So, this year I will be participating the Day of Blogs 2008!  The crowd’s a bit smaller, but it’s still for a great purpose, so I’m in!  This Saturday, July 26 (at 9AM EST) I will begin blogging every half hour for 24 hours.  Bring on the caffeine!

This year, the charity that I have chosen is Children’s Literacy Initiative.  Anyone who knows me knows that I LOVE reading (I mean, I double majored in English and theatre - that’s a lot of reading, LOL).  I have hundreds of books at home, and I’m always reading something.  I attribute my passion for reading to my early childhood experiences with books, mostly from my parents and my teachers.  I’ll share more of my personal experiences during Day of Blogs, but know that reading is something I am quite dedicated to, and believe every child should have significant exposure to.  Children’s Literacy Initiative doesn’t just support childhood literacy - it trains the teachers of pre-K through 3rd grade students who will work with these children on ways to effectively reach them and grant them a fulfilling education.

Children’s Literacy Initiative Mission Statement

Children’s Literacy Initiative works with teachers of our youngest children to transform instruction so that all children become powerful readers, writers, and thinkers.

From their profile on Charity Navigator:

Children’s Literacy Initiative (CLI) was founded in 1988 to enhance the opportunity for children from low-income families to enter school ready to learn and, once in school, to be successful in learning to read. CLI works to increase children’s literacy skills and to foster a love of reading by providing professional development for teachers of pre-kindergarten through third grade students. Our programs are designed to provide training in the most effective literacy practices and include quality books and materials for creating a literacy-rich classroom environment. CLI is involved in large projects in the public school systems of Philadelphia, Newark (NJ), Camden, Baltimore, and Boston, as well as training in several school districts in Pennsylvania.

Please consider sponsoring me for Day of Blogs. Donations can be received through Network for Good via the link at the end of each post during Day of Blogs (or by clicking HERE) or you may click through the widget on my sidebar.

There are all sorts of answers that you can find on the Day of Blogs website, but as always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

This post is for the Day of Blogs 2008! I am blogging for Children’s Literacy Initiative. For more information about what I am doing, please click here, or you can sponsor me!

• 1/31/2006 — Questions from you!
• 1/23/2008 — Holidays, Hospitals, and Higher Learning
• 12/8/2006 — ABC Meme!

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The instructions:
Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - 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 Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
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
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
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
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’ 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
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

Hat Tip: Sassymonkey Reads

• 3/10/2007 — A Bookish Meme
• 2/22/2007 — Thursday Thirteen #39
• 12/29/2006 — Thursday Thirteen #35

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First, AJ, Bo, and I met up in San Francisco.  It was a little weird that Bo and I were on vacation together without my parents.  I guess we’re really grown up now, huh?  LOL!

The first full day was our big sightseeing day.  We took a sightseeing tour bus that drove us all around town and showed us everything.  It took us to the top of a hill where we could see the whole city - it’s so big and hilly!

And then the bus took us to Golden Gate Bridge:

Then we traveled to Muir Woods, which was a beautiful state park.  The redwoods were so gorgeous!  So, of course, AJ had to act goofy in the middle of them

Then, that night, we went to see Al Capone’s old haunt - Alcatraz:

The next few days we spent exploring the city, including visiting the original Ghirardelli store.

We also spent an afternoon at Haight Ashbury, which is a place I’ve been wanting to visit for YEARS!  We also smoked a little hookah in a hookah bar at Haight Ashbury, which just seemed too appropriate.  This is a horrible angle for me, but look, I was there!

Then we met up with my parents and we all headed to Napa Valley!  We had the best time.  We probably went to 15-20 wineries.

AJ and I slowly collected a case’s worth of wine to bring home with us . . . until we went to the last winery.  We had tours at several of the wineries, and tastings at almost everyone, but the last winery we went to was a little different.  At Del Dotto, we did a barrel tasting - we tasted the wine straight from the barrels that were in the caves!  It was so cool!

This was some of the best wine that we have ever tasted, and since the vineyard is a smaller vineyard that only sells wine from the winery (not in stores or resteraunts), we bought another half case of wine there, LOL!  We’re going to let the wine age, so AJ and I used a Christmas gift certificate I had saved to by this AWESOME wine fridge.

So, I guess can check off #37 on my 101 in 1001 - I’ve been to California!  For all the pictures, see my Flickr.

Then, Mama, Daddy, and Bo all went home and AJ and I went to New York for a couple of days.  We saw August: Osage County (which was soooooo amazing) and American Ballet Theatre’s production of Sleeping Beauty (which meant a lot to me - Disney’s movie has been my favorite movie since I was 2, and I’ve always wanted to see the ballet).  We also got to spend some time with my best friend Stephanie.  She lives in NYC now, and she’s never had a chance to meet AJ.

So, we’re back now, and completely exhausted, but we had a truly great vacation!  I think I’ve decided to give wine tasting/journaling another shot now that I’ve been to Napa and have a bit more knowledge about the whole thing.

Oh, and while I’m posting, we can also scratch #69 off of my 101 in 1001 list - over the past year I’ve really switched a lot of my grocery purchasing to organic food, and I try to consciously pick the organic options, even if they do cost a little more!

