Weekly Recap #69: Week of 9/2-9/8

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

I don’t really have much of anything to share this week.  It was just a normal week of work, homework, soccer, repeat.  We didn’t get off to the best start on a soccer season, suffering a 10-0 loss on our first game.  I don’t even really know what happened.  Our team looked great for about half a quarter and then it was like they collectively forgot how to play soccer.  It was disappointing for my son, but also for my husband since he’s the coach.  We’re supposed to have practice today so that we can regroup and come up with some different strategies going into game 2, but as per usual, it’s pouring rain so it will probably be canceled.

And don’t even get me started on Tropical Storm Florence.  She was originally projected to turn and go back out to sea, but now looks like she’s going to plow into the East Coast as a Category 4 hurricane.  The governor has already declared a state of emergency here in Virginia, so we’re starting to make our storm preps now since we have to take care of our house and my in-law’s house.  Because of the excessive rain we’ve had all summer long, storms like this do us in because they take down so many root-soaked big trees and bring the power lines down with them.  If you don’t see me around the blogosphere for a few days toward the end of the week, blame Florence, lol.

Speaking of the blog, I went a little overboard with acquiring books this week but I decided I wanted to start picking out books for the HoHoHo Readathon.  I found three Christmas themed books that sounded really good and then I picked up three other titles that I’ve been wanting to read for a while now.  If this hurricane hits and takes our power with it, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of reading time!

Oh well, I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   
       
 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
     
      
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

   
   
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #68: Week of 8/26-9/1

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

So, It’s the last holiday weekend of the summer. I can’t believe it’s here already but after our rainy and gross weather the past 3 months, I can honestly say I’m more than ready for autumn.  The weather was so nasty all summer that I only got to sit out on my deck and read once, which I find just depressing.  It would be nice to get into a cool, dry weather pattern for a while so that I can at least do that for the next couple of months before it gets too cold.

School is in full swing now and I find myself more grateful than ever for the existence of Google.  My son is taking Pre-Algebra this year and comes home everyday with homework that he doesn’t quite seem to understand.  I can’t tell if he’s in over his head, if he’s just not listening in class, or if he just doesn’t like the teaching style of his teacher.  Apparently she uses a lot of videos to teach math.  Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I’m having to re-teach myself Pre Algebra so that I can then re-teach my son each day’s lesson and make sure he really understands everything.  I’ve used the internet to refresh my memory about absolute values, rational and irrational numbers, and adding, subtracting and multiplying negative numbers so thank you, Google! LOL!

Not too much else has gone on this week.  I did finally make it to the theater to see Christopher Robin, which I thought was super cute, and I also watched Ready Player One, which was fantastic!  I have no idea what we’re going to be doing for the rest of this long weekend.  There, of course, is rain in the forecast yet again, and it rained yesterday.  Hopefully Mother Nature will give us a break so that we can get outside and do something fun.  If not, I guess it will be more movies and lots of reading.

Oh well, I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   
       
 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
     
   
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

   
  
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #67: Week of 8/19 – 8/25

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

When I sit down to write these posts, I swear all I think about is that I must be the most boring person on the entire planet.  Nothing all that interesting ever seems to happen to me, lol.  One pretty cool thing actually did happen this week though.  After I joined Instagram a couple of weeks ago, I started following some of my favorite authors, including Becky Albertalli.  She’s doing a Sunday political feature on her account every week where she spotlights a U.S. senator who is up for reelection in November.  The week I noticed her feature, she actually happened to be focusing on Tim Kaine, the senator from my state who is up for reelection this year.  I commented that I thought he was wonderful and definitely planned to cast my vote for him again in November, and the next thing I knew I had won a signed book of my choice from Becky!  I love all of her books and already owned all of them except for Leah on the Offbeat so I chose that one.  It came yesterday, signed by Becky, and filled with the cutest stickers from all of her other books too.  I only have one other signed book in my collection so this really made my week!

