Weekly Recap #79: Week of 11/18 -11/24

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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 Thanksgiving.  Mine was great, very busy, but it was still nice to spend some time with my mom and sister since I hadn’t seen them much lately.  Great food, great company made for a lovely way to spend the day.

I also got up on Friday with the intention of hitting some of the online Black Friday events, but got bored after after 20 minutes, and ended up watching Hallmark Christmas movies all day instead.  Oops.

I went into the long weekend with plans to get lots of reading done, but that didn’t happen either because…Christmas decorations! I think this is the earliest I’ve ever decorated but I just felt like I had to take advantage of having those few extra days off to to tick something major off my to-do list.   On the reading front, I did have a pretty decent week overall. I managed to finish The Winter of the Witch, which was a gorgeous 5 star read for me,  Tell Me Three Things, another backlist book that has been on my TBR forever, and I finally started Muse of Nightmares but haven’t gotten too far yet.

For the coming week, my goal is to get back on track with my Instagram account.  I had been doing pretty well posting a few times a week but let that slide after my NYC trip and have just been too busy to take the kind of photos I like to take ever since.  Now that my Christmas decorations are out, I’m feeling inspired though. 🙂

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

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

         
 
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
     
  
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

         

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #78: Week of 11/11 -11/17

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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 know if anyone noticed or not but I pulled a little disappearing act midweek. The reason for my disappearance was that I was busy with a million other things, the most important of which being that I completely forgot that we had scheduled our end of season soccer party for this weekend and had done absolutely nothing to plan for it.  We usually have our party in early October when the season is supposed to end, but our schedule was so out of whack because of the weather that everything got pushed way back.  Thankfully I was able to recover from my memory lapse and pull together something decent for the kids, but something had to go to make time for it and that something was the blog, lol.

Even though I failed a bit with the blogging last week, I still managed to keep up with my reading pretty well.  I actually got in a few extra hours of reading this week by reading while waiting for my son to complete his soccer lessons.  With that extra time, I was able to make it through 3 out of the 4 HoHoHoRAT reads I had selected for the readathon and I started on the fourth one last night.  I don’t know if I’ll finish it before the end of the readathon, but I’m glad I was able to make it through as many as I did considering how many other commitments I ended up having this past week.

Reading all of those Christmas books also has me thinking about Christmas weeks earlier than I normally do. I’m ready to start decorating, which has never happened this early before. Normally December 1 is when I start, but I’m ready to put up the tree this week.  The only catch to that is that my husband and I have finally decided to make the switch from a fresh cut tree to an artificial one so now we have to go out and find one that we both like and that is the right size for our living room.  We really need a 7′, which seems to be the most popular size AND seems to be sold out everywhere. I didn’t realize I needed to shop for a tree months in advance to actually get one, lol.  We’re going out again later today so hopefully we’ll get lucky. May the Christmas force be with us!

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

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

         
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     
     
 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #77: Week of 11/4 -11/10

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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’m sitting here staring at this space, trying to think of something to write. Yes, it has been one of those weeks.  Busy enough that it’s a blur but nothing exciting enough happened for me to actually remember it, lol.  I’m still adjusting to the new soccer training routine too.  I did well the first week but was so tired by Wednesday night of this week that I fell asleep with the laptop open in the middle of blog hopping.  Staying up late Tuesday night to watch the election returns come in probably didn’t help matters either, but hopefully I’ll get back on track this coming week.  I did sleep late Saturday morning and went to bed early Saturday night, so I’m feeling refreshed and will be blog hopping a bit today to get caught back up.

This weekend also marks the start of the HoHoHo Readathon, which I’m excited to take part in for the second year.  I’ve set aside the tentative TBR list that I posted last week for now so that I could go ahead and get started my first HoHoHoRAT book this weekend. I started The Christmas Sisters by Sarah Morgan and am really enjoying it so far.

I actually mostly ignored the tentative TBR I posted last week anyway because I ended up reading two backlisted books instead so that I could complete my Beat the Backlist Challenge.  I finished Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng and Salt to the Sea by Ruth Sepetys.  They were both great reads and I’m excited because both had been on my TBR for at least two years. It always feels like such an accomplished to finally mark those older TBR additions as Read.

