Books

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Five Good Things Friday (Including a Giveaway!)

This year is sure off to a batshit crazy start, isn’t it. I hope you’re holding up okay, that you’re out there fighting the good fight, that you and your loved ones are warm and safe. If you need, as I do, a break from the endless cycle of WHAT IS GOING ON, you have come to the right place as I have a few good things to share with you.

Good Thing #1: NICOLE’S BOOK IS OUT!!!!! Listen, I am pretty sure that everyone in our cozy blogland community is aware of this by now, but if you are somehow not aware or if you don’t yet know and love Nicole, here is the quick and dirty: Nicole wrote a beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, hopeful book called Inhale, Exhale and it is now out in the world for all of us to enjoy.

I would love to send someone a copy of Nicole’s novel. That someone could be you, or it could be someone you think would love Nicole’s singular brand of wry humor and warm wisdom (which, honestly, is everyone). Just leave a comment letting me know you’re interested by next Friday, January 30, at midnight Pacific time and I will randomly choose a winner. (I’ll email the winner for details about where to send the book.)

The giveaway is now closed.

Good Thing #2: Winter Wonders Wow, literally everything good pales in comparison to Good Thing #1, so I am jumping straight into a Good Thing that many people dislike. (Including my poor husband.) We are deep into winter, and I am LOVING IT. We have so much snow! We’ve already had one snow day and a cold day and we may have another cold day today and another snow day Monday! Listen, my child has most definitely NOT been in school enough so far in 2026, but if she’s going to miss school, I’m glad it’s for snow and not for illness (that is not an invitation for illness to find us; TOUCHING ALL THE WOOD). I do not mind the cold (although I am of course deeply grateful that I have warm clothes and a warm home, without which I might feel very different), and I love the snow. It feels like magic, the way it transforms the world into something gleaming and soft. I know cold climates are not for everyone, but I adore winter and I’m trying to enjoy every frosty moment.

Good Thing #3: Freezer / Pantry Meal I am working my way through all the goodies I’ve stashed in my freezer over the past eleventy hundred months, and yesterday I was able to whip up a batch of my favorite chipotle chicken tortilla soup with items I already had. I even had a Ziploc full of diced onion, poblano, and jalapeno waiting for me in the freezer! The only thing I had to buy fresh was cilantro. And now I have a huge Tupperware full of delicious soup to get me through these wintry days. (Yes, I also made another batch of cucumber salad. It is so good.)

Good Thing #4: One Fewer Couch For over two years now, we have had an old leather couch standing awkwardly in our piano room. It didn’t go with the space, it had a huge tear in one cushion, all the other cushions were worn past salvaging. And yet there it stayed. Well. The couch is no more! My husband and I finally arranged for the trash collectors to pick it up, and we moved it to the curb earlier this week and it is GONE. All that snow sure came in handy; it was surprisingly easy to slide the couch along the snow-covered lawn.

Good Thing #5: Cat Grandpa My family and I recently left town for a long weekend, leaving the cat at home. We hired a cat sitter to come feed him twice a day (he eats wet food for breakfast and dinner and has access to dry food [and water] all day long). But I was worried that my lovely Lenny cat would be lonely with such big stretches of his day unpeopled. So my father kindly drove 30+ minutes each way to hang out with the cat, every single day we were gone. He also sent me (and Carla) videos and photos of our kitty, because he knew we’d be missing him. Kindest of all, when the weather prevented the cat sitter from getting to our kitty one evening, and Carla sent a rogue text begging her grandfather to step in, my dad immediately got into his car, prepared to make the long drive a second time that day. I assured him that Lenny had access to plenty of fresh water and dry food, so he didn’t need to brave the snow and the dark. But he was at our house first thing the next morning to make sure the cat knew he hadn’t been abandoned. Is that not the sweetest?

Okay Internet, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I hope you have some good things in your life lately, or at least that good things are on the horizon. Sending you love and warmth and cat purrs.

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Five for Friday

Happy Halloween! I know it’s not for everyone, but I adore Halloween. The costumes, the candy, the decorations. It’s all fun. 

Oddly (for me), I haven’t done much more than decorate. Okay, I haven’t done anything more than decorate. And even then, Carla did most of the decorating herself. I haven’t bought any candy, I haven’t made any Halloween treats (although there’s still time for baking!), and we didn’t even buy a pumpkin! The only jack-o-lantern around here is my ceramic one.

