The Wildest Part of this Week was: I’ve been behind. I keep meaning to write and then the weekend comes and goes and I just don’t manage to write. I am not even sure how I can call out a particular part of the week as wild anymore as we’re all living in new normals where it all feels pretty wild and pretty normal all jumbled into one.
Top Goals Review: still actively doing covid work.
I celebrate: getting a whole weekend without work this weekend, the first in a few weeks.
I am grateful for: for being safe. for my family. for some downtime this weekend.
This week, I exercised: i started doing daily yoga this week and am still taking the walks with Jake. That’s about it here.
This week, I answered the Call of the Wild: Just the fresh air I get from being outside, not much of wild here.
I embracedSilence of the Wilderness: I did some scrapping this weekend, some OLW journaling and i have plans for this coming week.
This week’s Wildcard was: no major wildcards this week.
I said yes to: joining a zoom call with several of my highschool friends. it was lovely.
I said no to: going out i guess. i haven’t been anywhere except the perimeter of my house in a long long while.
Core Desired Feelings (leap, soft, release, join, delight) Check-in: i am working on doing all of these. taking a leap wherever i can at the moment. trying to release the anxiety i have. being soft with myself and my family. and joining whenever i can. the delight is mostly limited to flowers at the moment. oh and delighting my son with all the hardware i have at home.
My mood this week was: still pretty tired.
I am proud of: all that we got done this month, it was intense
I release: any anxiety around the future. the future is unknown so i can’t control it by being anxious, i am going to try to take it as it comes.
Here’s what I learned this week: i learned that i look for ways to be anxious, no matter the path i take.
What I love right now: I love the warm weather. i love my family. i am so grateful.
Weekly Review 2020 is a year-long project for 2020. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here.
Here are my goodreads reviews. If you’re on goodreads, add me as a friend so I can see your books too! I also have an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
Eight Perfect Murders (3 stars): So there were parts of this story I loved. The premise was excellent and it started strong and funny and interesting. And there were a handful of fun twists. But then I felt it devolved. So I feel torn that it had both excellent parts and parts I rolled my eyes. This book mentions so many books that, it was a worthwhile read just on the book recommendations alone.
Last Couple Standing (2.5 stars): This story, while a fun read, turned out to be more stereotypical than I would have liked. The lessons learned and the ways in which the characters made mistakes and learned from them and the conclusions they came to were all reasonably predictable for me. I enjoyed my time with it but it just wasn’t anything new.
The Glass Hotel (4.5 stars): Emily St. John Mandel has such a way with words and imagery that it’s not possible to not be in awe of her writing. Her characters are always memorable and her imagery is always so evocative. I loved this story about the Ponzi scheme and how it unravels all the different people it touches. The whole story was beautifully told, going back and forth in time but several scenes stood out especially strong for me. The 24 hours before the whole thing comes apart and all the ways in which the people who work in the company prepare for it was an exceptional scene.
Showing Vincent’s life before, during, and after was a great way to anchor this story to one character and made me, as a reader, experience it more profoundly.
It’s wonderful to see that while subject was wildly different than Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s new book was just as engaging, well-written, evocative, with richly developed characters and had some of the same etherial feelings. I cannot wait to read more of her.
Daisy Cooper’s Rules for Living (3 stars): This story took a long long time for me to get into. I loved the blurb around it being like Bridget Jones meets The Good Place and alas I felt like it was like neither. So I feel the blurb was a disservice in this case. There were funny moments and touching moments in this book and some very sad ones too. By the time I finished it, I thought the end also was poignant but it took too too long to get there imho.
The Sweeney Sisters (4 stars): “That’s the luxury that men have. They can be awful and beloved. Women don’t get that kind of leeway.”
I really enjoyed this story of three sisters who lose their father who also happens to be a very famous author. The story begins as each sister hears the news and they come together to figure out next steps and expands out when they find out about the fourth sister.
I liked the way the story brought together so many dynamics: each sister’s individual story of how their own life and path is unfolding, their way of dealing with the loss of their dad and their way of dealing with the news/interactions with the new sister. The way they can be seen both as individuals and also as a unit of 3+1 is well done in the story.
“Liza, who felt like she’d been hiding in her own life for a decade, was not having trouble staying quiet.”
While the story didn’t have any shocking twists and turns, I loved that some of the ways in which the story unfolded were more unexpected and thus opened the mind of the reader to the fact that there’s possibly more that’s going on here than meets the eye (as there often is in the real world.) I loved that there weren’t stereotypically good or evil characters. Each character was layered and textured and complex.
