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.
Now, let’s introduce our 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.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
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!
A little about Sally: My life is a musical. And during this strange pandemic year, I am feeling more than ever like Alice in (my top 10 favorite movie) the 1951 Disney “Alice in Wonderland,” living in a world of my own. With so much time and attention devoted to my idiosyncratic obsessions and the analysis thereof (because there is no such thing as a good hobby that doesn’t involve building spreadsheets), I realized that the only missing piece was a written narrative.
I thought: “Oh sure, what the world needs now is another middle-aged fat lady blogging about clothing, outfits, capsules, and wardrobes. Not really. But also…maybe yes?” Because on reflection, it’s not as though there are so many of them already. And there certainly is not one that has enough rabbit content!
So here we are!
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.
Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you
Isaiah 46:4 NIV
I need this verse right now. There is a lot going on in my life these days but I’ll write about that in another post someday.
For now, I’ll share that Friday was a weird day. I spent it painting rocks with my daughter in our yard and that ended when a bumble bee took off after me and I mean took off. It had it in for me. It stung me twice in the stomach after climbing down my pants (yes, my pants) and then proceeded to come after me again when I brushed it off, climbing in my shirt under my arm and stinging me again right after it crawled all over my face.
And, yes, it was a bumble bee and not a yellow jacket. It was possessed.
Surprisingly, the stings actually didn’t hurt hardly at all. They were swollen and red and I was convinced I was going to have a reaction because I’m a hypochondriac freak but in the end I was okay.
What sucked was how I was being brave and pushing aside some of my weird physical symptoms I deal with on a daily basis and playing with Little Miss in the yard and this is what happened.
That’s sort of my life story. I’ve always been afraid to fly. One day I probably will, and — well … let’s not even go there, shall we?
The thing is, that little bumblebee was actually cute. When I looked down at my waistband he was peering up over it at me all fluffy and cute. Then I started screaming and he flew off and came back at me full force. Looks can truly be deceiving.
The Unlikely Yarn of the Dragon Lady and Carry On, Jeeves.
This week I will be reading But First, Murder by Bee Littlefield and A Nancy Drew Mystery, The Password to Larkspur Lane.
Little Miss and I are reading The Good Master by Karen Seredy and at night we are listening to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, but I’ve either been too tired or can’t hear it well, so I’ve missed the whole story. Luckily it is one of my planned fall reads.
The Husband is reading Hostage by Robert Crais.
The Boy is listening to Red Tide, a Warhammer book.
We got Netflix for a month and only a month. The price for that service is absolutely nuts to me. My daughter wanted to watch KPop Demon Hunters and my husband and I want to watch The Thursday Murder Club.
I did watch Find Me Falling, a movie with Harry Connick Jr. that I had heard about earlier this year. It was okay. It used a trope I totally hate, and there were parts that fell flat to me, but it was heartwarming and that was what I needed.
Last week, I also watched The Long Hot Summer for the Summer of Angela and then several Murder, She Wrote episodes. I was very disappointed in one, though, where Jessica let the murderer go because he was old and a friend, and the victim was a member of the mob.
I also watched another episode of Ludwig.
Tonight, we are watching the new Superman movie because The Husband and The Boy watched it and loved it. Little Miss saw it with them but wasn’t terribly impressed.
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.
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.
Let’s get right to it and introduce our 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.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
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!
A little about Nancy: Colors 4 Health, the place where colors and a healthy lifestyle intersect. I’m a Health and Lifestyle Writer and Wellness Blogger, and Author of “Colors of Joy: A Woman’s Guide for Self-Discovery, Balance, and Bliss.”
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.
This past week was a tame week for the most part. Things picked up Friday when I picked up a friend of Little Miss’s and they had a sleepover before we all went to visit an old-school mall near Scranton, Pa. yesterday morning.
The mall has a small selection of stores still left but like many malls of today there are a lot of empty store spaces.
I didn’t walk as far as anyone else but one of the most exciting things for Little Miss was finding an escalator to ride up and down on.
That’s the main reason she wanted to go to a mall. She’d heard me tell stories about going on an escalator at the mall we used to go to when I was growing up and wanted to experience it herself.
