Weekly Round Up: Mostly Books

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  

The big news item of the week is that winter gave us a few more days of extreme cold and then settled back to normal.  There was a sweet spot where it was warm enough to walk the dog, and cold enough that the snow was very packable.  Hubs and Doggo had great fun with snowballs on our walks.

Eats

The chicken bowls that I made last Sunday turned out to be the gift that kept on giving.   We ate them in bowl form on Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday I finally put my foot down and moved on to something else.  I packed up the remaining chicken bowl ingredients into burritos for the fellas.

It is also worth noting that I've been on an incredible winning spree with avocados.  We needed a total of four to make four nights worth of guac, and each one just happened to be at its peak point on the night that we ate it.

Workouts

The usual plus hiking on weekends.

Watching

We finished season 5 of Seinfeld.  The big hits of this week were "he took it out" and Opposite.

We also took Lisa's tip and caught some Hot Couples TV.  The devil is in the details...stealing 4 billion dollars is step one, and figuring out how to spend it is step two.

 

Reading

We've got five books and one audio book to talk about!

First up, the best book that I've read so far this year is Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom.  It was so good that I want to keep it vague.  The book was inspired by real people and real events: in the 1800s a young Native American woman married an older white trader.  It was a marriage of part convenience and part attraction - he needed a wife who could speak the native languages, and she was interested in the adventure.  Plus they were attracted to each other.  Then a situation happened, which had everyone saying "stay out of it", but it was something that she wasn't OK with staying out of, so she took care of business.

Next up: a DNF.  Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman is a satire/spoof about a man whose family has fallen under the spell of "Fax News".  After a Very Bad Thanksgiving his mother starts leaving him erratic voice mails and he senses that something has gone terribly wrong, so he travels to visit them.  I loved the premise, but after a strong setup this went to straight zombie apocalypse, which I didn't feel like reading.  I think this is the right book for someone, just not me.

Next up: a fallback for a book that I wanted to read but couldn't get right now. I heard about a book called Rental House by Weike Wang...and so has everyone else because the hold line on Libby is loooooong.  I was chatting with Lisa, who mentioned that she wanted to read an earlier book by the same author.  Well guess what there was no waiting time so I snapped up Chemistry.  This book is a fairly short stream of consciousness about a chemistry PhD student who is on the path to lead her dream life: she's working hard on the PhD and her boyfriend proposes.  But something isn't quite right.  I bonded with the main character instantly and the pages flew by.

Currently: what the cool kids are reading! The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery for CBBC.  It's true that we will never read another book as great as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because that book doesn't exist, but Blue Castle is turning out to be a close contender.  It was a shear delight from page one.

Also Currently: a predictable hit.  I didn't have a next book to go to, so I picked up the next book in the Alphabet series, K is for Killer, to tide me over.  

Also currently: an audiobook.  When your mom is a YouTube star but you've got some ugly stuff going on behind the scenes.  That would be The House of My Mother by Shari Franke.  I heard about this on a blog BUT I CAN'T REMEMBER WHICH BLOG SO IF IT WAS YOU PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!! 

[Edit: Sophie was the recommendation source for House of My Mother]

Another thing to say about books: I loved Kae's post When are you reading so many books?  Let's see, I started Crow Mary last week, and I did put an extra hour or so one night into finishing it, I probably spent less than an hour on Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, Chemistry was a very quick read, I'm only reading the assigned portions of Blue Castle each week so it will take me a month to finish, K is for Killer is not a long book and I'm about halfway through, and I listened to about two hours of The House of My Mother last night on the plane and will easily finish it off driving in the car this week.  So that's how I ended up with gobs and gobs of books to talk about this week.

What Did You Say About A Plane?

I didn't say nothin' about no plane.  Mind your beeswax.

Let's meet back here next week and I'll 'splain myself