Tag Archives: Books

the big 2025 reads post!

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The stats: I read 82 books / 27,420 pages. Items of note: I switched over to StoryGraph and after a little while of scratching around trying to get comfortable, I like it much better than what I used previously. I used Libby extensively, both for audio and e-books from my library.

These things helped make 2025 a great reading year for me, especially in the genres of horror, thriller, mystery, and suspense. I like things grim and foreboding, I like reading about the darker side: murder, kidnapping, suspense, police procedurals, vampires, ghosts, face-eating zombies and the unknown. But I also appreciate it when writers find new ways to approach these fairly well-worn topics and this year was a treasure trove. This year – Gothic horror of all types. Chainsaws! Hooks for hands, vampires next door in Southern subdivisions and taking vengeance for the historic genocide of their people. Cursed film reels and a missing friend returned after a two year absence and weirdly not the same. Final girls! A haunted house! A murder in Oxford! Oh, and Fort Sumter. (Hmm.)

I don’t tend to rate or review books except for the ones I find to be the most outstanding. This year, my highest rated book was Silver Nitrate, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. (I think she was also one of my top authors in 2024, for Mexican Gothic.) I read two of her other books in 2025 – The Bewitching and The Seventh Veil of Salome, and they were both very good as well. The Bewitching also makes my short list of outstanding reads for the year, although farther down on the list.

Slightly lower on the rung: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones. I loved this book despite being a little let down by the ending. This book is not for everyone – it is graphic and very dark, but I could not put it down and ended up falling down a Stephen Graham Jones rabbit hole and reading his Indian Lake trilogy as well. The first novel in that trilogy, My Heart is a Chainsaw, also was a standout for me, possessing an unforgettable main character with an enthralling backstory and intermingling stream of conscious thesis on the horror film genre. (I learned a lot about horror movies and ended up watching a few that were mentioned here.)

Also in this ranking group was a late-year read, Guilty by Definition by Susie Dent. This was pure mystery, with main characters who work as lexicographers. I loved the way Dent worked in literary puzzles and clues as well as old words and language – a very novel and cerebral approach to an English mystery.

Other honorable mentions in the horror genre came from Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires. Again, not for everyone due to very dark and graphic content and trigger warnings galore, but again, for me – I couldn’t put it down. Rachel Harrison contributed two titles to my list this year, both in the horror / suspense genre, with The Return and Play Nice (rated less highly than The Return but still a standout read). Content warning(s) – none of these are for the faint of heart.

And for something completely different, favorite nonfiction: The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson, which covered the onset of the Civil War.

I hope you read some fantastic books in 2025 and are looking forward to more in 2026.

Past Big Reads posts: 2024, 2023.

recent pins – girl detective edition

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Happy Friday! It’s sunny here in Michigan today but chilly, thanks to a northeast wind sweeping across Lake Huron out of Canada. We had to cover up our baby plants last night. We’ve had a couple of nice days, but I think we’re all more than ready for sustained warmer weather.

This week’s edition of recent pins is dedicated to a book genre I loved as a kid – the girl detective! A few of my favorites: Trixie Belden (I own the complete series), Nancy Drew (of course), Kay Tracey, and Meg Duncan. I think it’s interesting that the format for many of these stories included motherless (or fatherless) women (Trixie being the exception). Meg’s mother had passed, and her father had an ‘important government job’ and was frequently away from home. We know that Nancy’s mother had also passed, and her influential attorney father Carson Drew, while a strong figure in her life, relied heavily on his housekeeper Hannah and left Nancy to her own devices frequently. Kay Tracey had lost her father, and lived with her mother and her older brother Bill. Trixie, by comparison, was more relatable for the average reader – she was 13, had to do chores, had a family structure, and yet STILL managed to get into hijinks and mysterious, creepy situations. She was tomboyish and frequently felt less attractive than her chums Honey and Diana, which felt familiar to me. She rode the bus, wore jeans, hated math and sewing, wanted her own horse – no Mustang or roadster, no titian hair, no handsome boyfriend like Nancy or Kay.