Her brother and dad were able to visit the mall about two weeks ago but that was the first day of a two-week illness for her and me (which would have been over sooner if it hadn’t been for that stinking sinus drainage she got! Poor kid!). I had never visited that mall. The one we used to go to was in New York State and the other one was an hour south but has since closed.
If you’re new here, we live in a very rural area that requires us to drive about an hour in any direction to find larger stores/malls/movie theaters, etc.
We don’t have a lot of buildings with escalators or elevators near us, so it is quite a treat when we get to visit one. I can’t believe it’s taken us until Little Miss is almost 11 to take her somewhere she could ride an escalator!
Yesterday there was a mechanical horse ride at the mall, but The Husband couldn’t get the change machine to work so Little Miss simply announced she wanted to go back on the escalator again. That was just as exciting to her and her friend as a mechanical horse ride.
The escalator was in a JC Penny Store. Yes, this mall still had a JC Penny and it has two stories.
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs knows that I don’t have much of a social life or get out much so she challenged me to go into a store and buy one thing I wouldn’t normally buy — like lipstick (she knows I don’t wear makeup so that’s probably why she suggested that. Ha!) I went into the first store I came to, which was Claire’s and grabbed a planner, some hairbands that were on sale, and tinted lip balm (when I originally wrote this I accidentally typed “tainted lip balm”. Well, that definitely would be something I don’t normally buy!). It shows how long it has been since I’ve been at a mall because when that woman with her black lipstick and black hair, wearing a Halloween costume in August, said to me, “That will be $42,” I went all old lady on her.
“I’m sorry? How much? What in the world did I buy?”
Turns out the lip gloss was $10 each and I had grabbed an extra one for Little Miss because she likes to pretend to do makeup with her friends. The planner was $15 and I do not think that they gave me the sales price on the hairbands.
Live and learn! And what I learned is I really don’t miss malls as much as I thought I d.
The kids had a lot of fun though and we even found a Barnes and Noble down the road to visit for a little while. Each girl picked out a book to read.
They also came home with a candle, a mug, a small stuffed animal, and friendship necklaces each. I loved how excited they were with those little things, but they did try for $10 little hamsters at Barnes and Noble which I turned down because we were there for books and not toys and had already gotten a couple of stuffed animals.
That’s one change from when we used to visit Barnes and Noble back in the day (20-some years ago) — there wasn’t a whole toy section, that I remember anyhow. I am sure bookstores are simply trying to diversify, but I like my bookstores to mainly carry books.
We only grabbed one book while we were there because I just ordered several books from Thriftbooks and I couldn’t think of any books I wanted that were new. The Husband picked up an Erle Stanley Gardner that we will share since we both like his books (or some of them anyhow).
I did want to look at journals, but I’ve gotten used to buying $5 dollar store journals and couldn’t bring myself to spend $18 or more on one. They had a huge 50 percent off cart of journals, but I didn’t see that until we were getting ready to leave so I left that for another day.
The mall and other stores aren’t super far away so we could definitely visit again someday soon.
I do feel like I’ve gotten old, though. The visit to B&N didn’t excite me as much as I thought it would. Maybe it was because I was having a bit of a stinky autoimmune day or maybe it’s because I’ve discovered I like little stores with used books more than I like big stores full of new books. Plus, there are so many books that I just wouldn’t read — like all those BookTok books — out in prominent places which means I would have had to hunt for any books I would really want to read.
Overall, it was a really nice trip, and I would love to go again when I am having a better health day and had had a little more sleep the night before. One of the nicest things about the trip was seeing the beautiful green hills of Pennsylvania. Summer is winding down and some trees are changing already, but for the most part green is dominating our views and I’m fine with that. I am, however, looking forward to the cooler temps of this week.
This morning as I got ready to cast my Sunday morning episode of Just A Few Acres Farm to the TV, I saw a notice that Bob from the Bob and Brad Physical Therapy YouTube Channel had passed away. It hit me very hard as I have watched this channel for years and gone there numerous times over the years to get ideas on how to help the various cricks and pains I get in my neck and muscles.
Bob was diagnosed with cerebral ataxia a few years ago, and it affected how he spoke and walked. I had no idea it would take his life, but apparently, it caused a cardiac event the week before last, and he passed suddenly. Brad and their new host (he stepped in a few years ago) and Bob’s son spoke about Brad during the episode announcing his death and I was a sobbing mess.
