Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot, where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.Please feel free to post new blog posts or old ones you want to bring attention to again.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
Tuesday we were hit with some snow. Like last time, the temps dropped, leaving the snow in place. Then yesterday we got some more and today we had snow squalls and it’s only about 19 degrees outside so, yet again, the snow is staying in place.
Now if it will only stay in place for 14 more days and we will have a white Christmas, not that I care either way. It’s pretty to have snow on the ground at Christmas, but it not necessary, of course, for a good Christmas.
We live in an area where we have a chance for snow on Christmas.
How about you? Do you get snow around or on Christmas where you live?
Now, let’s introduce our current hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Cat from Cat’s Wire is a bookworm, movie fan, crazy cat lady, armed with beads, cabs, wire and a very jumpy brain which loves to go down rabbit holes!
Rena from Fine, Whatever writes about style, midlife, and the “fine whatever” moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she’s been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
I’m thrilled to introduce you to my new space, Between The Bookends! Whether you’re a familiar face from Grace Filled Moments (Hi There!) or a brand new friend, I’m Paula, and I’m excited to have you here. This little corner of the internet will be a cozy little oasis for our shared love for all things books and writing.
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to. Feel free to link your posts about
Some husbands show their wives their love by buying them flowers or chocolate. My husband shows me love by buying me books and I’m here for it.
A couple of months ago he bought me My Beloved, the new book by Jan Karon, for my birthday/early Christmas gift. I haven’t read it yet because I gave it to my mom to read first.
Yesterday The Husband went Christmas shopping for the kids and came home with gifts for them but also a pretty copy of A Christmas Carol for me.
It’s a reproduction of a reproduction but that doesn’t matter to me. I love it, and I love how it includes the original introduction and preface that was in the 1922 version. To explain, there was a version of Dicken’s original version of A Christmas Carol published in 1922 by the National Book Trade Provident Society. Their version was republished this year by another publisher. So, a reproduction of a reproduction.Whatever it is, I love it. It’s little and cute and inside it features an introduction by GK Chesterton and original illustrations published in the original A Christmas Carol.
I read the story to my son several years ago so Monday I plan to start reading it to Little Miss.
This week we received our first snowfall of the year, and since the temps dropped so fast afterward, we still have snow on the ground and probably will for a while. Temps are going to stay very low for several more days.
I took this photo at my parents yesterday. I love this view.
Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) 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.
We are also hosting Comfy Cozy Christmas! As Erin said on her blog, “Anything holiday related – any December holiday – at all that strikes your fancy and you write about, please think about sharing on our linky.” You can find the link for that at the top of my page in the menu or 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.
This past week I breezed through a novella called Christmas in Harmony by Phillip Gulley. I really enjoyed it. It’s part of the Harmony series by Gulley, which I recommend if you’ve never tried it.
I almost finished Rebecca and probably will finish it by tomorrow. It was very slow at first with so much melodrama and description but it picks up halfway through and now I have to read to the end, even though I did see the movie in the past. I forgot the ending of the movie so this will remind me if the two are the same.
I am taking part in the 13th annual Ho Ho Ho Readathon from November 26 to December 17th. I finished my first Christmas/winter themed book with Christmas in Harmony.
This week I’ll be starting A Christmas Carol with my daughter and also continuing Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and A Christmas Scrapbook, a short story by Phillip Gulley.
I will also be reading excerpts from Little Women and Shepherd’s Abiding (a Jan Karon book and part of the Mitford series) at some point.
If you want to know more about the challenge, hop over here:
Little Miss and I will finish Magical Melons or Caddie Woodlawn’s Family (which the name was changed to) by Carol Ryrie Brink this week. This is the sequel to Caddie Woodlawn, which we listened to on Audible. We’ve been slowly reading it along with other school books for quite a while now. Each chapter is like its own short story. I really enjoyed a chapter we read this past week about Christmas and ended up crying over it. I’ll share more about the book in a future post.