Despite their different backgrounds and characters, these were all strong female role models in an age before we were regularly told “you can do and be anything you want”. The covers of these books are artwork in and of themselves – the illustrators usually did Trixie dirty but the Nancy and Kay Tracey covers are beautiful and dramatic. I’d love to have a few framed and hanging in my office.

For the most part, these books were written by ghostwriters under pseudonyms, sometimes several authors contributing to one pseudonym. This is an interesting article about Nancy’s creators (and if you’re interested, there’s a great book out there called ‘Girl Sleuth’ by Melanie Rehak). Trixie’s creators are harder to pin down. Julie Campbell wrote the first six books, and after that, Western House Publishing created the ‘Kathryn Kenny‘ pseudonym to continue the series. Kathryn Kenny was multiple authors, both male and female, and although I loved the entire original series, there are subtle changes in voice and characterizations as the books progressed.

I would have gone crazy for this cake at a certain age (umm, like 51)!

I liked paper dolls as a kid, even when I was too old to play with them. I vividly remember a rainy day, requesting my mom to make Trixie and Honey paper dolls for me and she complied, with an outfit or two each. I wish I’d saved them. I would have loved these.

And would it be immature or weird for a 50-something woman to carry a suitcase decoupaged with Nancy Drew covers and images? Nah, I don’t think so either.

I hope everyone has a great weekend and remember:

the friday files, harlequin edition: several intrepid heroines, a dummy, and a gurney

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This week has been a total blur – but I look back and feel like I traveled miles. There were work complexities, three days in the office, depression and rage over
the current political situation (always, now), a comparatively and thankfully minor ice
storm, and an evening spent at EMT Cadet training for the kiddo. (As usual, this was the
high point for me. This week our intrepid heroines strapped the lifelike dummy to the gurney and fluttered around him performing industrious lifesaving maneuvers. Then, they took turns hurtling the gurney up and down the halls, banging him around the corners, and loading him into and out of the ambulance. I’m glad that the dummy made this appearance; a couple of weeks ago it may have been volunteer moms strapped to that gurney. I speak from personal experience.)

I finished the latest Haruki Murakami book. “The City and its Uncertain Walls” was not
as swiftly immersive as “1Q84”. The book felt a bit disjointed, which makes sense as I
learned it was written in two different time periods of Murakami’s life. The cast of people and places include a teenage couple in love who become separated; there is a walled city with a library of dreams, perishing unicorns, and characters who become separated from their shadows. There is another library in another world, a ghostly librarian with a quirky fashion sense, and a boy with a Yellow Submarine parka. The plot and poetry lies amid those details. If you love Murakami and would read his writing even if it was on a bathroom wall in a Tokyo train station, you’ll enjoy the delicate unfurling of this book. If you don’t, or if you’re not familiar with him at all, this may not be the book for you.

In other reading news, perusing the NYTimes, I saw this starter pack of romance novels and I’m intrigued. I think the last romance novels I read were back in early high school. One summer vacation, our rental cottage had a rickety bookshelf full of old Harlequins and I worked my way through all of them with single minded determination, staying up late, gritty eyed with fatigue but determined to find out if the romance between the plucky yet wilting amnesiac with a secret twin and the arrogant aristocrat with the eyepatch and the tortured history could ever bear fruit. That led to spending allowance money on a few Regency romances at our local bookstore ‘The Printed Word’ (where I also bought my Tiger Beat magazines, horoscope rolls, and later, the biography of Ed Gein which made the clerk ask suspiciously if my mother knew what I was reading). I really only remember ‘Lady Lochinvar’, a Barbara Hazard banger (no pun intended) with the requisite strong-willed heroine and a worldly and fairly smutty viscount, but I know for a fact there were more than that on my shelves for awhile, until they became embarrassingly unsophisticated for my high school literary ambitions. One of my mom friends has a Goodreads account full of ‘new’ romance – she says she likes her reading to be “spicy”. She’s Canadian (and btw Canadians – I am SO VERY SORRY about our embarrassment of a “president” – over 75 million Americans did not choose this for you or for us) so many of these are centered in the hockey world, and have seemingly endless riffs on the word ‘puck’ in the titles. So there’s definitely a market for it and if romance is written up in the NY Times, it HAS to have an aura of respectability, right?

