Ok, guys, now I need help. I took these keys to Borders this morning, and the owner had never registered their card. So there was no way of tracking them down.

I've already posted to Craigslist in the lost and found, and I'm about to make fliers to go and put up around where I found they keys.

What else can I do?

How long should I hold on to them before giving them to the police?

For those good Googlers, one of the keys has black plastic on it and says 'BELL', but googling Bell Keys brings up musical instruments, not keys. Is it a key brand name? There is a serial number on it, I was thinking if I found the Bell Key Company, I could try that.

Threadless is having a really big $5 and $10 t shirt sale!

I'm going to bump this every now and then. If you guys could click on the link, it would rock.

Ok, so I have to tell everyone how much I love the yarny goodness website Eat Sleep Knit! Both times I've ordered from them, I've had my yarn in my hands in about a week. They even helped me out to find more Malabrigo in the same dye lot because I can't do addition.

Now, if you guys don't mind helping me out. Clicking on the link to the website earn me yards for their 'Yarn Marathon'. Anyone who sees this, please feel free to click on the link! I will earn prizes for how many yards I get - I also earn them by buying yarn.

Those of you who are knitters or crocheters - they do have some wonderful yarns, good prizes and awesome customer service. Oh, they also include scratch off yarn tickets with each order - on two of the three I won (2 order + 1 from my mom's gift certificate) $5 off on my next order.

This past year, I only started ordering from them in October and still made it to 1 mile.

From Crafty Christine

From Crafty Christine

Since I did just go out and buy my holiday cards, I figure that it's time to do the annual 'If you want a card, leave your address post'!

Comments are screened, and no, I won't be sending the cards out until December 1st - even I'm not that insane.

This is how the two of them sit on the couch. It makes me sick with all of it's cuteness.

From Emma

Sometimes, she'll even reach up with her little kitty paw and touch his face with it.

I think they are in LUV.

Dave and I both had the goal of reading 50 books in 2008. I just finished my 50th tonight!

If you're not on GoodReads yet, you can check out the list of what I've read:

With Dave and I seriously looking and thinking about houses and floor plans, I come to you guys with questions about your own houses and apartments. (I will also probably post this on hip_domestics and TQC).

1. What features do you LOVE about your house - can be indoor (any room) or outdoor?

2. What features did you think you were going to love but are either meh about or just don't like?

3. What do you wish your house had that it doesn't?

4. Are you happy with the size of your house? How big is it (either in bedrooms, or square feet if you know it)?


Thanks!

I know that a few of you guys have this:

This is a recipe that was in Real Simple this month. It looked good (and quick!), so we made it tonight.

1 cup rice
1 lb salmon
salt and pepper
4 oz sugar snap peas
1/3 cup soy sauce
4 scallions, trimmed and sliced
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon grated ginger
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

Mix the rice and 2 1/3 cup water in a medium skillet. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, for 10 minutes.

Slice the salmon on a diagonal into four 3/4 inch thick pieces. Season with salt and pepper. Place on top of the partially-cooked rice. Cover and cook for 7 minutes.

Scatter the peas over the salmon and rice. Cover and cook until the rice and peas are tender and the salmon is opaque and beginning to flake, 3-5 minutes.

Mix the soy sauce, scallions, vinegar, ginger, and sugar in a small bowl.

Spoon the sauce over salmon, peas, and rice to serve.

We didn't even use the whole tablespoon of ginger and even that was too much. It was borderline overpowering. But overall it was really good. Start to finish, it claims that it will take 25 minutes, we didn't time ourselves. It also says that it will serve 4 - so we had dinner and I have lunch tomorrow! Next time we might marinade the salmon in the sauce first.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by Library Thing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read and italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’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 Canterbury Tales
The Historian - boring as hell
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 Seriously people, I *HEART* Barbara Kingsolver
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
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere -
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved - we read this one in high school
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter We read this one in high school, too!
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye I'm sure I read this in either high school or college
On the Road - groovy, man
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics - I know I've owned this at one point, I think I lent it out and didn't get it back.
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

Dave's brother, Scott, and his fiance Kera are in the running for a free wedding. Not only do they deserve it because they are related to me and, of course, awesome, but because they are both very amazing people.

You can read more about it here. You can also see pictures of them, if you want to put a face with a name.

If you don't want to click on the link, here's what you do:

All you have to do is send an email to keraandscott@wbwb.com from every email address you use. Only one vote per email will be allowed. Email from every address you use and ask all your friends and family to do so as well. Seriously, every vote matters!!!

I would totally appreciate it if you guys could help them out by sending an email.

Thank you so much if you help these kids out.

For those of you who are interested, PBS is showing the documentary 'King Corn'. It's something Dave and I have wanted to see for a while (yes, it's on our Netflix list), but our local PBS station is showing it tonight. It didn't come up on our TV guide under that name, so you might have to search for it.

Let me start out by saying that we usually don't ever spend THIS MUCH on dinner. We only went here because Dave wanted it as his Christmas present and this was all that he got from me (I covered half of the cost of dinner, and the other half came out of 'our' account').

Dinner started at 6pm and we had to dress up! We asked if we could bring our camera because, of course, we had to blog about it. We actually totally missed the restaurant - it's a very nondescript building with only a very small sign outside. Walking up to the very large and plain door, we opened them and walked into a very futuristic-looking hallway. We walked down the hallway and were sort of confused because there didn't seem to be a door at all. Then we saw these large metal doors, but they had no handles of any sort. We stepped towards them and they were automatic doors and opened up.

