2023 memories

—

by

Ticia
in

I’m cleaning up my blog, and collapsing my month in review posts down into a year in review post, and so this is now the 2023 year. For these later years where I wrote a post for each month I picked a week from that month that had a particularly interesting story, or was particularly memorable, sometimes I grabbed a bit from several weeks to help create a cohesive story.

That means there will be affiliate links in here.

January

I have a lot of funny stories surrounding food this week.

That big picture is a baby quilt I finished for a former student. It was a scrappy quilt using fabrics I already owned but trying to match the colors she picked for her nursery. It turned out pretty well for being a scrappy quilt, and I think the fabric I chose for the cup ended up perfect.

I started out the week going to lunch with the Artist at Pei Wei, when we were there she got a bowl of wonton soup which they served in this giant container. It was a weird visit because when we went there they had so many items on their menu they were out of or said they couldn’t make, which we were very confused by.

Then later in the week we needed somewhere we could eat really quickly, and then we got there and it was closed, that’s that yellow picture. It was closed for health code violations. Which is not in the least bit worrying. Thankfully we didn’t get sick from it.

In the Lorehaven group chat we were talking about a big drama in “Romancelandia” (as my friend the clean romance author said) where an indie author had faked her suicide and just came back from the dead. It was super crazy. She was “spilling the tea,” and The Artist said I looked so offended the idea of spilling tea she had to make that illustration. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

Back to our food stories.

First on Monday I remade the Crispy chicken bites (chicken nuggets) from several years ago and I reprinted the recipe and the kids read my original directions and were absolutely appalled at my directions. APPALLED,”Mom you really put that on the internet?”

Tuesday I made Sri Lanken crepes, which The Artist read the recipe and said, “Mom, this isn’t a meal, this is dessert.” I replied, “But we’re adding bacon to it, so there’s protein, now it’s breakfast for dinner.” Then she read this some more and said, “Mom you’re making syrup, you need a candy thermometer.” Why don’t I just replace it with normal syrup? More sounds of indignation. In the end it was a delicious, if very sugary recipe.

Wednesday since we were studying South Korea we went back and made Korean bulgogi again, I figured since the two countries have only been split for 50ish years they probably still have very similar foods, and I kind of didn’t want to try and hunt down another recipe. Repeat another round of amazement at my directions from 10 years ago.

Then on Saturday I cooked a recipe for Mali, and nothing interesting happened, but it was significantly more mustard tasting than I really wanted. Oh well…

Since people still didn’t have the busyness of school and work for part of the week we played a couple more games from Christmas:

  • Pathfinder Level 20– it’s supposed to be competitive but we enjoyed playing it as cooperative
  • Dad Jokes– we ended up slightly revising how the game is played, changing it to did you smile rather than did you laugh because it’s too easy to stop from laughing

Then because I’m trying to keep better track of books I’ve read, here are the books I read this week:

  • Northanger Abbey– an author I follow is about to do a Beauty and the Beast and Northanger Abbey mashup
  • A Crown of Chains– a fantasy retelling of the book of Esther, I’ve come to the conclusion after reading this I don’t really like Esther retellings. I liked the overall story of this book, but because of parts of the story of Esther, it makes the story a little difficult to endure
  • Sew It’s a Quest– a fairy tale mashup, that was fun
  • Engaged to a Supervillain (betaread: sequel to Captured by a Supervillain)- superhero book

I was sick on Thursday so read A Crown of Chains in a day, then Friday came about and Leezard had a seizure and so I spent large parts of the day watching over her, so I read it all in one day also.

February

Most of the really big things that happened this week aren’t pictured.

Okay, so we had a big youth event at our church and I’d set up for an interpreter to come so our deaf students would be able to attend, and then Monday he wasn’t able to come because he was scheduled for work. Many panicked texts later, we had new interpreters set up, and it was even better because they were able to come for the session he couldn’t come, AND one of them was her former small group leader!!!!!

Okay, so that settled I was settling in and all ready to clean my house like crazy for the 8 students staying at my house. Then I got sick on Wednesday, so sick all I did was throw up and sleep for a day straight, oh and read really easy books to read (most of the books I read this week, I’d read them all before and so could kind of skim).

