Yesterday one of my students asked me if I was pregnant. It's time to start running again.

Because I feel that all too often I focus on the negative, complaining and whining when the world doesn't go my way or something annoys me, today I'm going to list all the things that made January 20, 2009 awesome:

1. I got to watch Barack Obama's inauguration at work, and I have to admit I got a little misty-eyed.
2. I was wearing the magic Jacob pants that make my normally flat behind look amazing.
3. It was not -23 with a -31 windchill.
   
4. I won a free massage in a wellness draw at work. I'm super excited -- I've always wanted a massage, but also always felt guilty about paying for such a splurge.
5. I finally found a student to work Tuesday nights, leaving me free for. . .
6. My French course at Universite Ste Anne, of which I had the first session this evening. Although I am definitely towards the bottom of the class, I was pleased to discover that I can actually manage Intermediate Conversation (within reason). It feels good to stretch my brain cells.
   
7. When I got home from class, starving and tired, I discovered that someone sweet had made chicken and mushroom crepes for dinner. I absolutely adore crepes (one day in Quebec I ate crepes with different fillings for every meal), and I felt deliciously spoiled.
8. I am downloading last night's episode of How I Met Your Mother and will be able to watch it in about fifteen minutes.

I think I should try making lists like this more often.

Because I don't have the mental energy to come up with something more creative to post... I found this on Aine O'Hare's Facebook page, and I'm pretty sure my responses are disgraceful for someone with an MA in English. I also want to know who says these are the 100 greatest novels because I see some pretty big gaps. (In my humble opinion, of course.)

This is a list of the 100 Greatest Novels Of All Time.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal (or Facebook), including these instructions.
2) Bold all the books you've read.
3) Pat yourself on the back for your pretention and perspicacity.

1. “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger
3. “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck
4. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee (this is one of my favourite books EVER)
5. “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker
6. “Ulysses,” James Joyce
7. “Beloved,” Toni Morrison
8. “The Lord of the Flies,” William Golding (Gr. 10 English; I despise this book)
9. “1984,” George Orwell
10. “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner
11. “Lolita,” Vladmir Nabokov
12. “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck
13. “Charlotte’s Web,” E.B. White
14. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce
15. “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller
16. “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley
17. “Animal Farm,” George Orwell
18. “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway
19. “As I Lay Dying,” William Faulkner
20. “A Farewell to Arms,” Ernest Hemingway
21. “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad
22. “Winnie-the-Pooh,” A.A. Milne (only gets better as I get older)
23. “Their Eyes are Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston
24. “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison
25. “Song of Solomon,” Toni Morrison
26. “Gone with the Wind,” Margaret Mitchell
27. “Native Son,” Richard Wright
28. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey
29. “Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut
30. “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Ernest Hemingway
31. “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac
32. “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway
33. “The Call of the Wild,” Jack London
34. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf
35. “Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James
36. “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” James Baldwin
37. “The World According to Garp,” John Irving
38. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren
39. “A Room with a View,” E.M. Forster
40. “The Lord of the Rings,” J.R.R. Tolkien
41. “Schindler’s List,” Thomas Keneally
42. “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton
43. “The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand
44. “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce
45. “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair
46. “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf
47. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Frank L. Baum
48. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D.H. Lawrence
49. “A Clockwork Orange,” Anthony Burgess
50. “The Awakening,” Kate Chopin
51. “My Antonia,” Willa Cather
52. “Howard’s End,” E.M. Forster
53. “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote
54. “Franny and Zooey,” J.D. Salinger
55. “Satanic Verses,” Salman Rushdie
56. “Jazz,” Toni Morrison
57. “Sophie’s Choice,” William Styron
58. “Absalom, Absalom!” William Faulkner
59. “Passage to India,” E.M. Forster
60. “Ethan Frome,” Edith Wharton
61. “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
62. “Tender is the Night,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. “Orlando,” Virginia Woolf
64. “Sons and Lovers,” D.H. Lawrence
65. “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Thomas Wolfe
66. “Cat’s Cradle,” Kurt Vonnegut
67. “A Separate Peace,” John Knowles
68. “Light in August,” William Faulkner
69. “The Wings of the Dove,” Henry James
70. “Things Fall Apart,” Chinua Achebe
71. “Rebecca,” Daphne du Maurier
72. “A Hithchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams
73. “Naked Lunch,” William S. Burroughs
74. “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh (thank Liam for that one)
75. “Women in Love,” D.H. Lawrence
76. “Look Homeward, Angel,” Thomas Wolfe
77. “In Our Time,” Ernest Hemingway
78. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias,” Gertrude Stein
79. “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett
80. “The Naked and the Dead,” Norman Mailer
81. “The Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys
82. “White Noise,” Don DeLillo
83. “O Pioneers!” Willa Cather
84. “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller
85. “The War of the Worlds,” HG Wells
86. “Lord Jim,” Joseph Conrad
87. “The Bostonians,” James Henry
88. “An American Tragedy,” Theodore Dreiser
89. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Willa Cather
90. “The Wind in the Willows,” Kenneth Grahame
91. “This Side of Paradise,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand
93. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” John Fowles
94. “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis
95. “Kim,” Rudyard Kipling
96. “The Beautiful and the Damned,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. “Rabbit, Run,” John Updike
98. “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” EM Forster
99. “Main Street,” Sinclair Lewis
100. “Midnight’s Children,” Salman Rushdie

