Awesome Book. Very insightful and great examples to apply immediately to my personal life. At first I read it in denial and thought of all the people it applied to...but after I picked the book up half way through, 6 months later, I realize that EVERYTHING in the book applies directly to ME. I am the one that needs to change and I am the one that has been going about the whole world with a critical let me fix it for you attitude. I never listen! I haven't listened probably my whole life...I always jump in with a solution to fix things and impart my great wisdom on everyone and anyone. I thought I was helping! I thought I was being nice. BUT it usually isn't what people want...I don't...why would they?
I realize I can't change myself overnight but I can try a little everyday to apply the things in this book and hopefully my relationship with my dear husband and my children and then my siblings and in laws and parents will change. Someday s I will do great and sometimes...I will slip into the old fix it attitude I feel comfortable with. I will apologize ahead of time for all the past fix its and the future fix its that slip.
Whole Book
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
The Law by Frederick Bastiat
This book was written in the 19th century but it is still applicable today, in fact more today then ever! It is full of truths, very insightful and inspired! He was an old French guy but such a good writer. He defends liberty on every front and I bet there aren't many that can argue with his facts on the flaws in socialism and other isms.
I like the way he says this about isms, "Please understand that I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law --by force --and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes....they need only give up the idea of forcing us to acquiesce to their groups and series..."
It is deep yet it is simple enough I could grasps most of it and apply it to my life today. I think I take a lot of our freedoms and laws for granted. I also think many of our laws have way too much government influence and control. This takes away our liberty and our pursuit of happiness.
So even though this book it so good and I highly recommend it to EVERYONE...Some of you might know that it took me over a year to read it! Yep I admit it. There is a lot to absorb but that really isn't the excuse I have...it was just such a dry book...in fact there isn't any adventure or romance or imagination! I kept getting distracted reading other things. AND to top all that off the book is only 85 pages long. That is embarrassing it took me so long. I think I might even read it again and why not again? Really it is good and I learned so much, I am only lazy lazy lazy.
Bastiat quotes Louis Blanc, "Society receives its momentum from power" This is the idea politicians accept. Then Bastiat says, "This will remain the case so long as human beings with feelings continue to remain passive; so long as they consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy; so long as they expect everything from the law; in short, so long as they imagine that their relationship to the state is the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd."
What does this quote say to you?
Whole Book
I like the way he says this about isms, "Please understand that I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law --by force --and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes....they need only give up the idea of forcing us to acquiesce to their groups and series..."
It is deep yet it is simple enough I could grasps most of it and apply it to my life today. I think I take a lot of our freedoms and laws for granted. I also think many of our laws have way too much government influence and control. This takes away our liberty and our pursuit of happiness.
So even though this book it so good and I highly recommend it to EVERYONE...Some of you might know that it took me over a year to read it! Yep I admit it. There is a lot to absorb but that really isn't the excuse I have...it was just such a dry book...in fact there isn't any adventure or romance or imagination! I kept getting distracted reading other things. AND to top all that off the book is only 85 pages long. That is embarrassing it took me so long. I think I might even read it again and why not again? Really it is good and I learned so much, I am only lazy lazy lazy.
Bastiat quotes Louis Blanc, "Society receives its momentum from power" This is the idea politicians accept. Then Bastiat says, "This will remain the case so long as human beings with feelings continue to remain passive; so long as they consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy; so long as they expect everything from the law; in short, so long as they imagine that their relationship to the state is the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd."
What does this quote say to you?
Whole Book
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Reading habits?
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a 'L'to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (p) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen--Lx
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-- Lx
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte-- X L
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling-X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - P
6 The Bible-X L
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte-- XL
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell—P
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x L
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens—P
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott-- XL
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy--
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller--
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-- P
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier-
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien--XL
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger-- X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot-- x
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald--X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens--P
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams—XL
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh-
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky--P
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck- x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll-X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame--P
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy- x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens--p
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis-- XL
34 Emma - Jane Austen- Lx
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen-Lx
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe -- XL
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini --x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden- X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne-- X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell—
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown-- x
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 --XL
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy--
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood--
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding--P
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel--X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert--X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons-
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen- x L
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon-
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens--P
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-- P
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-- XL
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--X
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--X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton--
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad--
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery-X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams--x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas-P
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare-X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl--X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo- xL
My total is 36. I was surprised at how many I didn't recognize. I wonder where they came up with this motley list.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a 'L'to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (p) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen--Lx
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-- Lx
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte-- X L
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling-X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - P
6 The Bible-X L
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte-- XL
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell—P
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x L
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens—P
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott-- XL
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy--
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller--
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-- P
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier-
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien--XL
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger-- X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot-- x
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald--X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens--P
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams—XL
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh-
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky--P
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck- x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll-X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame--P
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy- x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens--p
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis-- XL
34 Emma - Jane Austen- Lx
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen-Lx
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe -- XL
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini --x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden- X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne-- X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell—
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown-- x
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 --XL
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy--
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood--
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding--P
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan-
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel--X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert--X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons-
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen- x L
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon-
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens--P
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-- P
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-- XL
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--X
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--X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton--
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad--
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery-X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams--x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas-P
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare-X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl--X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo- xL
My total is 36. I was surprised at how many I didn't recognize. I wonder where they came up with this motley list.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana by Haven Kimmel
Hmm, it was a fast read and I don't know what all the excitement is about. I found it kind of boring. I wouldn't want to read it in my book group.