I was panicking and thinking I would have to tell the church they needed to find a new host home, and then Thursday I woke up feeling fine. I texted all my friends who were praying and while I had no energy, I could sit and brush up on ASL through SignIt ASL (read my SignIt ASL review). Then I got a call from Jeff, “I’m fine, but the Expedition is probably totaled,” this led to a bunch of panicked phone calls as we tried to figure out what car I could drive the girls in, since I was going to be driving them around for the weekend. Thankfully someone loaned me their car for the weekend, it was their super old minivan and she gave me a detailed explanation of how to make sure the car didn’t have any problems.

Coming back to add, I totally forgot the other part. I had insomnia on Thursday night, which then turned into sitting up with the dog as she had over 10 seizures starting at 3 AM going through when we left for DNow on Friday, she’d eaten some of a bag of almonds. It was less than pleasant as she lost all bladder control with the seizures so I was mopping the floor wherever she had her seizure and various other stuff.

Then DNOW happened, that’s the picture with all the smiley faces. It was amazing and I loved all that happened with the girls and the conversations we had.

When the weekend was over, the boys all played a zombie game together, and we had another round of Cthuthlu Dead May Die. I’m slowly gathering pictures to write a review of the game.

Superman is taking a set of coding classes from a group called Code2College which offers internships and things like that, that’s the bottom picture, he’s really enjoying it.

And on Valentine’s Day I cooked a Senegal fish recipe, and that was…. not good. I tried, I tried really hard, but everyone hated it. But wait, the recipe I tried for this next week was even worse.

Games played:

And books read:

March

The big event is of course the boys turned 18!!!!!

But other things happened.

Most of my pictures for this week revolve around the boys’ birthday. But that little picture in the middle row on the left is from Game Club. The boys were quite gracious as some of the other kids had brought some silly little games, but they were willing to play them, even if they didn’t like playing them.

And the only other picture not related to their birthday is of these pancakes, which aren’t actually pancakes, they are Yemen martabaks, a thick pancake. But really, they were a story in everything going wrong, but still tasting okay. I’m not really sure just what I did wrong, but somehow these are not what the recipe is supposed to be.

But all the rest of these pictures are related to the cousin sleepover for the boys’ birthday. The boys wanted hobo stew, so we created our various different meals, and sat around the fire as they cooked. After putting the fire out, they were quite entertained by pouring all the water on it, they played Minecraft together, until they decided they were tired. I don’t know how this decision was arrived at. They all trooped into the tent with every pillow and blanket they could get ahold of and happily slept in the tent all night. We got up and took everyone to church, where the 4 year old went to Sunday School and the two older cousins “helped” with the parking team.

I had quite a bit of fun telling one of the leaders we had elementary students helping us today, he got this panicked look as if he really thought we were going to have elementary kids directing traffic. I may be a bit cavalier with rules from time to time, but I would never be THAT cavalier. He calmed down quite a bit when I explained it was my niece and nephew.

Events not pictured that I want to make sure I remember.

  • Jeff, The Artist, and I went to go see Jesus Revolution in the theaters, it was really good and I highly recommend seeing it. We spent a lot of time afterward talking about the movie, and the people involved, and how the different couples reacted to troubles.
  • We all went to go see Antman Quantumania for my Mom’s belated birthday movie, which everyone enjoyed seeing together, but there were definitely some storytelling problems with the movie.
  • And I forced the kids to sit down and give me a date for their graduation. It was like herding cats who had been given Red Bull and 3 shots of espresso. It was not fun, by the end I had a crazed look in my eyes, as I don’t enjoy these conversations either, and The Artist said “Mom, do you need me to make you tea? Here, I’ll go make you tea.” We have a date set now, and next I need to force them to get me names for the invitations. Dramatic sigh, I am NOT looking forward to it.

I have no clue what games the boys played during Game Club, for their birthday they got more Smash UP expansions and the final villain for Cthulhu Death May Die we don’t have yet.

