Tag Archive for: weekly recap

Weekly Recap #87: Week of 1/13 – 1/19

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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.

What a crazy weather week we’ve had here in Virginia. My son was out of school Monday and Tuesday because we had five inches of snow and by the end of the week, we had temps in the 50s and it felt almost springlike.  The bottom is supposed to drop out on those temps tonight though with a projected low of 11 degrees tonight and a high of 25 tomorrow.  I know I won’t want to get out of bed tomorrow morning (not that I ever do on a Monday morning) with temps like that.

Other than the wild weather, life has been plodding along like usual.  The big excitement for this week was that I had minor surgery and therefore got to work from home two days.  The surgery itself was no big deal, but I have to say it was really nice working from home.  It was amazing how much I actually got done without having to worry about incoming phone calls, people stopping by my desk, and the other various interruptions that always happen in the office.  I could get used to that, lol.

I’ve been continuing my Gilmore Girls rewatch and enjoying it because it’s kind of like comfort food, but I will be abandoning that tomorrow to start watching Season 5 of Grace and Frankie, which is one of my favorite series.  I’m impressed that I’ve waited two whole days to start watching it, but I decided I wanted to use it as a reward if I can get all of this week’s blog posts out of the way this weekend.  I’m planning 5 posts for the week and this one is number 3, so we’ll see if I can stick to the plan.  I also got a little behind on blog hopping because of my surgery, but hopefully I’ll get caught up on that this weekend too.

I had a mixed bag on the reading front last week. I did end up DNFing 96 Words for Love. I just wasn’t feeling it so decided to cut my losses and move on.  On a much better note though, I finally read (and loved!) The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater.  That one had been on my TBR for over two years.  I also finished Murder on the Orient Express, which was also great.  I did both of those as audiobooks so they did double duty for my backlist and audiobook challenges.  I also finished two ARCs and will be reviewing those this week, The Suspect by Fiona Barton and The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff.  I had mixed feelings about The Suspect but enjoyed it overall, and I thought The Lost Girls of Paris was fantastic.

I think that’s about it for now.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
 
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     
   

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #86: Week of 1/6 – 1/12

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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 watching the snow fall as I type this post. Based on the latest forecast, we’re supposed to get 8-12″ of snow between now and Sunday night.  We don’t do snow here in Central Virginia so it should make for an interesting few days as far as work and school goes.  I spent most of today getting most of my errands and chores done, so I’m hoping to be able to spend tomorrow snuggled up by the fire reading.

Speaking of reading, I’ve gotten off to a pretty good start this year. As of today, I’ve finished six books and am about halfway through my seventh.  I only have two more January ARCs to read so I’m hoping to get those wrapped up this week and then get started on my February ones.  I’m reading 96 Words for Love right now and it’s not really holding my attention. If that doesn’t change soon, it might end up being my first DNF of 2019 because life is too short to waste on books that aren’t for me. The upcoming read I’m most excited about is The Lost Girls of Paris.  Pam Jenoff’s last book was incredible so I have very high hopes for this one too.

Honestly, not much else is going on. It has been pretty quiet. Season 5 of Grace & Frankie drops on Netflix this Friday, so I’m pretty excited about that.  In the meantime, I’ve been binge watching Gilmore Girls for the third time.  I have tons of new shows in my Netflix queue that I want to start, so I don’t even know why I’m re-watching an old show yet again.  I guess maybe it’s a comfort thing. Who knows?

I think that’s about it for now.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   
 
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
  
 
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

   

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #85: Week of 12/30 – 1/5

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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.

Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope that 2019 is off to a great start for all of you!  I had twelve days off from work and was like a whiny child when it was time to go back, but overall I had a wonderful and relaxing holiday and feel very refreshed and ready to tackle the new year so I won’t complain too much. I also finally decided on a new car and we picked that up while I was off from work.  It’s my first new car in twelve years so everyday since I’ve gotten the new one has been quite the adventure as I get used to all of the new technology that my old car didn’t have.  For those who remember me mentioning the car hunt before, we ended up going with the Subaru Ascent and so far I love it!

I spent this weekend taking down all of the Christmas decorations and putting the house back together.  My husband and I then did a huge purge/reorganization of our kitchen to make it easier to prepare what we hope will be healthier meals in 2019, as focusing on our health and fitness is one of the few goals we’ve decided on for the new year.  Aside from eating better (i.e. eating more veggies, less carbs and meat), we’re also planning to try to get to the gym three times a week for some cardio and weightlifting.  We failed miserably at this in 2018 so wish us luck, lol!

As far as blogging, I’m still thinking about my blogging goals for this year, so stay tuned for a post about those sometime soon.  I’ve started the new year focused almost solely on getting all of my January and early February ARCs read and reviewed on time.  I didn’t exercise nearly enough self control when I was requesting and then got approved for more than I was expecting to, so it will be a few weeks before I really get started on tackling what I think will be my main goal for the year – reading and reviewing books that I already own.

