Saturday, February 23, 2013

Twenty Five Years of Book Club: The Numbers


I love Book Club. Twenty five years ago, a friend of mine came up with this great idea to start a book club. That was before they were as popular as they are today. What a wonderful idea it was! Today we celebrated with a High Tea at the Biltmore. Nine of us were able to attend. We have about 12 members, although we rarely have all 12 at a meeting.  For our 10th anniversary, we had a dinner party. For our 20th anniversary, we had t shirts made with all the books we had read printed on them.

We have done some record keeping over the years. We have a list in which we keep track of all the books we have read. We also have a journal or "the book", in which we track attendance and write who chose the book and what we thought about it.  I have mined our list for some fun facts:

310  number of Books Read
19 Authors that we have read more than once


                                     The Oldest published book we have read. Written in 1513.

We have not read any books by authors whose last name start with x, y, or z.
We have read 4 plays, 51 nonfiction books and have done poetry 4 times.



This book has the longest title of any book we have read.

                                       This book has the shortest title of any book we have read.

And this is the current book we are reading:




Tuesday, February 19, 2013

A Day at The Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show

This is the second time I have spent a day at the Arabian Horse Show in Scottsdale. It is a national show and draws the most beautiful horses I have ever seen. There are competitions of all different kinds, western pleasure, english pleasure, native costume, driving, etc. My two favorites are English pleasure and liberty. In liberty, they bring a horse in and let them completely loose for 2 minutes. They are to run around the ring, show spirit, and watch their handler. It's pretty awesome. Then their handler has to be able to catch them within two minutes. I have a video clip, but I am not sure I am going to be able to get it to load.
The second class I really enjoy was English Pleasure. When the horse do the trot, they have a very fast, high stepping syncopated gait, that is amazing to watch.
I enjoy the halter class and just admiring how beautiful they all are. Here are a ton of photos for your viewing pleasure.







































They have a lot of horse related displays. This is a semi/RV. It was completley loaded with granite floors, counter tops, hard wood. It was amazing and bigger than my entire condo.