 

 

Aside from that bit of excitement, it was pretty much business as usual for me with school, homework, soccer practice, etc.  We are fully back into the grind now.  We did take a break last weekend and went to see Ant Man and the Wasp, which is hilarious by the way – I highly recommend it!  But this weekend has had gorgeous weather so we’ve been outside all weekend working on those DIY projects that got rained out almost every weekend of the summer.  Shutters are finally done and now we’re doing a brick veneer on the foundation of our house.  Our house is white and the builders had painted the foundation white as well, which just looks so plain.  It was fine before because we had these huge boxwoods that covered it up, but the boxwoods got so overgrown and unmanageable that we yanked them up this summer and plan to re-landscape those front beds.  In the meantime though, we noticed how naked the front of the house looked so thus, the new red brick veneer.  We’ve done about halfway across the front so far this weekend and hope to finish soon, but it already looks like a completely different house, so yay!

Oh well, I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   
       
 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
     
    
 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #66: Week of 8/12 – 8/18

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

This week was all about my son’s first week of middle school.  I’m happy to report that he’s off to a great start, no drama at all aside from trying to get his sleep pattern back on track for those early morning wakeups.  He’s not quite there yet, but hopefully another week and he’ll be back into the swing of things.

Although he didn’t have any drama, I sure did!  My desktop computer decided that this week would a great time to randomly kick the bucket.  It got stuck in some weird ‘Automatic Repair’ loop and I couldn’t get it to boot up at all.  I took it to Geek Squad and several days later, they were able to fix it.  And by fix it, I mean wipe the hard drive and reinstall the entire operating system.  Thankfully they were able to backup all of my files, but I lost all of my software and spent most of the week trying to find where I had stored all of that so I could get everything reinstalled.  One thing I learned throughout this experience is that my old eyes and fat fingers are very dependent on a large keyboard and a huge monitor.  I was glad that I had a laptop I could switch over to while waiting for my desktop to be fixed so that I didn’t fall too behind on all of my blogging, etc., but OMG, it took me so much longer to do everything!  I felt like I had never used a computer before, lol.

Aside from my computer woes, not too much else happened.  My son and I are going to see Ant Man and the Wasp today so hopefully that will be a fun time.  🙂

Oh well, I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

     
       
 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
     
     
 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

  
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #65: Week of 8/5 – 8/11

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

I don’t have much to report here. I was busy but it was mainly with back-to-school preparations — shopping for supplies and new clothes, getting my kid a haircut so he doesn’t look like a wild man on the first day of school, going to the school to meet teachers and learn how to use lockers, etc.  We also got our new soccer roster midweek so I feel like I’ve spent days on the phone calling parents with beginning-of-season info.  I had two days off at the end of the week and they’re both a blur.

It was busy but I still managed to get a ton of reading done, mainly because I started thinking about my son going to middle school and got too anxious to sleep.  Even with all of the extra books I added in, last night I started reading the final book on my Summer TBR Wipeout Challenge reading list. I don’t know if I’ll finish it before the challenge is over since it’s over 500 pages, but I’m thrilled to have read so many books this summer.

I’m also way behind on reviews and on blog visits again.  The time just got away from me with everything else that was going on this week.  We’re finally ready for school to start tomorrow though so I hope to work on getting caught up today.  I think as far as the reviews go that I’m only going to write proper reviews for the ARCs on the list below and then just a sentence or two on the others as part of my final recap post for the Summer TBR Wipeout Challenge.  My brain can’t handle being that many books behind so I need to do something to quickly get myself back on track.

Oh well, I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week! 🙂

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

  
       
 

 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
     
   
        
 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

  
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #64: Week of 7/29 – 8/4

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

As you can tell by how many reviews I have coming up, it was another great reading week for me but unfortunately a not-so-great writing one.  Apparently I’m a mood reader AND a mood writer, and I just didn’t feel like writing much of anything last week.  Thankfully I have a couple of days off from work this week and I plan to use those to get completely caught up on those reviews before I forget everything about every book I’ve read the past couple of weeks, lol.

Not too much else has been going on.  As I mentioned last weekend, I did finally sign up for an Instagram account for my blog.  I’m still trying to decide how much I’m going to use it, but I did do a couple of posts and have started following my fellow bloggers.  I’m still figuring out who has an account and who doesn’t so if I haven’t followed you yet, be sure to let me know your username so I can do that.  Here’s my account:  @thebookishlibra.

