Honest...not to goodness.... Scrap!

Primitive Lyric tagged me on this one. I've already done a few of thtese 'honest' scraps that if you've been reading me for a while now, you might be

1. either bored with me rambling on about myself,


2. or you already know enough about me to beign writing the foreword to my biography! (the one that'll be published sometime before I die, if I manage to fulfill all my dreams!!)


3. ok.... there's no Number 3.

So here it is!

I have to write 10 honest things about me. Here goes...

1. I am an only child, and I didn't like it at all... always wanted a big brother, but would have been happy with a little brother or sister. So everyday of my life, from when I was about 3 till I turned 16 I prayed for a baby brother or sister. I even had names picked for them!! from ages 16-20, I still prayed for a sibling, but not everyday. And then I accepted the plan God had for my life!
2. I have known my husband, Paunch for 7 years.....been married for 2 and a half.
3. I've always thought I was a 'good girl'. However, last Monday, I went and landed myself in the dreaded Police Records of the Chennai City Police Dept. More on that, in my next "Not Me Monday" post. (Nags... here's a hint of whats to come!)
4. I have an unruly mop of wavy black/dark brown hair on my head, and I'd really like to do a hair exchange with someone who has poker straight hair or really curly hair.
5. I am easily irritated, but only show my irritation openly to my husband and parents...I try to put on a smile and fake my true feelings with all others.
6. I might be able to count on one hand (if I wanted to) how many movies I've NOT cried for.... heck! Even some mildly senti scenes from "The Hangover" will give me a lump in my throat!!
7. I might seem like a Wuss, but when the need arises, I have been braver than most people around.
8. I saved the life of a young man who was involved in a bike/truck accident, only to find out later that he was the younger brother of one of my school classmates. Sadly, the two other boys with him in that accident lost their lives.
9. I am beginning to hate my "wild imagination" and am thinking of asking God to take it away from me because in the past few weeks, it has landed me in more trouble than I've ever wanted to have.
10. If pregnancy were easier, If childbirth were not so painful, If India had a smaller population and the World were a better place for Kids, then I'd have a huge family with at least 5 kids!!
    

What have You Read ??

Was bloghopping and found this. Thought I'd try it myself....

The books (novels) in bold (or rather, RED) I have read. You are supposed to "Italics" the books that are on your reading list. I am not sure if at the end I'm going to be ashamed about my reading list!! Many of these are classics. Try this one out for yourselves too!

P.S I don't know who came up with the list and on what basis.... I would take out some and add a few more!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (not entirely)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (books 1,2 &3.. got bored after that!)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (again... I really hope to have read it from cover to cover sometime soon)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Duh! If you've read the chronicles of Narnia, how could you miss this one?? )
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (does having seen the movie count???)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (My favoritest book in the world!)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (another favorite!)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

OK.... so lemme see... 46 books out of the 100 chosen from a stranger's reading list.... I am ashamed...it does nothing to add credit to my bachelors degree in English Literature!!! I should read more.

And.... another tag! This one I call "The Six Tag"

This one's from Lis of ' In getting there'
Here are the 6 rules.

• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Post rules on your blog.
• Write six random things about yourself.
• Tag six people at the end of your post
• Let each person know they've been tagged.
• Let the tagger know when you've posted your own randomness .

So, here are my 6!

1. I love my name and it means 'lamp' in most Indian languages. My parents named me after the Bible verse "Let your light shine before all that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven."... hey.. have I mentioned tis already in my blog? don't remember and am too lazy to go back and check.
2. I wore glasses -soda bottle thick ones- for 13 years of my life until my parents thought me old and unscatterbrainly enough to handle wearing contact lenses! (psst! I was 20 by the time I got my first lenses!)
3. I'm in love with my hometown, miss it like mad sometimes & can speak for ages about it!
4. I am horrible at dealing with teenagers and shudder to think of what I will be like when my kids grow up
5. I can play a little guitar, and love playing the little I can , yet have not taken the effort to learn anything new since I was 17!
6. I am pro-adoption and anti-abortion!

aaaaaaaand.... i dont want to tag anyone! Am breaking one rule! sokay!!! if you like this one, please feel free to follow the thread!!

20 Questions - A TAG from Sucharita

Here's something I had fun doing. Got tagged!

1. If your lover betrayed you, what would your reaction be?
I would be heartbroken and might never recover from it!

2. If you can have a dream come true, what would it be?
To be a superwife/mom who knows just what to do with every icky situation that comes her way, and who IS TRULY always right!

3. Whose butt would you like to kick?
Certain people in the Indian Govt for being spineless, and of course all the ‘roadside romeos’ in Chennai and elsewhere!

4. What would you do with a billion dollars?
If this happens, (has to be sheer luck or divine providence) I would give at least a tenth to a good cause and then invest some for my kids (by then I’ll be rich enough to hire a financial advisor), buy my husband dearest all the guy stuff I couldn’t buy in our 6 years of being together, and then splurge the remaining!

5. Will you fall in love with your best friend?
I did! And what a life it has been! No regrets!

6. Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?
I thought a lot about it, and I just don’t know! Can you rate blessings?