• 6/29/2006 — Thursday Thirteen #47
• 7/19/2006 — About Me
• 5/25/2006 — Thursday Thirteen #42

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I won’t go into too much detail about the book because I really feel like it’s worth the read! But part of what struck me so much about this book was the amount of research that A. J. Jacobs put into the different rules he was reading about (and the reasons behind them). He read hundreds of books during this process, and shared a lot of his findings throughout the book. Here are a few of the books that I’ve added to my wishlist as a result of reading this book:

- Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally, Marcus J. Borg
- Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, John Shelby Spong - very divided reader reviews on this one!
- God: A Biography, Jack Miles
- Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, Robin Lane Fox - more divided reader reviews
- Daily Life in Biblical Times, Oded Borowski

Also, Jacobs uses the website Charity Navigator to help him figure out how to tithe his money. I think this is a really neat site, and I’ve added it to my bookmarks!

There’s also another website that he mentioned called MoveOn.org. I’m still not 100% what this website’s purpose is, but I’m intrigued.

And on the rare off-chance that A. J. Jacobs is “self-Googling” (pg. 151) - I LOVED your book!  I have Post-It notes all over my book and send a copy to my mom.  Thanks for the great read!

• 7/19/2006 — About Me
• 1/10/2008 — Books Read in 2008
• 9/1/2007 — Foodies Unite!

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From I Can Has Cheezburger?

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Hat Tip: Pragmatic Compendium

• 9/5/2007 — 171 Starbucks
• 11/18/2007 — What does it have to do with juice?
• 11/6/2007 — Moving up in the world!

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So, here’s to our first year :-)!

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Then, once I started to look around, I realized that LinkedIn is really unlike any other social media site. I mean, this one is basically an online directory of resumes that allows you to publicize your networking. It really is all about career stuff. I think it’s really neat to be able to keep up with everyone and see where they’re going, who they’re working with, and what exciting things they are doing now.

Around this time, I saw the true power (at least in the technology industry) that LinkedIn has for professional uses - we actually used LinkedIn to hire a new designer for E. Webscapes. The response to the post at LinkedIn was overwhelming . . . this social media phenomenon really surprised me. You mean we can do more than just poke each other and turn people into zombies? I’m officially impressed.

So, having come to these conclusions, I decided to bulk up my profile and fill in as many sections as I could (I’m at 90% complete - I just need 2 more recommendations . . . interested?). But I quickly realized that the true power of LinkedIn lies within its networking capabilities. I have been looking through all the people I went to school with and I have also been seeking out everyone in my contacts so that I can maximize the network.

So here is my call to all of you! If you are on LinkedIn and we aren’t networked yet, let’s make that happen! Here is my profile - hook it up. If you are NOT on LinkedIn, I am inviting you to join us in this productive social media site (and strangely that’s not a complete oxymoron). Click on my profile link above and you will be able to join up there.

See, not so bad? This makes networking actually FUN!

• 3/2/2008 — 101 in 1001 updates!
• 2/24/2008 — It’s my blogiversary!!!
• 1/23/2008 — Holidays, Hospitals, and Higher Learning

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It all started when we got back from Florida. AJ’s supposed to be getting central heating and air in his condo, so the guy came on Monday to do a walk through, give them a quote, etc. He said they’d start work next week, AJ said OK, we go to lunch.

Then AJ gets a phone call . . . and it’s the heating and ac people. The apartment they were supposed to start work on has water damage and they can’t do anything until the water is vacuumed out. Can they start work on AJ’s condo today?

Well, we had to do something with his three adorable kitties . . . so they came over to my apartment. Yes, your math is right, for this week I have FIVE kittens! Don’t get me wrong, I love them all dearly - they’re my babies! But they hadn’t all met each other, and it has been . . . interesting.

AJ’s kittens actually seem to be adjusting quite well. They love me, and everything smells like me, so it wasn’t too scary. And my place has carpet and his doesn’t, so they are LOVING the traction they can get while running around my apartment. My kittens are another story all together. Miles is very slowly warming up to them. He walks around them, lets them sniff him, he even doesn’t hiss at them too much. He’s just kind of confused.

Oscar is mad.

I was quite surprised by this. As I’ve had them, I’ve come to realize that Miles is the dominant cat and Oscar is submissive. So if ANYTHING, I figured Oscar would be cool with things. But noooo . . . he is mad. He has been hissing at the other cats for even entering the same room as him. He bats at them, growls constantly, and is just not happy. He even growls and hisses at Miles now! And they’ve been together since birth! They are absolutely BFF, but he’s not having it now. And he’s growled and batted at me too.

He’s getting a little better. Tuesday it was intolerable - I was afraid to leave them in the same room alone. Yesterday and last night were better. Not great, but now I’m beginning to think there is hope (where before I didn’t).

So, that’s what I’ve been up to this week! Oh, and I started back to school today. Yay?

And since I’m talking about them, I have to show them to you

They are in age order: Jazz (AJ’s, almost a year), Ninja (AJ’s, almost a year), Oscar (mine, 9ish months), Miles (mine, 9ish months), and Ana (AJ’s, 5ish months)

Won’t you pray for us please? LOL, I love them all so much!

• 12/1/2007 — My Christmas Present from Mama and Daddy!
• 12/1/2007 — Storage Solutions
• 7/28/2007 — Take Two

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