January in Review – Adventures in a Messy Life

Okay, let’s go. It is so weird to think that one fourth of this century is done. And here goes my plan of just recycling these posts and republishing them each year. This may be a crazy idea, but I think it will work.

(There are affiliate links in here)

Week 1

The first week of the year was the last week Batman was here, so it was a lot of doing stuff together. It was also a lot of the kids attempting to annoy each other as much as possible. So there were pictures like that bottom right picture of them piled up together poking at each other.

We rented a storage unit and we have been slowly loading stuff up into it to store away for the kids until they get their own places so our house will be less crowded as we get ready to sell our house. That bottom left picture is Jeff pushing me on the cart at the storage unit as he and Superman were racing to get to the elevator after loading a bunch of stuff into the unit. Some of the stuff we are loading into the unit is stuff the kids haven’t decided if they want to keep for their future kids like a toy refrigerator Jeff’s Dad made for them when they were little and they played with and really loved, but now they obviously don’t care about as much.

Then there are the multiple car loads of stuff I’ve been taking to give away. I think so far this year I’ve taken 5 trunks full of stuff to load up to giveaway, which has me pretty happy right now.

The top picture is us at the local fondue restaurant. We chose to go there for a cheese and dessert course rather than for the actual full meal because those are the best courses.

Books read:

• Bo and Mr. Quillen: The Lost Chick- a quick read to review for Lorehaven, a middle grade book I’m thinking of picking up for Tara’s kids
• another book I don’t have handy because I’ve misplaced my notebook somewhere

Games played:

• Nemesis- Superman’s new game that he got which is basically you’re playing the plot of Alien the movie, but not because you know legally it has to be different
• Whatever game of Batman’s we played several rounds of before he left that is by the same company
• My Shelfie- a fun dice game I picked up on a whim that I like

Week 2

Actually, we may have technically played Nemesis during this week… This is why I need to take pictures when we’re playing games so I remember what we played.

This was the last full week Batman was here. You can see him in the picture up in the top row as we took his stuff up to the storage unit. Look at our pretty storage unit in the middle row.

We plan to change out the carpet upstairs in preparation for selling the house, and I’m slowly working on painting the upstairs to prepare for that, and we emptied out almost all of the furniture on one side of our house to do that. We had the kids help us with that as I had them shove things into the movie room so the other half is ready for replacing carpets.

Then, we’ve got that top right picture, Leezard had a seizure and I was washing her bedding and decided to wash the inner layer, now I swear I’ve washed it before, and had no problems, but this time I washed it and the casing of the stuffing broke inside the dryer and just made a huge mess.

HUGE MESS.

So, now I’m trying to figure out how I want to figure out how to fix this.

Batman had a couple of games he backed on Kickstarter that have been sitting in our house, and we played them several times. It’s an interesting campaign game, and each character you can play has a storyline you get to read as you advance your character and the character I played had the most tragic story I’ve ever read, which I had a lot of fun discussing with him.

I forget if Batman left at the end of this week or the beginning of the next, but he left sometime in there.

Books Read

I was looking back at the books I read last year, and I need to do a better job at writing more about them because I had some I just didn’t remember a thing about them when looking back later.

• Mr. Bo and Quillery and the Lost Chick– This was a review book for Lorehaven. It’s a cute early middle grade book in a similar vein to Hank the Cow Dog. I’m tempted to buy them for Tara and her kids
• Aquamancer’s Secret– Now here’s an interesting question, I first heard this on a podcast which reads free novellas and so I hadn’t counted it as a book read because I hadn’t thought about it as a book because it was originally on a podcast, and I’m realizing all of those episodes are actually novellas I’ve heard there, or novelletes. An interesting thing to think about. But, I enjoyed this and plan to buy the full length novel in this world. The author’s intent is to create a world that adults can enjoy, but can also be read aloud to the entire family, and at least in this novella, that’s what he did. The novella has the vibe of a cozy fantasy where it’s sweet and fun to listen to. The full-lenth novel is supposed to be more of an epic fantasy in the same world.
• Warlock’s Bride– I spent most of this book deciding if I wanted to finish the book. It was bland and okay. The female main character’s main trait is she is mad at everyone, and the man’s trait is he’s charismatic and they accidentally drink a potion causing them have to be near eaach other. It’s bland and was okay. I mainly finished it because it was more bother to pick a new book.
• Yule Bride- This is the author’s freebie on her newsletter maybe, it’s like 50 pages and is the halfway between the Warlock’s Bride and whatever comes after in the series. I read it more just to have it read, then from any real desire. I really have no clue why I did this to myself. It was stupid.

