A Decade of Blogging

Posted on February 15, 2018 by Thistle

Technically, my ten-year-blogoversary was yesterday, but I didn’t get my act together in time to post this, so I’m a bit late. I don’t mind. I started my blog on Valentine’s Day, in the wee early hours of the morning while I suffered from jet lag after returning from my sister’s wedding in Palestine, but I wrote my first book review on the 15th, so today’s as good a day as any.

(I don’t know where this photo came from but it’s the only one I have of my original Blogspot header)

As many of you know, I’ve not always been the most consistent blogger. When I get knocked off course, I have a tendency to bounce around wildly like in a pinball machine until I settle. From mid-2011 until August 2014, I could not tell you how many times I switched blogs, quit blogging, blogged only privately, etc before reopening The Zen Leaf. Once I settled, I was fine. For a few years, though, I pretty much lost 95% of my readership, and honestly I’ve never been keen to be as big a blog again as I was before quitting. I’m perfectly happy with my little corner of the blogosphere!

(header photo after moving to WordPress in 2010)

That’s not to say that I haven’t gotten things out of blogging, both on a larger scale and my current smaller one. It’s been a wonderful decade, full of wonderful things and wonderful people, and I’m still doing what I love: writing my way through the world as a way to connect with like-minded people. Blogging has always been about friendship to me, and ten years on, this is still the most important thing!

So, in the last ten years, here are some fun facts and highlights!

Books read/reviewed: just over 1000!

Book Split: 82% fiction, 12% nonfiction, 6% other (poetry, drama, collections, etc)
Fiction Split: 56% speculative, 44% realistic
Media Split: 74% text, 20% audio, 6% visual
Audience Split: 56% adult, 33% young adult, 11% children’s

Longest book: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (~1500 pages)
Longest audiobook: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (60:31)
Longest title (excluding subtitles): The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind by Kirsten Cronn-Mills
Shortest title: (tie) M by Jon Muth; S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst

I’ve still never read a book with a title that begins with an X, though I’ve read authors with last names beginning with every letter of the alphabet!

Top Ten Most-Read Authors

  • David Levithan (8)
  • Suzanne Collins (8)
  • Maureen Johnson (9)
  • Neil Gaiman (9)
  • Maggie Stiefvater (9)
  • William Somerset Maugham (10)
  • Diana Wynne Jones (13)
  • JK Rowling (13)
  • Scott Westerfeld (16)
  • Brandon Sanderson (21)

Things that did not work for me as a blogger

  • Reading challenges (whether host or participant) – These restricted my reading too much! The one exception is the annual RIP challenge!
  • Graphic novels – While I enjoy a very small percentage of these, I prefer my books in prose form.
  • Readalongs (whether host or participant) – I have a difficult time reading only a small segment at a time when I have the full book at my disposal.
  • Joint reviews – Fun idea, but the execution made me anxious!
  • Book tours and review books – While it’s sometimes fun to get a book ahead of time, I find that I cull too many books and this makes me feel guilty.
  • Ratings – I used to star-rate my books but found that ratings changed over time or were too static/single-minded for me.
  • Vlogging – I love watching others’ vlogs but prefer writing myself.

Things that did work for me as a blogger

  • Readathon! – I haven’t gotten to participate as much as I’d like, but I love this event so much!
  • New genres – Without blogging, I’d probably still be reading only classics and Harry Potter! Through book blogs, I’ve discovered so many of my favorite authors, genres, and books.
  • Audiobooks – I used to think I disliked audiobooks and boy how wrong I was!
  • GoodReads – This is like a reader’s paradise! Especially if you’re a list-fanatic like me.
  • Culling and abandoning books – I used to never give up a book once I started. Now I regularly abandon books at any point, from the first few paragraphs the last chapter. Life’s too short!
  • Wider blogging – In the beginning, my blog was all-books-all-the-time and I’ve discovered that I like a more free-range style.
  • Slower reading – In the early days of blogging, it was not unusual for me to read/review around 200 books per year, which burned me out really fast. I eventually settled into a good rate for me, around 60-80 books per year.
  • Multi-reads – This was something I did pre-blogging and had to rediscover. Sometimes it’s okay (and great!) to read a book twice (or twenty times) in a row.