I think that’s about it for now.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

        
 
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
   
 
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

Believe it or not?  No new books this week!

     
 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #84: Week of 12/23 – 12/29

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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.

I hope that everyone who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful holiday this week.  Mine was very nice, low-key like I wanted it to be, but I think everyone still enjoyed it.  Instead of trying to go see everyone on Christmas Day, we spread it out over a few days so that we can spend more time with each family member we’re visiting. So we saw my Dad and step-mom on the 23rd, my in-laws on the 24th, had the 25th for ourselves, and then went to my mother’s on the 26th.  I slept 10 hours the following day, but woke up feeling refreshed and have been pretty productive since then, especially on the blog.

I only posted one review this past week since I figured it would be a light traffic week, but also because I hadn’t written anymore. I finally got my butt in gear though and wrote all of my backlogged reviews so look for those next week.  I’ll have reviews for Muse of Nightmares, Vengeful, Throne of Glass, An Anonymous Girl, and possibly The Girl King going up this week. I also finally met my goal for the 2018 Discussion Challenge this week too so that was exciting, especially since it was the only challenge goal I hadn’t met yet.

As you can see from my list below, Christmas was very good to me in terms of books. Between actual gifts I received, an unexpected approval from Netgalley, and the great ebook deals on Amazon, I seriously stacked my shelves. Now I just need to stop watching Hallmark Holiday movies and get busy reading!

Oh well, I think that’s it for me.  Happy New Year, everyone!

 

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

       
 
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
   
 
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     
 

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #83: Week of 12/16 – 12/22

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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.

I’m late with today’s post because our Christmas celebrations started first thing this morning.  We hit the road for a trip out into the country to see my Dad and my step-mom.  I was going to type something up before I left but ended up accidentally oversleeping instead and had to rush around and get my act together so we could get out the door on time.  Oops!

Anyway, it was a really nice visit, lowkey and relaxed, which is how I like it.  The weather was nice so we spent quite a bit of the day outside, just relaxing and enjoying each other’s company.  I’m home now and taking stock of where I am in terms of our Christmas preparations for the rest of the holiday.  I’m thrilled to say that I’m actually pretty much done.  We baked cookies and wrapped all of our gifts yesterday and we hit the grocery store today on the way home to pick up everything we need in terms of food to entertain our visitors.  We don’t do much here on Christmas Eve so tomorrow will hopefully be a relaxing day of reading and watching Hallmark movies.

I haven’t decided yet how much I’ll be posting on the blog this week.  If I’m remembering correctly, this is usually a slow week traffic-wise so I think I will probably just post a few times and then spend the rest of the time reading and getting caught up on blog hopping since I know I’m a couple days behind on that.  I also have a backlog of reviews I need to get to that I’ve been saying I’m going to post for weeks now and somehow still haven’t managed to find the time.  Here’s hoping for a relaxing yet productive week!

Happy Holidays everyone!

 

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

       
 
       
 

 UPCOMING REVIEWS

     
      
 
 
 
 

 

 STACKING THE SHELVES

     
  

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap #82: Week of 12/9 -12/15

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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.

We had our first big snowfall of the season here in Central Virginia this past week.  Well, not really all that big, but we don’t do snow here so it doesn’t take much to shut everything down.  We had 5 inches of the white stuff, and my son’s school was closed for 3 1/2 days.  I even got one snow day out of it myself, which was nice since I’ve been so wiped out lately.  This Thursday thankfully is my last work day of 2018, so I can have a couple of days to crash and burn before the holiday festivities kick into high gear.

My son had his first band concert of the year this past Thursday night.  He plays trumpet and band is really the only class he likes this year, so I was really glad to attend the concert and hear how great they actually already sounded.  It was especially impressive considering they’ve only been playing their instruments since late August and all of the band classes only got to meet together once to practice as a big group because of the snow cancellations.

Speaking of my son, I love him dearly but he was a huge source of unexpected drama this week.  Since Thanksgiving he’s been telling me that his math teacher has been giving them time in class to finish their homework and so he hasn’t been bringing anything home to work on.  As I found out the hard way this week, that’s not the case, and he has actually turned in so little work since Thanksgiving that his grade has dropped from an A to a C.  I can’t get a straight answer out of him as to what’s going on, but I think he has been lying about having homework to do because his soccer classes are eating into his video game time.  The only way he could reclaim that time was to say he had already completed his homework and then hide the evidence to the contrary by not bringing anything home.  I had an impromptu conference with the math teacher this week and she showed me how I can go online and see her actual grade book and know what’s missing and what has been turned in going forward, but needless to say, it did not make for a good week and my son is now expected to bring his assignments home every night, whether or not he has already completed them, so that I can see for myself.