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Several of the classic titles I may have read as a teenager, and one that I most definitely did not…

I feel like I might be coming down with a head cold so perhaps some time spent under
the duvet with a couple of recommended steamy romance novels may be the best plan
for the weekend ahead. I will report back.


In the meantime, be well and safe – xo.

the big 2024 reads post!

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Firstly, Happy New Year to all. The last week or so has been a blur of stretchy pants, movies, excellent eats, naps, and family time. 2024 was ‘mid’ as my daughter would say so we are all ready to embrace 2025 in the calmest, softest, most forgiving and patient ways we can, and hope for the best.

Now on to the content – the big 2024 reads post!

The stats: I read 75 books / 27,617 pages.

Favorite fiction: Without a doubt, the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells get top honors for fiction this year. I’m not usually an enormous science fiction fan (although maybe I really am but just don’t think I am) but her writing style was addictive and SecUnit was the most fascinating and loveable character I spent time with all year.

Favorite author: Martha Wells. In addition to Murderbot, I also read her Witch King and Cloud Roads series and liked them enormously, though not as much as Murderbot.

Runners-up in favorite fiction: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. I loved this book and devoured the rest of the series although I confess that after Annihilation I was completely baffled by the Southern Reach / Area X tale as it unwound; but it was undeniably fascinating. Also, honorable mentions to The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Favorite nonfiction: After seeing the Georgia O’Keeffe ‘My New Yorks’ exhibit at the Chicago Institute of Art, I picked up her biography by Roxana Robinson and loved it – it was like reading a novel. Runner up in favorite nonfiction would be Red Comet by Heather Clark, about Sylvia Plath.

There were definitely novels that did not do it for me this year, but I’m going to focus only on the positives this year – I think reading is very subjective and just because I didn’t love them doesn’t mean others would feel the same.

I hope all the readers out there had a very satisfying year and look forward to more excellent hours spent with books in 2025.

a few good things

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  1. I bought a cinnamon broom for the den and it smells sooo autumnal.
  2. It has been a very hot and dry month in Michigan yet this evening we are sitting here with the windows open listening to a gentle cool rain.
  3. I just finished a fantastic creepy book – one of the best books I’ve read this year, I think – highly recommend “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It was EXCELLENT. So atmospheric with a heroine you immediately are staunchly behind and the most chilling and fascinating setting. I’ve just picked up another by her (“Gods of Jade and Shadow”).
  4. We spent all day yesterday at the first marching band competition of the year. Unfortunately it was 85 degrees with a blazing sun on a high school football field with zero shadow (and zero parking which meant street parking blocks away). Wool uniforms are still de rigueur and if we parents in the stands were red faced and running with sweat then the kids were truly suffering. But I love a good marching band and so I was deeply satisfied and even more so when our kids won second place in Class A competition, best percussion, best color guard, and best in music!
  5. Next week is Homecoming. Insert happy face emoji surrounded by hearts.

I need a few good things today because I have a case of the Sunday Scaries. My beloved boss has moved up and out of Widget Central and I am left with a mass of complex tasks, exponentially increasing workload, and instability. I keep telling myself it isn’t my first time at this rodeo but – let me bury my nose in a gothic horror novel and a delicious cinnamon broom for a bit longer, okay?

august ahead

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July has flown by and here we are with August ahead, which used to be a summer month (albeit an elderly one) but is now the back to school month. The kid has a driving test on Sunday, and then the hustle begins with pre-band camp, band camp, her sweet sixteen, picture day, and then the first day of school before Labor Day.

Brandon is still in Iowa but we managed to carve out a long weekend for a Chicago museum spree. (And gosh, I love Chicago. Maybe being a Midwesterner makes me biased, but that city has a vibe and an easygoing indifferent accessibility – a history and a style – like none other.) We stayed in a glass loft on the South Loop with a view of the rail and the river on one side and a glittering expanse of Lake Michigan on the other. It was blistering hot and stormed at night, lightning brighter than the city lights all around us.