I have a Murder, She Wrote book, The Murder of Twelve, by Donald Bain on tap for sometime soon, but will probably end up reading more Christmas stories/books throughout December.
This week I watched an old movie called Ball of Fire, part of the PBS Little Women mini-series, and tried to watch a movie called Wonder Man with Danny Kaye but couldn’t get into it.
I honestly can’t remember what else I watched this past week so I guess it wasn’t very exciting.
Today I will be watching some sort of Christmas movie but I am not sure which one yet.
I added a couple thousand words to Gladwynn Grant Goes Back to School last week.
I am listening (off and on) to Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Now It’s Your Turn
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this. You can copy my blog graphic to your computer if you want to participate in my link party or you can join the other awesome link ups below.
Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot, where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.Please feel free to post new blog posts or old ones you want to bring attention to again.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
We had our first snowfall in Northern Pennsylvania this week. It was only about three or four inches but the temperatures dropped very fast afterward so it is still on the ground and still a bit icy. When it gets icy around here, I can’t get the car out of my steep driveway so I am somewhat stranded. I was also stranded this week because Little Miss caught a small, quick cold that gave her a low grade fever only one day but left her draining and blowing her nose for most of the week.
So far no one else has had it. Do you have snow where you live?
Now, let’s introduce our current hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Cat from Cat’s Wire is a bookworm, movie fan, crazy cat lady, armed with beads, cabs, wire and a very jumpy brain which loves to go down rabbit holes!
Rena from Fine, Whatever writes about style, midlife, and the “fine whatever” moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she’s been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
I’m Val , Canadian born, Vancouver BC raised! Here you’ll find top resources to plan your dream trip: In the USA, Canada & Europe. We are experts in travel to Portugal , the Pacific Northwest, Vegas and other Hidden Gems Around the Globe. Thx for joining my journey!
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
This week we could choose whichever topic we wanted so I chose: Top Ten Quotes from my favorite Christmas book (or one of them): Shepherds Abiding by Jan Karon.
A description of the book:
Experience the joys of a small town Christmas in this novel in the beloved Mitford series from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jan Karon.
Millions of Americans have found Mitford to be a favorite home-away-from-home, and countless readers have long wondered what Christmas in Mitford would be like. The eighth Mitford novel provides a glimpse, offering a meditation on the best of all presents: the gift of one’s heart.
Since he was a boy, Father Tim has lived what he calls “the life of the mind” and has never really learned to savor the work of his hands. When he finds a derelict nativity scene that has suffered the indignities of time and neglect, he imagines the excitement in the eyes of his wife, Cynthia, and decides to undertake the daunting task of restoring it. As Father Tim begins his journey, readers are given a seat at Mitford’s holiday table and treated to a magical tale about the true Christmas spirit.
I try to read either all of this book, or parts of it, each year at Christmastime.
“Lord, make me a blessing to someone today!” He uttered aloud his grandmother’s prayer, raised his umbrella, and, beneath the sound of rain thudding onto black nylon, turned left, and headed to Lord’s Chapel to borrow a volume of Jonathan Edwards from the church library.
The day after his visit to Oxford Antiques, he realized that the angel had seized his imagination. He was surprised by a vivid recollection of her face, which he’d found beautiful, and the piety of her folded hands and downcast eyes. As for the missing wing, wasn’t that a pretty accurate representation of most of the human horde, himself certainly included?
In the back room of Happy Endings, Hope finished reading the second letter on her desk and held it for a moment close to her heart. She had never received a love letter before. She was, of course, the only one who would think it a love letter, as there was no mention of love in it, at all. Yet she could feel love beating in each word, in every stroke of the pen, just as it beat in the heart and soul of the chaplain of Hope House and expressed itself in everything he did.
His father gazed at him for an instant more, then walked up the steps and into the house. He sat there, numb with a mixture of joy and bewilderment. In one brief and startling moment, he realized that he was, after all, seen — and perhaps even loved.
When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.
