Afternoons of Reverie

The B&N Classics Challenge

Friday, July 22, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Books

I LOVE reading classical literature. There is something so inspiring in reading the great works. One of my goals is to read through all the Barnes & Noble Classics. And there's quite a few of them.

So far I've gotten this far in my B&N Classics quest. I found this list on List of Bests and I decided posting them here would be a great visual way to record my progress

If it's bolded, I've read it. If there's a link on a title, you can read what I thought about it. A lot of these were read before my discovery of blogging, so they won't have a post, but who knows? Maybe I'll re-read them and post about them in the future.

1.	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2.	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
3.	The Aeneid by Vergil
4.	Aesop's Fables by Aesop
5.	The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
6.	Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
7.	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
8.	The Ambassadors by Henry James
9.	Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
10.	The Arabian Nights
11.	The Art of War by Sun Tzu
12.	The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Other Writings by James Weldon Johnson
13.	The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction by Kate Chopin
14.	Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
15.	Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
16.	The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17.	Beowulf
18.	Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
19.	Bleak House by Charles Dickens
20.	The Bostonians by Henry James
21.	The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
22.	Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch
23.	The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London
24.	Candide by Voltaire
25.	The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
26.	A Christmas Carol, The Chimes & The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens
27.	The Collected Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
28.	The Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant
29.	The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
30.	Common Sense and Other Writings by Thomas Paine
31.	The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
32.	The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
33.	The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 2 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
34.	Confessions by Saint Augustine of Hippo
35.	A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark J. Twain
36.	The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
37.	The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett
38.	Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
39.	Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
40.	Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James
41.	Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
42.	David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
43.	Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
44.	The Death of Ivan Ilych & Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
45.	The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper
46.	Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
47.	Dracula by Bram Stoker
48.	Emma by Jane Austen
49.	The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit
50.	Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson
51.	Essential Dialogues of Plato
52.	The Essential Tales And Poems of Edgar Allen Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
53.	Ethan Frome & Selected Stories by Edith Wharton
54.	Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
55.	Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
56.	Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
57.	The Federalist by Hamilton, Madison, Jay
58.	Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights by Jefferson, et al.
59.	The Four Feathers by A. E. W. Mason
60.	Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
61.	Germinal by Emile Zola
62.	The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
63.	Great American Short Stories : From Hawthorne to Hemingway
64.	The Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives
65.	Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
66.	Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm
67.	Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
68.	Hard Times by Charles Dickens
69.	Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction by Joseph Conrad
70.	The Histories by Herodotus
71.	The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
72.	The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
73.	The House of the Dead and Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky
74.	The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
75.	Howards End by E.M. Forster
76.	The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
77.	The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
78.	The Iliad by Homer
79.	The Importance of Being Earnest and Four Other Plays by Oscar Wilde
80.	Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
81.	The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
82.	The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
83.	Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
84.	Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
85.	Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
86.	Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
87.	The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
88.	The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
89.	Kim by Rudyard Kipling
90.	King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
91.	Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
92.	The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
93.	Leaves of Grass: First and "Death-Bed" Editions by Walt Whitman
94.	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Writings by Washington Irving
95.	Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Peirre Choderlos de Laclos
96.	Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
97.	The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell
98.	Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
99.	Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
100.	Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac
101.	Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
102.	Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York by Stephen Crane
103.	The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
104.	Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
105.	Man and Superman and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw
106.	The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
107.	Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
108.	The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
109.	The Metamorphoses by Ovid
110.	Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
111.	Middlemarch by George Eliot
112.	Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
113.	Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
114.	The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
115.	My Antonia by Willa Cather
116.	My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
117.	Nana by Emile Zola
118.	Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
119.	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
120.	Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
121.	Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
122.	Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
123.	Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
124.	Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
125.	O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
126.	The Odyssey by Homer
127.	Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
128.	Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
129.	The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
130.	Paradise Lost by John Milton
131.	The Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
132.	Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
133.	Persuasion by Jane Austen
134.	Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
135.	The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
136.	The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
137.	The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
138.	Poetics and Rhetoric by Aristotle
139.	The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
140.	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners by James Joyce
141.	The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
142.	Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
143.	The Prince and Other Writings by Niccolo Machiavelli
144.	The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
145.	Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain
146.	The Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
147.	Pygmalion and Three Other Plays by George Bernard Shaw
148.	The Red and the Black by Stendhal
149.	The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Short Fiction by Stephen Crane
150.	Republic by Plato
151.	The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
152.	The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
153.	A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
154.	Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
155.	Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
156.	Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
157.	The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
158.	The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
159.	The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
160.	The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
161.	Selected Stories of O. Henry by O. Henry
162.	Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
163.	Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
164.	Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
165.	Silas Marner and Two Short Stories by George Eliot
166.	Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
167.	Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen by Henrik Ibsen
168.	Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
169.	The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
170.	The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
171.	Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
172.	A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
173.	Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
174.	Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
175.	Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
176.	This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
177.	Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
178.	The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
179.	Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
180.	Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
181.	The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
182.	Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
183.	Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson III
184.	The Turn of the Screw, the Aspern Papers and Two Stories by Henry James
185.	Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
186.	Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea by Richard Henry Dana
187.	Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
188.	Utopia by Sir Thomas More
189.	Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
190.	The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James
191.	Villette by Charlotte Bronte
192.	The Virginian by Owen Wister
193.	The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
194.	Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
195.	War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
196.	The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
197.	Ward No. 6 and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov
198.	The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
199.	The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
200.	The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
201.	The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
202.	Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
203.	Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
204.	The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
205.	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
206.	Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Sea Otters, Stingrays, Fox Kits. & A Penguin Update!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Animals , Aquariums , Veterinary Medicine