It is about a small time town in Indiana. It is told from a child's point of view from birth to about 10 years old. It starts our a bit charming but then gets a bit weird when she talks about the animals that are killed by her neighbors and the lack of compassion she has for life in general or the people around her. She seems precocious but is really a very obnoxious kid. I think her take on religion kind of straggled away from the plot of the story.
This memoir is nice but could really use some editing. Her sister was right...why would anyone want to read about her life as a little girl in a town of 300 and a broken family? It just wasn't what I was expecting. It never got better just blah.
broken book
It is about a small time town in Indiana. It is told from a child's point of view from birth to about 10 years old. It starts our a bit charming but then gets a bit weird when she talks about the animals that are killed by her neighbors and the lack of compassion she has for life in general or the people around her. She seems precocious but is really a very obnoxious kid. I think her take on religion kind of straggled away from the plot of the story.
This memoir is nice but could really use some editing. Her sister was right...why would anyone want to read about her life as a little girl in a town of 300 and a broken family? It just wasn't what I was expecting. It never got better just blah.
broken book
The Case Against the Fed by Murray N. Rothbard
Hmmm, this was an interesting book...for all of the %10 I understood. Economics has never been my strong point. But it wasn't a total waste of time. In fact now I understand Atlas Shrugged a little better! Ha Ha.
What I got from the book is this...counterfeiting is bad and the Federal Reserve is essentially doing this very well and no one cares enough to put a stop to it. FOR YEARS!!! No one checks up on the Feds and most rich and powerful people in the history of the US (plus Presidents of the US) are all in on the scandal right under our noses. The American people are really quite ignorant of the whole thing...including me last week because we are too lazy to learn anything about banking and economics.
The solution...well it took two of the last pages to cover this one...go back to gold coins and don't print any more green paper money in the USA. I'm not sure this would work but at least it would be something since the nation is so totally in debt and the Feds got us there in the first place! They are very good liars and try to make themselves the heroes. Not!
Check out this blog for a better explanation of the Feds today and our economic crisis.
Whole Book
What I got from the book is this...counterfeiting is bad and the Federal Reserve is essentially doing this very well and no one cares enough to put a stop to it. FOR YEARS!!! No one checks up on the Feds and most rich and powerful people in the history of the US (plus Presidents of the US) are all in on the scandal right under our noses. The American people are really quite ignorant of the whole thing...including me last week because we are too lazy to learn anything about banking and economics.
The solution...well it took two of the last pages to cover this one...go back to gold coins and don't print any more green paper money in the USA. I'm not sure this would work but at least it would be something since the nation is so totally in debt and the Feds got us there in the first place! They are very good liars and try to make themselves the heroes. Not!
Check out this blog for a better explanation of the Feds today and our economic crisis.
Whole Book
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Empire by Orson Scott Card
Yikes, what a scary and exciting book! Written in 2006 it is amazing what some of the parallels to our society today are! It is of course fictional but makes many points about the political system and all the corruptness that is happening today.
Card makes up an American Civil War in the near future. There is all kinds of military things happening and espionage and of course terrorists. This was a fast read because I couldn't put it down. I had to know what happened next. I think he plans on making it a tv series or movie or something because it is written in tiny bursts of adventure and adrenaline scenes, one after the other....there really isn't a lot of time for getting into each characters head and developing deep dialogs or plots like Ender's Game.
What is really creepy is all the killing that happened and how important it is to defend ones family and have a plan. You have to be prepared and watch your back. You don't know who is your enemy. The police, the army the special ops, the CIA the President of the US or even the people you work with could be on the other side or just following orders from someone corrupt further up the line.
