waiting for paint to dry

I am sure there is a way to paint ceilings without getting splattered. I just haven't found it.

Having (painstakingly) removed all the bloody glow-in-the-dark stars and planets (never buy your kids showbags with free stickers!) and drenched myself in hot sugar soap solution, the first coat on the ceiling has, at last, gone on. Mostly on the plaster but, also, liberally sploshed on the walls, floor and me. (There is also some on Oi but quite how that happened I don't know. He wasn't even in the room.)

Second coat will go on as soon as I have finished up with blogging.

Hmmm, this calls for some procrastination. So, a small story.

A few weeks ago I got an email from my daughter in far off (and not very nice) places. Amongst the news she made a request for some books to be sent over. She said she was currently into biographies, the "girlie bleeding-heart" type. I put a plea out to my (almost)DIL because she reads that type of stuff and also had a quick scan through my bookshelves for anything suitable. I sent her off a couple of my books, including this one by our very own CosmicThis morning I got another email from my girl. Amongst other things she said...

"I need more lip balm, the body shop one, and are there any more books by Murray? I loved the warm fuzzy one. Weve all red(sic) it even the godman."

So, if you haven't bought her book, maybe you should. After all, a gaggle of faraway soldiers in a nasty place (and me) can't be wrong

More procrastination.

I filched this from Jen (who probably nicked it from other people)

The instructions are: Bold what you have read, italicize those you didn't finish, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf. Underline books that are on your "to read" list.

the list, and my reactions to it:

+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
*+A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
+Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
+War and Peace
+Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’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
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
+The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
+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
*+1984
*+Angels & Demons
+The 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
The Corrections
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
+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 : a novel
+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
+*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
*+Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
*+The Hobbit
+In Cold Blood
White Teeth
+Treasure Island
+David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I hadn't realised how many books my hubby had bought and I hadn't yet read. Time to rattle my dags.

OK, this second coat isn't going to do itself.