“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

We saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘My New Yorks’ exhibit at the Chicago Institute of Art and although I’ve never been a huge fan of her flowers or Southwest motifs, seeing the city through her eyes and brush changed my opinion on her altogether.

“New York Night” by Georgia O’Keeffe
“The Shelton with Sunspots”

I’d vastly prefer my mister to be here, but with him gone, the structure of the summer has softened and turned uncertain. With more time to myself, I turn inward. There have been lots of summer evenings on the front porch with books, watching the sun wheel through the western sky and come down in sprays of green and gold through the leaves of our old tulip tree. I’ve read some really good things this summer – I loved a book of Kate Atkinson short stories ‘Normal Rules Don’t Apply’, and Lev Grossman’s ‘The Bright Sword’ was wonderful (and the last sentence flooded me with unexpected emotion and tears). I am reading a fantastic biography of Georgia O’Keeffe that reads almost like a novel and having these other little worlds to dive into after the workday is done (and sometimes before evening calls with my colleagues in Japan as we negotiate a thorny contract) has been like a swim in a very cool pool when you’re hot and sticky.

I head out on a business trip tomorrow which will likely be a short and uninspiring parade of a boxy interstate hotel and strip mall restaurants and then home for a weekend of hopefully not much by the pool with Georgia as she meets Alfred Steiglitz. There is a cardinal sitting in the pine tree outside of my open home office window singing for the feeders to be refilled. August ahead looks – busy? and short with all of the activity. It is a birthday month for a few very important women in my life – mother, grandmother, and the kid. Anyway, I hope to greet it on the porch with a book and possibly armed with a knitting needle. Be well and enjoy the last heavy breath of summertime.

long spring catch-up post.

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I hate to make proclamations but the spring so far has been okay and vastly better than the winter was. I’ve avoided making this observation because – you know, the proverbial ‘other shoe’ – but in my little corner of the Internet no one is really listening anyway so knock wood and let’s goooooo.

Making. My only recently finished object is a – dishcloth. (I subscribe to the Kitchen Sink Shop newsletter and every month she sends a free dishcloth pattern!) I am a slow knitter. I have two pairs of socks (plain vanilla on 9-inch circulars) going (they’ve been my springtime soccer field knitting), as well as the Cozy Comfort throw from Homespun House, and I have the Shift kit ready to cast on as soon as I finish the socks (and as a side note isn’t Andrea Mowry just absolutely gorgeous and so cool? I wish I could have that kind of edgy yet laid-back coolness). I’m also really close to finishing a cross-stitch kit (a little A-frame cottage). As usual I have too much stash, too many projects to start, and not enough time, and I still keep finding new kits, new patterns, and new yarn to fill all the nooks and crannies of my dusty little office / crafting space. I need to lock in and get some finished objects. (As usual you can find me on Ravelry as sixtenpine.)

Reading. On vacation in the Bahamas I blew through all seven of Martha Wells’ ‘Murderbot Diaries’ and would have just kept going if there were more. These were sci-fi about a futuristic security unit android that attains some level of cold human observation and affinity. SecUnit (or ‘Murderbot’ as it refers to itself) spends the seven novels alternately amused, horrified, sympathetic, fascinated, and repelled by the humans it is charged with guarding and its internal monologue is (for me) un-put-downable. After Murderbot I plunged into some dry histories (I went through a massive Mary Queen of Scots phase and then some Romanov which was depressing). Slogging through beheadings, conspiracies, doomed royals and the events of Ipatiev House might not have been the best overall choice and sadly my reading slowed down a bit. I’m trying to jump-start it with the new Tana French ‘The Hunter’ but it isn’t really doing it for me yet. (I wish she’d go back to the Dublin Murder squad format.)

Watching. Brandon and I finally watched ‘The Bear’ and loved it. I hope next season we get more of the Richie comeback and more Fak. The kid and I are watching the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (a multiple rewatchable for me, her first time) and she’s hooked. I’m debating about whether she’s ready for ‘Fire Walk With Me’ and you know, no one is ready for season 3 The Return. Maybe if I rewatched it, I’d understand it more. While Brandon is in Iowa during the week, I watched ‘Marie Antoinette‘ on Prime (LOVED it) and caught up on ‘Nordic Murders’.

