Friday Randomness

Just a few random things I’m thinking about today. First off, while I appreciate the humor of the joke above, I am a firm believer in the Oxford Comma, so the first line bugs me. Enough of that. On to randomness.

Kyria posted about things she has learned, and one of them was about how she uses Feedly. I don’t use Feedly, but my blog does have an option when you comment, that you can get an email if someone replies to your comment. However, I have heard (from Ally I think) that it does not work. Color me pleased to read in Kyria’s comments that you need a plugin to get it to work. I wonder if that’s true? I have installed the plugin that Michelle at MG Doodle Studio suggested, so if you are going to comment today, please check that box and then let me know if you get an email when I reply. 🙂

Suzanne posted about Halloween Decorations, and how she loves happy ghosts, which reminded me of these cheerful ghosts that were up in our neighborhood a few years ago. I love them.

Nicole posted about some of her favorite book series, which got me to thinking about some of my favorite book series.

• Little House books – Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like so many kids my age, I adored these books. I wore them out. I have read them so many times, I can open any book in the series and know exactly what is going on. Sometimes I feel like reading a specific chapter, and not the rest of the book, so I’ll do that. My mom introduced me to the series, because of my love for horses. She suggested I might enjoy Farmer Boy, because of Almonzo’s love for horses, and the rest is history. I was hooked. Side note, have any of you read Caroline, by Sarah Miller? It is the events told in Little House on the Prairie told from Ma’s perspective. It’s beautiful. There is one scene in Little House where Pa is gone overnight, and Ma stays up with the gun in her lap. The author wanted to get deeper into that scene, and Ma’s life and what that must have been like for her.
• Narnia books – C.S. Lewis. This is another series that my mom introduced to me because of my love for horses. She suggested that I might enjoy The Horse and His Boy. I did love it, and of course I went on to read the entire series, over and over again. I haven’t read them as many times as I have read the Little House books, but they are the same kind of comforting to me. I have my favorites – The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I really dislike The Last Battle, though if I’m reading them all in order, I will read it and wonder why I’m doing that. Maybe for Jewel the unicorn.
• Paddington Bear – Michael Bond. I have only read these books once, and perhaps not all of them, but I have to mention it to talk about my mom. My mom was a voracious reader. She had wall after wall of books, mostly paperbacks, on her board and brick bookshelves. She had them categorized and alphabetized. She had some literature, but she said what she wanted was stories. Lots of mysteries, some romance, historical fiction, etc. Lots of non-fiction too, which I pretty much ignored. Anyway, she loved to read. She would often read what I was reading, so we could talk about it. With the Paddington books, we enjoyed reading about Paddington’s love for marmalade and tea. That was one year when my mom had a decent paying job, and she started collecting tea pots and marmalade. We thought we would have tea together in the afternoons or something, I guess. She must have bought 4 or 5 teapots and teas and types of marmalade. What’s funny about this is that neither of us enjoyed tea that much, and I didn’t like marmalade. I remember talking to my mom about this and how she loved to collect things that she wasn’t going to use, and laughing so hard. She wrote about it on her blog the next day, and my comment was that we talked so long and laughed so hard, I had to gargle with salt water the next day. She also taught me how to make little patchwork quilt squares, because we were reading the Little House books. Gosh I miss her.
• Amy and Laura – Marilyn Sachs. I think I got these books from the bookmobile, a library on wheels that used to come to our house. There were several books in the series: Amy Moves In, Amy and Laura, and Laura’s Luck. Then there were a couple of other books written about side characters from the A&L stories, Veronica Ganz and Peter and Veronica. They take place in Brooklyn in the 1940s, and tell the story of Amy and Laura, two sisters who move to a new neighborhood and have to make friends and figure out school and so on. I feel like they started off pretty care free, but got more serious in the second book. I loved these books, and I remember my mom making up a song about Veronica Ganz (who was a bully and always beating kids up). All I remember of it was “Veronica Ganz has hot little hands!” Sigh.
• The Black Stallion – Walter Farley. There were a LOT of books in this series, about a boy, Alec, who survives a shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, and is marooned on a desert island with a beautiful black stallion. They become best friends, and when Alec is rescued and goes home to New York state, he brings the horse with him. I loved this series so much, though I don’t think I owned many of the books. I got them from the school library. When I was in 6th grade, I knew a girl who loved the series even more than I did, who would say that she was going to have that exact same adventure. “You’re going to have a beautiful black racehorse?” I asked, wistfully hopeful. “No,” she said, “I’m going to be on an ocean liner in the Indian Ocean, and it’s going to sink, and the only survivors are going to be me and The Black, and we’re going to survive on a desert island and be rescued.” Oh….Kay. I wonder if that ever happened? (Short answer, likely not.)
• Saga of the Phenwick Women – Katheryn Kimbrough. This is a semi-gothic series of historical fiction. I think there are probably about 40 books in the series. My mom had these on her extensive shelves, so I just read them one after the other. I remember really liking them at the time, but I suspect that they’re not that well written. The first book tells of Augusta, a young British woman, who comes to colonial America (Maine, I think), and the other books are her descendants.

OK, what else. We’re watching lots of TV, as always. These are our current shows:

• My Brilliant Friend – The fourth and final season just started on HBO. I could not love this series more. If you have HBO, give it a chance, even if you didn’t love the books.
• The Perfect Couple – We have watched the first episode of this murder mystery starring Nicole Kidman, and I’d like to get back to it at some point, but I keep forgetting. Available on Netflix.
• Industry – This is our current go-to, as we are behind and have several seasons to watch. We’re on season 2 right now. It’s the story of a group of recent college grads, competing for jobs at an investment bank in London. HBO, so watch for lots of somewhat graphic sex scenes. We fast forward through them, so if any important plot points happen during the sex, we miss them.
• Bad Monkey – Vince Vaughn is a former Miami Police Department member turned health inspector who investigates a case involving a human arm. Kind of reminiscent of Moonlighting in a way, because Vaughn’s character reminds us of Bruce Willis. Apple TV+.
• The Golden Bachelorette – WHY. The new season just started, and yes, we’re watching. We never watched any seasons of this franchise until The Golden Bachelor, and somehow have watched all of the seasons since. When Maya told me she wanted to start watching this season, my first reaction was, No, I don’t want to. She said no problem, she would watch it on her own, and then within 1/2 hour I decided I wanted to watch it after all. So whatever with me. I will say that I find the Golden series more compelling than the ones with younger folks, but that’s probably because I’m in that demographic.

That’s a whole lot of random! It’s 3pm on Friday afternoon, and I need to get busy reading your blogs and saying hello.