I was happy Bob donated his organs and saved at least three more lives, if not more, but it was so depressing for me to hear about I was glad I had not made plans to do anything today.
Right before I was about to post this today, I noticed my blog stats had gone crazy. I usually get 200-250 views a day, and yesterday I had over 5,00,0 but with no comments to match that I can see. The visitors are actually lower than I get too. And all the views are from the Netherlands. That’s all I know! Does anyone know where to find out where these views are coming from? All I can find is “Google search” and I don’t even see a ton of views on any one post. I am beginning to think something is wrong with WordPress’s stats.
I have a monthly book-related link party if you are interested. You can find the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea link party at the top of my page or here. It is for posts about books that you are reading, have read, book reviews — just anything book-related really. So even posts about book collections, authors etc. etc.
We will be holding another one next Sunday, August 24th from 1 to around 3 p.m.
The Crafternoons are events where we gather on Zoom and craft at our respective homes and chat while we work on various projects. We are calling them drop-in crafternoons because you can drop in and out during the time we are on (usually from about 1 to 3 p.m. EST US time). No need to stay the whole time if you can’t. Come late if you want or leave early.
If you want to join in, email Erin at crackcrumblife@gmail.com and she will add you to the mailing list.
This past week I finished Dave Barry Isn’t Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry (humor columnist for the Miami Herald). It was very funny! It was a collection of his columns from 2000.
Right now I am reading Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse and will probably finish it this week.
I am also reading But First, Murder (A Betti Bryant Mystery) by Bee Littlefield and Nancy Drew Mystery: Password to Larkspur Lane by Carolyn Keene (I’m sure I’ll finish it this week. These books are so short.).
I’ll be reading Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan next. This is an autobiographical book by Agatha Christie about some of her travels with her second husband, who was an archaeologist. I read the first couple of pages already, and her humor really comes through. I am looking forward to getting into it more.
Little Miss and I are reading The Good Master by Kate Seredy.
This weekend The Husband and I watched an episode of Rizzoli and Isles, a show I’d totally forgotten about. I watched a Murder, She Wrote episode and a coupe of Quantum Leap episodes. I also watched a couple episodes of my favorite farmer’s YouTube Channel — Just A Few Acres.
For my Summer of Angela feature, I watched A Life At Stake.
I made some progress on Gladwynn Grant Goes Back to School this past week and hope to make a lot more during this upcoming week. I am shooting for a November release. We will see how that goes!
I hope to finish up The Unlikely Yarn of the Dragon Lady by Sharon J. Mondagon this week. I hadn’t been listening to it consistently so it’s taken a bit for me to finish it. This week I plan to find some time during dishwashing, etc. to listen.
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.
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.
Let’s introduce our 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.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
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!
A little about Erin’s blog: I try to create a culture of celebration in our home. For life, for the little things, for wonder and for whimsy. I try to find the beauty around us and teach my son Wyatt to find it, and appreciate it and love it as well.
We are a homeschool family, and we love it. We love the freedom it gives us to explore a topic or idea more deeply, and I like that I can adjust our schedule around Wyatt’s other needs. Wyatt has cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and his week often has therapy, doctor’s appointments, naps peppered throughout which would make a traditional school schedule difficult. He is also an asynchronous learner, and I love that I can tailor learning to where Wyatt is at that moment.
We have a house full of animals and will probably add more because we like a zoo. We have one cat, Miso, who is a rescue. She is 14 years old and my little floofy girl. We also have one leopard gecko, Luna, a pictus gecko named Harlow, a pacman frog named Freddy, and two crested geckos, Applejack and Oliver. We love all of our little friends!
My husband Billy, Wyatt, and I are all curious, creative, stubborn humans which makes for some fun times around here.
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
“I made up my mind that I would pop back and do the strong, manly thing by lying low in my flat and telling Jeeves to inform everybody who called that I wasn’t at home.”
The Inimitable Jeeves was my first P.G. Wodehouse book and I enjoyed it so much I’m already reading another one in the Jeeves series.