To Snape

Friday, July 15, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Movies

I just returned from watching the last Harry Potter Film - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II. It's strange to watch as an era of your life ends. Like so many others, I grew up with these books. I felt I was a part of them. I grew up alongside Ron, Harry, and Hermione feeling their struggles, sorrowing in their tragedies, and rejoicing in their triumphs as they encountered them. And Professor Dumbledore seemed as much my tutor as he was theirs.

To say that I loved those three is hardly worth mentioning. Who doesn't? But there is another character who I think shines above them all in his complexity and ability to teach. And that would be Severus Snape. Of all of JK Rowling's characters, there is not another so intricate. The books and the films give us a beautiful sense of this complexity. At times we see the dreaded potions master and hate him and at others we stand in awe at the bravery of a man who defied Voldemort at every turn. Here we have a man who lived surrounded by hate - a man who hated himself for his own wrongdoings and carried himself in a shadow that only revealed the parts of him so easily hated by others - but who shone brilliantly internally.

But that really is the lesson of these books. No matter who we are, where we come from, how we are perceived, or how we are raised it is our choices that define us. So to give tribute to Snape and to these books I find it best to conclude with some of the words that have given life to one of the most wonderful stories of our time that have helped to raise me throughout my childhood.

"Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known. He and Voldemort and Snape, the abandoned boys, had all found home here."

"Do not pity the dead, Harry, pity the living. Above all pity those who live without love. By returning you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed and fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say goodbye for the present." -Albus Dumbledore

"The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."

Aquarium After Dark

Sunday, June 12, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Aquariums

Why Are Fish So Smart? Because They Live In Schools!!!

Saturday, June 11, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Animals , Aquariums , Veterinary Medicine

Crazy! Surgeries on FISH. That’s right – FISH. It don’t get much crazier than that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this internship, it’s that you never stop learning. There’s always some new technique and some new species you’ve never worked with. I love that about Veterinary Medicine and I can’t wait to get into it.

So here’s the awesome things I’ve been working with recently! We’ve been treating one of the aquarium’s Pacific Creole Fish for quite some time now. A recurring infection has led to repeated incidents where gas accumulate behind the fish’s eye and it sort of pops out. Not out out, but sticking out there a little more than normal. So we removed it.

Pacific Creole Fish

Fish anesthesia is accomplished by dissolving the anesthetic agent (MS-222) in water, placing the fish in it and waiting for it to go under. The tricky part is keeping it breathing while you do the procedure. Surgery has to take place out of the water because the loss of body fluids would kill the fish if it were submerged. A pump brings water from the bucket the fish was put under in through a tube into its mouth where it flows over the gills keeping the fish asleep and breathing.