Off the blog, it was business as usual.  Aside from buying school supplies for my son, the only other thing I can remember doing is watching the newest season of Orange is the New Black.  I have mixed feelings about what I watched.  On the one hand, I thought it ended on a very powerful note, but overall I thought the season got off to a weak  start and didn’t really improve until the last 2 or 3 episodes.  There were too many new characters that didn’t interest me, and several of my favorite characters didn’t even make an appearance.  Kind of reminded me of that last George R.R. Martin book I read, haha.

Oh well, I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week! 🙂

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

  
    
 

 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
    
     
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #63: Week of 7/22 – 7/28

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

This was a very good writing week for me.  I was 6 reviews behind at the beginning of last week but managed to get five written this week so I’m not feeling nearly as bad about backlogged reviews as I had been.  Of course I also finished reading two more books so I still need to write 3 to be fully caught up but such is the life of a book blogger, right?  LOL!

I hate when this happens, but I am a few days behind on blog comments and visits.  I’m fully placing the blame for that on Mother Nature.  After the rainiest summer I can remember in recent memory, we finally had three days of sun in a row so I’ve been outside as much as possible trying to work on those home improvement projects we started weeks ago and haven’t had enough dry weather to complete.  We’re so desperate to get those projects wrapped up that I even spent part of my Saturday night helping my husband start hanging our newly painted shutters.  We hung shutters until about 9pm when I finally had to quit because it was too dark and because the mosquitoes were eating me alive.  We still have two sets to paint but the end of that project is finally in sight!

In other blog-related news, I actually set up an Instagram account for my blog this week.  Now that I’ve set it up, I of course have cold feet about posting anything but we’ll see how that goes.  I may just end up using it to follow other book bloggers and like their pics.

Not too much else is really going on.  We’ve already started back-to-school shopping, which has my son a little crabby.  The county we live in voted to change the school calendar, starting with the upcoming school year.  We have historically gone back to school after Labor Day in September but this year because of the calendar change, the kids lose three weeks of their summer break and go back to school on August 13.  It will be nice in the spring because they’ll end up getting out before Memorial Day, but my son is mad as hell about losing so much of his summer break this year.  I’m sure he’ll get over it as soon as he’s back with his friends, etc., but right now, it’s like living with a grumpy old bear every time someone even mentions the word “school.”  Fun times!

I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week! 🙂

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

 
      
 

 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
     
      
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

  
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Source:  inkygirl.com

Weekly Recap #62: Week of 7/15 – 7/21

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

Not much to report here this week. It’s one of those ‘I don’t even remember what I did this week so it couldn’t have been too exciting’ kind of weeks, haha.  Just work, work, and more work, with the only break in work being to take off from work to run my son over to his middle school orientation.  Still can’t believe I’m about to have a middle schooler on my hands!

As soon as the weekend hit, we were inundated with pouring rain, which according to the forecast is supposed to stay with us through at least August 4th 🙁 , so aside from driving an hour in it yesterday to meet my dad and stepmom for lunch because I haven’t seen them in 6 months, my weekend will be spent in the house staying dry.

As you can see from my Upcoming Reviews list below, I’m also way behind on posting reviews. I’m actually behind on writing them honestly. I’m not sure what happened there, but today will be a writing catch up day so I should finally knock a few books off that list.

I wasn’t a total blog slacker this week though.  I posted my first Summer TBR Wipeout challenge recap where you can see that I’ve read 6 books out of the goal of 15 I had set for myself.  So definitely lots of reading going on.  Participating in the Summer TBR Wipeout also moved along my Beat the Backlist Challenge, so I’m up to 22 out of my goal of 30 backlisted books for the year. I also posted my first discussion post in a while where I talked about how my reading tastes have changed over the years.  Once I get semi caught up on my reviews, I should have another discussion post coming along to get myself back on track for the discussion challenge I’m taking part in.

I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week! 🙂

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   
      
 

 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
      
        
 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

 
      
 

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #61: Week of 7/8 – 7/14

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

This past week was mainly just the same old, same old — work, continuing with home improvement projects, and getting outside as much as possible to enjoy the great summer weather we’ve been having.  I’m still binge watching Felicity. I’m about halfway through season 2, which is the season where she chopped off all of her hair.  I still remember watching that for the first time and seeing all of the entertainment news magazines and shows go nuts.  Who knew a haircut could cause so much drama? LOL.