Why must you insist on photographing me with these strange objects, woman?!
  • Carla has been really into Halloween this year, and has been leaning into the scary side of it.We’ve been listening to some “scary” audiobooks in the car, which is so fun. Pleasingly, some of my favorite books from when I was a kid hold up pretty well. We’ve listened to as many Zilpha Keatley Snyder books as are available at my library: The Egypt Game, The Witches of Worm, and The Headless Cupid. I love how these books have a slightly supernatural element to them without being overly frightening. As a parent, I also appreciate how insightful they are about kid psychology. Carla loved them. We own the other Stanley mysteries, so hopefully we’ll get to those once we’ve finished reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which is not particularly scary at all and might even be kind of boring. We’ve been reading it for a long time and it’s kind of a slog. But in my memory it was so good! After we exhausted the Snyder audiobooks, we turned to The Dollhouse Murders, which remains an excellent novel and is, unfortunately, the only Betty Ren Wright audiobook my library carries. I see that Audible has Christina’s Ghost in its catalog, but none of Wright’s other wonderfully creepy novels. I get it, they’re old. But they are SO GOOD.  Right now, we’re listening to Doll Bones by Holly Black, another Newbury Honor Winner. It’s pretty good so far.
  • Our seasonal media hasn’t stopped at books; we’ve been watching some scary movies, too. My husband and I watched the first Scream movie with Carla. I think it holds up okay, for a 90s film. It wasn’t as scary as I remember, and Carla was unfazed. Then we watched The Sixth Sense, which I hadn’t seen since I first watched in back in the early aughts. It was much slower than I remember, and Carla didn’t seem quite as shocked by the big twist as I remember being. I suppose movies have gotten a lot twistier in the intervening decades. We tried to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I remember was a lot of fun. But wow. It is SO BAD. My husband and I have also been watching some scary movies instead of our normal nightly TV show. We’ve seen Weapons, which was excellent, and The VVitch, which was also good but in a much less horror-movie kind of way. I liked Weapons because it was kind of a mystery story disguised as a horror movie. It did have some truly graphic violence though, the kind where I had to look at my husband watching the movie instead of looking at it myself. This weekend, we plan to watch Bring Her Back. 
  • Lenny / Leo finds Halloween to be quite perplexing. But he’s rolling with it. There are a lot of fun new things to sniff and bite and knock over.
Despite appearances, no pumpkins were harmed in the taking of this photo.
  • Will this be the last year of trick-or-treating? According to Carla, she is going to be dressing up and trick-or-treating for many years to come. But some of her friends have already indicated that they aren’t dressing up next year.  I don’t mind either way. If she decides not to trick-or-treat next year, we could invite a couple of friends over to watch scary movies and hand out candy. Of course, I’m happy for my kiddo to be a kid as long as she wants to, so dressing up and trick-or-treating sounds fine to me. I have no memory of when I stopped trick-or-treating. Maybe it was in middle school? I do remember that in middle school, I started to have friends over to watch scary movies. Perhaps this wasn’t just around Halloween, though; it seems like every sleepover I went to involved some sort of horror flick. I was big into witchy stuff – I had a Ouija board that I loved and pulled out at sleepovers as often as possible. We played games like Bloody Mary and Light As a Feather, Stiff As a Board and told each other scary stories. Being scared – while knowing you were ultimately safe and secure – was such a delicious feeling. 
  • If you dressed up for Halloween, what was your favorite costume? My mom handmade me a Halloween costume every year – how she managed that, between working full time and raising two kids, is beyond me; I am a strictly Store Bought Costume kind of mom – and my all-time favorite was a fortune teller costume. My mom found this gorgeous crimson paisley material and made me a long, full skirt. I think she made me a sleeveless top out of some sort of gold gauzy material, and a belt out of some sort of gold fringe. I felt mysterious and beautiful in that outfit and I think I had her repurpose it a few years in a row. Carla has been a ton of fun things for Halloween over the years, but I think my favorite was when she was two. She loved the Super Grover segments on Sesame Street, and she specifically requested to be Super Grover for Halloween. She was adorable. 

    As I mentioned, I have not bought a single piece of Halloween candy this year. I did ask that Carla try to snag me a Snickers or a bag of Sour Patch Kids while she’s out trick-or-treating. (I would also love a Milky Way Midnight or a Skor / Heath bar, but those are few and far between.) What kind of candy will you be hoping for tonight?

