Sunday Bookends: Cow beauty pageant and new authors to me

On By Lisa R. HowelerIn Sunday Bookends, Sunday Salon

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what the rest of the family and I have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing.

I’ve been enjoying the cooler temps we’ve been having. I am not a summer girl, but I do like nicer weather where I can sit on the back porch and read. We’ve had that a lot the last week or so and I have been making the most of it.

I stayed home and enjoyed the nice weather and a quiet day yesterday while Warren (The Husband) and Little Miss went to a cow beauty pageant.

Yes, you’ve read that correctly. It was a cow beauty pageant. They judged cows in front of the county courthouse, choosing the prettiest one. One-hundred years ago, a similar contest was held so the county tourism board or ag board, I can’t remember which, decided to hold it as a nostalgic event.

Little Miss sent me plenty of photographs of the event, many of them taken behind the county’s veteran’s memorial, which is actually quite nice and impressive for a small county. The county they went to is the one next to ours, so it’s a bit bigger with 50,000 to 60,000 people, while ours has about 5,000.

Then later that night, she and her dad went to our county’s dairy parade downtown. I can’t show you many photographs of that because she took a video and the majority of it is of the sidewalk while she looks down to pick up all the candy that was thrown at her. She was on a corner where hardly any other kids were so she made out like a bandit. When she came home, though, she told me she’d hardly gotten any candy and The Husband said he was surprised they didn’t throw out as much candy at this parade as they used to.

Then he opened his camera bag and dumped out a huge pile of candy onto the chair in the living room.

It was a fun day for them. Today we are going to see my parents for Father’s Day.

What I/We’ve Been Reading

Just Finished

I finished The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie last week. Someone online spilled the beans that the ending was shocking and a twist so that had me trying to figure out the twist through most of the book, which means I figured out the killer but still had to be sure I was right and still wanted to know how Agatha lead the reader there. I was right but I still enjoyed the book immensely. Agatha really was ahead of her time with her plot twists and stories overall

In Progress

I am slow reading Stillmeadow Daybrook by Gladys Taber. Since each chapter is a month, I plan to read a chapter a month. I’m also reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

I am finally reading my first D.E. Stevenson book, Miss Buncle’s Book, and so far it is very fun and entertaining. It was written in the 1930s so it’s got an older, slower-paced style, but that’s fine for me.

The premise of the book involves Miss Barbara Buncle writing a book to earn some extra money and being excited when a publisher accepts it.

When it is released, the people in her small town start to recognize themselves in the pages. The names are different but the personalities and situations are the same. They don’t know who has written it, though, because Miss Buncle has used a male pen name. I believe the majority of the book is going to be them trying to figure out who wrote this book about every day life in a small English village where nothing really happens, but, for some reason, it’s still entertaining. That’s exactly Miss Buncle’s Book. It’s just a book about everyday life in an English village with a bit of a bonus plot of the people in the village trying to find out the identity of the author, but somehow it is very entertaining.

I am also reading The Ivory Dagger (A Miss Silver Mystery) by Patricia Wentworth. I’m enjoying it so far, though I’m not sure where Miss Silver comes in. This is my first book by this author, too so this is a week of new-to-me authors.

Up Soon

After these two, I have another Agatha on tap – The Rose and the Yew Tree, which she wrote under the pen name of Mary Westcott and a Margery Allingham, Mystery Mile.

What The Family is Reading

The Husband is reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Little Miss and I are halfway through Heidi (we didn’t read it very much this past week).

New arrivals to my bookshelf

Nothing this week!

What I/We’ve Been Watching

This past week I watched The Thin Man Goes Home, a 1930s Nancy Drew Movie called Nancy Drew Detective, two more episodes of The Other Bennett Sister, a couple more episodes of As Time Goes By, Around The World in 80 Days, and The Lady Eve.

I ended my Spring of Bette Davis feature but I will be writing about Around the World in 80 Days with David Niven and The Thin Man Goes Home this week.

What I’ve Been Writing

I made a lot of progress on book four of The Gladwynn Grant Mysteries!