Life Stuff. As I said, I think things have evened out from our winter of discontent (it was a tough one). Brandon still spends weekdays in Iowa and weekends here, and that has made for some adjustment, both for us as a couple and our family unit. It’s not ideal but we are working through it and understanding (or trying to) that it’s just a season of life and it too will pass and fade into a new season.

I am still dealing with pre-menopause health issues which all in all are pretty minor compared to some horror stories I’ve heard. HRT has helped with the mood swings, night sweats and recurring monthly pain and nausea. It hasn’t helped much with brain fog or weight gain, but I just have to keep pushing through. I try to eat well without restricting, and get out 3-4 times a week either to the gym or for runs around the neighborhood. I’d love to lose 20 lbs but I’m also not willing to head into the land of diet culture to do that, so for now it’s bigger pants. [shrug]

Soccer, soccer, soccer. Spring sports are a lot but this soccer season for the kid was fun and for the most part, laid-back. They’re not the best team but they’re not the worst, either, and manage to have fun and enjoy themselves even when they lose and when they’re playing in downpours or gale force winds. She just started a part-time summer job at the local family-owned garden center / plant nursery and I am hoping it’s a great vibe for her, working outdoors with little growing things. She has a male friend (ahem) and after several years of being at home with us every evening, now, on occasion, he’ll pick her up and they’ll get food or go to a school sporting event or movie. She is hoping to get her driver’s license this summer on her birthday and so I feel we’re on the verge of a big jump forward in terms of maturity and independence…I am alternately dreading it and looking forward to it. She took an AP exam this week, is mostly indifferent about her grades yet but still gets things done. She’s a good kid and we laugh a lot when we’re together, which is a lot, especially now that it’s just the two of us during the weekdays when Brandon is away. I have to balance the feeling that she is my best friend these days with the reminder that I am the parent, as well, and so that’s been an interesting line to tread.

Despite things being easier than they were a few months ago, overall, I am in a mostly introverted phase. And since I live my life as a baseline introvert, for me to say I am in an introverted phase probably realistically means I’m full-on hermit now. I viciously culled my personal social media feeds this winter and just don’t post much anymore. I’ve pulled back from volunteering for school things and the parent text threads. Work has settled back down into it’s usual place in my life, instead of waking me up at 3AM in a cold sweat, and if that means that some days I only can do what I can, that’s the way it is right now. I no longer have the bandwidth to put energy into things that look “right” but don’t feel “right” or pay back in emotional dividends and that runs the gamut from doing everything and more at work to trying to look like the perfect normal active cheerful mom in the neighborhood and school community. Hustle culture, social media pressure, competitiveness and comparison – it’s all real and I’ve had to seriously duck back into my introvert shell and focus on us – my little family – and how it feels instead of how it looks. We do our own thing and for us right now that’s healthy and positive.

2023 reads

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I haven’t kept up with regular book posts throughout the year so instead I offer a quick summary of my 2023 reading. I read 65 books, falling pretty short of previous years, but I don’t have any “worst of” to list because if I don’t like a book I simply won’t finish it. (Life is short.) I think my lower total is indicative of starting and abandoning several selections that just didn’t do it for me. I will, however, say that I read some pretty dubious stuff while down with Covid because my attention span just wouldn’t let me focus on much else so who knows how it all evened out.

Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) again captures a top spot with The Running Grave, the latest in the Cormoran Strike saga. I don’t particularly like Rowling and don’t agree with her public statements about the trans community and think she should have just kept her mouth shut since other people’s choices in that area don’t have anything to do with her, but for some reason I can’t hold Strike accountable for her bigotry. This one wasn’t quite as engrossing for me as last year’s Ink Black Heart but still quite good.

Top honors also go to Natasha Pulley’s Watchmaker of Filigree Street trilogy, which I found absolutely beautiful and which brought me to tears several times.

I gave Nona the Ninth high marks as well. This is the latest of the sci-fi goth mindbender series that is Tamsin Muir‘s Locked Tomb series. Holy smokes it’s good.

I also loved Circe by Madeline Miller and Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati gets an honorable mention.

2024 is starting out for me with the Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. It has a sexy premise of occult Yale secret societies so we’ll see if it holds up! I look forward to seeing what my bookish friends get into in 2024 and as always, I love recommendations and would love more friends over on Goodreads (link in my sidebar). Happy 2024 reading!

dispatch from a disjointed july – tour de france, camp, and cologuard

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July is strange – the whole month feels like a weird suspension of normal routine, with the 4th holiday, many people in my office taking vacations, the kid at camp, and the Tour de France. This week felt particularly disjointed – bouts of torrential rain and oppressive humidity, two very productive and busy office days, and many hours spent with the Tour.

The Tour has been good this year except for my overwhelming disappointment that Mark Cavendish – an oldster at the ripe age of 38 – crashed out and broke his collarbone in what he’d declared was his last TDF before retirement. He was trying to break the record of the most stage wins (he’s currently tied at 34 with Eddie Merckx). It was a good lesson not to get too attached to any one rider or team because it’s a fairly brutal sport and you can love someone and they can get knocked out in a millisecond and then you still have endless stages ahead of you to feel disappointed. In addition to the 4-5 hours a day viewing the stages, we also spend another 1-2 hours listening to Lance Armstrong’s podcast The Move to analyze each stage. Yes, I know that Lance is a douche but since it’s very difficult to find any mainstream news coverage of the Tour, my July is filled with his mellifluous boasting and I’ve come to enjoy it heartily.

In other news this week – solid office days (office days have become a vital part of my week and although I enjoy my work from home days, I’m finding that I need the anchoring of a couple in-person days, too), fresh salads from the new office lunch delivery service, a couple of exceptionally humid morning / lunchtime runs on work from home days, and doing my first Cologuard. This may be TMI but you know, health matters. It feels inappropriate to poop in a jar and have to take the conspicuous box to the UPS store (they could at least give you an anonymous box) to mail it somewhere – but that’s life these days. And dear God, those Cologuard people will run you to the ends of the freaking earth to get that jar back. I think I got at least twenty calls, emails, and texts from that happy little toilet so I was relieved to be able to dump it on the UPS counter and be done with the damn thing.

The kid has been at camp with no phone. She’s written a few letters, and I purchase email credits so I can send her an email every day that she’s gone. In one of her letters, she described writing snail mail letters to me like ‘screaming into a void and not getting any answer back’ and that’s how I feel about the daily emails I send her, too. So imagine my surprise when she convinced her unit director to let her call me on Thursday afternoon because she was feeling a smidge homesick and just wanted to hear my voice. My kiddo has always been brave, extroverted, social, and the type who from very early on didn’t want to hold my hand when I walked her into school, so, in the summer she turns 15, for her to want to write me letters from camp and call me just to hear my voice – well, that is quite gratifying for me.

I’m reading ‘A Deadly Education’ by Naomi Novik, which is sort of a violent and edgy Hogwarts school tale mixed with a bit of ‘Hunger Games’ and I’m really liking it so far. It’s part of a trilogy and I picked it up from the library after seeing the most recent one in a bookstore in Cincinnati. I am hoping the weekend will be full of some front porch reading and wine drinking, although Sunday will be a completely lost day as I travel 6+ hours round trip to fetch the kid from camp. It’s worth it – I can’t wait to hug her – and July rolls on.

sentence per picture

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Gifts from Brandon’s recent trip. ♥️

Daily Tarot card pulls and this Queen has come up for me twice in two weeks.

Obligatory cute cat pic starring Emmett.

My work pants are perilously close to not fitting me; thinking about these “Dream Pants” but afraid I’ll look like a chimney sweep in them.

Windy, warm, and wet for Michigan February.

Finished the Road Trippin’ hat in time for my bestie’s 50th birthday celebration this weekend – we have an AirBnB, champagne, facial and dinner reservations, and an itinerary of vintage and antique stores to explore.

TGIF! xo