My meanderings through life and writing . . .
Just a quick post to say thank you! I got a very pleasant surprise in the mail today!
Thanks to Wednesday Books and St. Martin’s Press for hosting this giveaway! And thanks to Rants and Raves of a Bibliophile for hosting during the blog tour – I entered through the link on your post! 🙂
Two posts on a weekend!!!! What is happening!!???!!
Hi again! Wanted to pop in for just a few minutes to tell everyone about a new blogging project I’m going to be working on. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but was also inspired by a short conversation on another blog – and I can’t find it! I wish I could give you credit! If this was you, please let me know and I will edit this.
Anyway, we ended up talking about The Baby-Sitters Club books that we both read as kids and how much fun they were. I remember having so many of them, they would barely fit on my bookshelf. And that was just one series. I followed MANY of them, as my mother can attest. The blogger I was commenting with mentioned a podcast called The Baby-Sitters Club Club where these two guys discuss the series in chronological order. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but I thought it sounded like a ton of fun.
That’s when I finally decided to do this. For a few months now, I have had a weird desire to revisit some of the books of my youth. Maybe it was just a simpler time and I feel the need to explore that more. Maybe I’m just a little weird. Or both. Which brings me to my new feature on this blog:
A few notes:
Just these series alone give me hundreds and hundreds of books to post about. I think it will be fun to see how well these stories hold up. They will be dated, of course – it was the late 80s/early 90s when I read them! Even so, I think this will be fun. It will be interesting to see how many of you also read these when you were a kid.
Maybe I’ll be adventurous and jump right in with the first post tomorrow? If not tomorrow, then definitely sometime next week. I’m excited! This will be so much fun!
But I don’t wanna.
Today is really cold. Really, really cold. We had some sleet over the weekend, but not enough to cause any sort of problems on the roads. Which is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still really cold.
And by “really cold,” I mean in the 30s Fahrenheit. Which to some people may not be that bad, but I’m a weakling.
On top of that, because some folks lost power, the schools were on a two-hour delay, which completely messes up my schedule. You would think that I would be grateful to sleep in a bit, but you would be wrong. I am a creature of habit, and anything that disrupts my routine annoys me. I got to work an hour late because of it and everything just feels out of sync.
This is a very complain-y Monday post, y’all. Sorry about that.
My goals for this week are:
Hope things are better wherever you are. More bookish shenanigans will be upcoming this week, as always!
Ugh, I so don’t want to wake up this Monday! My bed was so comfortable!
I’ve been really down over the past few days, and I’m not sure why. I was able to keep up with more of my goals last week, but this week is starting out a bit wonky. I really don’t know why. Oh well.
I also decided that I am signing up for a new challenge, which should dovetail into my current challenges quite nicely: the Beat the Backlist challenge, hosted by NovelKnight.
I have decided that I will read 20 books towards this particular challenge – 20 books off of my current TBR that I already own. I might actually pre-select them, but that will be in a separate post. I don’t know if I will be able to take part in the other mini-challenges they have, but I’ll do my best. 🙂
Have a good week everyone!
Edited to say: I will be representing Ravenclaw! Where my fellow Ravenclaws at?
Y’all, 2018 is almost over! How on earth did that happen! Seriously, does anyone else feel like this year went by incredibly fast? Not that I am necessarily complaining. This year was a tumultuous year for me, in good and bad ways. By the end of this year though, I feel like things are finally settling down. I feel more positive about life than I have in a long time, and not just because I am trying to make goals for 2019, but because my life is just better now. Let’s take a look:
All good things, right? How is this my life now!
I have some health related goals for this year, but seeing as this is primarily a book blog, I am going to go over my reading goals, starting with how I did for last year.
I originally, due to my reading slumps, had made my GoodReads goal to read 35 books this year. I met that goal in September, so I bumped it up to 50, and met that earlier this month. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I re-read two series in December that I read pretty quickly, but in my defense, it had been a while since I had read them the first time. So they were due. Here’s my final list (assuming that I will not finish my current read today):
Sigh. One day, I will do better at this goal. I really will. I have a list of 30-something series that I have started, but never finished (you can see it here, along with my other goal stuff). I had wanted to finish at least five. I finished one (Chicagoland Vampires by Chloe Neill). On the plus side, I also made the goal of trying to finish any new series that I started, and I finished all of those (Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Periodic by Megan Curd, and My So-Called Afterlife by Jamie Ayers). So the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice will be added to the list for next year. Not really much progress, but hey, at least I didn’t make it worse!
I am going to keep my GoodReads goal at 50 books in 2019. I am trying to make sure I read every day, even if it’s only one chapter, to avoid the dreaded reading slump. I’m on a good pace right now, so hopefully that will continue.
