I've been missing my books a lot recently, they're all packed up in boxes at the MIL's house while this place is up for sale. I'm having to beg, borrow, and buy new books to read.
This afternoon I was reading about Britains most cherished contemporary novels. I was quite pleased that I've read 14 of the 50 on the list. A meme found on Yarn Utopia, and I'm not quite as pleased, at least I've got some inspiration about what I can read next though.

Copy the list, highlight which one's you've read

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontè, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontè, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (bits of it anyway)
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I knew I'd forget something!

I have a Gmail account. This gave me the ability to spend a fun few days winding up my techie mates who really wanted one. But then I got invites and I made some techies very happy people (although my dire financial straight did make me consider selling them on ebay.)

I'll probably get some more invites at some point, so if you too want to gloat about getting the exact username you want then leave a comment and I'll know who to give the next lot of invites to.

I read something about blogging being what you do when there's nothing happening in life. This seems to be the case at the moment.

Since the last update, we've had several long tiring days in Manchester visiting estate agents and viewing houses. We know certain parts of South Manchester really well now, we can quote grid references from the A-Z.
We've seen about 15 houses, I'm losing count as they're blurring into one. Most have been horrid, some have been horrid to the extent that they became funny, a small few have been nice.
We've tried to place 3 offers, all have been refused, one as it wasn't enough, the second because a first time buyer got there first, even though we offered more money, and a third because when we phoned to place the offer we were told it already had an offer accepted on it. So what exactly were we doing viewing a house on a Saturday morning after 4 hours sleep when the house wasn't available?
I really really hate house hunting.
Friday we'll be doing it all over again.

In between all this house hunting there have been gigs galore. Porl has been involved in all of them, and as usual I'm the roadie, (not that can carry anything, but I'm the only one who drives.)
Lynskey is gigging to promote the upcoming EP Launch, the main bit of this will be at The Font Bar in Manchester on 25th June. If anyone's in the area come down, it'll be fun, and it's free!
Shirokuma played in a record label showcase in possibly the hottest venue in Manchester, The Night and Day Cafe, which really should learn about this thing called air conditioning.
Needless to say all the gigs have been great, and if I went into anymore details I'd be here all day.

Some other events of the past month, include trips to the vets after Duke developed a limp, he's fine now, Gonzo has his usual fat lip that he develops every summer, I'm sure the stupid creature eats nettles.
The blitzing of this house continues, we have new carpets everywhere, the smell of paint has finally gone, although I need to do some more touching up. I've been spending a lot of time gardening, the obvious signs of years of neglect are slowly disappearing, I hope the new buyers, whoever they may be, will appreciate our efforts.

I'm sure I've missed out plenty of things, but this month has become a complete blur fuelled by stress, excitement and disapointment. I'll try to write in shorter bursts from now on, it may be easier than trying to remember everything.