The Creole Fish Again!

Once the Creole Fish’s eye was out, Dr. Adams sealed the associated blood vessels with his hemostat and placed a thick skin protectant cream in the socket. We examined the eye and it turns out the poor thing definitely couldn’t see out of it anyway. Tissues were loose all over the place in there. So he’s doing much better now. We’ve got him on antibiotics and he’s healing nicely.

Ballonfish

Fishie number two is the Ballonfish! These things are sweet. Dr. Adams was notified of a growth under the fish’s mouth last week so we went to check it out. As we were examining, the little guy went from this:

Happy

To this!

Mad

I had never seen one blow up before. It’s so cool! They suck a lot of water into their stomach and slowly fill up (it takes like 10 seconds when they decide to do it). Lance told me how when he worked at a pet shop back in the day they would feed them guppies and then harass them till they puffed up. Then you could hold them up to the light and see the guppies swimming around in the porcupine fish bowls!

Anyway…this week we removed that mass. Same anesthetic procedure as above, only this time we had to use more invasive surgery tools because the mass clearly went into the tissue below. Lance removed it and then sutured it up. Apparently because most fish skin is so thin, they don’t respond to sutures well and usually end up tearing them out just by moving. But Balloonfish are different. Their skin is thicker and they do quite well. We gave him some antibiotics and now he’s swimming around doing just great.

So now here comes the biggie. We examined a Striped Sea Bass. Now these things are big. Like rrrrreal big. I don’t know who this dude is, but I found this picture because I just want you to understand what I mean when I say rrrrreal big.

Striped Sea Bass & Some Really Happy Guy

For a couple weeks he’s been hiding at the top of Blue Cavern (the Aquarium of the Pacific’s three story tank!) with clear respiratory distress. So the aquarists pulled him out and we sedated him (we used a whole lot of triple 2!). He’s got little bites all over his body cause the other fish were picking on him. We looked at the gills and there were little nodules on them. We took a sample and sent it in, but when we looked at it, it just looked like mucus. His head is really big. Bigger than normal. And because of that it seems that his operculum (the bony covering that protects the gills) is just too big. So we’re waiting for results or for him to grow into his head. Either way he’s isolated from the bullies that were a quarter his size and getting all the food he can eat, so things are looking up for him.

Dr. Adams has taken me through several exit exams as well. When new fish arrive they are put on quarantine and go through a series of different treatments to relieve them of any ailments they may have brought with them and to protect the other fish they will be living with. We do skin scrapes and gill biopsies and look at them under the microscope to look for any nasty parasites that might have made it through the treatments. But so far everything has passed wonderfully.

Blue-Green Chromis

Sculpin


Blacksmith Chromis

And we’ve done a bunch of treatments on various species of fish so I’ve included pictures for you cause everybody loves pictures!

I LOVE SEA LIONS!!!

Tuesday, June 07, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Animals , Aquariums , Veterinary Medicine

Shark Bait - Hoo Ha Ha!

Tuesday, May 31, 2011 Mikentire 0 Comments Category : Animals , Aquariums , Veterinary Medicine

Today Dr. Adams was still out of town having an awesome time camping. So it was just me and Samantha running the joint. We worked on the penguin, and did some of our usual clean up jobs. But then she took me through a punch of the parts of the aquarium that aren’t in my usual job description. And don’t you forget – the links are educational!

We started by checking out the life support systems on each tank. She went over the protein skimmers, the sand filters, bio towers, and all the intricacies of the plumbing and equipment. I want it - all of it. Amazing.

Shiner Surfperch

We also rescued a Shiner Surfperch who was having difficulty giving birth. We anesthetized her and pulled out a couple of her babies (she was trying to have three at the same time and it didn’t look so nice). They are one of the few viviparous salt water fish, meaning that they give birth to live young.