I did take one vacation day this week and took my son to Water Country USA water park in Williamsburg.  Neither of us had ever been there before so it was a nice treat for us both.  It’s a little expensive, especially if you add in the Quick Queue option that allows you to skip the lines, but I hate waiting in long lines so it was worth it.  We both had an amazing time and had nearly perfect weather for it too.  It was just warm and sunny enough to be a beautiful day, but not so hot and scorching that either of us ended up with sunburn.  My son, who can sometimes be a little timid about rides, actually rode every ride in the park, even those huge terrifying drop slides that I can’t even look at, much less ride, lol.  I rode everything except for those and it was just an all around nice mom/son day.  It was also just nice to be completely unplugged from my phone and computer for the day since I couldn’t even carry my phone around at the park for fear of losing it or getting it completely waterlogged.

I had a great reading week as well, finishing up A Feast for Crows, the last book in the Grishaverse trilogy, as well as an ARC of Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win.  Reviews for all three of these will be up on the blog this week, as well as my first update for the Summer TBR Wipeout Challenge so I can see how I’m doing on that.  A couple of library books that became available sooner than I expected has shuffled my TBR for that challenge a little, but I’m still hoping to knock 15 books off my list before all is said and done.

I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week! 🙂

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

  
      
 

 

 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
    
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

 
 

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Source: Society6

Weekly Recap #60: Week of 7/1 – 7/7

 

It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

I hope everyone who was celebrating this week had a wonderful 4th of July.  We had a quiet day here since both my husband and I had to work the day before and the day after the holiday.  We did finally get to the theater to see Ocean’s 8 though, which was fabulous, for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.  I had never seen the other Ocean’s movies either so I came home with the intention of binge watching all of them.  That didn’t work out too well, unfortunately.  I fell asleep halfway through both Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12, then gave up on the whole plan.  I think the buildup to the actual heists just felt so slow in the original movies compared to Ocean’s 8 and my attention span just wasn’t up for the challenge.  I gave up and ended up binge watching the first season of the old TV show Felicity instead.  I had forgotten how much I loved that show when it first came on TV.

This has also been the week of major home improvement projects.  My Saturday was seriously so exciting I just couldn’t stand it!  Want to know how I spent it?  Painting the shutters on my house and waiting for my new oven to finally be delivered.    We were given an annoying 4-hour delivery window for the oven so since we had to stay at home for that long anyway, we decided to multi-task and get the shutters painted.  We’re also planning to redo our front porch so once we got the oven, we spent the rest of the afternoon driving around looking for porch railings and columns that we liked.  Exciting stuff, right?

My son is at his grandmother’s for the holiday, so it was quiet here all week and the weather was gorgeous so I spent the rest of my time out on my deck reading. I got a lot of reading done on A Feast for Crows.  I’m over 700 pages in now and hope to actually finish it this week, which I’m kind of impressed with myself about since it usually takes me months to read one of those books.  I’m also planning to finish the Grishaverse trilogy this week.  I started the last book yesterday but got sidetracked by all of that shutter painting excitement.

My son comes home today and we’re taking him out for a celebratory milk shake.  While he was at his grandmother’s, we got his math placement in the mail and learned that he has placed into Pre-Algebra for the upcoming school year.  He’s going into 6th grade and only about 10% of the 6th graders in the county place into Pre-Algebra so we’re very excited for him especially since he loves Math and really wanted to place into Pre-Algebra.  Why a milkshake?  Because apparently I’m a horrible parent and my child has never had a milkshake before.   I know, I know! *hangs head in shame*.  In my defense. for years he has done nothing but tell me how much he hates milk and, up until about two years ago, he wouldn’t really eat ice cream either.  It just never dawned on me that he would have any interest in a milkshake. But now the interest is definitely there and he has FaceTimed me everyday this week to make sure we’re still going today, lol.

I think that’s it for me. I hope everyone else has a great week! 🙂

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

         
  
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

       
  
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

   
 
 

 

TOTALLY RANDOM