“Over the course of Serena’s lifetime, it seemed like families were allowed to be more complicated, less cookie-cutter versions of one mom, one dad, loving siblings version of previous generations.”
This story of family, sisterhood, life and mistakes is sweetly told and as a reader, I got more and more attached to the characters as the story unfolded and I found myself rooting for each of them.
With gratitude to netgalley and HarperCollins Publishers for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
And there we go, a little bit of reading.
Books I Read this Week 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. I am also tracking my books in real time on Good Reads here. If you’re on Good Reads add me so I can follow you, too! I’ve also started an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
There are many things that make me, me. Like loving my family, working hard, being reliable, helping others, showing up, finishing things, doing it anyway. These are the pieces of who I am and they all make up what’s important to me.
But at the core of everything is my burning desire to grow. To learn more, to do better, to be better. Intentional growth is the fuel that keeps me going. Setting goals and creating projects that enable those goals is who I am. It’s what makes me, me.
I’ve learned over the years that if I wait to be in the mood to do something, I will likely wait forever. There are very, very few things I am in the mood to do. However there are many, many things I am very happy to have done. Even the things I love doing can fall into that category: like art and reading. It’s easy for me to not want to do anything. But when I look back at all that I did, I am always unequivocally happy and proud and grateful.
So I set intentions, I make plans, I get intentional.
This is how I grow and learn and become the person I hope to be. This is the biggest part of what makes me, me.
This year I am planning to do something different than last year. Around last September, I stopped taking a lot of daily photos which then meant I also stopped scrapbooking. I have several of the Story Kit’s piled up. So I decided to switch gears a bit and see if I can use Ali’s prompts to tell my stories. I might (or might not) also turn them into scrapbook pages. In the meantime, I will just enjoy telling my stories.
Stories from 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. The prompts are from Ali’s Story Kits unless mentioned otherwise. I have started an instagram account for these, we’ll see if I keep it up.
Here are my goodreads reviews. If you’re on goodreads, add me as a friend so I can see your books too! I also have an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
The Two Lives of Lydia Bird (3 stars): There’s something about Josie Silver’s characters and writing that doesn’t fully resonate with me. I felt the same way with her previous book. But also, just like the previous one, I loved the poignancy of the ending, what she says about relationships, and the lessons her characters learn/grow into by the end. I love the endings of her books. And this one was no exception. If you liked the previous one, I am confident you will like this one, too.
The Silent Treatment (5 stars): “Because that is what love is, isn’t it? Giving without receiving. Of course, there is always the hope of receiving. Tiny, precious, fragile. You can be batted away a thousand times and still it will be there, too.”
Oh my. I read this book in one sitting and it broke my heart to a million pieces. By the end, I was sobbing. I don’t want to give too much away of the plot. This is basically a story about marriage and parenting. The way I felt about this story was the way I felt as I was reading Normal People. It’s a book I loved unequivocally and a book that I can’t see is not for everyone. There are also deeply sad and triggering subjects in the book.
‘“I like that.” Your voice is barely above a whisper. “The little things that no one sees that could make the biggest change of all.”’
This book is about how relationships are hard and communication is hard, and about the little (or big) secrets to keep from each other. Sometimes to spare the other person’s feelings. But so many times to ensure that the way they feel about us (and the way they see us) doesn’t change. So many times it’s out of fear. Out of love. Out of loneliness. Out of feeling alone and as if we are the only one. It’s about how relationships can go awry and how secrets breed other secrets and how shame loves secrecy.
“If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive,” says Dr. Brene Brown And this book is exactly about that. The secrecy, silence and worry around judgement. And the impact of that on a marriage.
“it’s that try as we might, there would always be some part of Eleanor that resided in the wilds outside our reach.”
It’s also about parenthood. About how hard it is. About how little control we have over who our kids turn out to be, about what happens to them, about our ability to parent them. This book is deeply about the impact a kid can have on his/her parents and on their marriage.
“He is coming to realize that there is a lot about Maggie that he never fully understood, a row of blanks in the crossword of their life together that are still empty.”
The writing in this story is really beautiful. Touching, poignant, heartbreaking, flowing and it grabs you and doesn’t let you go until the end. Much like “Normal People” it’s about how broken we all are, and how when you put two broken people together and have them love each other fiercely, they can still manage to break each other in the process. We are all flawed and we don’t always know how to do the right things.
“Frank, of all people, knows how it feels to be isolated by a secret.”