Blast it! No! He would not forfeit the glad rewards of this rare, unhurried moment. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and closed his eyes. Thank you, Lord, for the grace of an untroubled spirit, and for the blessings which are ours in numbers too great to count or even recognize. . . . He sat for some time, giving thanks, and then, without precisely meaning to, remembering. . . .
But, no. He didn’t want the Holy Family to go faster. He’d developed a special tenderness toward the last of this worshipful assembly, and wanted to give them his best effort, his deepest concentration. Indeed, it seemed to be the wont of most people in a distracted and frantic world to blast through an experience without savoring it or, later, reflecting upon it.
“I brought it home and thought, Timothy gave Hélène his beautiful bronze angel, I want to do this for him. Because if I could do it, it would represent the very reason Christ was born. He came to put us back together, and make us whole.”
“Christmas is real,” he said. “It’s all true.”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s all true.
“Merry Christmas, my love.”
“Merry Christmas, dearest.”
“I’m a sinner saved by grace, Lew, not by works. It doesn’t matter a whit that I’m a priest. What matters is that we surrender our hearts to God and receive His forgiveness, and come into personal relationship with His Son.”
Bonus: He leaned down and took her chin in his hand and kissed her, lingering. “I like to see your eyelashes go up and down and the little stars come out of you.”
If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.
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.
Welcome to the A Good Book & A Cup of Tea (A Monthly Bookish Link Party)!! This link-up is for book and reading posts or anything related to books and reading (even movies based on books!).
1. For Bloggers, you can link unlimited posts related to books and reading. They can be older posts or newer posts. These can be posts about what you’re reading, book reviews, books you’ve added to your shelf, reading habits, what you’ve been reading, about trips to the bookstore, etc. You get the drift.
2. Link to a specific blog post (URL of a specific post, not just your website). Feel free to link up any older posts that may need some love and attention, too.
3. Please visit at least two other bloggers on this list and comment on their posts. Have fun! Interact! Get some book recommendations.
4. Readers can click the blue button below to visit blog posts.
5. If you add a link, you are giving me permission to share and link back to your post(s).
Thank you to those who linked up last month. Here are some highlights from that link party:
My feelings about The Tale of Hill Top Farm by Susan Wittig Albert are mixed, and part of that is because I listened to others who had read it and said it was something it actually isn’t.
Many who recommended this book, and even a couple of the descriptions, suggested it was about Beatrix Potter — the children’s book author — acting as an amateur sleuth.
If you read the description on Goodreads, though, which I did not read before I read the book, Beatrix isn’t the sleuth. The pets in town are, however.
Here is that description:
The author of Peter Rabbit and other creature tales, Beatrix Potter is still, after a century, beloved by children and adults the world over. In this first Cottage Tale, Albert introduces Beatrix, an animal lover who has just bought a farm in England’s beautiful Lake District. As Beatrix tries to win over the hearts of her fellow villagers, her animal friends set out to solve a mystery all their own.
And that is what happens in this book. We read about Beatrix getting to know the villagers, trying to overcome a tragedy in her life, and trying to figure out where she is going to live in the village after the farm she’s purchased is already being lived in by the family that runs it. Meanwhile, there has been a possible suspicious death and the theft of a couple of objects and some money and the pets in the village decide to solve the crimes.
I had expected Beatrix to be the main character and for her to do some of the sleuthing. Instead, she is more of a background character when it comes to the mystery, though she does throw in a couple of tips to the other three or four characters from the village who are also subjects of this book. The animals, who talk amongst themselves but aren’t understood by the human characters, solve the crimes while the humans seem to mainly ponder things.
Beatrix actually doesn’t solve anything. In at least one case, the mystery is solved while she is there, but she is simply told what has happened.
And you know what? It just needs to be said. There are too many characters in this book. There were four or five points of view going on with just the humans and several more with rabbits, mice, cats, and a dog.
It was confusing. I couldn’t remember who said what to who because two of the female human characters seemed so similar. If even two characters had been dropped, it would have made things a lot easier to keep track of.
I have to agree with what a reviewer on Goodreads said about the book: “Less of a mystery and more of life in a small town with well-drawn characters and a sentimental fantasy of Beatrix Potter’s life in Sawrey.”