This book was originally presented as a collection of short stories which appeared in The Strand magazine in the U.K. The stories were later compiled into a novel. The first collection of short stories was Carry On, Jeeves, which I am reading now.
A little background on this series of short stories/books first.
Bertie Wooster is a “English gentleman” who is considered one of the “idle rich.” He doesn’t have a job. He mainly lives off his rich aunt Agatha and, probably, a trust fund.
Jeeves is Bertie’s valet or male attendant, if you don’t know what valet means. I wasn’t totally sure of the meaning of the word “valet” myself when I first heard the term years ago.
Jeeves gets Bertie out of the many predicaments Bertie gets himself into by being too nice or too arrogant by thinking he can fix a situation. In this book Bertie gets himself in trouble in a variety of ways, including helping his old school chum Bingo who is in love with a new woman every other month.
He also has to try to dodge his Aunt Agatha who is always trying to marry him off because she feels he is simply too lazy.
“It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair,” she says at one point. “Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry!”
The tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic humor in this book was exactly what I needed right now. Honestly, it is a type of humor that I feel like I am going to need consistently from now on. Because the chapters are short stories all their own it makes it easy to read a chapter here or there, put it down for a bit, and then pick it back up and still know what is going on
I love how Jeeves not only always solves the problems that Bertie has but how he also gets away with lowkey (and sometimes not so lowkey) insulting Bertie throughout.
Speaking to a valet who was going to fill in for him when he was on vacation, Jeeves says of Bertie, “You will find Mr. Wooster an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible — quite negligible.”
Bertie is, of course, offended.
“I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubt whether it’s humanly possible to tick Jeeves off. Personally, I didn’t even have a dash at it. I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do somethings — appointments and people’s birthdays, and letters to post and all that, but not an absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.”
Insults or not, Jeeves is always there for Bertie, especially when he thinks Bertie is wearing the wrong outfit or the wrong piece of clothing for specific outfits.
“The cummerbund?” I said in a careless, debonair way, passing it off. “Oh, rather!”
“I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“The effect, sir, is loud in the extreme.”
I tackled the blighter squarely. I mean to say, nobody knows better than I do that Jeeves is a master mind and all that, but dash it, a fellow must call his soul his own. You can’t be a serf to your valet. Besides, I was feeling pretty low and the cummerbund was the only thing which could cheer me up.
“You know, the trouble with you, Jeeves,” I said. “is that you’re too — what’s the word I want? Too bally insular. You can’t realise that you aren’t in Piccadilly all the time. In a place like this a bit of colour and touch of the poetic is expected of you. Why, I’ve just seen a fellow downstairs in a morning suit of yellow velvet.”
“Nevertheless, sir —”
“Jeeves,” I said firmly, “my mind is made up. I am feeling a little low spirited and need cheering. Besides, what’s wrong with it? This cummerbund seems to me to be called for. I consider that it has a rather Spanish effect. A touch of the hidalgo. Sort of Vicente y Blasco What’s-his-name stuff. The jolly old hidalgo off to the bull fight.”
“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves coldly.
Oh gosh, I love their banter and how Bertie calls everyone “the blighter.” I now go around saying this to myself when thinking about certain people in my life.
I love Bertie’s struggle to be a proper English gentleman while also trying to have fun and rebel against the upper crust he is a part of. There is a lot of satirical commentary and digs on the rich of England in these stories.
I have been told there was a television show in the 1990s based on the stories, starring Hugh Laurie, but I’m not ready to watch it yet. I prefer to hold on to the versions of Bertie and Jeeves I have formed in my imagination for now.
As I mentioned earlier, I am currently reading Carry On, Jeeves and plan to read more of the stories and books in the series in the future.
According to the web site Fantastic Fiction, there are 15 books in the series:
My Man Jeeves (1919) The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) Carry on, Jeeves (1925) Very Good, Jeeves (1930) Thank You, Jeeves (1934) Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) The Code of the Woosters (1938) Joy in the Morning (1946) aka Jeeves in the Morning The Mating Season (1949) Ring for Jeeves (1953) aka The Return of Jeeves Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954) Jeeves in the Offing (1960) aka How Right You Are, Jeeves Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963) Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971) aka Jeeves and the Tie That Binds Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974) aka The Cat-Nappers
Have you ever read this book or any of the Jeeves books? How about any of Wodehouse’s other books?
