Notes
Finished reading: How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow 📚
Lovely and sweet. Made me cry when the main character’s mom really shows up for her. Also kinda makes me want to travel to DC.
📚🗨️ “I want to live my life being irrationally hopeful. Loving people and fish and cities with my whole heart.” Jake Maia Arlow, How to Excavate a Heart
Yesterday my mom, who in April 2022 was told she would probably never walk again, walked (with a walker and people around to spot her) up my front steps, into my house, and over to the couch. This is the result of months of hard work and physical therapy. ♥️
🍿 Watched Hats Off to Christmas.
This is the most paradigmatic Hallmark Christmas movie. It has everything:
- a struggling small business
- a suit guy
- who is going back to his small hometown after life in the big city
- a wheelchair-riding moppet
- who miraculously recovers from the injury that made him need a wheelchair
- a woman being stupid because of a conversation she eavesdropped on
- who is a young widow
- two chaste kisses
- a happy ending
Is it a good movie? No. But is it a laughably bad movie? No. Haylie Duff is incredibly winning and the reason I kept watching. Her chemistry with her costar is non-existent but she’s so cute, I didn’t care.
Finished reading: Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun 📚
This one was so lovely it made me cry. I can’t even sum up. Go read the description if it sounds good to you, try it out. Highly recommend.
I made this Funko Pop of myself using this Microsoft Designer prompt and I love her so much.
My little family is in the production of A Christmas Carol honoring the retirement of the director of the theater where W & I met. At rehearsal last night I looked at a particular spot on the floor of the theater & thought, “That’s where I fell in love with W.”
Bringing back The PhD Story’s predictive text New Year’s Resolution:
My resolution for 2024 is to be a good time.
Finished reading: You’re a Mean One, Matthew Prince by Timothy Janovsky 📚
Oh my goodness I love it. Matthew Prince starts out as a spoiled party boy but Janovsky slowly pulled the onion layers back until I loved him. And his love interest Hector is wonderful. Highly recommend.
📚 Listening to Patrick Stewart read A Christmas Carol and it’s just feels like having Jean-Luc Picard read it to you. 😍
Finished reading: In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae 📚
A lovely place-based friends-to-lovers second chance. As often happens, the third act breakup made me want to yell at the main character but the book had me happy-teary by the end.
Finished reading: Eight Kisses by Mindy Klasky 📚
Eight Hanukkah romance stories. I read one each night. My favorites are the one with the Frisky Bean coffee shop and the one with empty nesters reconnecting.
📚🗨️
When people who don’t have fibromyalgia ask me how it feels, I tell them to imagine the last time they had a bad flu, then to picture going shopping, cooking, or exercising while feeling like that.
- Ginevra Liptan, The FibroManual
Me: My heel hurts.
My doctor: Have you tried using that ointment I told to use for pain on it?
Me: I will now.
🔖📚 Read How To Get Started Reading Romance Novels by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade).
This is an excellent guide. Also? If you have unkind things to say about romance as a genre, please say them somewhere else. They’re not welcome in my replies.
Me: I’m going to take a 20 minute nap (sets alarm)
Narrator: She took a 90 minute nap. She did not hear the alarm.
I have 3 one -month gift subscriptions to Jami Attenberg’s Craft Talk to give away. Let me know if you want one.
🍿 Watched Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
My kid’s first time seeing both. Home Alone is, of course, a classic. Home Alone 2 isn’t a revelation but is super fun.
🕎🖖🏻 I would like to thank s-h-a-s-e on Tumblr for this Hanukkah gift of Sarek, Amanda, and Spock celebrating.
In the words of Adam Sandler:
You don’t need Deck the Halls or Jingle Bells Rock ‘cuz you can spin the dreidel with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock—both Jewish!
Book Character, Age 25: Seeing her has me feeling seventeen again.
Me, Age 42: Please. You’re only 25. You’re barely not 17.
2006 Me, Age 25: (shaking her fist at 2023 Me) Stop being so ageist.
🍿📺🎄 Watched The Christmas Train.
Based on a David Baldacci novel & bringing a bit of star power with Dermot Mulroney, Joan Cusack, and Danny Glover. A journalist runs into an old flame on The Christmas Train. Cute stuff. Almost too high-quality actually, for the vibes I’m looking for.