Does it being “less of a mystery and more of a life in a small town” make it a bad book?
No, but having too many characters and too much background information about characters that never coincided with the overall plot, did make it a less of an enjoyable read for me.
Even with not being a fan of all of the POVs and with it not being as much of an enjoyable read as I hoped, I am willing and interested in reading another book in the series.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to. Feel free to link your posts about
Yesterday the kids and I went to see The Husband in the play version of It’s A Wonderful Life. Attending the play has become such a wonderful kick off to the Christmas season for us since he was also in the play last year.
This play is set up as a “radio play” where the characters are radio personalities presenting a play for an audience who only had access to a radio not a TV. This means the characters are reading from scripts but there are sound effects and voice changes that bring it all alive.
Each actor plays a couple of different characters so they have to change their voices or tones throughout. The Husband played four different characters but my favorite was Mr. Potter who I think he pulled off perfectly.
After the play an older man approached by husband and told him he had brought his blind adult son. The son thanked my husband and said the production came alive for him because of the voice changes and the sound effects added in.
My husband was so touched that the production meant that much to the young man, especially since there wasn’t a huge crowd there.
I hope more people attend the production today because the play version almost touched me more than the movie version, which I totally loved. I teared up a couple of times during it — especially at the end when George realizes how special his life is and how lost those in his life would be if he’d never been born.
It’s also interesting to note that Philip Van Doren Stern who wrote the original short story was born in the small town where my husband performed the play. He didn’t grow up there, but he was born there in 1900 and his father lived there for a time. (source Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Van_Doren_Stern)
If you don’t know the story, Stern wrote the short story for Christmas cards he and his daughter were sending out in 1943. He tried to get the story published but publishers didn’t pick it up so he self-published it. Later the short story was used for a full play and then for a screenplay for what has become one of the most famous Christmas movies of all time.
Now that we’ve seen the play, I feel like I can fully immerse myself in the Christmas season and am looking forward to making a list of Christmas movies to watch and Christmas books to read.
I thought I should mention here like I did in yesterday’s post that the girl kitten I’ve been writing about that was dropped off at our house a few weeks ago, is not actually a girl. We discovered some appendages this week that girl kittens do not have so our girl kitten is a boy kitten, but we are sticking with the name Cas.
It explains a lot about his behavior and his incessant yowling too.
Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) 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.
We will also be hosting Comfy Cozy Christmas starting tomorrow! As Erin said on her blog, “Anything holiday related – any December holiday – at all that strikes your fancy and you write about, please think about sharing on our linky.”
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.
Last night I finished The Tale of Hill Top Farm by Susan Wittig Albert.
The concept of this book was a good one — Beatrix Potter, the children’s book author as a amateur sleuth — but when I finally got into the book, she wasn’t actually doing much sleuthing. She wasn’t even really the main character at times. There also wasn’t a ton of real “mystery” involved.
Instead, Beatrix wandered around talking to people and drawing pictures and meeting children while other characters (including the talking animals who were only understood by each other) did most of the solving of the very simple mysteries. There was more than one POV while I thought Beatrix would provide the main one.
The main mystery was a bit of a letdown for me in the end, but overall, the book had some cute, sweet moments. This was definitely a very, very light mystery with no gruesome of violent aspects (other than an owl making a meal out of some rats) and that isn’t a bad thing at all.
I don’t know if I will read more of this series or not yet. I’ll have to be in the mood for a leisurely wander rather than a strict whodunit if I do. That happens a lot so I’m sure book two will be read sometime in 2026.
I’m still reading Rebecca by Daphne DeMauier and will probably finish it this week unless I get wrapped up in Christmas movies and specials.
I might finish Nancy Drew: The Triple Hoax but I won’t finish it in time for Nancy Drew November.
I’m not really liking it, so it isn’t a priority for me.
I just ordered a copy of Letters From Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien and it won’t be here until a week before Christmas, but I think that will be perfect timing.