And books read (and for those wondering how I read so much, these are short novels around 200 pages, OR novellas):

  • Pendant fro Trouble- prequel novella, you have to subscribe to the author’s newsletter to get it
  • The Lady Jewel Diviner– a gas lamp fantasy, or alternate history fantasy set in Regency England
  • The Selkie Scandal- a second prequel novella in the box set
  • The Moria Pearls
  • Royal Gone Rogue– I stayed up way too late finishing reading this for the first time
  • Royally Rearranged– then I went back and read the first book in the series, it’s a nice bit of fluff that doesn’t require much thought

April

I subscribe to a monthly tea of the day and the tea for April 1 was Cursed Tea, and it was. It was well and truly cursed and it was terrible. I then had to make both Jeff and the Artist taste this horrible tea. It was so bad that even the smell was making me gag. Jeff was absolutely amazed I got this if it had such teas, and I had to explain it frequently had good tea, but this particular tea was just so horrible I couldn’t stand it.

Then that night I was going to make Mama Fry bake from St. Vincent and Grenadines, only to discover that it was basically fry bread and that is not something you can make a meal out of. So I quickly revised my plan and used the Mama Fry bake to make Navajo tacos, which is essentially using fry bread in place of a tortilla. They turned out fine despite the first attempt or two not going well.

Monday I helped at The Artist’s AHG troop as responsible adult, which mainly meant I sat in the room and talked with other adults. I did wander over at one point and get a picture of The Artist working on her project. They were making stained glass.

I continued working on the questions for April’s Book Quest over at Lorehaven, The Chase by Bradley Caffee, it’s Superman’s favorite dystopian book series, and I’ve found so many great questions to ask.

We had a meal from UAE, Biryani, but I managed to forget several different ingredients, so I can’t really claim it was a true-to-life version of the meal, but I enjoyed it, especially the toasted cashews we added on.

I got a random picture of Batman just chilling with Leezard and reading one day, and I just loved the picture.

And then the last picture is Superman after surgery on his wrist. After 8 months in a cast, we finally went with surgery (we actually almost did in December, but the doctor at that time thought it looked healed, but it was reinjured in February). He spent the day watching TV with us, and then we finished off our multi-year gaming campaign. It was an epic ending that I still have to write up, when I do it will be added to Addie’s Journal, and maybe at some point it will be turned into a series of books.

Books read:

Games played:

Easter was insanely busy, as you might guess. Parking was crazy, there were so many cars. Afterward, we went home and got ready for the cousins and the Easter T-rex greeted them with much squealing and chasing. Then we had our Easter egg hunt, with Batman happily sporting many many bunny ears he stole/was given by the cousins. It was a fun Easter, and everyone was quite happy.

Superman went in to work on Monday, despite having literally just had surgery on Friday, so I made Batman go eat lunch there, I got this oh-so-happy look from him as we were leaving. His co-workers were amused by it.

What is especially amusing about all that, the area manager came in later (his store manager had been let go for not doing his job over the weekend while Superman was off), and said, “Why are you here? Are you cleared to come back to work?” So his boss basically told him not to come back until he had a doctor’s note clearing him to work. When he called into the doctor’s office asking about that, the receptionist said, “Oh honey, you just had surgery. You do not need to be going to work.” So he has to wait another week before he can go into work. Then we’ll see what the doctor says on Wednesday.

May

This week was insanely busy. INSANELY busy.

We ate three cooking around the world meals, Saint Kitts and Nevis coconut dumplings which had very mixed opinions. Then we had some Tanzanian steak, which everyone thought was okay, but they wouldn’t necessarily seek it out. Finally, we had Togo chicken, which was lots and lots of garlic and ginger, which never goes wrong in our family, but my kids have recently grown to be less fond of chicken legs so they just kind of shrugged their shoulders at it.

The top left picture is Batman and Artist with one of the kids from the Bible study they lead.

Then the top right is from The Artist’s Court of Awards, she received the Silver Presidential Service Award and her level award for Patriots, next she gets to go for her Stars and Stripes award. She is both excited and nervous about this.

But, what really had us so busy was the kids’ graduation on Saturday. We had quite a fun graduation party with around 30-40 people there, and I made way too much food for the event, but everyone had a great time, which is that bottom two pictures. The left is a picture with one of the boys’ friends and the right is a picture with their cousins and their Mimi. Most of the other pictures from the graduation are just nowhere near as photogenic. Seriously, one of my pictures is a bunch of The Artist’s friends with their hands in the baby pool of ice and drinks, seeing who would keep their hands in there the longest. Kids are weird.

