Welcome to Sunday Bookends where I ramble about what I’ve been reading, doing, watching, writing and listening to.

What’s Been Occurring

I did very little again this week thanks to the ridiculously cold temperatures. On Saturday morning our weather app said the temperature was negative 15 at 5 a.m. By 8 a.m. it had warmed all the way up to negative nine. Similar cold temperatures are expected this week as well. I don’t have plans to run around anywhere because we missed two days of school last week. One day we drove to get my son’s hair cut (finally!!! After a year of him refusing to get his hair cut) and another day my daughter spent a day with her friends. Those were the two days I left the house. The second coldest day of the week was when I took my daughter to meet her friends. The roads I travel to get there are very narrow for most of the drive.

The main road I take doesn’t have yellow lines and has me gripping the steering wheel and tensing my buttock cheeks almost the entire way. Driving it during the day is stressful, but at night it is even worse because the lights from the oncoming cars are blinding and there is no room to move over to give the other car space and get away from those lights. After the trip in the dark where I worried I was going to have a head-on collision, I told my husband he can do the night pick-ups from now on. He’s used to the road because he drives it every day, twice a day, for work.

To top it off, when I hit the bottom of a hill and parked at my old high school to meet my friend to pick up my daughter, the heat stopped working in our van. The thermometer read 12 degrees and we had no heat for the drive home. That’s what I thought anyhow but with a little fiddling, the heat came back on, thank God. We made it home and I promptly announced I was not leaving the house until March.

Of course, that won’t hold, I’ll have to visit my parents, but beyond that — I am not leaving my house until March. *wink*.

What I’m Reading

I’m enjoying Still The One by Susan May Warren and Rachel D. Russell and might finish it this week. I plan to finish The Rhise of Hope, this week and share a review at the end of the week.

I had put The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson on hold to finish Max’s book, but I’d love to get back to that book before the end of the week. I love Johnson’s writing style.

I also hope to start Cape Refuge by Terri Blackstock next week, but first I have a Carrie Stuart Parks book I really want to finish, that I just remembered this week I had put aside because of some heavy subject matter. I wasn’t feeling heavy that particular week.

Little Miss and I are reading Emily’s Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary before bed and Freedom Crossing a few times during the week for school.

The Boy is reading A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park for school.

The husband is reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.

What I’m Watching

This week we watched reruns of The Jeffersons and Night Court.  We watched another episode of Lovejoy and are three episodes away from the end.

I reluctantly watched Spaceballs with my son and hate to even admit that.

I’d never seen it before and now I’m wishing I could still say that.

I also watched a couple of episodes of The Cleaner, a BBC show about a crime scene cleaner. It’s a mix of funny, sad, and touching with a bit of gore tossed in once in a while.

What I’m Writing

I’m in serious first draft mode for A New Chapter and hope to finish it by early or mid-February so I can start the second draft and then send it out to my critique group. I always say “second draft” but really I edit as I go in my books at times, so it’s probably more like a third or fourth draft. I have not gone back and reworked this book as much as past books and that’s because I lost a month from being sick and because I’m determined to get the draft done and then start gutting it. I tentatively have set up April 26^th as the release date for the book.

I didn’t share much on the blog last week because I didn’t have any ideas. I have a couple of ideas for this week, so I’ll probably share a little more.

I did share another chapter of A New Chapter for Fiction Friday. If you’re waiting until the entire book is done to read it, that’s totally fine. I mainly post the chapters for the couple of readers who are following around, with the caveat that the story could change by the time I publish it.

What I’m Listening To

This week I listened a lot to the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman, especially at the end of the week when I had to do a lot of driving. On the way home from dropping Little Miss off at her friends I became a Broadway singer – even attempting to act out the scenes, but finally decided that was a bad idea considering the twists and turns of the road I was on.

Now It’s Your Turn

So that’s my week in review, how about you? What have you been reading, listening to, watching, or doing lately? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to know. Definitely share any good books you are reading.