I plan to read at least one more Agatha Christie before the year ends and I think it will be Partners in Crime, my first Tommy and Tuppence mystery.
I also hope to read another Murder, She Wrote book but that might wait until after my Christmas reads, which including reading at least parts of Shepherds Abiding by Jan Karon and Little Woman.
I watched my first James Cagney movie, Strawberry Blond, this week. I enjoyed it and will be watching it for my planned Winter of Cagney that I will be starting in January. I will be doing that at the same time I rewatch all of the Thin Man movies in order. It will be a fun month of old movies.
I also watched my second Bette Davis movie, Another Man’s Poison, (my first was All About Eve) this past week, and hope to watch more of her movies soon for Spring of Bette.
I watched The Barney Miller Show and episodes of TJ Hooker and Hunter with The Husband. We also watched a Murder, She Wrote episode. This week I hope to watch some more old movies, maybe a couple of Christmas movies, and some movies based on Agatha Christie books or stories. I also hope to watch at least one The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries episode so I can recap it on the blog.
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this. You can copy my blog graphic to your computer if you want to participate in my link party or you can join the other awesome link ups below.
Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot, where we offer a place for bloggers to link up and get a fresh set of eyes on their posts. We also feature one blog a week, letting our readers know about the blog and providing a link so readers can learn more about it.Please feel free to post new blog posts or old ones you want to bring attention to again.
Look for the post to go live about 9:30 PM EST on Thursdays.
I hope everyone in the U.S. had a great Thanksgiving today (yesterday if you are reading this Friday). My small family spent the day with my parents and ate turkey prepared by my husband. He did a wonderful job. It was one of the best turkeys I’ve ever had at Thanksgiving. Little Miss and I made a couple of pumpkin pies and then I made potatoes and sweet potato soup (usually it’s sweet potato casserole, but Little Miss wanted something different. Then when it came to dinner she wouldn’t eat it but that’s another story. Kids!)
Now, let’s introduce our current hosts for the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot:
Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!
Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household – The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!
Lisa from Boondock Ramblingsshares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.
Cat from Cat’s Wire is a bookworm, movie fan, crazy cat lady, armed with beads, cabs, wire and a very jumpy brain which loves to go down rabbit holes!
Rena from Fine, Whatever writes about style, midlife, and the “fine whatever” moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she’s been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.
We would love to have additional Co-Hosts to share in the creativity and fun! If you think this would be a good fit for you and you like having fun (come on, who doesn’t!) while still being creative, drop one of us an email and someone will get back with you!
WTJR will be highlighting a different blogger each week this year! We invite you to stop by their blog, take a look around and say hello!
I’m a story teller. Everyday, I make someone listen to me as I talk about how I caught my bus last minute, which YouTube video I watched, why my little brother made me laugh, or what I think about a politician who’s acting up. Throughout my youth, I would victimize my mom, siblings or a fellow school buddy for this purpose. When I graduated from university, it hit me that I would no longer meet the people I’d been seeing for the past four years! And of course, it was a given that they were gonna miss hearing about my adventures… :P Besides, I thought having a blog would be a great way to keep in touch. It’s also fun to read a piece written by someone you personally know or have been following for sometime.
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to. Feel free to link your posts about
Before I get too far into this post, I want to mention that today is my husband’s birthday and my brother and sister-in-law’s anniversary.
Happy birthday to The Husband and happy anniversary to Butthead and Kim. Er….Bryan and Kim.
I have to say that I feel a bit bad telling this next story, considering it is my husband’s birthday, but I am going to do so anyhow because he’s a good sport. And please know that this story is shared in good humor, not as an actual complaint – since you can’t hear my tone which would be one tinged with laughter.
Last night he picked me up from my parents where I had been visiting them after he dropped me off. He suggested I sit in the back with our dog who tries to push her way into the middle console and bump against his arm while he’s trying to drive if there isn’t someone in the backseat with her.