Games played:

No clue, I’m writing this June 6

Books read:

  • I’m going to assume I read the rest of the Timeless Tales books.
  • Swan Lake– Looking at the cover, I’m reminded again of why the saying don’t judge a book by its cover exists, because I am hard-core judging that wedding dress outfit on the cover, it’s horrid for the story.
  • Sleeping Beauty– I like the twist she did so that Sleeping Beauty isn’t marrying a complete stranger when she wakes up OR not some random guy she met in the woods.
  • Frog Prince– This made me laugh because the frog prince is a minor character in other books
  • Snow White– this was my least favorite of the entire series, I didn’t really like the “dwarf” characters or the love interest really

June

This was club week, so the kids were gone all day and I had a quiet house. While they were gone I did a bunch of behind the scenes work on my blog, which meant I was going through and deleting a bunch of posts that are useless (old Science Sunday posts that essentially said, “Ack life crazy, link here and I’ll do something later” I didn’t add in something later) or just weird posts that didn’t do anything. Then I’m working on better organizing all of the memory-type posts. I don’t want to completely delete them, but I also don’t need a post that is like two sentences and a random picture saying, “Look at how cute my kids are!” So, I’m combining some of those into an uber post of memories, and copying the comments into a word file so I can remember what people said (and in some cases I’m adding in the comments into the newly combined post).

Then the kids would come home and tell me stories about how clubs went, “Oh my goodness we had a foam canon, it was so much fun” (bottom center) “The foam was waist deep!” “We did water balloons today,” more and more stories about friends.

Then on Thursday I got a text from Superman saying, I’m going to be Big Bird this afternoon if you want a picture of me and the cousins together come up to church, so I did and I forced all the cousins to get a picture. I also got a picture from my friend who made her kids take a picture with Superman in the Big Bird costume. I love all of these pictures. So much.

That same night the cousins came over to spend the night, but the youngest cousin was too young to go to VBS, so I babysat her until everyone was home, and so I got that awesome selfie together.

As we were watching a movie together, or more I was kind of watching the movie and she was playing, I got a phone call with, “Your dog is at our house, would you like to come get her?” It was near enough I thought I could just run over there with no shoes on.

That was a mistake, however the dog thought it was the most awesome trip ever, and wasn’t this so much fun?

No, no it was not.

Eventually all the cousins were there and they had fun playing Minecraft together, which is the bottom right picture, and eventually I sent them to bed after the four year old managed to steal some of the Artist’s coffee.

Oops.

The next day was Batman’s last gaming session before heading off to the army, so I snagged a quick picture of the chaos that is 11 players.

All in all a good week.

I lost my notebook where I’ve been recording what I read and what games I played, so I don’t really remember, even though it is literally only a day or so later. Go figure.

Okay, it’s 11:20, and I may have eaten too much ice cream, and so I’m getting a headache.

July

Though technically the pictures for it start almost halfway through that week….

For Independence Day Batman wanted to launch fireworks and watch ALL of the Scream movies since we had missed seeing the new one in the theaters.The apple pie army picture is from that movie marathon.

We started July 3, and in honor of watching Scream, I bought some Jiffy Pop, which are apparently horrendously overpriced now since they are primarily a novelty item bought for nostalgia. It was still fun to make them try out that bit of nostalgia from my teen years (though even then microwave popcorn was a thing).

Then they got to launch various fireworks, as always happens we had a few times where one went slightly wrong and we got a surprise. The Artist had a fountain she got that was a little bigger than we realized, and we all very quickly backed up quite a bit.

The next day was pool day and Batman had a lot of fun organizing all of the kids to play various games and get another great canon ball picture (why can’t I remember which one is cannon and canon? I’m not bothering looking up which should have 1 n), which I didn’t include this time because I had so many other things to include.

That afternoon was game club and the boys happily expanded the time ever so slightly so they could get away with playing some longer games and they split up into two different groups, I’m not entirely sure what games they played, though I’ll try to write them all down.

Thursday several ladies from the co-op came over and cleaned the downstairs of our house. It was amazing. I got home and cried because they were able to clean things I’d been struggling to figure out how to get the stains out, and organized some areas of my house that were a mess. It was an amazing gift.

