Lifted from facebook...

So this is a things from facebook where you put an X by each book that you have read. The government (?) reckons that each of us have read at least 6 of these. I've cheated slightly because there are a couple here that I didn't finish... and you can't include films. I've kept this lest on my blog so I can update it if and when I read any more.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks X
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’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 X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere X
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
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 X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
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 X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
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 X
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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
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 X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Photo From the Uptairs Window

So this kind of shows part of the U shape of houses that this house is a part of. The green in the middle is a large, shared area plus we also would have a big back garden. This photo doesn't really show you but it is rather lovely and Jane Austen esque as you walk around it.

Still as Undecided as a Fat Bird in a Cake Shop Who's Only Allowed To Buy One Thing

ARRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

DOUBLE AAAAAARHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Looks like we're buying the house.

We had our offer accepted and went around there yesterday and today with various surveyors/drains people to give quotes and advice. My head it is literally spinning like a jet propelled top from what they said and I still don't know if we're doing the right thing. Thank you guys for all the advice though, I love you all! That sounded cheesy and American but it is true.

The main things about the house is that it either has a) possibly wall tie failure or b) possibly a collapsed drain that has caused cracking and a small amount of subsidence. It has a few cracks on the gable end and it's knowing what those cracks are that is the issue. When the house was flooded last month there was over and inch of water throughout the ground floor so you can imagine the state of the plaster and floors in there. We are either brave or stooopid in believing we are tough enough to take it on.

Nick went up into the very dirty loft around there yesterday and found a very old book on existential philosophy. Maybe I should read it to find out if we're doing the right thing! It seems to be whispering "get a job get a job", it's a feisty little number.

Still it's not 100% that we're doing it but rather than 50/50 I would say it's more like 60/40 for. It's making me feel physically sick with nerves and I nearly vommed the other night which is kind of good as my appetite has been slightly suppresed. Great way to lose weight! No, obviously I don't want to be so stressed that I puke but we made some bad financial decisions last year that ended costing us potentially thousands of pounds and I can't bear the thought that we're being stupid with our money again so I am really, really nervous about it. Still, I pretty much hate all banks as a result so I would rather have our savings tucked away in a property than in a bank at the moment. I think. Interest rates suck arse right now, that's for sure.

This is the most awesome book I have read in a long time. Just go and get it out of your library and savour it. I steamed through it in a few days and kind of wish I had taken my time to enjoy slowly. Honest, it's brilliant!

Oh - also read 'The Graveyard Book' by Neil Gaiman, another brilliant one although it's for the sort of Harry Potter age group. Doesn't matter! Kids books rule!

You Spin Me Right Round Baby

The last few days have been pretty hectic, in an emotional (definitely not physical, we have been really lazy) way. We were supposed to be heading off by ferry to France next week to begin our Euro travels 2009. Instead we found a house that we both felt ticked all the right boxes for us here in Southampton and have been toing and froing with offers via the estate agents. We didn't plan on buying a property until we finished our travels but Nick has been keeping an eye on the market around this particular area that we like here in the city and this particular one really does look good. We viewed it on Tuesday and since then have been going around in circles changing our life plans.

It is a total wreck, with water everywhere inside from a terrible leak and cracks on the outside that worry me a great deal. It hasn't been lived in for a while and smells awful inside. EVERYTHING need doing - electrics, knocking walls down, plasterwork, central heating....

It is a Herbert Collins house, in a listed conservation area. It is beautiful from the outside and is in an estate that feels like something straight out of Jane Austen. It has a long back garden that faces southwest, the best direction in my opinion.... three bedrooms, garage, parking, lounge and a separate dining room. So even though it needs a shit load of work it could be really really something special. These properties are very much in demand historically speaking, but with the market the way it is who knows what the future holds.

Of course it's going around and around my head that we are buying at a really bad time and the market could drop considerably so we would have to get a really good deal on it. It will be really complicated to do up as well, especially if the cracks are subsidence. And our travels would have to be put on hold. I wish someone could just say to me the right thing to do. Do we go for it (and remember it is really very rare that a Collins house crops up on the market with parking) or stop being so silly and continue with our travels??? There is no easy answer and it doesn't help that family members seem to be either extremely for it or vehemently against it.

These things are sent to try us, right?

Back in Sarfampton

I'm feeling a bit more bloggie now that I'm back from skiing. I think my new years resolution should have been to blog post more than once a month for 2009. Of course that is easier said than done, especially when facebook is such a darned distraction...

Skiing in Bulgaria rocked. Officially. The flight was better than anticipated, as the plane was much more modern than the Monarch one we flew to Florida on last summer. We lucked out with the extra legroom seats as well which was fortuitous. And they even gave us shepherds pie! Even though is was only a shortish flight! All is forgiven.

Once we arrived at Sofia airport we were whisked to our hotel by coach with a bunch of other trippers. It was WEIRD to be on a package holiday after all of our travels, and have all the guides trying to sell you excursions and all that crap. It was late at night when we arrived so couldn't take in the surroundings very well but it was definitely snowy. And icy and cold.

The Rila hotel was huge and very budget, despite it being rated somehow as 4 stars. Am I just too picky? Nick summed it up well when we described it as '80's Novotel stylee'... Our room was a really good size with en suite bathroom and big corner balcony and telly, but it was horrendously noisy late at night, quite cold, with very dodgy electrics that blew twice and yellowy/brown tap water. Nice. It was such a cheap holiday that I shouldn't complain, it really was fine to be honest, once we'd made some earplugs out of toilet paper. CLEAN toilet paper.

There were different areas to ski in which was good; lower down the slopes were quite busy and full of dangerous beginners falling around everywhere, but you could take a gondola right up to the top of the Musala mountain and there were quite a few great runs up there at the top. Sadly on 2 days the gondola was closed due to high winds but we found a third area with 3 different red runs to play on. No broken bones to report, just one rather large bruise on the side of my thigh that is shaped exactly like the end of my ski pole! It has snowed just prior to our arrival but then didn't show all week so by the end the lower slopes were getting back to bare earth, thick slush and ice. I found them quite a challenge like that but Nick didn't really like them and stayed off. We saw many people on crutches in our hotel, I feel quite lucky I wasn't one of them.

I really am so pleased to have gone, the last time I was so slow and couldn't turn and now I am much faster, can turn and even managed a black run at one point. To be fair I didn't realise it was black until we'd reached the bottom and Nick spotted the sign, or I wouldn't have done it. I felt quite confident on the red runs by the end of the week.

Borovets itself is very chavvy and seedy, with lots of go-go erotic bars and crap like that. Bars pumping out Euro pop selling 'full English breakfasts' and telling you they're 'cheap price! Asda price!' I guess that's what most Brits want when they go abroad. Very cringeworthy.

In other news! ... My very good friend Catherine and her husband Damian have just had a baby! She is called Samantha Elizabeth and was born on Thursday 5th Feb weighing just under 6lb. Massive congratulations to them both and hurry up and post some pics on facebook or your blog please...

We are hanging around in the UK until this weekend when our friend Ben is coming down from Birmingham to stay. Then we plan to hit the road, Jack, at some time next week., depending on snow/ice conditions here and in northern Europe. This week we are getting the van ready and keeping busy doing lots of last minute things. The van is being serviced today so fingers crossed they don't find anything terribly wrong with her.