It is kind of a mystery book that unravels as it goes along. It was very good and worth reading.
Healing Book
Card makes up an American Civil War in the near future. There is all kinds of military things happening and espionage and of course terrorists. This was a fast read because I couldn't put it down. I had to know what happened next. I think he plans on making it a tv series or movie or something because it is written in tiny bursts of adventure and adrenaline scenes, one after the other....there really isn't a lot of time for getting into each characters head and developing deep dialogs or plots like Ender's Game.
What is really creepy is all the killing that happened and how important it is to defend ones family and have a plan. You have to be prepared and watch your back. You don't know who is your enemy. The police, the army the special ops, the CIA the President of the US or even the people you work with could be on the other side or just following orders from someone corrupt further up the line.
It is kind of a mystery book that unravels as it goes along. It was very good and worth reading.
Healing Book
Thursday, February 05, 2009
History of Hyde Park in Utah's Cache Valley, 1860-1990 by Dale Z Kirby
This is the tour of the new town we moved to in the last 3 months. It has such a rich pioneer heritage. I just finished reading History of Hyde Park in Utah's Cache Valley, 1860-1990 by Dale Z. Kirby. The author is a direct decedent of one of the first settlers in this town and had some very interesting journal entries from his ancestors.
My favorite part of the book was finding out that quite a few of the people that live in our ward are related to the early pioneers in Hyde Park! And it is really cool that our house was built by a guy in our ward's dad, who is related to the early settlers in this valley. And the water we get from the tap is from the natural Spring that attracted people to settle here in the first place!
This is a picture of the view from the up the hill just past the church. It shows the mountains west of Hyde Park over in Logan and beyond.
The church we attend is just around the corner from our house. It is a newer stake center build in the late 1990's but one of the first things they did when the pioneers got here was build a church. They had to keep rebuilding it bigger and bigger as more settlers came into the valley. They added a gymnasium where most of the fun dances and community events were held for a long time. Basketball and Baseball were very very popular to keep the youth from getting too bored and out of mischief.
The first bishop called by Brigham Young was William Hyde. He also served with Joseph Smith in the Mormon Battalion. He was a hard worker and a fair and honest man. He organized and lead the people in Hyde Park to build a community that cared for the people, their God, the land and the freedoms we have in this country.
Many people in Hyde Park also helped in the quarries to bring the rock down for the building of the Logan Temple.
This is a picture to the East. North Logan's mountains. We look at these mountains our our kitchen window! I love them covered with snow!
Hyde Park is actually only 3.2 Square miles. There are only just under
2,000 people living here. All of the shopping and businesses are in Logan. There isn't anything here but neighborhoods and farmland. We do have our own city building, community center and post office and a few parks but the schools are all in Logan and Smithfield. But the early settlers took education very seriously. There was always schools built in Hyde Park but they are all burned down or fallen down but one, it is still used today but is part of the North Logan School district. Many many people from Hyde Park were teachers and administrators in other schools nearby. Plus the university is USU is just 4 miles away over in Logan. 4-H was very popular and still is today.
It is a really cool place to live. The early settlers used to have dairy farms, mink farms, the RS sisters got into raising silk worms so they didn't just have to wear wool all the time. There were lots of sugar beets grown here and hay. They had a train station just down the road so they could get mail and goods from other towns. There used to be a co-op grocery store and a few other stores. But in the middle 1900's the town voted to limit businesses and growth in the town because it was getting to crowded and expensive to get water to the new homes. There are also a lot of canals running all through Hyde Park. Everyone had a barn and gardens on their property. There are a lot of people today that still have horses and small gardens. There were even polygamists in the 1800's that lived here in town...until they made it against the law and the rules of the church and they had to work our other options for living and caring for their multiple families. The police and fire stations are today combined with North Logan's and even the Library. It is just a mile down the road from us but in N. Logan. So we do all of our shopping and errands in Logan where they have grocery stores and the DI and Kohl's, a tiny mall, Walmart, Home Depot, Borders and restraunts plus lots of other stores because it is a "big" university town.
Our house has a big backyard and a few fruit trees. It also has a little barn and the water is on an irrigation water share system. There are Llamas behind our property owned by one of our neighbors and most of the neighbors near us all have goats,chickens, dogs and cats.
Our cool house!
Look at the awesome icicles hanging from our roof !
We love it here! We miss CALIF. but this is where we live now. It will be a great place for the kids to just run around and have fun all summer! We can't wait to jump into the fun of Hyde Park!
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