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Life
Whew, last week went by in a flash! I've been very busy but feeling like I'm not making much progress. I still have not even looked back at my 2024 goals, summarized my health in 2024 (I like data and it helps me to see what helps and what doesn't), or set 2025 goals ... and now it's January 20! One reason I'm so far behind is that we have been laser-focused since January 1 on planning a big month-long road trip to Glacier National Park and Banff National Park (in Canada) in July and August (about 2500 miles each way). Campsites in the parks have to be booked six months in advance, and I've heard it's as hard as trying to get Taylor Swift tickets! So, we spent the weekend confirming our itinerary and doing a lot of prep work so we can be ready to hit that Reserve button Wednesday morning. We did get a pretty snowfall yesterday, so it was a good day to be inside. We spotted this fox walking through the woods behind our house. When we stepped out on the deck to get a better view, he stopped to look at us (he's between the trees in the photo).
The rest of the week was good. We celebrated our son's 27th birthday Monday. He and his girlfriend came over for a steak dinner, cake, and presents. We love spending time with them, and it is so amazing to be feeling well enough to cook a dinner, bake a cake, and enjoy company again!
In fact, I went to book group Wednesday and very much enjoyed it. And we had friends over Saturday night for take-out, and it was great to catch up with them. It's such a joy to be able to be social again (though I still have to be very cautious about being exposed to anything).
I also walked almost every day last week and even re-started some tiny strength-training exercises (baby steps). My husband and I enjoyed a lovely winter walk at our local nature center on Friday, on a rare day when the temperatures were above freezing!
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| Still a lot of snow and ice on the creeks! |
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| Our iconic local covered bridge |
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Friday Reads 1-17-24: Two Outstanding Novels - my brief weekly reading update
2024 Outdoor Travel Year in Review: Exploring State Parks & Local Attractions in VA, PA, DE, and NY - I planned to put this video together on Tuesday, but it took me all week to go through all our travel/outdoor videos from last year and pull it together into a highlight reel. We took some great trips in 2024! Hope you enjoy the recap.
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A Man on the Inside - We absolutely loved this warm, funny show with a mystery at its heart. Ted Danson stars as a widowed older man at loose ends. His daughter encourages him to find a hobby, so he answers an ad looking for an older person to be an assistant to a PI (not what his daughter had in mind!). He goes undercover in a fancy retirement community to find out who is stealing jewelry. This show is hilarious but also poignant, and the mystery is a twisty one. Ted Danson is fabulous in it, and many of our friends are enjoying it as well. It's a Netflix show.
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I finished reading Writers and Lovers by Lily King, a buddy read with Melinda from A Web of Stories blog and Booktube channel and really enjoyed our discussions. After the sudden death of her mother in 1997, thirty-one-year-old Casey moves back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, after living in many different places. She is at loose ends, working long hours as a waitress while she struggles to write her novel, seeing many of her friends move onto marriage, children, and steady careers. You gradually learn more about Casey's childhood, parents, and writing life. It's a story with grief at its center, but it's about healing and learning to move forward. Both of us enjoyed it. I loved the writing style, would like to read more from Lily King, and found the characters to be well-defined and intriguing. And we had a great discussion, which always makes a good book even better.
Now I am--finally!--reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. As a child and teen of the 60's and 70's, I somehow missed this YA classic, set in Tulsa in the mid-1960's. In case you, too, have been living in a cave for 60 years, the novel focuses on a tight-knit group of boys who are called Greasers in their local parlance, for their long hair, slicked back with hair grease. They're not quite as bad as Hoods, but they're mostly poor and not treated well by others. Their enemies are the Socs, short for Socials, who are wealthy, spoiled, and often cruel. Ponyboy Curtis is the narrator, a fourteen-year-old boy who lives with his two older brothers, Sodapop and Darrell, since their parents died. The three are close and consider the other Greasers their family: small Johnny, rough guy Dallas who's been in prison, Two-Bit who's always cracking jokes, and Steve who is Sodapop's childhood best friend. Things come to a head with the Socs one night when they attack Ponyboy and Johnny, and one of the Socs ends up dead. The novel is just as outstanding as everyone has been telling me for decades, and I have been staying up too late every night reading it!
On audio, I finished listening to The Briar Club by Kate Quinn, my book group's pick for January. I enjoyed Quinn's The Diamond Eye, but this one is a new favorite. Unlike some of her others, this novel is not based on a real person, but it centers on a real time and place and the world events that defined it. The focus here is on the Briarwood House, a rundown boarding house for women in Washington, DC, in 1950, as a new resident, Grace, moves in. The reader is introduced to the widely different cast of women living in the home (each gets her own chapter), as well as the cranky, strict woman who runs the house, and her children, 8-year-old Lena, and 13-year-old Pete. The residents of the house gradually get to know each other through Grace's impromptu Thursday dinners in her room, cooked on a hot plate and dubbed The Briar Club by the women, but each of them is hiding secrets. It's also a murder mystery, as you know from the start that someone is murdered in the house in 1954. It's excellent, with in-depth characters set against the backdrop of the paranoia of the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, and the Korean War. Quinn highlights a wide range of issues affecting women at that time, through the varied characters. The audio was outstanding, with each woman given her own voice (by a single, talented narrator) and characteristics. In a rare show of unity, everyone in my book group loved it, and it got an average rating of 8.8, a tie for our highest ever!
My husband, Ken, finished The Searcher by Tana French. We are both huge fans of French and have loved her Dublin Murder Squad series, including In the Woods, The Likeness (my favorite), Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor. This is the start of a new series, featuring a retired American police detective now living in Ireland. Ken really enjoyed it, perhaps even more than the Dublin Murder Squad books and said it has a sense of humor (the others are very dark). He definitely wants to read more of this character and this series. He has now started his most-anticipated Christmas present, In Too Deep by Lee Child and Andrew Child, the 29th book in the Jack Reacher series, my husband's favorite.
Our son, 30, is reading Practical Adept, book 17 of the Spellmonger series by Terry Mancour, which he loves! I doubt he had much reading time, with a busy week at work and a weekend getaway with his girlfriend to the Catskills.
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