Ten highlights from the last ten years of blogging

  1. The Return of the Native – I didn’t used to think I liked audiobooks until I stumbled across this one, read by Alan Rickman (mmm), and my entire book world changed.
  2. The Omnivore’s Dilemma – This is another book that changed my life, teaching me an entirely different way to view nutrition, especially fresh produce.
  3. The Night Circus – I’ve wanted to be a writer/author my entire life, until one year when I was so discouraged that I actually decided to quit. Nine months later, I read this book and changed my mind.
  4. NaNoWriMo – It was book bloggers that first introduced me to National Novel Writing Month, and book bloggers that encouraged me to participate.
  5. Brandon Sanderson – Sanderson wrote a NaNoWriMo pep talk one year that was so good I just had to read one of his books. He wrote in a genre I didn’t ever read – traditional fantasy – but his books helped me to fall in love with the genre and he’s now my favorite author ever.
  6. Library-Palooza – Speaking of Brandon Sanderson, I got to meet him and several other authors at this event in 2016!
  7. BEA and other book events – Book Expo America, Book Blogger Conference, Texas Book Festival, Library-Palooza…etc. I’ve been to a lot of these events over the years, often meeting up with other book bloggers for them.
  8. Community – I’ve met dozens and dozens of bloggers over the years. Since blogging has always been about friendship for me, these meet-ups are one of the best things about creating The Zen Leaf all those years ago.
  9. Support – I’ve gone through quite a number of rough times over the last decade, most notably the awful year I was in Boston. A select group of close blogger friends, as well as other friends and family, made up an online support group that kept me safe and sane through that year.
  10. The Death and Baby Death Book Hour – Most of my current readers never got to experience this little video series that my husband and I put together in the early days of blogging. Sadly, the series can never return as Death suffered his own death while we were living in Boston. Happily, I still have all the videos. And this picture:

Last but not least, I couldn’t celebrate this blogoversary without highlighting several of my favorite books from over the years. I couldn’t pick just ten favorites – gah! out of a thousand?? – so instead I’m going to list a few favorites from each year since The Zen Leaf began.

  • 2008: The Grapes of Wrath, We
  • 2009: Between Mom and Jo, Crossed Wires
  • 2010: Germinal, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, Return of the Native
  • 2011: The Host, The Unit, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Night Circus
  • 2012: Howl’s Moving Castle, Mistborn, Shadow and Bone
  • 2013: City of Dark Magic
  • 2014: The Raven Boys (and series)
  • 2015: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
  • 2016: Words of Radiance, Bellweather Rhapsody
  • 2017: Oathbringer, A Face Like Glass, Strange the Dreamer
  • 2018: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

If you are still reading (this post, this blog…), thank you. To all my blogger friends out there, thank you. I can’t even imagine what my life would have been like these last ten years without all of this and all of you.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | 12 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Flu

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Thistle

It was bound to happen. The flu season is bad this year and Jason was the only one of us to get a flu shot yet. We were complacent and silly. And last Saturday, while Ambrose was at a friend’s house, he got a mild fever. On Sunday, it remained mild, and we still had no thoughts of flu. He didn’t have any nausea or other symptoms besides a sore throat. By Monday, though, he had a really high fever that we couldn’t lower. We made an appointment with his pediatrician, and they took a strep test and flu test. Strep was negative, flu was positive for Type A.

Unfortunately, we’d had people over on the weekend for the Super Bowl. We sent out warnings, and while most of the guest weren’t worried (a large family who had all already had the flu apparently), one guest did end up getting the flu by Wednesday. (Sorry, Stephanie!) Thankfully with the foreknowledge, she was able to get in to urgent care right away and start Tamiflu. We also got Tamiflu for our other two boys, who both started showing fevers by Wednesday. Ambrose felt fine and went back to school Thursday, and the other two boys (Tamiflu works so well) were back on Friday. As for me, I had a mild fever for a couple days and slept away a couple afternoons, but that was it. Hopefully (fingers crossed) I dodged a bullet here! Jason, having gotten the flu shot, was fine. Whew!

In better news, remember back when USPS lost Jason’s wedding ring? We went shopping for a new ring on our anniversary, but we didn’t find anything he liked. We moved online and found a craftsman who creates rings out of hardwood and various metals. Jason chose a design of wood and rose gold, and put in the order. They’re all made-to-order, each unique, and his ring arrived this week! It’s beautiful, fits him perfectly, and is much lighter to wear than a metal ring (which he loves). It’s absolutely perfect.

Lastly, my family arranged the funeral and such for my grandmother this week. Unfortunately, Fort Sam (where she’ll be buried with my grandpa) is very backed up on their burial schedule, so the funeral won’t be until the 26th. I admit, it’s a little upsetting to have to wait so long, but at the same time, I console myself that she’ll be buried the day my grandpa died in 2007 – a symmetry that I think she would have appreciated.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 5 Comments

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman (audio)

Posted on February 9, 2018 by Thistle

Eleanor Oliphant is a peculiar woman. She has little to no social skills, she speaks so precisely that it borders on absurd, and she is completely detached from emotion. Around her thirtieth birthday, life begins to change. She and a coworker witness an elderly man fall on the street, and they help him get medical help. Slowly, Eleanor’s life is penetrated by Other People, which leads to penetration by Emotion.

Let me start by saying what this book isn’t: This is not a story of “awkward woman meets man and he/love saves her.” This is instead a story of a woman who has suffered terrible traumas in childhood and has learned to cope in the only way she knows how. All her awkwardness and quirks stem from these coping mechanisms, the childhood traumas, and the dysfunctional way she grew up. Eleanor was abused terribly, both physically and emotionally (particularly the latter), until the age of ten, when she entered the care system. These are not spoilers – all this information comes out in the first chapters.

The story is more than just the aftermath of a horrendous childhood, though. Yes, there is horror here, but ultimately, this is a book of hope. Eleanor’s coworker, Raymond, is a very kind person who, despite recognizing that Eleanor is extremely unusual, treats her with courtesy and friendliness. The elderly man they save, Sammy, is gregarious and grateful, and essentially treats his two rescuers as part of his family now. Through these two new people in Eleanor’s life, plus a few personal projects she’s undertaken, Eleanor learns a bit more about what it means to truly interact with others. This isn’t a story of someone saving her, but of a woman who learns that small acts of kindness (performed toward her and by her) are the glue that ties a person to community and friendship.

In tone, the book reminded me very strongly of two others I’ve read. The first is Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, in that Eleanor tends to see her own viewpoint as normal when it is so clearly not (to the reader, at least!). The second was The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, in the way that several isolated people come to take care of each other despite each of their quirks and oddities. It was just as well written as both of those books, and added something special of its own. The setting (Glasgow) was perfectly painted, the pacing was spot-on, and Eleanor’s transformation was very realistic – she grows and learns, but she’s still awkward and oblivious and accidentally rude in her interactions with others. The novel took some painful topics – abuse, alcoholism, severe depression, therapy, among others – and explored them with grace and care.

Others have been raving about this book since it published last year. I admit, this is not a book I ever thought I’d read. I didn’t know much about it, and had somehow gotten the impression that it was a contemporary YA novel. I picked it up now solely because one of my book clubs was reading it. Sometimes fate just intervenes, I suppose. This is one of the best books I’ve read in quite some time, and definitely an early contender for 2018 favorites for me. I read it twice back to back, actually, due to some unexpected revelations that made me rethink the earlier parts of the novel, and both reads were wonderful. The audio narrator, Cathleen McCarron, did an absolutely perfect rendition, and made the novel that much more real and present for me. All around, the experience was marvelous, and I highly recommend this book. It is totally worth all the hype and praise that it has received.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Wellness Wednesday – Cultivate a Life You Love

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Thistle

Please note: this post was pre-drafted before my grandmother’s health declined. I’m still allowing it to post, but I will be very slow to respond to comments.

***
Back in the fall, an article on personal happiness popped up in my Facebook news feed that struck home. I didn’t actually read the article in question, because the headline and accompanying blurb were already powerful enough that I felt a bit wretched. I can’t remember the exact words, but essentially the paraphrase is: “Self-care is not about bubble baths and wine. It’s about creating a life that you don’t constantly need to escape.” Having spent my fair number of nights escaping into bubble baths or wine, this kinda hit me right in the heart and gut.

The thing is, I once had a life that I didn’t constantly feel the need to escape from. When I did need escape – often in the evenings after Jason got home from work, since my job as a stay at home mom is 24/7 – it wasn’t an escape from life but a retreat to some alone time for my own sanity. While I’ve never been particularly fond of the SAHM job, it’s important to me, and so I keep it up and make the best of the situation. I figured out ways to be in the world through book clubs, writing groups, NaNoWriMo, book blogs, a bit of travel, and eventually in my health and fitness journey. At home, I exercised and wrote and blogged and read books and took care of the house and my kids. There were good times and bad times, of course, but essentially life felt right.

(Thanksgiving 2012)

That rightness started to crack in July 2013, but I managed to keep cultivating good things until May 2014 when life kicked me into the gutter so hard that I’m just barely starting to fully recover. Everything in my life fell apart. It was at this point that I started to attempt to escape my world rather than self-care. I stress-ate, drank too much, exercised so hard that I’d be crippled for days. I dove into a series of mindless books that distracted me but that I didn’t even record reading. I binge-watched TV shows that I’d already seen, watching over and over just to keep my brain off the wretchedness of my world. Therapy and medication could only help a tiny bit, because the source of all the wretchedness was ever-present and unending. For the first time since my boys were infants/toddlers, I began taking vacations alone purely to get away from home. Then I’d get home after the vacation, during which I’d been happy, and just cry.

Four cross-country moves and a lot of therapy later, I’ve gotten a lot better about many of these things. I’ve started to find things that I enjoy again, rather than mindless escapes. This is a slow process and I’m not always the best at it. That particular article headline/blurb hit me so hard last fall because I realized that despite everything, I still wasn’t happy with my life. So many things were still frail and fractured and painful. It’s hard to know how to build a life you love when so many of the things you cherish were taken from you and can never return. I just had to keep trying.

In November, when I read Oathbringer, I was struck by a quote: “The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.” In a way, this isn’t much different from what that article stated. The real difference is that one points out a fallacy, and one suggests an action point. For me, one focused on the things I had once and lost, the other focuses on what I need to do to build again. That tiny shift in mindset makes all the difference. I chose the world Cultivate as my one-word in 2018 particularly for this purpose: to cultivate a life of happiness, to cultivate a life I love, to cultivate a life I don’t constantly need to escape from.

(Yes, he’s wearing “ports” – he did it himself)

And I think I’m making progress. Earlier this week, I watched as Jason and my youngest son did yoga together in the evening. Laurence as usual was fussing and complaining the whole time, yelling at Adriene for asking him to do “impossible” things, while simultaneously listening to rap on his headphones. In one pose, he started dancing instead of paying attention, and I asked him if he was listening to music instead of to Adriene. He looked at me and said, “Yeah, of course!” Then he pointed to the video, while Adriene did a couple finger-snaps for whatever reason, and said, “See? She’s listening to rap, too! That was perfectly on the beat!” Then he went back to the yoga, and I had a moment of involuntary thought: Man I love my life. It was the first time in nearly four years that I’ve thought anything close to that.

I don’t expect everything to be perfect or for the rest of this cultivation to be easy. Most days, however, I spend more time working on the things I want to do and less time escaping my life and environment, and that seems a step in the right direction.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Girl on the Velvet Swing, by Simon Baatz (audio)

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Thistle

Subtitled: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Trigger warning: sexual violence
Spoiler warning: These are actual events, so I will discuss details.

In the early 1900s, Evelyn Nesbit was raped by architect Stanford White, who was then supporting her family. Several years later, after Nesbit married a young rich man named Harry Thaw, Thaw murdered White in retribution. The trial that followed was a national sensation. This book is the account of the events leading up to the murder and trial, and the fallout afterwards, including all the contradictory evidence brought forward from multiple sources over many years.

There is a lot of contradictory evidence. Both White and Thaw were accused of sexual and physical violence toward young girls, accusations coupled with varying claims of sadism, drug use, and blackmail. Nesbit changed her stance and testimony about both White and Thaw several times. The book’s afterword said that the truth was never fully uncovered and it’s difficult to tell what the actual story was in places. After listening through the whole audiobook and then reading some additional materials, my conclusions are these:

Thaw was obviously a very nasty man. Whether or not one believes the stories of him threatening his wife after his trials, or that his lawyers tricked Nesbit into lying on the stand, or that he had a right to kill White for his wife’s honor, these two facts stand out. First, he murdered someone in public, possibly taking the law into his own hands, and possibly using Nesbit’s rape as an excuse to get rid of someone who had made his life difficult. Second, long after this particular affair was over and Thaw was eventually a free man again, he attacked and whipped a young man in the same manner he’d been accused of doing to young girls before the trial.

White was also obviously a very nasty man. He was a known serial “seducer” of young girls. It doesn’t matter whether or not he drugged Nesbit and raped her while she was unconscious (one claim she made) or he “seduced” her into losing her virginity (another claim she made). Either way, a man in his late 40s “seducing” a girl of 16 (or younger) is rape. Flat out.

As for Evelyn Nesbit, I hardly know what to think of her, except to feel sorry for her. She was manipulated by the men in her life, and then torn apart by the press for being beautiful and making her way in life via photography and stage acts. People have cast her as a seductress that manipulated those around her, but I’m sorry, she’s was frickin’ 16 years old! Maybe even younger, since there’s some evidence her mother lied about her age and that she was actually 14. I think that, as usual, the woman got blamed when it was the two men who had harmed and used her. It’s hard to know what to think of her only because the records that still exist all show the media’s skewing of her true self to sell a story.

The book was well-written and a good, balanced account – from what I can tell – of the events. I struggled a bit with the parts that don’t add up, and appreciated the afterword where Baatz addresses this. The prose was engaging, and I was interested in reading more about the events when the book was over. Moreover, the audio performance by Christine Lakin was very good and helped to keep me engaged.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – On Saying Goodbye

Posted on February 4, 2018 by Thistle

Thursday morning, I got word that my grandmother’s health was in rapid decline. She’d been in poor health for a few weeks with pneumonia, but now the hospice nurse said her body was shutting down. I went straight over to her house to spend the day with my aunts and to say my goodbyes.

She looked rough. I last saw my grandma in the fall, and she was doing so well. Laughing, singing, dancing, telling stories from when her seven kids were young. We talked to her over the phone for Christmas – her health prevents much in the way of visits over the colder months – and she was strong and doing well then, too. It was a shock to see how much she had changed. She struggled to speak, but she told me that she was ready, that she was going to be with my grandpa again, and she asked me to remember that love was the most important thing, the most enduring thing. When I left a few hours later, she told me to tell my boys goodbye for her. We got a message the next afternoon that she said she was ready and had asked for morphine. A couple hours later, she passed away.

(2012 – 78th birthday party)

My grandmother is the fifth member of my family that I’ve said goodbye to (that I was old enough to remember, anyway), and one of the hardest goodbyes for me. I was particularly close to her. My sister and I used to stay at her house in the summer for a few weeks while our parents and younger siblings went back to South Carolina where we lived. She taught us to knit, let us build “houses” out of couch pillows, gave us Flintstones vitamins every night before bed. When I was around 11 or 12 years old, she gave up a pack-a-day smoking habit cold turkey, one of the hardest things I’ve ever seen anyone do. She was just so strong and so sharp. Even after her body began to fail her and she couldn’t walk anymore, her mind was so sharp. She could remember the tiniest details and tell stories like no one else I’ve ever known.

(~1993/1994, early high school, with my dad and grandparents)

I have so many memories. My grandma always led the songs and cheering during birthday parties with specific intros. She made the best spaghetti, and she forced me to eat peaches even when I didn’t like them (ha!). Her entire dining room was covered from floor to vaulted ceiling with framed photos, hundreds of them, until the last few years when she could no longer keep up with the dusting. She was from Britain and had the best accent, with a touch of Bronx from my grandpa mixed in over the years. My sister and I used to hug fire hydrants when we were five-ish, calling them “grandma” because we missed her when we lived in South Carolina and she was in Texas.

(2014, 80th birthday party, with the boys – sadly I caught her blinking!)

Grief has always been a bit unpredictable for me. The last few days, I’ve had moments when I feel put together and moments when I start having panic attacks and moments where I start sobbing out of nowhere. I don’t know exactly how the next few weeks will go. Sometimes while grieving, I tend to throw myself into writing, and I might start drafting blog posts for the next few weeks. Sometimes I withdraw into my in-real-life support system and disappear from the online world altogether. I don’t know how it will be for me now. I have one post pre-drafted for the week already, before I got the news, and that will still post, but otherwise I don’t have any plans and I might be sporadic for a time. If I’m not posting here and not commenting on your blogs for now, please know I’ll be back as soon as I’m recovered.

(I’m on the left under covers. Jason stayed with me, the kitties knew I was upset.)

Thank you all for listening. I’m grateful for my support system (both on- and offline), and for being able to say goodbye to my grandmother, and for my family members that have taken such good care of Grandma over the years, and for being back in San Antonio so that I was able to spend one of her last days by her side. I’m grateful that once her pain got to be too much, she didn’t have to linger long in agony. I’m grateful that she had to a chance to tell so many of us goodbye. I’m grateful that my boys got to know her and are old enough to remember. I’m grateful for my husband for taking care of things while I’m out of commission, and for his very flexible job, and for the kitties who know something’s up and keep trying to comfort me. I’m grateful for yoga, which has helped to keep me grounded while my body tries to process the grief physically. I’m grateful for so many things, and I know the love of my family and friends will help me to get through this time.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 8 Comments

January in Review

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Thistle

Please note: This post was pre-drafted before my grandmother’s health began to decline (more on this soon). I’m allowing it to post still, but I will be slow to respond to comments etc.

***
I didn’t do monthly recaps last year and found that I missed the process, especially when I was looking back on the year for happy moments. I don’t know that I’ll do this every month – I have a tendency to forget – but I’m going to try to do better.

Generally, the month was a fairly good one. I didn’t do as well as I wanted in terms of nutrition or mental health, but I made progress in a lot of other ways and had some truly happy moments.

Goals
A couple of my big goals of the year got crossed off very early – namely selling our WI house and paying off the credit card. Yay!!! I also got rid of 95% of my yarn surplus, leaving only a couple skeins plus the stuff I need for my afghan-in-progress. I saw two movies in theatre – Darkest Hour and The Post – and tried out a few new TV shows (Supernatural – no!, Stranger Things – yes!, Glee – meh…). I also got to go to the San Antonio Cat Cafe. So I’m off to a great start in terms of goals this year!

Health
As I said above, I didn’t do so well in this category. While I exercised a lot – 28 days, 1700 minutes – and hit my yoga and walking goals (34 yoga sessions, 31 miles), my nutrition was all over the place. My weight didn’t budge due to this, and I kinda started from scratch this week. Again. In terms of mental health, I’m still working with my doctor to tweak medication levels, and have yet to find a good therapist (sigh).

(Goddess pose – this is HARD!)

Books
This was a major slump month for me. Of the five books I read, only one (Consider the Fork) really stands out. One (Mind Games) I forgot completely, as evidenced by the following anecdote. Two weeks after I finished it, GoodReads recommended a book to me based on my reading Mind Games. I had no idea what it was talking about and had to go look Mind Games up, thinking a book got onto my read-list by mistake. Oops! There are a few books coming out in February that I’m highly anticipating, so hopefully it’ll be a better month in books for me!

Highlights of January
Selling the house and paying off the credit card obviously top this list. Other highlights include:

  • celebrating Jason’s birthday
  • listening to many outstanding TED Talks
  • visiting the Cat Cafe (twice!)
  • meeting with my writer friends (including one I haven’t seen in a couple years)
  • joining an online yoga community
  • getting our taxes done (yay refunds!)
  • Ambrose starting driver’s ed

I have to note that many of these things I’ve felt more intellectually than emotionally. My emotional state has been very scattered and often numbed out this month. I know that when I look back on January later in the year, it will be a good month in my memory. For now, though, I’m processing most of it on a thinking level rather than a heart level. That’s something that I want to get better with time.

Coming up in February
February should be relatively quiet, beyond the fact that one of my kids will be learning to drive, heh. My nephew’s fourth birthday is the weekend, and of course there’s Valentine’s Day, but mostly I expect I’ll be pretty homebound. I plan on easing up on the yoga this month – daily (sometimes twice-daily) sessions are taking a bit of a toll on my body – and doing more walking, hiking, and maybe even running again. And if all goes well, we’ll finally be able to replace my failing car this month. Wish us luck with that one!

How was your January? Any fun stuff coming up this month?

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – A Look at Up Til Now

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Thistle

Hello everyone! As it’s a new year and (hopefully) the beginning of a new journey for me, I wanted to go back over a bit of my history up to this point. Those of you who have known me for a long time will already know these stories, so feel free to skip them. Also note that this post will be long!

Continue reading →

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Yoga With Cats!

Posted on January 29, 2018 by Thistle

Yoga with cats should have been on my bucket list, but it wasn’t. After all, I get plenty of yoga with cats at home. Nimi is a big fan of yoga, often lying by my side and wrapping herself around me for the entire session. (She gets really annoyed when my knees nudge her away during extended child’s pose, ha!) Yoga with someone else’s cats is a different experience entirely. Yoga in a group with several dozen cats? That’s just plain awesome! Definitely a bucket list item, even if I neglected to put it on mine!