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
After I posted the blog post I decided to drop the list down to 10 because my summer was looking busy with some health things going on with myself, my husband, and my elderly parents.
At this point though, it looks like I should squeak out 12 books and one audiobook before all is said and done on August 28.
I made some substitutions and tossed some books from this list altogether, not because they were bad (in most cases), but because I am a mood reader and they didn’t fit my mood this summer.
First, my original list:
Summer of Yes by Courtney Walsh
Between Sound and Sea by Amanda Cox
The Clue in the Diary by Carolyn Keene
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Woodhouse
Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
Spill the Jackpot by Erle Stanley Gardner
‘Tis Herself by Maureen O’Hara
Death In A Budapest Butterfly by Julia Buckley
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonassen
But First Murder by Bee Littlefield
The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie
Britt-Marie was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Midnight Dance by Joanna Davidson Politano
The Unlikely Yarn of The Dragon Lady by Sharon J. Mondragon
Now what I have read so far this summer:
All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot
The Wishing Well by Mildred Wirt
A Midnight Dance by Joanna Davidson Politano
The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie
The Clue in the Diary by Carolyn Keene
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Spill the Jackpot by Erle Stanley Gardner
Killer in the Kitchen (A Murder She Wrote book) by Donald Bain
Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
I am almost done with Dave Barry is Not Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry and will probably finish Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse before the end of the month. I’d love to say I’ll also finish The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson but. . .. oh gosh this book is so boring. Gah! I don’t know if I can get through it. I’m trying because my husband liked it and told me to read it. God bless, him for liking it, but I am seriously struggling.
I also plan to finish The Unlikely Yarn of the Dragon Lady by Sharon J. Mondragon on audiobook before the end of the month.
What I will have to decide at the end of the month is if I am going to move the books I didn’t read to my Autumn TBR, and I might do that for a couple of them. As for the others, I might not read them at all because a couple of them I tried and could not get into (The Summer of Yes being one of them).
There is a questionairre on the host blogs about what we read so far so . . .
Which book surprised you the most this month? The Scarlet Pimpernel suprised me the most because I thought it was going to be written in very old language and just not be very good. It was much better than I expected!
If your July reading experience was a weather forecast, what would it be and why? My July reading experience was a mix of sunny days and dark confusing nights (looking at you for that last one, Spill the Jackpot!)
Name a setting from your July books where you’d love (or hate) to take a summer vacation. I hated the inn in The Pale Horse. It was creepy and I didn’t enjoy the occult stuff the women did there.
If you could turn one book into a summer festival, I would turn The Scarlet Pimpernel into masquarade ball where everyone has to guess who the real Scarlet Pimpernel is.
If you do reading challenges, how are you doing this summer on your challenges? If you don’t do challenges, have you read anything interesting lately?
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
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.
I made a comment to someone in the comment section last week that the bear I saw on our back porch, and purchased a Ring camera to keep an eye on, probably would never show again.
How wrong I was.
The other night the dog was barking crazily outside. She is hooked up on a lead and I periodically walk back to check on her. Now we have a Ring camera that I can turn on and watch from my phone, but I didn’t because, well, I really didn’t think anything would happen.
The only thing that might happen is she might take off after a skunk like she did last weekend, yanking the stake to her lead out of the ground and disappearing behind our shed where she, and our son, was sprayed by a skunk.
That’s what I thought would happen anyhow but as I headed toward the back door I turned on the Ring camera from my phone and before I even looked down at it, I was at the back door looking out at Zooma face to face with a black bear, ten or twelve feet from our back door.
Zooma was barking bouncing back and forth in front of the bear, who looked quite confused honestly. I called Zooma back with a tremble in my voice, worried the bear might reach out and take out a swipe at her.
Luckily, Zooma barked a few more times but then came to me and I quickly opened the door and let her in while the bear continued to look confused.
This video does not do justice to how close the bear was to the house because of the angle of the camera. I left the audio in even though I sound like I’m crying, which I really wasn’t, but I was nervous and recovering from the virus we had so my voice sounded pretty shaky. I was just worried Zooma was going to get smacked around.