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

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

         
 
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
    
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

     
     
 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #76: Week of 10/28 -11/3

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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’ve been gradually getting back on track with the blog after taking off a week for my vacation. It does seem like I’m moving from one busy month to the next though.  In addition to starting to plan for the fast approaching Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, I’ve also just enrolled my son in small group soccer lessons.  He wants to try out for his middle school team in the spring and so we felt like he needed to keep working on his skills through the winter months so that he’s in top form when spring rolls around.  He has lessons Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays starting at 4, and I get off from work at 3:30 so there’s lots of mad dashing around town on lesson days.  He’s loving the lessons so far though so as long as he’s happy and thinks the lessons are worth it, it’s worth the running around I’m doing.

As the midterm elections will be taking place in just a couple of days, I’ve also been obsessed with all things politics, especially the House races.  For those keeping track, I live in district VA-07 (Spanberger vs. Brat).  Typically my district has been a Republican stronghold with the incumbent winning in 2014 and 2016 by double digit margins and a Democrat has actually not held the seat since before I was born. It’s usually a pretty boring race and I don’t pay much attention, lol.  This year, however, we are actually a toss-up race.  All of the latest polls show the two candidates virtually tied so it has been an exciting race to watch.  As of this moment, I still can’t even begin to guess who will come out on top.  Based on the national news coverage our race has been getting for the past 3-4 months, I also think that all eyes will be on VA-07 Tuesday night.

I don’t have much else to report. We’ve had some gorgeous weather this weekend so even though I had initially planned to stay inside and get caught up/blog ahead, instead I’ve spent most of it outside cleaning up the yard and planting bulbs for the spring.  I did take a few minutes to assess where I am on my blogging challenges.  Overall, I’m doing well. I’ve completed most of them and am getting ready to start my 30th backlist book, which will finish out that challenge.  The one area where I’m a little behind is with my discussion posts though so expect several of those in the coming weeks as I try to meet that last goal.

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

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

    
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
    
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

         
     
 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #75: Week of 10/21 -10/27

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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, I’m back home from my trip to New York City and what a great trip it was!  I had decided not to try to keep up with the blog at all while vacationing and I think it was the right choice because I truly had no downtime whatsoever to devote to it.  I won’t bore you to death with all of the details of the trip, but I’ll share a few highlights.  We got there Sunday evening and started our adventure with dinner followed by a show at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village.  If you love stand-up, I highly recommend this place.  I’ve been there twice now and thought it was absolutely hilarious both times.  Plus, you can stroll around the Village before or after the show, which is always cool.

Those who know me well know that I have an obsession with food tours.  I like to pick up a little knowledge about where I’ve traveling to, but I’m really all about tasting all of the delicious food choices that are unique to the area.  I’ve done several tours in NY through Foods of New York and I highly recommend them, especially their Original Greenwich Village tour, which is incredible.  This time, however, we went with a different company, Urban Adventures, but still had an equally fantastic experience.  The tour we picked was the Lower East Side Food and Culture Tour and it took us through Little Italy, Nolita, SoHo, Chinatown, and more.  The food was delicious, and I had never really done much exploring in that part of the city so it was great to finally get to do that.  I think the highlight of the tour for everyone in my group was going to Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery and trying our first ever knish.  OMG, so good!

We of course took in a couple of Broadway shows while we were there as well.  For those who have been following my misadventures in trying to score Hamilton and Springsteen tickets, you know this was a huge deal for me.  Now don’t get me wrong, you can still get tickets to either show, if you’re willing to pay through the nose to buy them from a third-party reseller.  I was not willing to do that.  It was either straight from the venue at the normal ticket price or I wasn’t going. So after more than a year of impatiently waiting for my turn, using the Ticketmaster Verified Fan program, I was finally able to score tickets to both shows for this past week.  I have cursed that whole process for months now, but I have to tell you, after seeing both shows this week, it was totally worth the whole pain-in-the-ass process.  Both shows were everything I hoped they would be and more.  Hamilton is truly brilliant.  It’s now my favorite Broadway musical and I think Lin-Manuel Miranda is nothing short of a musical genius.  46 songs, mostly rap and hip hop, minimal dialogue outside of the songs, and everything about the show just blew me away.  I’ve had the soundtrack on repeat ever since we got on the train to head back home.  And Springsteen is a master storyteller.  I’m not sure any other pop/rock artist could pull off the kind of show he puts on on Broadway.  It’s quintessential Springsteen, both in song choice and in showmanship.  Man, I just love that guy…

I could keep babbling about my trip, but I won’t.  Apologies in advance if this post is filled with typos or just rambles incoherently.  I’m still so tired because I don’t sleep well when I travel and I have a case of the post-vacation blues that I really need to get over, lol.