Not much else is going on here. I just finished picking out what blogging/reading challenges I want to do in 2019, so I’ll be posting those tomorrow.  I only have one more ARC that I need to review for December and I’m reading that right now so I’m feeling pretty good about that right now.  I still need to do two discussion posts to complete my 2018 discussion challenge so hopefully I can knock those out in the next couple of weeks as well.

Oh well, that’s all I have.  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 #81: Week of 12/2 -12/8

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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 really hoping this upcoming week is my last busy week of the year because I’m truly exhausted right now.  I didn’t realize how tired I was until Saturday when I woke up at 6:40 a.m., decided I wanted to rest my eyes for just a few more minutes, and next woke up three hours later, lol.  Oops! We’ve added after school band practices and Math Club to my son’s already busy schedule so I feel I like I spent half my week in the car chauffeuring him around and then scrambling around at home to make up for the time I’ve lost doing everything else that needs to be done.  It’s all better than him sitting in front of the xBox for all of those hours so I try not to complain too much, but all that running around just makes me feel old and tired, lol. Thankfully the band concert is this Thursday so then those practices will stop and some downtime will open back up for me.

On the blog, even with the busy week, I did manage to do six posts, including a discussion post.  My goal was to do at least 12 for the year and so far I’ve done 10.  Hopefully I’ll make it.  I do have a few other topics I’d like to write about, if I can find the time  Yes, time, or lack thereof, is definitely the theme of this week’s post!

Speaking of the blog, does anyone else use WordPress?  Specifically, did you update to WordPress 5.0?  I updated last Thursday night and nearly had a heart attack when I went in to write my next post.  They have totally revamped the editor and it looks NOTHING like it did before I updated.  It’s all boxes now. You have to add boxes to type each paragraph of your post into.  Lots of the formatting shortcuts I had been using now no longer work.  It took three to four times longer than it usually does to write a post because everything was so hard to find and hard to use.  I also usually write my reviews in Word and then just paste them into WordPress.  Well, if I do that now, the formatting goes haywire and most of the words get pushed together so I have to re-proofread and reformat the entire post.  After muddling through it long enough to get my Friday post up, I spent yesterday looking around to see if there was a way to undo the update.  I found that WordPress has released an official Plugin that will restore the old editor.  As much as I hate adding plugins to my site, the alternative, which is keeping a complicated new editor that I don’t have time to properly learn how to use right now, is even worse.  For anyone else who is struggling with the new editor, here’s the plugin link — Classic Editor.  I’m sure I’ll revisit the updated editor at some point after the holidays once I’ve watched some videos or something on how to use it, but damn, bad timing WordPress.

I didn’t get too much reading done this week with everything else that was going on, but I did manage to get through The Accidental Beauty Queen.  I have to say this was a case of the right book at the right time because it’s such a sweet, fluffy, and fun read and it has so many of my favorite things in it.  I won’t say much more since I’ll be reviewing it later this week, but it was just a perfect fit for me this week.  I also started My Favorite Half-Night Stand yesterday and so far I’m really into it.   Watching You is the last review book I need to get through before the end of the year so that’s on deck and then I hope to round out the year by finishing V.C. Schwab’s Villains duology.  I haven’t even looked to see what ARCs I need to read in January, so this reading plan may change a bit once I get into the 2019 frame of mind and see what I have going on.

Oh well, that’s all I have.  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 #80: Week of 11/25 -12/1

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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.

Okay, seriously, how the heck is it December already? Seems like I was just handing out Halloween candy last week and now we’re already just a few weeks away from Christmas! I’ve barely started my holiday shopping too, so I really need to get a move on it.

I had another light posting week on the blog last week, this time because of emergency datacenter maintenance at my host provider.  I kept getting all of these notices about it and about how downtime could possibly be extensive so I just decided not to post until they had resolved whatever issue they were having.  I got the all clear notice yesterday, so I should hopefully be back to my normal 5 posts a week starting today.

Since I wasn’t really blogging much past midweek, I did get a lot of reading done, including finishing the much-anticipated Muse of Nightmares, which was every bit as fabulous as I hoped it would be.  I’ve also gotten halfway through my ARC of Diane’s Setterfield’s Once Upon a River, a very atmospheric read with a hint of supernatural elements.  I’m hoping to finish that one tomorrow and then get started on The Psychology of Time Travel, which I’ll be participating in a blog tour for later this week.

Outside of the blog, nothing too exciting has gone on.  Just the usual work, soccer, work, soccer shuffle.  The only change in the routine is that my husband and I have been car shopping, which is always an interesting experience.  I’ve had my car for 12 years and although it has been a fantastic car, it has decided it’s time to retire soon so we’re looking to quickly get a replacement.  I’ve been test driving Subarus and really like them, so once I decide which one I want, that’s probably the direction I’m going to go.  I’ll miss my old car but I have to admit that it will be exciting to finally have a new vehicle again. and one that actually has all of the modern technology.

Oh well, that’s all I have.  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 #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