Games Played

• Floor Plan- which sadly is not for sale anywhere
• Nemesis– I may not have linked to the game we played, but I’m feeling lazy about finding the right one… Either way this was fun to play.
• Whatever the game was with Batman, which honestly I don’t remember but goodness was my character’s story depressing

Week 3

The top picture is the mural my Sunday School class made of why you might follow Jesus. I set them free with the supplies, admittedly combined from two different activities, and let them just create for 5-10 minutes. I had to laugh at two of the girls who just randomly decided to make food, and when I said, “What does that have to do with the assignment?” wrote their answer on the food. Yep, there you go, that totally is what I was expecting. In the meantime, one of the boys made this super cool 3-D version of a miracle of Jesus, and on the other one that I didn’t include in the collage another boy made this cool door that opened up so you could open up the door like it talks about in Revelation.

Not pictured, but we had a “New year, New Start” party for our homeschool co-op with a White Elephant where we all were wildly encouraged to regift stuff and it was so much fun and everyone had a lot of fun with the game. The board games I put in for the White Elephant were wildly popular and I can’t wait to hear what people think of playing them.

Then we played Sweet Existence together, and I had the worst luck and kept getting the “I Perish,” which is the card that ends the game and means your team loses. It was the WORST. Especially when you know you’ve been passed it and you are just this ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

And then I took this big load up to the storage unit, and rearranged it again. I’m slowly getting things more and more organized.

Books read

• Fae Bride– I was curious if I would like this author better with a more likeable main character, and I continued to find the book rather blah, but I have now read all of her books that I had in my library. So, that’s good. I now know not to get anymore of her books even if they are free, it doesn’t matter if the covers look good or the back copy sounds decent, I just don’t like her writing style and sher hasn’t figure out how to make the story actually work. And that’s with having a storyline that in theory should be interesting, it just wasn’t. It was bland and similar.
• Twelve Months– The next book in the Dresden Files, I’ve been waiting 6 years for this. I loved it. It was very slice of life as he slowly healed from the events of the last book. Hopefully this next book takes significantly less time or we’ll never finish this series.
• Once Upon Thyme– This was another book that I kept thinking about DNFing because I wasn’t sure if I liked the main character, the princess’ main character seemed to be “I’m not like other princesses,” which is okay but not all that interesting. I did like that she really cared about her sister, and so it was okay, but not my favorite.

Games played

Week 4

I promise that humans exist in my life, but guess what most of the humans in my life don’t really care about taking pictures, and there’s only so many pictures I can take of myself just randomly taking walks, so my dog randomly does weird stuff.

The last week of January started with all of Texas freaking out as we worried about a freeze starting. It started almost a week out as everyone stormed HEB and bought out everything. It was hilarious as Jeff and I went by there the day before the freeze and took some random pictures of the mostly empty store. Like seriously why is there no produce, or why did everyone buy out every single bit of meat? There was some bread and milk, but practically no toilet paper. It was a predicted freeze of 2 days, like people you will not run out of food in 2 days. You will probably be fine.

Like seriously, why is every single bit of seafood gone? None left. The produce aisles empty, the meat aisles empty. It was just insane.

Jeff and I happily stayed home for a couple of days, we enjoyed church from home. It was communion Sunday, so we had a delightful communion of Saltine crackers and orange juice. God knows the heart, so that is just as much communion as any other material.

We took Leezard for several slow and steady walks which were highly amusing to us as she didn’t think she needed to be slow and steady so there were a few times where she completely wiped out and lost her footing, and we had a much easier time convincing her to go the direction we wanted as she had zero traction.

She is also getting much better at finding the food she wants. She got into her allergy chews, and I’d heard this random thumping sound and came in to discover she’d grabbed the bottle off the counter and had figured out how to chew the lid off in some sort of fashion. I don’t know, but she was then quite determinedly figuring out how to get it out of the giant mostly empty plastic tin.

Then she knocked over the bucket of popcorn on top of her crate that I keep for her when she goes there, and so the two of us had a competition to see who could most quickly get it all put away. Me shoving it back into the bucket, or her eating as fast as she can.

Not pictured but Jeff and I kept working on the upstairs. I’ve almost got the boys’ old room completely painted, it’s amazing just how many coats of paint that very dark blue took to cover up. And then the various little odds and ends of debris that was up in the loft is almost completely out of there which will be nice to get done.

Books read

I decided to reread the Dresden Files and started to read the first book but then decided to skip the first two books.

I also have started TWO different nonfiction books. First is City of God, which I got a good part of the way through, but have discovered I don’t like the copy I got from the library because of how it’s translated, but I’m discovering that seems to be common for all versions. Every translation seems to have very short chapters wich very long chapter headings.

And then I checked out a book from the library on Regency dress, which I have mostly finished, or a good deal of the way finished and want to finish up.

• Grave Peril
• Summer Knight
• Death Masks
• Bloot Rites- these are all the Dresden Files books, no need to say more I’ve read them several times before

Games Played

• Battle for Hogwarts
• Satisfactory- this is a computer game the whole family has been playing and I want to include this because we’ve all been playing it together for the past month and it’s been a lot of fun