I will complete three series on my “Complete the Series” list, as well as finish all new series that I start in 2019. Let’s see if I can manage that at least.
Happy New Year everyone! May 2019 bring you health, happiness, and lots and lots of new books to read!
It’s nearly 3:00 PM as I’m writing this, so I assume that most people are up by now, although I suppose that could be up for debate. I am up and at work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m 100% awake! The past month or so has been brutal in that regard. Part of it has to do with some upheaval in my day job (which has thankfully led to a slight raise, a promotion, and increased job stability for me at least), part is due to being in another community theater show, and part is due to my kiddo having some issues that has definitely made me lose some sleep.
And now it’s almost Christmas. How the heck did that happen?
I am spending my time now trying to figure out presents for two teenagers (how the heck did THAT happen???) who really don’t need anything, as well as presents for two adults (my husband and my mom) who mean the world to me in ways that no gift wrapped box can express. Both will tell me that they don’t need anything, but that’s not the point of Christmas presents! I have something for the hubby, so he’s taken care of, and I know he will like it because ever since he found boardgaming as a hobby, he is ridiculously easy to shop for.
My last show is Wednesday, so after that sleeping should be a bit easier, or at least, I won’t be out quite so late. And after this week, I will have some time off of work the week of Christmas, so that will also be helpful.
In other news, I am working on a new blog/web project that will hopefully kick off sometime in the New Year. So keep an eye out for that. It should be fun, but I’m also a little nervous about it. We’ll see how it goes!
But I don’t want to.
Seriously, sleeping in would have felt sooooooo good this morning! Alas, it’s not meant to be.
In this random post, I want to talk about a dream that I had. This post might get a bit personal. The dream has made me think a lot this past week about a lot of things, in that random way dreams do. I’ll explain.
In the dream, I was waking up from a nap, but I was not in my house or any other home I’ve ever lived in. I was sleeping on a couch, curled up at the end, using an arm rest as a pillow. The couch was not in a house or an apartment – it was in a library. The library didn’t seem to be open – the lights were mostly off except for a few. It took me a few minutes, but I soon realized that I recognized the library as the one that I worked at when I was in college. I didn’t remember a couch being in that spot, but I did remember the room I was in.
I look over and notice that I’m not alone sleeping on this couch. This is the weird part. My ex-husband was sleeping on the other side of the couch, slouched down, his head resting on the back of it, snoring lightly. That’s when I should have known it was a dream – he never snored that quiet! Before I could even process this, I hear someone running towards me. I look up and see my daughter, arms outstretched, a big smile on her face. Only it’s not her now, as a teenager. She looks like she’s maybe seven or eight years old. I ask her what she’s doing there and she throws her arms around me, tells me she missed me, and that grandma “brought her early.” I look up and see my mom walking behind her. She waves at me. My ex wakes up. And then I wake up, for real.
So, a lot to unpack here.
While I’m not necessarily a person who believes that ever dream is meaningful, I haven’t been able to get this one out of my mind, so I’ve been trying to process it. The only thing I can come up with so far is that I am feeling very nostalgic for a particular part of my life, which the location of this dream would point to. I loved being in college. I loved everything about the environment, which is part of why I had originally never wanted to leave. I wanted to either be a professor once I got my Master’s degree, or to come back and work at the library as a regular employee. Neither of those things ever happened for me, and I’m starting to realize that they most likely never will. It’s next to impossible for me to ever get my Master’s and I would need one for either one of those scenarios.
This also fits with seeing my daughter as a happy little girl. As much as I was stressed as a parent back then, it is so much harder now! I worry constantly about her mental health, her safety, her school, not to mention the fact that the world is getting to be a much more negative place. I do miss when she was little, but mostly I miss how easy it was to make her happy. This has been an ongoing thing with me. I see a cute little outfit in a store and literally start crying. I would give anything to go back to that time and spend more time with her.
The only thing that doesn’t quite fit here is my ex-husband (yeah, he didn’t quite fit in my life either). I don’t miss him or miss being married to him. At all. Those eight years were some of the hardest of my life. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I miss him living closer because of our shared kid. He lives several states away and it has put a mental toll on our daughter and, as such, put a toll on me as well. I don’t miss him as a husband, but maybe I miss him as a father since he is missing out on so much.
I don’t think my mom in the background represents much other than the fact that she is always there in my life. With everything I have been through, she has been my constant, my rock.
So maybe this dream is just a way of acknowledging things that have been and finding a way to say goodbye to them. Saying goodbye is always hard, but maybe it’s just time. Time to accept that this is where life has taken me and, even though it’s not where I thought I would end up, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good place.