7. How long would you wait for someone you loved?
I waited 3 months. But if I had to, I think I might have waited longer!

8. If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?
Flee!

9. If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?
Corruption. I wish the question was “If you could root OUT 1 social cause what would it be?” simply rooting for a cause…. How effective is that?

10. What takes you down the fastest?
It doesn’t take much to take me down! So I don’t know!

11. Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
At an amusement park, enjoying a weekend with my family.

12. What’s your fear?
Frogs and Toads. Seriously!!!

13. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
A very creative person, a fun mother, a keen observer of life, a happy rememberer, a sensitive thinker, an open hearted writer who will someday sign my copy of her booker prize winning novel!

14. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?
Married and poor most definitely. Even if I were poor, just having someone to share in my poverty, having a husband to snuggle up to on the cold nights when the rain seeps through our thatched roof will more than compensate the loneliness a hopeless romantic like me would feel!

15. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Same as Sucharita - Wish I could sleep for a few hours more.

16. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?
My husband and my baby!...... simple!

17. Would you give all in a relationship?
Sure! Why hold back when you get all in return for giving all?

18. Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has done?
Forgive, yes … but with difficulty. But to forget…um…I don’t know. True forgiveness actually takes the pain out of the sting. So the forgetting part is not so important. (I know from experience!)

19. Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?
Question 14’s answer should do for this one too!

20. List of 6 people to tag:
Nandini, Macabreday, Amrita, Paunch & Babu (in the hope that they’ll revive their dying blogs) and last but not least, Aleta

Tagged!!!........ and finally getting down to do it!

I was tagged by Sucharita a long, long time ago, but have only got down to working on it now.
Here are the rules:
Pick up the nearest book.
Open to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people, and acknowledge the person tagged you .

And, here goes....

The book is called "Papa's Wife" it's by Thyra Ferre Bjorn. Page 123 in this book is the last page of the chapter and so doesn't even have a 5th line. So am going to post sentences 5-10 from the next page. oh... and am adding an extra line... just for fun.

"Here, every Monday was washday. Every week, instead of twice a year as it was in Lapland. Of course, in Lapland she had not done all the work herself in those twice-a-year washings which consumed a whole week. Tant Renberg and Emma Erickson had helped. All the white clothes were boiled in lut and pounded vigorously with a klapptra on a board in the brook, until they were as white as the mountain snow. It was twelve dozen sheets and several times as many towels and pillowcases then, but now, she had only two dozen each."

I love this book. I got it as a birthday gift on my 16th birthday. When I went home this time, I fished it out of my bookshelf and brought it here to read again. I listed it on my favorite books list on my blogger account and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are others who love the book too! Here's an excerpt from the book's blurb.

All the girls had crushes on the handsome, silver-tongued preacher. But he, was determined to remain a bachelor forever. Then Maria took matters into her own hands. She moved right into the same house with him, as his maid. So began one of the most delightfully unconventional courtships in the history of fiction.

Maria (Mama) manages to convince Papa to leave Lapland and move to America. The major part of the book is about how the family adjusts to life in America. The author-one of Maria's daughters says the books is "fiction based on a fact - a happy mixture of truth and fancy- and it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins"

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is anything like me!

The A B C's of me

How do tags work? Does there have to be a person who tagged you? Couldn't you just look at what someone else has written and then do something similar? I don't know the rules... and even if there are unwritten rules for blogging i'm going to say "Bah Humbug!" to them! .......... hah!
so... anyway, I found this on a friend's friend's blog. And am trying it out for moi!

The A B Cs of Me
A-Available?: No! very happily married thank you! (but if "available?" means something else, then I dont know)
B-Best friend: Ashwin!!!!!!!!!!
C-Cake or Pie?: um.... I can bake cakes better but i think I prefer pies.
D-Drink of choice: Fresh lemonade
E-Essential thing used everyday: contact lenses
F-Favorite color: (s) blue, green, purple
G-Gummi bears or worms: worms - just because u get more from one piece.
H-Hometown: Oddanchatram
I-Indulgence: 'death by chocolate'
J-January or February: February -becoz it's shorter
K-Kids and names: Let me know they're on their way at least. Then I'll proclaim it to the world!
L-Life is incomplete without: My god and my husband
M-Marriage date: 7th July 2007 (we picked 7.7.7 quite by accident! but how cool a date is that!)
N-Number of siblings: siblings =zero. brothers and sisters = lots and lots!
O-Oranges or apples: apples -fresh crispy ones.
P-Phobias: frogs
Q-Quote: "When the grass looks greener on the other side, it's time to water your own garden"
R-Reason to smile: I am a teacher, and so I laugh more than average people!
S-Season: What seasons can you have in ChennaI? between Hot, Hotter, Hottest and Hell, I think I like Hot.
U-Unknown fact about me: I took Bharatanatyam classes (indian classical dance) for about 2and a half years when I was in school but now I can' do a thing excpt the head shake!
V-Vegetable you do not like: snakegourd
W-Worst habit: Procastination
X-rays you have had: 4 i think.
Y-Your favourite food: Dosa with sambhar and 5 kinds of chutney
Z-Zodiac: aries (tho i dont belive your zodiac has anything to do with your future/personality)