This week on the blog I shared:

What I/We’ve Been Listening To

I am listening to Murder, She Wrote: The Maine Mutiny by Donald Bain on Audible.

Some Housekeeping

Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs), Cat (Cat’s Wire) and I host a monthly bookish link party called A Good Book and A Cup of Tea.  This link-up is for book and reading posts or anything related to books and reading (even movies based on books!). Each link party will be open for a month. You can find that link up for this month here.

Each week, I host the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot with some great hosts. It goes live Thursday night, but you can share any kind of blog posts (family-friendly) there until Tuesday of each week. You can check my recent posts on the sidebar to the right for the most recent link party.

Now It’s Your Turn

What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing?

This post is linked up with The Sunday Post at  Kimba at Caffeinated Reviewer,  Deb at with Deb at Readerbuzz, and Book Date: It’s Monday! What are you reading hosted by Kathyrn at The Book Date and Stacking the Shelves is hosted by Reading Reality.

Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.

You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

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22 thoughts on “Sunday Bookends: Cow beauty pageant and new authors to me”

  1. We’re having a heat wave here, over 90 degrees in your counting for a few days now but going down tomorrow and returning to normal on Sunday thank goodness. Mind you, having a fan on by my ear all night has led to me sleeping like anything, so that’s good! White noise and all that. Glad you’re enjoying Miss Buncle.

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  3. Ues I’m looking forward to your next Gladwynn book also! I’m glad you had some time to write more in it this week. But those cow events sound like fun! Enjoy the first. Week of summer now! Blessings!

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  4. I’m honestly surprised we don’t have a cow beauty contest here since we have so many dairy farms in our area. One local volunteer fire department holds a carnival every June and there are parades (with candy throwing for the kids) every night in that small town near us. There’s a farmer’s parade on Tuesday of that week and all the farmers drive their tractors in it. It would be a perfect time for a cow beauty pageant!

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  5. marsha57's avatar marsha57

    I honestly think I would love living in your county of only 5000 people! I miss living in the country so much. I am not a city (well suburban) girl at all. I miss the open air, hearing the birds, the chickens, all the country sounds. I keep meaning to mention how much I love As Time Goes By. I just love Judi Dench, and I honestly thought the two were married when I first started watching it decades ago. The British do these kinds of shows so well! The thing about that series is you can rewatch the episodes and still love them as much as the first or second time you saw them.

    A cow beauty pageant! Did they crown the winner with something cows love? Was it a female cow or a male (I don’t know what they are really called)? Questions, I have questions!

    I am reading another book by Richard Peck who writes such wonderful books for older adolescents. My fourth graders loved him as do I!

    https://marshainthemiddle.com/

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    1. That’s how I feel about As Time Goes By too. I have watched the episodes countless times and enjoy them every time. She wasn’t married to the actor in that show, but Judi was in a show called A Fine Romance with her husband Michael Williams from 1981 to 1984.

      The cow that won was a heifer, I believe, which is a cow that hasn’t given birth yet.

      I lived in a small town that was getting bigger and bigger for about 18 years and I’m in a small town now but it is very tiny and the woods are behind me and literally in walking distance from my house. I did not enjoy living in a town and feel better here because it’s not as big. I grew up almost in the middle of the nowhere and I’m not sure if I could do it again because it is almost too quiet and it takes longer to get to a store.

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  6. I never ever figure out mysteries, but I didn’t even come close to figuring out The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It was such a good book, and then we got cheap tickets to see it as a play in Houston a few days later. I love the idea of a cow beauty contest.

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  10. handmade by amalia's avatar handmade by amalia

    I found so many favorites here, both in the books you read and the movies. I adore mysteries and am currently racing through the Lady Hardcastle mysteries and enjoying myself very much.

    Amalia

    xo

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  11. I finished Miss Buncle today and thought it was really fun although, like you say, not that much even happens. And it seems to me from the few Miss Silvers I read so far that she’s always quite late! I haven’t read “The Ivory Dagger” yet, though.
    I just started a crime novel from Iceland, a book with movie reviews from 1920 to 1927, and we are still reading Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” in my German classic “project”.

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