    That’s right pumpkin heads. BEWARE OF CAT.
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    Thursday Chit Chat

    Oh hi there – I have a big mug of tea and a nice cold mango smoothie next to me and I’m feeling chatty. Care to sit a minute and catch up?

    The first thing on my mind is that I have been doing some Spring Shopping. You know, because once again, I hate all my clothes and nothing fits or looks remotely cute. My first purchase arrived yesterday. I got some pants and a shirt from Quince. Have you tried Quince? One of my friends swears by them – and she is always beautifully dressed, so I have had Quince on my radar for awhile. I bought a pair of wide leg ponte pants, a pair of wide leg linen pants, and a plain white T-shirt. The shipping was remarkably fast and I was so excited to try everything on. 

    The T-shirt feels amazing. It is so soft, but also feels substantial, somehow? Not flimsy, like some of those tissue Ts, which I guess is the fault of the Me and not of the T when “tissue” is right there in the name. I got it in white, and it’s not see-through, which I appreciate. What I like most about it is that it’s fitted. Most T-shirts these days seem to be so boxy, and I really need all the help I can get when it comes to approximating a waistline, so I like a shirt that is more fitted. Also! It’s not SHORT. I am long-waisted as it is, but everything is both boxy and short, and I like to keep my midriff covered; yes I know midriffs are In again, but my midriff had plenty of exposure in the 90s thank you very much.

    The linen pants were lovely, but I am not keeping them. The material is soft and hangs beautifully, and they fit just fine. However, they had what I can only describe as a little pouch that cupped my lower tummy like a precious jewel. I mean, it FELT very nice, very comforting. My lower tum was free to be itself. The thing is… when it comes to clothing, I want my lower abdomen to be smoothed and disguised, not cherished. I do not need a pooch pocket, is what I’m saying. 

    But the ponte pants. Oh my goodness. I may have ordered them in slightly the wrong size? Either that or they are designed for people who are more straight up and down than I am. But I love them so. They just FEEL so GOOD. The material is beautiful, they drape in such a lovely way, and they make my bottom half feel well-dressed. I don’t know that they are particularly flattering on my body shape, but they are so nice I am considering keeping them anyway. 

    Anyway, I don’t know that I found the right Quince clothing for me, but I plan to keep trying. (And if you decide to try it, let me know and I can send you a $20 off $100 coupon!)

    This talk of clothing reminds me that I did end up buying the anti-cellulite cream. It’s still early days, so I don’t know if it’s magically transforming my cellulite yet. But it does produce quite a lot of heat on the areas of application. I would describe the sensation as similar to the feeling of sitting in direct sunlight for a long time. It feels deeply uncomfortable, but not unbearable. The worst part, for me, is that sometimes it moves past hot to itchy. If it does help with the cellulite, it will all have been worth it.

    I am in a bit of book slump lately. Usually, I have an audiobook that I listen to while driving/walking/puttering around the house, and I also have a book I read in bed before I fall asleep. My last three audiobooks have been a big flop, though. One of the books (bookshop.org / amazon) just hasn’t captured my attention; I’m 35% in and I think I’m going to DNF. I just don’t care about any of the characters and I think there was a murder, but it happened so long ago I’ve lost any sense of urgency about it. 

    The other two books were DNFs because of the narrators. So maybe I will pick one or both of them up later, as physical books? The first is a book (bookshop.org / amazon) I really want to read, and I was enjoying it, but the narrator WHISPERS the entire time and at 54% in I cannot stand it anymore. I’m either missing crucial things or feeling irritated by the whispering and I just can’t do it. The next book (bookshop.org / amazon) was a new release that was on my holds list, either because someone recommended it, or it just sounded good – I’m not sure – but the narrator swallows audibly and I JUST CANNOT.

    My husband is listening to Wellness (bookshop.org / amazon)  right now, and loves it. So maybe I will listen to that one next? 

    I’m having similar issues with my physical books, though. I read through the prologue and first chapter of a book on my Kindle, and that was enough for me. It’s not like I have any sort of dearth of books on hand, but nothing is calling to me. What’s the last book you read or listened to that really gripped you from the beginning? 

    That’s what’s on my mind this morning. What are you in the mood to chat about?