurate.
• My fears are losing Andy, and having a disabled child that I felt inadequate to care for.
• When I was about nine, my bedroom was being upgraded. I insisted on buying my own bed with the money I’d saved from Christmases and birthdays because I thought it was the responsible thing to do.
• When I had to date people, I thought that sometimes you had to give persistent guys a first date, if only to prove to him what you already know: you are not remotely well matched.
• I can read really quickly. That’s probably my strength. My weakness is good food. And good food combined with my lack of nutritional self-discipline becomes my undoing.
• I feel like when I go home to England, I’m going to feel like a foreigner for a while.
• I love brand new journals, and blank-paged books. I’m always hesitant to write or draw in them lest I mar their nice, clean pages. That kind of goes hand in hand with my school-work OCD, where if make a messy error within, say, the top four lines of a new page, I’m likely to rip the page out, and re-write it on a new one. If the mistake’s a bit farther down the page, I don’t bother.
• I’m very rarely bored. And I only say “rarely” because I can’t think of a time when I have been genuinely bored, but there may be one. There’s always something to do even if that something is just sitting around with my own thoughts.
• I’ve never been a truly passionate fan of any sport team/group/school/country/blah blah blah. Call me apathetic, but I just can’t get myself to freak out over team spirit.
• I’m not one of those people that takes 30 minutes and a hot shower to wake up. I’ve been known to scare people by coherently answering a question that has woken me up, without them having to repeat it or shake me or something.
• Sometimes I regret not following a practical career path in science. People need caring for, and Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Cancer, Alzheimer’s etc aren’t going to cure themselves.

Play a competent game of Chess
Go home
Rid our house of things we don’t need
Read more scripture
Dust off my violin and learn new pieces
Eurorail trip with Andy
Graduate School
Figure out what I want and what’s right
Minimise my wardrobe: I don’t need or want the 14 t-shirts and 11 cardigans I’ve collected over the years
Get back to listening to classical music
Learn enough French to get by
Read more novels
Temple, once at month
Not take showers at such a hot temperature
Save money

I was going to rhyme the word Great with 2008, and then I took it a step further and half-heartedly attempted to rhyme the word GRATEful with 2008. I’m scrapping the entire attempt at being tacky, and I’m just going to list a few things from 2008 that I’ve been or am grateful for. In no particular order:

• Andy. He’s the main all singing, all-dancing reason why I love life.
• Moses. For being the only cat I know who doesn’t think he’s better than everyone else.
• For being able to go to the Temple with Andy.
• Grape Vines. You made the short walk to church so much more aromatic.
• The gospel. For the covenants I’ve made and the perspective it gives life.
• Conditional Green Card. It’s not actually green, and it’s conditional, but seriously, without it I would still be cleaning houses, nannying demons, and keeping the thermostat at 56 without it. Actually, USCIS officials would be escorting me on the first boat back to England.
• Laser Eye Surgery. Sweet, sweet 20/15 vision after being something like 20/400 my whole life.
• For Utah remaining dry through the fall. I hate raking wet leaves.
• Our car never blowing a tyre on the freeway and sending me careening out of control off the I-15. It’s a legitimate fear.
• Marriott Man, for letting us swim in the hotel pool last summer, and emboldening us in our pool sneaking this last summer.
• My dad sending money to us for pizza and my mum sending those topshop goodies when we were having a rough few months.
• Living in a safe neighborhood.
• Park City Roger Man. For selling me a class bike with a Cougar colour palette and answering all my obtuse questions about road bikes.
• Professors like Andy’s Dr. Carter. He’s probably the most intelligent man I’ve met, and somehow so humble.
• Fake Mexican and Fake Chinese food. Costa Vida and Rice King will always have a special place in my heart and it’s foreseeable triple bypass.
• Nu Skin. So glad they hired me.
• For Andy’s mum, anticipating my heat-seeking needs with the electric blanket and space heater. I used that heater for about 60% of 2008.
• For Andy spray-painting the mailbox black, so our house didn’t look so much like the abode of preschooler anymore.

I do not understand:

1. People who like their house kinda dirty.
2. Students who do not know how to do their own laundry.
3. Parents who love the names gavin & cheryl
4. It when an an individivual begrudges someone for not being flexible, when they won’t accommodate last minute plans of a disorganised person
5. Recipes that call for a serious love affair with shortening
6. Kids that take an attitude of superiority because they’re “liberal”.
7. Students who tell people they’re cultured (because they know who Mahler is).
8. Orem Mom’s I work for for a day before I go crazy, who eat a large selection of non-prescribed health pills, supplements, dietary aids and vitamins every single day.
9. Seven year olds with their own cell phone
10. Conceited people who spend entire conversations with others defining themselves, whether it be through musical taste, dress style, food fetishes or political perspective.
11. Mormons who refuse to vote Mitt Romney purely on the basis that they don’t want to be ‘another one of those Mormons’
12. Students who actually understand accutarial statistics. Or like it for that matter.
13. Lovers that think that “taking a three month long break” in a serious relationship actually makes sense
14. Trendy kids that think that owning a vast personal collection of G-Star jeans is an “investment”.
15. Adults who think it’s reeeeeally funny for a man to dress up as a woman.
16. People who write “X-Mas” instead of Christmas.
17. Anyone who thinks that all English people are from London.
18. Peers who think they’re rad because they grew up listening to Morrissey, The Smiths, The Who and The Pixies.
19. Classmates that think that they can toss around phrases like “multiple personality disorder”, “anal retentive” and “totally schizophrenic” and think they know something about psychology.
20. Hipsters who think that it’s alright for an Endowed individual to remove their garments for the sake of a Halloween costume.
21. Teens that use the excuse “because I felt like it” to hide the fact they did something for attention.
22. Bi-racial/non-white people who claim themselves to be racially injusticed because their fore-fore-fore fathers were slaves, even though they are upper- middle class
23. Couples who use the phrase “We’re Pregnant”. No, SHE is pregnant, you impregnated her. She has morning sickness, you do not. She has a warped body she’ll have to figure out later, and you do not. SHE is pregnant.
24. Wear T-shirts with ’sassy’/'flirty’ sayings on them. These people probably put Roxy/obnoxious bumper stickers on their car. A car which they use to ignore road rules and highway code. Yes, that last one is a judgment.