We were immediately greeted, our coats were taken, and we were lead to our seats. The confirmed that we had the tour (24 courses) and asked if we wanted the wine with it, as well. We were spending $195 per person for dinner and they told us that the cost of the wine would be 3/4 of the price of the food (I like how they didn't mention an actual price). We turned it down because of the cost, but next time I think we might save up a bit more and do that as well.

We also had about 8 different servers! We had a few regulars who would bring us the dishes and silverwea, clear the plates, pour more water, etc, but then there were a few special who brought out certain dishes and explained them to us.

( Lots and lots of pictures )

The neat thing was that the tables around us had come in either before or after us - so nobody was on the exact same time table. It was very hard to not watch the plates being delivered and know that we'd be getting them shortly. On the other hand, it was fun to watch the people behind us in dinner - by the time we were at the 20th course we were saying things like, "Oh yeah! Remember that one? It was good!"

For those of you especially who are doing '50 books in the year' this website is really cool. It keeps a list of your books, you can review them, add friends, etc. It's like MySpace, but for nerds.

Checkout my reading list on GoodReads - where you can see what your friends are reading.

Here is the beginning of my list. I obviously don't have the full 101 listed here, but I'm working on it. I'm open to suggestions - if you have a list, please post a link to it! Some are ones that won't be accomplished until later in the 1001 days (buying a house, for example), but I think all of them are realistic goals.


101 things in 1001 days

1. Go snowboarding
2. Travel to another country Went to Italy in March of 2008
3. Travel to NYC
4. Travel west in the USA
5. Go skinny dipping
6. Go camping
7. Go rafting
8. Blog on peacelovefood.com at least once a week
9. Take the el to work every day for a month
10. Take an accounting class
11. Buy a home
12. Have and use a rain barrel
13. Have a compost pile
14. Volunteer at the library once a week
15. Eat a healthy vegetarian meal once a month
16. Make a knitting needle holder
17. Go ice skating
18. Watch yarn being made from shearing to finished product
19. See cheese being made
20. Learn how to shoot a gun (from a class or from my dad)
21. Enter a cooking competition
22. Make a list of family birthdays (possibly with a card organizer)
23. Read 50 books in a calendar year Finished 50 books in October of 2008!
24. Ride a train (Amtrak or Metra, not the el)
25. Keep a garden
26. Buy a piece of art
27. Go through a car wash by myself
28. Join a gym
29. Get my sewing machine working or get a new one Bought a sewing machine from a friend of the family.
30. Adopt a dog
31. Throw a New Year’s party at home
32. Eat for one week without HFCS
33. Eat gluten-free for one week
34. Get a piercing/use my giftcard for the Alley Got my conch pierced in May of 2008.
35. Teach someone how to knit
36. Spend entire tax return on a vacation 2008 refund went to pay for trip to Nashville
37. Floss my teeth everyday for a month
38. Get a king size bed
39. Donate blood Dave and I both gave blood on October 22, 2008.
40. Vote in a presidential election
41. Start doing Yelp reviews of the places that we eat in the city Signed up for Yelp already and wrote one review
42. Get my eyebrows waxed
43. Take a vitamin everyday for a month
44. Try ‘raw milk’
45. Update my resume
46. Take a yoga class
47. Shred all old bills and junk mail All caught up as of April 2008
48. Tag and title each of my LJ entries
49. Buy no new beauty products in 2008 (soap, shampoo, body wash, lotion, scrubs) - I have enough and I have to use them!
50. Buy no more new yarn in 2008, unless I have a specific pattern in mind that I will use it for. No more just buying pretty yarns.
51. Finish FIVE new knitting projects. Project 1: Jaywalker socks, finished March 2008. Project 2: hat for David
52. Use all 50 condoms we bought by the end of 2008.
53. Take a class at The Chopping Block.
54. Take a sewing class. Took a class at The Needle Shop on April 28, 2008.
55. Eat a Sonic. Did this while in Nashville in May of 2008.
56. See the Mississippi River in person.
57. Eat at a Cracker Barrel.
58. Use my sewing machine to make something.
59. Eat an artichoke.

This is reposted from May, but there is another $10 sale going on right now! Remember, if you're in the city, you can go pick yours up and avoid the shipping charges.

The coolest T-shirt site ever, Threadless is currently having a $10 sale. All of their short-sleeved shirts are only $10, which is a great deal! Long sleeves and hoodies are more expensive, of course.

Clink the link and take a look around. If you see something you like, and buy it after clicking my link, I'll get points for it. But their shirts are totally cool and very long-lasting. I wear them just about everyday and they have held up really well.

EDIT: Thanks to whoever bought! Feel free to share which shirts you got. I'm having a hard time picking, I want so many!

I'm totally stealing a QuestionClub question to see what my friends have to say. I love this question!

if you could have your own personal 2 day music festival with one stage(so you don't have to choose!) and 10 bands, what bands would you pick and in what order?


My answers were:

Day 1:
Liz Phair
Brand New
Bowling for Soup
Ben Harper
Dispatch

Day 2:
Lucky Boys Confusion
Dashboard Confessional
John Meyer
Jason Mraz
Counting Crows

We're home and the books are with us.

We ordered Chicago's Pizza to get us through the night (they deliver until 5AM!).

I probably won't be back online until I'm done.

I'M SO EXCITED!

I've added quite a few new people in the past week or two.

It's time to play catch-up. Both new and old friends, are there any questions you feel like you should know the answers to, but don't? Anything you want to get out of the way and ask?

Comments will be screened, so you don't have to feel embarrassed if you think you're going to ask a 'dumb question'.

Ask away!