Friday Batman had his final Nerf war, which you can see the picture where I got a group picture and then Superman said, “Charge Mommy!” I just sat there taking about 2 million pictures. I would include that hilarious grouping, but I would have to spend so much time adding smiley faces over the faces of so many kids…

After the Nerf War, he had his last Bible study with everyone, which is that picture in the top left corner.

Saturday we had a going away party and there were a lot of people, but the pictures are not particularly interesting as it was just lots of people talking, but it was cool to have all sorts of people from their life come, including the camp leaders from the camp they used to go to several years ago (the leaders were also my youth leaders when I was in high school, so I’ve known them since I was a young teen).

The night was full of more board game playing

Sunday we went out for breakfast together, then spent the day playing a D&D campaign we came up with completely on the fly of what would happen if someone from a D&D world came into our world, how would they adapt?

Basically, it looks like, after we were very confused by all manner of things, we were briefly committed to somewhere because it was clear we were not from where we appeared, but we also were generally very confusing, so they were trying to figure out who we were (especially since one of the people was furry, but looked human).

Monday, that was when Batman left. Originally he was supposed to leave on Sunday, but it got pushed back a day, so Superman was scheduled to work. They said a not-emotional goodbye on their part, for me I was emotional, then the rest of the family headed off to breakfast where I did my best not to cry.

Spoiler: I was no always successful.

We came home and spent the afternoon playing the board games Batman picked out, and then we drove him to the recruiter office to drop him off. That’s that big picture at the bottom.

I was emotional getting him there, and then the bus was late, so we sat there for two hours before finally just leaving him.

It was weird, very very weird.

Games played:

Books read:

Okay, got this off my to do list, now to move on to the next thing! Oh crud! I just remembered something I NEED to get done before I leave today. Better go do that.

August

Most of the big things that happened this week did not make it into pictures.

So, here are the things that made it into pictures.

We as a family had a couple of times of playing games. More Shadows of Brimstone, some more Tempurra, and a round of the Harry Potter game where I kind of created a game to play.

Superman had game club, where they played Tempurra (current family favorite as you can tell), and Root, which another kid had brought.

During our weekly call I asked Batman about how he liked the memes I’ve been sending him, and I could practically hear him rolling his eyes as he said, “Yeah… My drill sergeant had to go through all of them that you sent to make sure you weren’t sending me any contraband.” He may have said something else, but it broke up then briefly. His phone calls are not always the easiest to hear. I mentioned this in the Lorehaven group and one of the ladies (whose husband is an army chaplain) said, “You need to send him drill sergeant memes now! So I created that top meme. I need to Google Drill Sergeant memes. Though that may be too far.

I did, and found a few more I added in to mail Batman.

I heard lick mats can be this great thing for your dog and really help them with stress and other stuff, so I bought one, and when we left Leezard in her crate I left her with the mat. We got home from church and she had licked the mat, but she also had started chewing on it and as she chewed on it accidentally pulled the blanket through the mat, and just generally destroyed it.

Sigh…

And for a final thing, yesterday I got a worried call from Jeff asking if I knew why the fire alarm was going off, well I was out at lunch, and so I left Mom with The Artist, started driving home as I’m getting updates from Jeff by text, “fire department on the way,” “alarm has gone off,” then I got a call from the alarm company.

Meanwhile Jeff is getting calls from the fire department, the police station, and the alarm company, so he starts driving home.

I drive up to see three firefighters standing in front of the door not going in because there is no obvious fire, but at the same time an alarm is going off.

I let them in, they check to see if there is any fire, there is none, just as they leave Jeff drives up, and I get to explain the whole thing to him, then Mom drives up with The Artist and the whole conversation starts over again.

Long story somewhat short (I’m turning this into a 2 page epic letter for Batman, you know so I can send the memes), we’re getting our alarm system checked out to make sure it doesn’t do that again.

It was exciting.