Oh, before I forget, I did go back and visit The Strand Bookstore and it was just as awesome as I remembered.  I didn’t buy any books, but I did pick up a ton of cool bookish merchandise – totes, pins, etc.  If you ever make it to NYC, I definitely recommend going there and then heading across the street to Max Brenner’s Chocolate Bar for a delicious gourmet Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate. Yum!

Oh well, that’s it for me.  I’ll be back to blog hopping and regular posting this week so I’ll see you around the blogosphere.  Have a great week!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

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 STACKING THE SHELVES

    
     
 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #74: Week of 10/7 -10/13

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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.

My apologies for being a bit scarce the past few days. Those deadlines I talked about last weekend are tomorrow so I’ve been been too busy and tired to put much effort into blogging.  I should be around more this upcoming week but then I’ll be off to New York for 5 days after that and after getting so behind the last time I traveled, I’ve decided I won’t be posting anything from 10/21 through 10/25 so that I can just start fresh when I return from my trip.  Once I get through my deadlines, I really need to get serious about planning some activities for my trip too.  If anyone has any ideas that are beyond the obvious touristy stuff, most of which I’ve already done, I’d love to hear them.

Outside of work, life was mostly a blur this week, although we did have make-up three soccer games.  The kids played well but we lost all three games, the end result of not being allowed to practice for fear of ruining the grass on the county’s sports field.  Don’t even get me started on that one, haha.  But we’re on to the playoffs now, so fingers crossed that they can get at least one more win and end the season on a more upbeat note than back-to-back losses.

Reading wise, I finished both Sea Witch and The Girl from Berlin last week.  Sea Witch was okay.  It started out strong but then fizzled a bit for me as I got closer to the end.  The Girl from Berlin, however, was a great historical fiction.  I devoured that one in about a day and a half.  I’m now working my way through Good Luck with That. I’m enjoying it so far but have found myself skimming occasionally because it’s 480 pages, which just seems long for a contemporary.  That or maybe I just have the attention span of a gnat this week, lol.

I also finally watched SOLO last night, after saying I was going to for 5 months.  It was actually much better than I was expecting it to be based on the critic’s reviews.  Both my husband and I really liked it and thought they did a great job making it plausibly fit into the rest of the Star Wars time line and I loved seeing the backstory for how Han and Chewy ended up partners. It was admittedly weird seeing someone who was not Harrison Ford play the part of Han but I was able to get past that and enjoy the film.

Oh well, 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 #73: Week of 9/30-10/6

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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 write about this week.  I’ve been busy at work with our last two major deadlines of the year looming on October 15th.  So I’ve been working, working, working all day and sitting around like a slug all evening, lol. On the plus side, I do have a trip to NYC coming up in a couple of weeks that I’m stoked about.  I still need to come up with a few more things to do, which sometimes gets challenging since I’ve already done most of the obvious touristy activities.  What I do know so far is that I’ll be seeing Hamilton and Springsteen on Broadway while I’m there, celebrating my birthday which happens to be that week, and hanging out with one of my best friends so I’m really looking forward to it.

Because of my work deadlines, I didn’t really get much reading done this week either. I finally finished Wildcard last night, and it was my only read for the whole week.  I don’t know if it’s just because I was so tired all week, but it took me a lot longer to read that one than Warcross and I found myself skimming at times.  I still ended up really liking it in the end thankfully, but I was surprised that I didn’t find it more riveting since I thought Warcross was so epic.  My library loans for Sea Witch and Good Luck with That also came through at the end of last week, so I’m shuffling up my upcoming reads to try to fit those in before they’re due to go back to the library.

Aside from that, I did find one new TV addiction.  I’m two years late to the party, but I’m officially obsessed with This is Us.  As I’ve been sitting around like a lump this week, I’ve watched 12 episodes from season 1 and can honestly say that all the hype surrounding this show is real.  I’ve loved every minute of it so far.  I still haven’t watched a single new fall show yet and at the rate I’m going, that probably won’t happen until after my trip.  If you’ve discovered any good ones though, let me know. Almost all of my shows got cancelled so I’ll be looking for new ones to watch.

Oh well, 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: Huffington Post

Weekly Recap #72: Week of 9/23-9/29

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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.

Thanks so much to everyone for their kind words about my grandmother’s passing.  They really meant a lot to me.  I traveled to attend the funeral services this week.  They were lovely — I think she would have been pleased —  and now I’m back at home and back at work. I probably could have taken another day or so off, but I just prefer to stay busy.

