• My Year of Yoga

    I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions, or set many goals for myself for a year. There have been years when I do, like when I decided to get serious about flossing my teeth, but generally I take care of things as they come up. Last year, though, I decided that I wanted to do 30 days of Yoga in January. I had been kind of doing yoga for a couple of years, mostly through the Yoga with Adriene channel on YouTube. It’s been quite a few years since I took an in person yoga class. Adriene Mishler has been offering yoga videos on YouTube since 2012, and for the…

  • Penelope

    Penelope is an immersive and quiet coming of age story, about a 16 year old girl who, seemingly on a whim, leaves her family, friends, and technology behind and decides to live a hermit-like life in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. The 8 episode Netflix series (about 1/2 hour each) begins with Penelope who is at some kind of camp with a lot of other folks, including her parents. The first episode begins with a ‘silent dance party’, where a large group of teenagers are dancing near some cabins, wearing headphones to dampen the noise. Penelope spies a wolf on the edge of the party, and is stunned. She…

  • Saturday Randomness

    I hope that everyone has enjoyed their Christmas/Hanukkah celebrations, and that life is returning to normal (if that is what you want) or that the festivities are continuing (if that’s more your jam). My company gave us both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as holidays, and then next week we will have both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as holidays, plus we still have Fabulous Fridays off (at least we did yesterday, they haven’t told us whether this wonderful benefit will carry in to 2025, and let me tell you, WE ARE ON PINS AND NEEDLES waiting to find out!), so I went ahead and took a couple…

  • Meme Monday

    Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, wonderful, peaceful, joyful holidays to all who celebrate them. Our Christmas plans include dinner at Ted’s parents’ house, which will be ‘white people Christmas’, as Ted put it. Standing rib roast, mashed potatoes, peas with pearl onions, and pumpkin pie. For Ted’s mom, who is pescatarian, salmon tikka masala. For Maya, who is also pescatarian but not really a big fan of most fish (??), fake turkey cutlets as she can’t think of anything she would like more. Our Hanukkah plans will be pushed back, as his family doesn’t celebrate. We will have latkes and such on the 26th. For those who are new here, we…

  • Cool Bloggers Cookie Swap

    Suzanne is hosting a cookie swap this week, and I am here for it. I have 4 recipes for you. I will link to 2 recipes that I have shared before, and also share 2 ‘new’ ones. I say ‘new’, because when I search my blog, I have never written them up, though I have linked to them in the past. First the links to past cookie recipes: Now for the ‘new’ recipes. When I was growing up, my mom always made fudge for my grandpa, who had the biggest sweet tooth in the family (perhaps more than my Aunt Flo even, though that’s difficult to fathom). The recipe was…

  • Happy Winter Solstice

    I know I’ve shown you this picture before. This is a time lapse photo of the arc of the sun on the Winter Solstice, at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. Fairbanks is just outside of the arctic circle, so you do get a glimpse of the sun for an hour or two, but it never really gets light. Pretty cool photo. Starting tomorrow* our evenings will darken a bit later every day. It still takes longer for the sun to come up in the mornings for a couple more weeks, though, which I don’t really understand, but Jamie explained a couple of years ago. Also, obviously, Happy Summer Solstice…

  • Wellness

    Wellness ~ Nathan Hill Jack and Elizabeth meet in 1993. They are neighbors who have been creepily spying upon each others through their windows, kind of like the cast of Friends spying on Ugly Naked Guy. They fall in love quickly and completely after finally meeting in a bar when Jack rescues Elizabeth from a creeper trying to pick her up. 20 years later, they’re trying to figure out how to maintain their marriage, planning the layout of their new luxury condo. Will they have open shelving or cabinets? One en-suite bedroom, or two? Can they find the meaning that they are missing by making such decisions? They are unhappy.…

  • The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

    The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store ~ James McBride This is the story of Chicken Hill, a black and Jewish community in Pottstown, PA, that starts in the early 1970s when the skeleton of a man is found in a well, then travels back to the 1930s, where we meet the characters of Chicken Hill, and eventually discover the identity and story behind the discovery. There is Chona, who owns The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and refuses to sell it and move when her husband, Moshe, makes good money running his jazz theater. Then there is Dodo, a young voiceless black boy with special needs, who is being cared…

  • The Vanishing Half

    The Vanishing Half ~ Brit Bennett Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical twin sisters from the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana, a town inhabited by very light skinned black people. The sisters witness the lynching of their father in the 1940s, and their mother pulls them out of school in order to help support their household by becoming housekeepers for a local family, where Stella is assaulted. At the age of 16, the sisters run away. In order to find a job, Stella starts passing for white, and eventually falls in love with a white man and moves away, leaving her heartbroken sister behind. Stella marries and lives in Los…

  • The Women

    The Women ~ Kristin Hannah Frances “Frankie” McGrath is a San Diego nursing student from a wealthy family turned Army nurse, who goes to war in Vietnam. She is dropped into a field hospital with barely any training, and quickly learns the ropes and shows herself to be a gifted trauma nurse. While there, she makes close friendships and falls in love with an (unbeknownst to her) married man. She comes home after her second tour and faces a world that is hostile to veterans in general, and an absolute lack of support for female veterans. Again and again she tries to get help for her trauma, and again and…

  • Friday Randomness

    First off, I received my gift from the Secret SANta gift exchange! It’s so fun to receive a gift in the mail (sorry Canadian friends! I hope your postal strike resolves soon!) and to see what someone has picked out for you. A big Thank-You to my Secret SANta, Penny, for this wonderful gift! What a fun holiday themed mug! And lots of treats to go with it! In other blog friend news, Kyria and I are having breakfast today! She’s in the area for the holidays. I’m really looking forward to meeting her. I think we need to do more local meetups, there are several people in Northern California.…

  • The Monsters of Templeton

    The Monsters of Templeton ~ Lauren Groff The corpse of a 50-foot underwater creature surfaces from Lake Glimmerglass. Like Nessie, there were stories about a monster in the lake, but no one really believed them before now. Willie Upton returns to her home in Templeton, New York, to her mother’s home near the lake shore. Willie has had a rough time of it lately. She’s a Stanford graduate student who is pregnant with the child of one of her (married) professors, whose wife she tried to run over with a prop plane in Alaska. Willie’s mother, Vi, drops a bombshell on her. Willie has been told her entire life that…

  • Playground

    Playground ~ Richard Powers Todd Keane is a middle-aged white tech billionaire diagnosed with dementia. He had a privileged childhood in Illinois, and develops an extremely popular online app, Playground. Rafi Young is a worker with an NGO who went to prep-school and college with Todd. He is a black man from a poor neighborhood, whose parents sacrifice in order to give him the education he clearly craves, as his is a gifted mind. Ina Aroita is a sculptor from the South Pacific who meets Todd and Rafi in college. She and Rafi fall in love and start a tumultuous relationship. Evelyne Beaulieu is a gifted deep sea diver who…