But my favorite part of the day was helping with the shark feeding at Shark Lagoon. Several times a day the Aquarium of the Pacific husbandry staff put on a feeding show. And today I got to be part of it. The sharks are trained to come to one of three feeding stations around their exhibit. Sam & I were at one station where I was in charge of the Nurse Shark and the Zebra Shark and Samantha was in charge of the Reticulate Whipray.

Nurse Shark

The Nurse Shark Keith was kind of a jerk and kept trying to steal the food from the ray and from Fern – the only of our Zebra Sharks living in Shark Lagoon. But I still like him. Nurse sharks can get pretty big and they suck their food up like rays do. Every time Keith ate though, it sounded like a small implosion had taken place!

Juvenile Zebra Shark

Adult Zebra Shark

The Zebra Shark also sucks its food up. They have long beautiful tails that take up half their body length. And even though they are spotted they still are called Zebra Sharks because they are striped as juveniles but eventually spots replace their stripes.

Reticulate Whipray

The Reticulate Whipray is one of the largest fish we have. They can weigh over 250 lbs. Ours didn’t seem to enjoy the squid she was being fed, but still ate everything else that was offered.

Now while I didn’t get to feed all the sharks since I couldn’t be in three places at once, I still feel that they all deserve an honorable mention. Especially because Shark Lagoon is just freaking awesome. So here it goes!

If you spend some time around the touch pool you can pet a few small sharks and rays. It’s a pretty fun experience!

Epaulette Shark

The Epaulette Shark is one of several sharks classified as Bamboo Sharks. That big spot on their side looks like an eye and makes predators think they are bigger than they are so they get left alone.

Bat Ray

My favorite of the rays in the touch pool are the Bat Rays. They just look cool!

Swell Shark

Bonnethead Shark

Outside of Shark Lagoon, you can check out the Swell Sharks in the Southern California Gallery or the Bonnethead Sharks in the hugemongous tank in the Tropical Pacific Gallery. I think they’re both beautiful and wanted to show them to you even though I didn’t get to work with them today.

There's a cool egg tank with lots of Baby Swell Sharks and Baby Swell Sharks to be and come on, who doesn't like Hammerheads?!

So now back to the big tank in Shark Lagoon. We have a couple Whitetip Reef Sharks. They tend to aggregate in large schools and can get pretty excited when there’s a lot of food to be had (if you’re like me you’ve seen them on Animal Planet).

Whitetip Reef Shark

I think the most beautiful sharks in the tank are the Blacktip Reef Sharks though. They swim so gracefully and are easily the most active of the fish in that tank. These guys are healthy – so much so one of the females is on a diet - and they have been mating recently.

Blacktip Reef Shark

My second favorite shark in that tank is the Sandbar Shark. It’s beautiful too. They are a highly migratory species and can live more than 30 years.

Sandbar Shark

Clearly the scariest looking and definitely the meanest fish in the tank is the Sand Tiger Shark. They swim slow with their scary teeth out, but they mean business. The one we have now has been known to nip at fins (the poor Sawfish got bit yesterday) and one we had a while ago actually almost severed the Sawfish’s Rostrum (again, poor guy) but Dr. Adams saved it because he is a genius.

Sand Tiger Shark - Scary Right?!

The Freshwater Sawfish is my favorite of the rays. It’s crazy looking and obviously very tough. Their long rostrum is covered in sharpened dentacles that form the “teeth” of its “saw”. The Sawfish uses it to spear and stun its prey or to stir up prey in the substrate. And don't you worry - the "Freshwater Sawfish" is able to live in salt, brackish, and fresh water.

Freshwater Sawfish

So sharks are pretty cool. And the Aquarium of the Pacific has some sweet ones. Dr. Adams loves sharks and has done a lot of research into their reproduction and has had success with the smaller Bamboo Sharks and is looking forward to perfecting his techniques on the larger species.

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The B&N Classics Challenge

Sea Otters, Stingrays, Fox Kits. & A Penguin Update!

To Snape

Aquarium After Dark

Why Are Fish So Smart? Because They Live In Schools!!!

I LOVE SEA LIONS!!!

Shark Bait - Hoo Ha Ha!

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