I loved every bit of this story and may I never get to experience many of the sorrows in the book and may i learn to ask for help, for forgiveness and may i have the courage to douse my shame with empathy when I invariably make mistakes.
Thank you to netgalley and HarperCollins Publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
Untamed (5 stars): Glennon has a way with words. She can articulate all of the things I’m feeling in just the right way and make me feel less alone and more understood in three pages than anyone ever has. She shares her life’s journey and choices and learnings and lessons with such humor and grace and authenticity that I am ever so grateful for writers like her. Anyone who can make me feel less alone in the world is a gift.
In Five Years (3.5 stars): I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I was going to. I was worried it would be sappy once I started it and saw where it was going, but it wasn’t melodramatic and had a lot of sweet real moments. It wasn’t perfect and some moments felt sappy. I thought it was going to be more like Sliding Doors than it was but still glad I read it.
And there we go, a little bit of reading.
Books I Read this Week 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. I am also tracking my books in real time on Good Reads here. If you’re on Good Reads add me so I can follow you, too! I’ve also started an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
Prompt: Move – 02 | Tell a story of the last time you were really moved by a comment, movie, song, etc.
My husband has been obsessed with rock climbing for the last two years. He spends hours and hours and hours of his week climbing. During this time, he watched tons of movies about climbing and for reasons that aren’t clear to me, I refused to watch them with him.
Finally, a few months ago, I decided I was going to get on board and start watching some of these movies.
He started with “Dawn Wall” which he said was his favorite of all of them. In the beginning of the movie, I was thinking that I would not end up liking this movie and it was just a favor to my husband. But within 30 minutes I was not only captivated by the climber’s crazy life but also by his determination. As I got more and more involved in his story, what ended up moving me the most was his determination to share this journey with his climbing partner and his unwillingness to leave him behind. It made me cheer both of them on with all my heart.
“Dawn Wall” was my favorite movie of 2019. I loved every minute of it. I am so glad I finally gave up my stubbornness and was open to sharing this amazing movie with my husband
This year I am planning to do something different than last year. Around last September, I stopped taking a lot of daily photos which then meant I also stopped scrapbooking. I have several of the Story Kit’s piled up. So I decided to switch gears a bit and see if I can use Ali’s prompts to tell my stories. I might (or might not) also turn them into scrapbook pages. In the meantime, I will just enjoy telling my stories.
Stories from 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. The prompts are from Ali’s Story Kits unless mentioned otherwise. I have started an instagram account for these, we’ll see if I keep it up.
Weekly Intention: Ok well it’s hard to tell what this week will look like. If things are quieting down a bit then maybe i can have a bit of a personal routine of exercising, journaling, doing art and reading each day. Just 90 minutes a day total should do the trick. We’ll see how much of it I can manage.
This month’s intention is:Wild Air: Go outside. Smell the spring air. The seasons are shifting again and it’s time to try new things, new places, take new chances. Pick one thing and go big. Drink the wild air.Well not sure I can do this anymore. But if next weekend is quiet too maybe we can do a long hike. Cross fingers.
One way I will show up this week: ready.
I will go into the wild: for now i will continue my daily walks and sit in the back yard when possible.
This week, I will pay attention to: seeing if i can start some small exercise, continue to eat as healthy as i can, and slowly build little bits of routine.
One new thing I will begin this week: hmm maybe drawing a tiny bit.
One magic I will create: maybe a little bit of noticing/journaling time daily.
One thing I hope to release: just everything honestly each day i will let go of it all and start over.
One thing I will join in on: maybe some puzzle time with kids.
One area I will practice being open: that we will find our new normal and things will be ok again.
I am looking forward to: getting some fresh groceries.
This week’s challenges: being home all the time is definitely challenging.
Top Goals: honestly i am just going to do the next right thing everywhere i can.
I will focus on my values (love, learn, peace, service, gratitude): i am getting to lean into all of these right now.
This week, I want to remember: i am so grateful to be together and healthy.
Living Wild is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here.
The Wildest Part of this Week was: Ok so I ended up skipping last week because I worked 32 hours last weekend over the course of the two days. When I wasn’t working, I was sleeping. This week was no different. Work work work work, and then sleep. I am not even sure how to say what the wildest part of this week was except to say all of it. When I picked wild for my word this was not at all what I had in mind.
Top Goals Review: all these went out the door in the wake of covid and all covid related work.
I celebrate: My team at work getting some valuable features out the door, I am so proud to work where I work and be a part of this amazing team.