As the bear turned to leave, The Husband and I noticed he or she was limping, which was so sad to me.
I couldn’t film any longer because the bear was headed toward my neighbor’s backyard and sometimes they are out watering their garden late at night, so I wanted to warn her.
We did contact the game warden and they said they’d send someone out, but we never heard anything back. Hopefully, next week someone will update us on the condition or location of the bear.
Seeing the bear has made me very nervous but really it is a little silly to be afraid of the bear. They are black bears and aren’t really huge fans of people. They also aren’t known to attack people or, usually, pets. They simply come down looking mainly for food and our one neighbor has food out for the animals (yes, I’m pretty sure this is illegal and if not it is at least dangerous!). If you make loud noises or have a barking dog they tend to leave.
Still, I don’t relish the idea of stepping outside of my house and finding myself face to face with one.
That was the exciting part of our week. The rest of the week was spent being up weird times of the night while Little Miss coughed a lot from sinus drainage left over from the virus we had earlier in the week. We spend our days napping and trying to catch up from the weird sleep the night before.
We are still trying to recover from all of that and from the lack of sleep.
This next week I am actually going to start school for Little Miss. I wanted to do it the last couple of weeks but with being sick and recovering, that went out the window.
I have all of Little Miss’s curriculum so there is no excuse to not just get started. I’m looking forward to the upcoming year, especially art and literature, which are her and my favorite subjects.
I am still reading the same books, for the most part, but I am making progress. I finished The Scarlet Pimpernel last night. I enjoyed the book, even more so than the 1970s movie with Jane Seymour, but the ending did seem quite sudden to me. I would have liked a little more of a wrap up.
I am still reading Dave Berry Isn’t Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry. It is a collection of his columns for the Miami Herald and they are so funny.
I did not read any from Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse last week but I will be back into that this week. The Jeeves books are so funny.
I was very excited to receive a delivery this week from Thriftbooks that included two P.G. Wodehouse books, one of them a Jeeves book.
The books are Very Good, Jeeves and A Damsel in Distress. I am gathering that A Damsel in Distress is not a Jeeves book, based on the title and the description on the back, which is fine with me. I am interested in trying Wodehouse’s other books.
The order also included Nancy Drew books Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, The Whispering Statue, and The Triple Hoax, Remains to be Seen by Elizabeth Caldell, An Enola Holmes Mystery: The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer, and Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan.
I am looking forward to reading Nancy Drew: The Triple Hoax soon but first I am going to read the Nancy Drew Mystery Password to Larkspur Lane.
Little Miss is reading The Clue of the Missing Diary by Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew).
The Boy is reading/listening to Red Tithe by Robbie MacNiven.
The Husband is reading. That’s all I know right now because I forgot to ask which book he is reading. I know he finished Targeted: Beirut by Jack Carr about a week ago.
This week I watched Murder She Wrote, The Picture of Dorian Gray, episodes of Canal Boat Diaries, and a movie called Raffles, which ended terribly.
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.
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.
Our family is still recovering from the effects of a virus that hit us out of nowhere.
Our daughter has been dealing with horrible sinus drainage that has kept her and us awake. We are truly hoping to turn a corner next week. I can’t believe how long the effects lasted for a virus that didn’t even last a week. I think it would all have gone away faster if it hadn’t been for all the sleepless nights that followed it.
The weather has been sort of nice, though, despite the haze from the wildfires in Canada making everything look very dystopian.
Now, let’s introduce our 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.
Sue from Women Living Well After 50 started blogging in 2015 and writes about living an active and healthy lifestyle, fashion, book reviews and her podcast and enjoying life as a woman over 50. She invites you to join her living life in full bloom.
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!
A little about Judee: I am a retired high school teacher, author of the popular cookbook, Easy Plant-Based Soups From Farm To Ladle (which you can purchase below), wife, mother of two and grandma Judee to four adorable grandkids.
I have always loved to cook and entertain. I post heath conscious plant-based recipes that are also naturally gluten free.
I live a vegan lifestyle with a focus on nutrition, wellness, and personal development. My blog has given me a platform to share and connect with the blogging community. I’m grateful to all of my dedicated readers.
Thank you so much for joining us for our link-up!
And now some posts that were highlights for me this past week:
