It’s been a busy time for me lately. Between the change in weather, which is never the same day to day here in Georgia, personal celebrations, and Thanksgiving, I haven’t had the headspace to really update my blog here. That doesn’t mean that I stopped reading, though! Currently I’m actually in the middle of reading The Stand by Stephen King with my local book club. We’ve broken it up into sections so that some of our slower readers can have enough time to really read the book rather than rushing through it.

(Trying to post on a new day!) I bought a copy of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers from a local second hand store because I'd been eyeing it for a while but to be transparent it's been MONTHS since I bought it. It's just been sitting there waiting for me and I FINALLY gave in and started it last week.

I’ve been so preoccupied with other things going on in my life that I haven’t had a moment or the brainpower to make an entry lately. Just know that I have still been reading despite it all! I may talk about some of the things that have happened later but for today I have a little reading update. My wife and I are doing an audiobook buddy read this month!

This week I spent my time taking things a little more slowly. Partly because my wife took a few extra days off and we just simply spent the time together but also because I wanted to. I think it's nice to take the time when you can. It isn't easy, though, realistically to do so. I take the opportunity every time I can.

I'm not one for magical realism, though I have absolutely read books in the genre before, but I'm currently listening to The Phoenix Pencil Company audiobook and I'm enjoying the experience so far. It's about a family that has the ability to use pencils to recover what someone last wrote with them. There are two different perspectives within two different time periods as well.

The last time we talked I was reading An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, which y'all will be happy to know that I did finish and I did like overall despite how long it took me to get through it, so I thought we'd take a moment to do a little summary of my July reading. This graphic is from The Storygraph, which I use as my main means of tracking my reading since I have a bad tendency to forget what I've already read and NEED to make sure I don't read something I disliked again.

July has been a pretty slow reading month for me. Between the suffocating heat and humidity and just feeling fairly burnt out this month, I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked on a few things I've been reading. One of which is Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Technically I'm reading this for a prompt/challenge on…

I’ve had a pretty good week that’s been capped off by an equally good Saturday! I took some time this week to rearrange some things on my bookshelf and to do a good dusting. I needed to reorganize my books primarily because I was having a tough time getting to a few of them. Also just for funsies. Sometimes I rearrange and reorganize just to entertain my brain.

Daily writing prompt Which activities make you lose track of time? View all responses I wanted to answer this because, specifically today, I lost half of my day to one of my hobbies. For a long while, I would cultivate a playlist every month for myself of new music or music that catches my interest to listen to throughout the entirety of the month.

Though this week hasn't been incredibly reading heavy, I did finish my 65th read this year! Which means I'm still ahead of my goal for this year and I could slow down in terms of reading this month. Will I do that? No, probably not. Mostly just because I can't help but read at least two to three books at the same time despite whatever else is going on in my life.

I used to do quite a bit of writing. I would write poems and short stories and even the beginnings of full novels, just for fun. I specifically did this a lot in my teens and twenties as an outlet for my feelings or just to get things out of my head. Nowadays, it’s rare if I sit down to write anything other than a journal, blog post, or my daily to do list.

This reading month has been an uphill battle due to a lot of things. Mainly, though, I got stuck in a book that I thought was going to be more interesting than it was when I was reading it. To be fair, this book, Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks by David Bushman and Mark T.

Oh my goodness, y'all, I'm back to blogging? Who thought that would happen? I'm going to make an effort to get back on track since things have settled a bit more now that we're in the middle of June when I'm not melting in the Georgia heat. We've had a couple of pretty gnarly storms rip through our area in the past few weeks and had our power get knocked out twice.

I posted about my May TBR earlier this month and let me tell y’all, I did not stick to it hardly at all, haha. There were a few things that I did keep on there but there were a lot of books that were added or removed instead. So let’s see what changed! This was the original TBR: You'd Look Better as a Ghost…

Okay so I haven’t just finished this book but I did finish it this month so here’s what I thought about it! The novel is about Claire who has just lost her father. He’d been struggling with his health and dementia which for Claire is hard to deal with since he had been the only real parent she’s ever had. He was living in a facility and Claire spent her time both with him as well as doing her job, which is painting.

Good news! My wife had surgery on her knee yesterday and it went really well! The doctor told me that things went just as planned and that she can even put weight on her knee as long as she keeps her leg, which is also in a brace that prevents bending, straight. Eventually she will be able to bend it slightly but that's weeks out.

It's been a rough week so far. Over the weekend my wife tripped and broke her knee cap. It's split nearly exactly in half, which seems like an overachiever move if I'm honest, and she's going to have to have surgery to get it fixed. Thankfully, the doctors think that she should be able to be back on her feet nearly fully in just a few months.

I shared in a post about my recent obsession with birding and now I have a little update: I got my first pair of binoculars! Now, they aren’t the most expensive or professional but they’re honestly really nice and they work for what I’m doing which is just observing the birds hanging around our yard and in the cow pasture next door.

Okay, so I haven’t strayed too far from the horror/thriller genre. But to be fair, this one is a comedic horror novel. (Love the covers on both of these. I also have Blood Sugar to read after this so I gotta get a move on.) My friend who shares my love of reading that I visited a month or so ago actually recommended it to me when we were chatting and I lucked out that the library had it the last time I went.

It's the last day of April and y'all know what that means right? Resetting the 'to be read' pile for May. As of right now, it's looking like May is going to be a busy, busy month for us here in the wilds of Georgia. We've got a bunch of appointments for my dad to go to, social engagements to take part in, and tons of yard work to take care of, as long as the weather permits us to.

The flowers have been blooming for a bit now but I thought I'd share these photos I took of a few that have popped up recently. It's always a surprise, these flowers, because some were those that my wife and I planted years ago and some are flowers that my mother planted here as well. So every spring feels like she's here again, taking her own photos of them with me.

I gave Hawk Mountain a 3.5 and that’s because I felt like it wasn’t the worst nor was it the best book I’ve read this year. I ended up finishing it on Sunday after I reached a point that was just a wild series of events and then, despite being slightly stunned, I wanted to know how it was going to conclude from there.

Daily writing prompt Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind. View all responses Compared to the beginning of this week, I've been struggling to get through the book I'm reading. I'm only about 50 or so pages into Hawk Mountain and it isn't bad...but I don't think my brain is really interested in it. Maybe I need to just switch to the other book I'm reading on my kindle for today and give myself a break.

I like to celebrate my little successes. For instance, this week my sister asked with help to get her computer working again because she couldn’t get it to come on. Now, what you should know about my sister and technology is that she does not necessarily have the best luck with technology. I’ve had to repair many of her devices to the best of my ability which is still minimal compared to someone who professionally can fix tech.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten really into watching the birds that live around our house. I don't know when it happened but suddenly I just really enjoyed birding. We never had the space in the other places we've lived to have bird feeders really and my parents were never super into it. My grandpa, though, was a guy who loved to watch birds and he was the first person I remember who knew all kinds of the varied birdsongs that sang through the trees in his north GA mountain home.