The San Antonio Cat Cafe opened sometime this past fall. I bookmarked their site and liked/followed their facebook page. When they started hosting yoga with cats in December, I was unable to go to either event. I’ve been waiting and waiting for another workshop to come up, and it finally did last week. My friend Stephanie and I both signed up, and went to the evening event last Tuesday night. The yoga was slow and available for all levels, and the cats indeed played all around the yogis for the hour-long practice. Things I learned:

– I can’t resist cats. I really can’t. If I’m not careful, I might just come home with a fourth kitty-child one of these days.

– Grey kitties are the cutest kitties ever.

(my Gavroche)

– Maybe this is only a coincidence, but all the tuxedo kittens (of which there were about a half-dozen) acted just like my Gavroche – friendly and silly and lovable and super active, but not the brightest cats ever. Haha!

– Cats really do bring people “prizes.” None of my three babies have ever done this, but one of the tuxedo kittens brought me a toy mouse and then hung out on my mat for quite some time, essentially adopting me.

– Speaking of mats, my cotton yoga mat – which I use on top of a regular mat, for extra cushioning as well as less slippage – is a huge cat-attraction. They love it!

– Savasana, or corpse pose, is an interesting time to have one kitten playing with your toes and one kitten nestling into your armpit. Ha!

Really, it was just so much fun. The workout was good – I was pretty sore the next day and decided to take a day off – but the cats running around and joining us were what really made the night. I obviously need to get back to volunteering at a shelter soon or I’ll go kitty-crazy and then I’ll really have to worry about bringing a fourth kitty-child home one day!

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Sunday Coffee – Recommendations?

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Thistle

Two Sundays ago, I talked about bookish slump I’m kinda in. But I realized since then, there are some books and other things that are holding my attention. They’re (for the most part) stuff I don’t have as much experience with, so I’m asking for recommendations today!

TED Talks
My cousin’s wife sent me a TED talk on the first day of the year. It was only the second one I’d ever watched (I think?), and I fell in love. Since then I’ll been grabbing talks at random when I have time to watch them, usually from their Facebook page. But honestly, I don’t know how to find them more efficiently. I don’t do podcasts and I don’t want to subscribe to a service that will send me dozens of links/videos per day. I don’t know if there’s an easier way to do that, so mostly I’m asking for recommendations for specific videos. Do you know an excellent TED talk? Leave me a link in the comments!

Chunkster Fantasies
Despite my love of Brandon Sanderson, I’m really not well-versed on long epic fantasies. I’ve tried a few and quit (Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones) and I’ve recently been craving these longer complex books. However, the last one I tried to find for myself ended up feeling like a derivative of Sanderson and the Wheel of Time, and I quit halfway into the first book. I like fantasies that spend more time on character and limitations than on cool special effects magic, and I’ve had a hard time finding something with a good balance of worldbuilding, story, character, and good writing. Suggestions?

Cultural Exploration
I recently read the first few chapters of a book that will release in March (Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Edeyemi). It’s set in a fantasy version of West Africa, steeped in a combination of real-world culture and the speculative worldbuilding. Those chapters were phenomenal and I can’t wait for the full book to release. One of main selling points for me was that blend of culture and fantasy. I’ve said it before – I get so tired of magical books set in London! Give me magic from around the world, culture from around the world. Let me read a fantasy set in Indonesia or Paraguay or Zambia. Right now, I’m very interested in reading about non-American, non-European cultures, whether in the fantasy genre or not. So if you know some good ones, please leave your recommendations below!

Nonfiction
Consider the Fork was definitely the best book I read this January, and I had none of my lack-of-focus problems while listening to that audiobook. Between that and the TED Talk obsession, I kinda think my focus is now going to be mostly on nonfiction for awhile. I’m not normally a huge nonfiction person but every once in awhile, I go on a kick. Problem is, because I’m not really a nonfiction person, I don’t know a lot of what’s out there. Second problem is, I’m super picky! I avoid politics, government, and war stuff, as well as memoirs, and I prefer nonfiction steeped in culture, sociology, psychology, or micro-histories. Because I’m so picky, it’s possible that only one in ten suggestions will end up working for me, so if you’re a big nonfic reader, go to town here! Leave me a list of dozens, haha!

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | 14 Comments