I am grateful for: my family being safe here, in Boston, in Michigan, and in Istanbul. I am so glad we are all healthy and safe at the moment.
This week, I exercised: I’ve been taking daily walks around the block and that’s been the extent of my exercise lately.
This week, I answered the Call of the Wild: Just the fresh air I get from being outside.
I embracedSilence of the Wilderness: no journaling but finally a bit of a quieter weekend so a lot more reading and resting and napping.
This week’s Wildcard was: Coronavirus and Jake win it all handsdown.
I said yes to: doing whatever’s needed at work.
I said no to: doing pretty much anything else to be honest.
Core Desired Feelings (leap, soft, release, join, delight) Check-in: well things are a bit topsy turvy at the moment. I am trying really hard to be soft and to find little ways to help delight. I ordered flowers from our local CSA and bought myself a candle that crackles thanks to a wood wick. I am taking the little moments as they come.
My mood this week was: exhausted and focused.
I am proud of: my kids being patient with all that’s going on. And helping their dad.
I release: all of everything dropping on the floor at the moment. 2020 is apparently going to be a year for the books. May it come and go with all of us staying healthy and may we all slowly recover from this.
Here’s what I learned this week: so much learning about what we’re each capable of. we are capable of doing hard things.
What I love right now: I love that it’s getting warmer. Hopefully rain will come and go quickly and we can enjoy a bit of warm weather.
Weekly Review 2020 is a year-long project for 2020. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here.
Here are my goodreads reviews. If you’re on goodreads, add me as a friend so I can see your books too! I also have an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
My Path to Happy (3 stars): I enjoyed my time with this little book that brings to life the author’s journey with her depression. The drawings were cute and slightly juvenile. If you read this as the story of one person and her journey through this really dark time in her life, I think there’s a lot of authenticity and hope in her own journey even though not a lot of depth. However, I would not recommend giving this to anyone currently suffering from depression. The author makes a lot of choices for herself where she experiments with different ideas and ignores doctor recommendations. That might be completely ok for her but not necessarily great as advice to others since it’s important to see a professional and make your own choices around your mental health.
thank you to netgalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing fr an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
The Art of Spiral Drawing (4 stars): When I saw the cover of this book, I couldn’t stop staring at the unique and 3-dimensional looking drawings. This book breaks this style into very simple components and shows you how to make some of those much more complicated art pieces on the cover.
I’d never heard of Spiral Drawing but it’s super-cool looking and relatively simple to do. It reminds me of zentangles and once I’ve practiced enough I have no doubt it will be just as calming. If these intrigue you as much as they did me, I am sure you will love this book.
with gratitude to netgalley and Quarto Publishing Group for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
21 Rituals to Connect with Nature (4 stars): I pick a word of the year each year and my word for 2020 is “wild.” My goal is to connect more with nature and to spend more time outdoors. So when I saw this book, I knew I was going to have to read it.
I knew nothing about the author and didn’t read much of the blurb either, so I had no prejudices going in. This book has 3 sections of 7 rituals each. Each ritual has the science behind it, an anecdotal story, and then the “what to do” as well as some thoughts to journal. All of them are relatively basic and simple but powerful exercises. If you go into this book thinking it will be new, complicated or unusual ideas, you will get disappointed.
Most of the ideas are things that involve your senses or intentionally being aware of the nature around you. Trees, birds, water, sun, etc. They might seem simple, but for me, they were the exact reminder I needed that there are really small things I can do each day that have profound effects in my life. I loved almost all the ideas in here.
Most of the ideas in the book are very tangible but there are a small handful of ideas that may or may not resonate with you depending on how you feel about psychic energy. Those didn’t fully resonate with me but it didn’t deter from the power of the overall book, for me.
I cannot wait to do these rituals again and again.
with gratitude to netgalley and Watkins Publishing for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Meditative Stone Art (4 stars): This book is about creating small pieces of art on top of stones. I have done that in the past and loved it but what really drew me to this book was the mandalas. I’ve been trying to learn how to draw mandalas and I loved the ones that were on the cover of this book. So I was hoping it would help me to learn more about how to draw them.
As the title indicates, this book has step by step of 40+ designs. It also has a template for every single one of them at the back of the book. for me, it was the perfect starting book. Besides the mandalas, it also has wonderful examples of beetles, butterflies, fish and other animals and plants.