I did so and when we got home, after dark mind you, my husband asked the dog if she was going to exit through the front door or would wait for me to move so she could exit through the back door. The dog stayed sitting next to me, so The Husband closed the door and walked into the house.
I thought he was going to go turn the outside light on and come back to help me with my bags, but instead when the dog and I got out of the car I found out we were totally alone in the driveway and backyard.
We’ve been married for 23-years and the man didn’t even open the door for me. Gasp! I was certain he would look out the back door to see if I was coming but after a few minutes, Zooma the Wonder Dog and I were still outside in the cold. I went inside and said, “Hey! Thanks a lot for leaving me!”
I found The Husband staring at The Avengers movie with the kids.
“I could have been eaten by a bear!” I told him.
“You wouldn’t have been eaten by a bear,” he insisted. “We’re located in a fairly safe neighborhood with a fairly well lit driveway. You were fine.”
For the record, we live on the end of a street at the far end of a tiny town, surrounded by the woods, and a couple of months ago Zooma the Wonder Dog had a stand off with a black bear in our backyard – a few hundred feet from where I was standing (alone and in semi-darkness).
“I just read a story about a black bear chasing a boy into a Dollar General in Pennsylvania!” I told him.
“What part of Pennsylvania?” he asked.
“Pittsburgh area but we still have bears around here you know!”
Chivalry is dead, ya’ll. Dead.
Something else that is also dead is my desire to worry about the number of books I am reading each year.
In 2026 I am simply going to read whatever I want and take as long as I want to read the books I choose. It isn’t that I worry about how many books I’ve read in a year too often anyhow, but sometimes I do find myself feeling bad I’m not reading more, usually because I am comparing myself to other bloggers or readers on social media.
It’s really silly to compare ourselves to others, especially at my age, but luckily it is a very brief comparison when I do so.
This year, I chose books I wanted to read, not books others said I should read, and I hope to do the same next year. I still want to list the books I read in my reading journal because I enjoy doing that and looking back at them at the end of the year, partially so I can recommend them (or not) to others, but I think next year I’ll simply list and not number. Or maybe I’ll just stop overthinking it? That might work too. *wink*
Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) 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.
We will also be hosting Comfy Cozy Christmas starting the day after Thanksgiving! As Erin said on her blog, “Anything holiday related – any December holiday – at all that strikes your fancy and you write about, please think about sharing on our linky.”
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.
I finished The Whispering Statue last week. It’s a Nancy Drew mystery and it had a lot of plot issues, but yet, it was also an interesting mystery, or had interesting aspects.
I am still reading Rebecca by Daphne De Maurier — a few chapters a week.
I added The Tale of Hilltop Farm by Susan Wittig Albert to break up the drama of Rebecca.
Here is a quick description of the book from online: “The author of Peter Rabbit and other tales, Beatrix Potter is still, after a century, beloved by children and adults worldwide. In this first Cottage Tale, Albert introduces Beatrix, an animal lover and Good Samaritan with a knack for solving mysteries. With help from her entourage of talking animal friends, Beatrix sets out to win over the human hearts of Sawrey, where she’s just bought an old farm–and plans to stay.”
Up soon I plan to read an Agatha Christie book but I haven’t decided which one yet.
I have been watching mostly old shows again but also movies with the kids who are making their way through the Marvel movies. This would be a first time for Little Miss (11) and many times for The Boy (19).
This past week it was The Avengers and Iron Man 3. I hate Iron Man 3 so I tried to do other things while it was on. It was like watching a train wreck. It is the worst of the series for the Iron Man part. We just skipped the second Thor movie (The Dark World) because it is also horrible.
I also started a Bob Hope movie called I’ll Take Sweden. Frankie Avalon is also in it and it’s ridiculous. I had to go to bed before I could finish it.
And I watched a couple of YouTubers this week, including The Cottage Fairy who has been gone for a long time after having a baby but put up a new video this week.
I’ve been listening to The Jack Benny Show at night before bed.
Now It’s Your Turn
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this. You can copy my blog graphic to your computer if you want to participate in my link party or you can join the other awesome link ups below.