Yeah, 19 out of 100 isn't great. The problem is, most of these aren't even books I really want to read. I might have to make my own list.

Sometimes I am extremely gullible. In case you needed proof, here is a recent conversation I had at a Shoppers Drugmart after I kept setting the alarms off every time I tried to go out door:

Roseanne: I'm really sorry; I promise I haven't stolen anything.

Cashier Guy: No problem. We'll just have to give you a quick blood test. [Reaches for his cash drawer.]

Roseanne: [In a very high-pitched voice] A blood test?!

Liam: [Whispering] I think he's joking.

Last October Dee and I stood on the sidewalk across from the CBC building in Halifax and cheered on our friend Emily in the CIBC Run for the Cure. I had started running the week before, and wasn't even able to huff and puff my way past jogging for about ten minutes in two minute intervals, but as everyone waved and yelled encouraging words, I decided that next year I would be one of the runners decked out in pink. I wanted a number to pin on the front of my T-shirt, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could run 5K without dying. And of course, raising money for cancer research would be great too.

Yesterday, after a year in which I wimped out of running during the winter because it was too cold and icy outside and struggled to get out of the house on days when I just wanted to curl up on the couch, I did it. It was a crisp, sunny morning. I was exhausted because I had gone to a birthday celebration the night before and accidentally gotten quite tipsy. Some people pushed strollers; some people ran with their dogs. There were three different bands playing along the route, and everyone was excited to be there. Annie and Liam finished before me, but I did it! As a member of the Librarians Run for the Cure team, I ran 5K. And my number was 7660.

Next up: the Salvation Army's Santa Shuffle in December. I hear people run wearing Santa hats and jingle bells…

Oh. My. Gosh. Kahlua just showed up at our back door at home. I can't believe it! I'm so happy!

She's been gone almost a month, and my parents have no idea where she was. She was very hungry and thirsty and a little skinny, but still in one piece.

Now there are three cats at my house, and I'm even more anxious to get back to PEI than I was before. SO HAPPY!!!!!

Having resigned ourselves to the fact that Kahlua is not coming home again, my family has adopted a new kitten. Three-month old Friday arrived yesterday. She's all black with curly whiskers and a very loud purr.

She is also a master of concealment. She'd only been home for half an hour when she disappeared for the entire afternoon, leaving me frantically wondering if she'd been able to slip outside and how I was going to explain to my mother that I had lost her new kitten. She turned up at supper time, but when we left her alone for ten minutes to eat dinner she disappeared again!

We thought she'd reappear when she got hungry, but she still hadn't come out by the time everyone was going to bed. Then we thought if the house was quiet for the night she might come out when we were sleeping. Morning came, and still no Friday. I got home from my run this morning to find my mother in the living room with one hand to her ear: she thought she could hear the kitten in the chimney.

Sure enough, when I got a flashlight and looked inside, there, behind the damper, was a tiny little black kitten gazing at me with glowing eyes. She was very eager to be petted, but she was stuck and couldn't get back down again. I ended up inside the fireplace for an hour or so, trying to coax her out. Unfortunately, this didn't work, so next I tried hammering the damper screw, trying to make the hole bigger so Friday could jump down. Still no luck. (And I was extremely dirty. I have a whole new respect for Bert the Chimney Sweep from Mary Poppins.)

We didn't want to leave her there because she still has stitches in her belly, she hadn't eaten in over 24 hours and she had a cough from all the soot in the chimney. Thankfully, when my brother came home he was able to get her out. She was filthy and shaking, but she purred and I think she was happy to leave her ashy hiding place.

Currently she's curled up in the bookcase. She did a bit of grooming and now she's taking a little nap. After all, it's been an eventful day and a half.

And that is how I spent the only sunny day of my vacation wedged inside a chimney.