If stone painting or mandalas are interesting at all to you, you will enjoy this book!
with gratitude to netgalley and Quarto Publishing Group for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Expressive Sketchbooks (4 stars): If you’re a beginner Sketchbooker or are interested in beginning, I think you will really enjoy this delightful book. It has a great collection of the author’s sketchbooks and some really simple ideas to help get you started. And it also has elegant, beautiful, and more sophisticated ideas too. There’s a great mix of ideas with pencil, watercolor, and collage.
This book also talks about the emotional experience of creating, of doubting yourself, of getting stuck and learning to make peace with your art and looking at it as practice and learning. I really enjoyed the author’s kind voice and soft guidance throughout. She was both relatable and knowledgeable.
A great encouragement and idea-filled book for sketchers.
with gratitude to netgalley and Quarto Publishing Group for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.
Postscript (3 stars): For reasons I couldn’t understand, I kept resisting reading this book. I barely remember reading the original and wasn’t sure if this would feel like an unnecessary extension of a lovely story that should have been well-enough left alone.
Thankfully, it didn’t feel that way. The story had its own proper plot and also had the benefit of seeing a story over time and reflecting on its lessons slightly differently after so much time had passed. Considering how long it had been since the first book, I though this was a nice juxtaposition between real life and the book.
I really liked it, of course. Ahern can write and knows how to weave a story well with memorable characters. If you liked the first, you will likely like this one, too.
Leave Only Footprints (5 stars): “It occurred to me that part of the reason I’d seen so much debate about the year’s first sunrise, and not its last sunset, was that our beginnings always seem more important than our endings. In life, we can often control how things start. Endings are elusive and amorphous and uncertain.”
I loved this book. My word of the year this year is “wild” which is about being in the wilderness more. In 2002, I did a cross-country trip with my husband where we went to 30+ national parks and promised each other to rent an RV when we retired so we could do more of that. So when I saw this book I knew I wanted to read it immediately. I wanted to revisit the parks I’d seen in person and find out about all the ones I hadn’t.
“I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.”
And the book did not disappoint. It is the journey of the author over the course of a year as he visits every National Park in the United States. The book has parts that are informative, parts that are funny, and parts that are poignant. For me, it struck the perfect balance between the three, managing to make it a really enjoyable read.
“In a cave, you are simultaneously outdoors and indoors, protected from the elements and yet exposed to all sorts of new dangers.”
I will admit that more than once, I wished the book came with photos. I wanted to be able to imagine what the parks looked like as he told stories about being in them. Some are very briefly mentioned, while the others are longer. But I wanted to see photos of all of them. I spent time going between my book and internet searches so I could see the photos of the mentioned places.
“When I saw the pile, I couldn’t decide if it was depressing or beautiful. It’s probably a bit of both. It’s a monument to our desire to do the right thing, but it’s also proof that, sometimes, doing the right thing doesn’t matter. Sometimes it can be too little, too late.”
I know the author has live video segments, I haven’t seen any of them, but I will definitely go looking for them so I can enjoy all of this once more.
Thank you to netgalley and Crown Publishing for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
And there we go, another week of reading in 2020.
Books I Read this Week 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. I am also tracking my books in real time on Good Reads here. If you’re on Good Reads add me so I can follow you, too! I’ve also started an instagram account where I join my love of reading with my love of art.
Prompt: Listen – 04 | Use “Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.” to tell the story of a specific song that brings back memories for you.
When my husband and I first started dating back in college, I spent a lot of time in his dorm room, hanging out with him and his college roommate, Jason. At the time, they were really into Quentin Tarantino and while I hated the movies, I loved the soundtrack. At some point, we started listening to “Son of a Preacher man” and couldn’t stop.
We put the song on repeat and basically never turned it off. We would lower the volume and just keep it going in the background the whole time. When one of us entered the room, we would yell “Oh it’s my favorite song, turn it up!!” and we would increase the volume and sing it together.
This kept going for the better part of many, many months. I never got sick of it.
Even now, when I hear the song, it makes me smile and brings back all of the memories of that time of my life. The best memories.
This year I am planning to do something different than last year. Around last September, I stopped taking a lot of daily photos which then meant I also stopped scrapbooking. I have several of the Story Kit’s piled up. So I decided to switch gears a bit and see if I can use Ali’s prompts to tell my stories. I might (or might not) also turn them into scrapbook pages. In the meantime, I will just enjoy telling my stories.
Stories from 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. The prompts are from Ali’s Story Kits unless mentioned otherwise. I have started an instagram account for these, we’ll see if I keep it up.