Because I like to stay busy, I have also been working to get caught up on the blog for the past couple of days.  I still have a little catching up to do with comments, etc but hope that I’ll be fully caught up by the end of the weekend.

Reading wise, I actually ended up finishing two books from my backlist, Girl out of Water and Bone Gap.  Both were available in audiobook form from the library so I listened to them while I was traveling. I also read and sadly did not like The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton.  I wanted to like this one so much, but the pace was just so slow, the timelines were actually very confusing, and there were way too many characters to keep track of.  It’s an epic that just turned out to be a little too epic for me.  I’ve seen a few other Morton fans say this one is quite different from what she usually writes, so I would still like to try another of her books. This was just disappointing since it was one of my most anticipated reads for the fall.

I don’t have much else to report at this time.  New fall TV shows have started.  I DVR’ed several, including the Murphy Brown reboot, but haven’t had time to watch any yet.  I also saw that SOLO is now out on DVD so I’ll probably try to rent that soon since we never made it to the theaters to watch it.  The rest of my time will be filled with soccer.  Our season should be ending on 10/1 but so many games have been rained out that we have makeups scheduled all the way through 10/9, then still have to work playoffs in.  I’m leaving for NYC on 10/21 so we’re going to be cutting it close, lol.

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

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

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 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
    
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

    
    
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #71: Week of 9/16-9/22

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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.

Well, it has been a pretty difficult week here.  My grandmother passed away on Saturday after nearly a week in hospice care.  Thankfully I was able to make the trip home this week to see her one last time, but it’s still sad to think that she’s no longer with us.

It was also a bit awkward because she died on my son’s birthday.  At first we were going to postpone his party, but I finally decided that we could all use the distraction, so as I’m sitting here typing, I have 4 pre-teen boys running around my house acting like lunatics.  Their silliness is infectious, so I’m glad we decided to go ahead and have them over.

Needless to say though, I haven’t gotten much reading or blogging done this week.  I had some pre-scheduled posts that went up last week, but it will probably be pretty quiet here until after the funeral.  I will get back on a regular schedule as far as posting and visiting as soon as I feel up to it.

Thanks for your understanding and I hope everyone else has a great week.

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

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 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
  
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

    
    
     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #70: Week of 9/9-9/15

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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.

It has been such a strange week here in terms of the weather.  Last week I posted about how we were getting ready for Hurricane Florence and that I was expecting to lose power, etc.  Well, Florence made a last minute dip south and is plowing her way through the Carolinas as I type this.  We are actually still waiting for her, however, but she is now expected to make a U-turn and head back out to sea by way of Virginia.  So it’s going to take her a while to bring her flooding rains here, but they’re still coming.  Crazy weather, lol.  I don’t know if I have any followers who live in the Carolinas, but if so, I hope that you made it through the storm okay.

Because everyone was so sure that we would be getting pummeled by Florence’s wind and rain the whole weekend, all of my son’s soccer games and practices were cancelled “due to poor field conditions.”  A little premature obviously but I guess better safe than sorry.  For those keeping track of our soccer adventures though, we did come back and win Game 2 4-1, so we’re all feeling better about the season now.  It would have been nice to get that third game in yesterday and another practice to keep the momentum going but we’ll take what we can get at this point.

Reading and blog-wise, I feel like I didn’t get much of anything done this week.  I fell asleep most evening when I sat down to read and had some trouble getting into Unstoppable Moses.  It picked up a few chapters in and I’m now nearly finished with it, but I definitely got off to a rough start with it.  I also had to revamp my reading schedule to accommodate a library loan that was expiring today.  It was The Cheerleaders and thankfully it was such a page turner that I ended up starting and finishing it on Friday.

I did participate in the blog tour for The Lantern’s Ember by Colleen Houck this week.  There’s a U.S. only giveaway from the publisher included in my review post so definitely check that out if you’re interested in a chance to win a copy of that book.  They’re giving away 3 of them.

I’ve also been trying to get better about walking, not just for me but also for my son.  Looking at him on the soccer field this season, I don’t think all of his video game playing is doing him any favors.  He has pretty much no stamina out there.  And with me sitting at a desk all day, I’m not much better.  I already have a fitbit so we also bought my son one and everyday this week we have tried to walk at least 10,000 steps.  We were successful all but one day, so we’re going to keep this up and hopefully I can eventually even get both of us up to a slow jog.  He seems content to get out there and do it as long as he has me for company so hopefully that will be good motivation for both of us.

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