Books Read:

  • Teacup Quilt Mystery– a novella that was amusing, I picked it up because it was free, it was a nice quick read, which makes sense with it only being 150 pages
  • Rose Gate– Beauty and the Beast retelling, it’s an interesting series of books, mostly independent, but also somewhat sharing ideas between books
  • Glass Gate– Cinderella retelling
  • Imperfectly Proverbs 31– I forget if I read this last week or this week, I can’t decide what I think of this book. There were parts of it I enjoyed, and there were parts of it that were rather not good in ways I can’t explain

Games played:

  • Tempurra– a press your luck game I forced everyone to play to figure out if we want to keep it and now everyone really likes it
  • Root– I know nothing about this, Superman didn’t have much to say about it
  • Shadows of Brimstone (I have lots of people looking up how to organize their new stuff, so I’ve gotten quite a few hits on my how-to-organize Shadows of Brimstone), I had to laugh the new expansion is on Amazon, but it does not cost that much, I’m guessing someone is selling their Kickstarter game

I’m using the “Search success picture to stand in for the original collage.

That giant photo of Leezard and the smaller photo of lasagna being constructed go together as two rather amusing stories.

I was going to start off telling the Leezard story, but first I have to back up and tell a different story. This story starts with deciding to make spaghetti noodles from scratch for dinner the night before to make chow mein.

So, I made the pasta, had leftover dough, and I wrapped it up then got distracted and left it on the counter.

Fast forward to the next day and I was drying off from taking a shower. I heard a noise from the kitchen that implied something was happening that shouldn’t have.

I get out there and she has found the chicken I had left from a project that morning and was very carefully eating from the glass bowl that she had somehow not shattered.

I look around and the pasta dough I had gotten back out so it would be warmed up to make lasagna noodles was gone. I stuck her in her crate, ran back to my room got dressed and proceeded to search for the wrapping for the dough.

The wrapping was nowhere to be found. I did a quick google search and basically got, “Maybe she needs emergency surgery, maybe she just needs to be watched to make sure she passes the wrap and it is not blocking anything.”

I am not excited by this.

All right I think, I’ll just use some ready-made noodles.

Only we don’t have any, so I decide to make another batch of pasta dough, only to discover we do not have enough eggs to make pasta dough.

I called Jeff and he said he’d pick up eggs, so that problem was solved.

Then I ran out of flour, but thankfully I had a brand new bag of 25 pounds of flour.

This is where the Leezard story comes back in.

We’re attempting to pour this bag of flour into a 5 gallon bucket, but it was missing the bucket, and Leezard was trying her best to eat it all.

We eventually got the flour all pour in, and Leezard was desperately licking up as much flour as she could as if I was going to stop her from doing this, until suddenly she looked up and saw this just was not as good as she thought it was going to be, so suddenly I now had slightly soggy flour all over the floor.

I finished making the pasta, got it mixed up and then swept up the flour resolving to mop the next day (which I did).

In the end, I had the most amazing dish of lasagna ever because homemade noodles, homemade sauce, and two pounds of mozzarella makes a delicious meal.

September

Things rather blurred together, but that’s a good thing.

The week actually started with the picture in the bottom center, Superman had a Kung Fu show, it was very weird seeing him perform without his brother. There were a few times I had to not cry.

Then the bottom corner is a Call of Abraham game I’m trying to make that is somewhat similar to the Oregon Trail card game in how it plays, but not completely the same. I still need to work on it some.

But the big deal is heading up to Oklahoma to see Batman graduate from Basic Training. I made him take lots of pictures, which he put up with.

Some funny stories from that:

  • We got up there and planned to go grocery shopping, only to discover half of the town did not have power. At one point we said, “I guess we’ll try shopping at Target,” but a gallon of milk was
  • As we’re picking him up for Family Day, one of his platoon mates came up and said, “You duplicated Messing,” which was rather hilarious.
  • Then that night when he came back, there was a lot of discussion on how they thought he would look with a beard, since Superman has a beard. The general agreement was he should not grow a beard.

His big requests for that day was to play D&D and have soup, so we made him tomato basil soup and he gm’d for us up there.

We had a lot of fun seeing him, and it was great to see how he was doing.

Books read:

  • The Dragon and the Scholar Saga– this was an omnibus, and each book is 150-200 pages, but it’s a fun fantasy series, the first book has a scholar sent to a kingdom to help cure the king’s injuries from a dragon fight
  • Beast of Talesend– Beauty and the Beast in a film noir setting, this was last month’s book quest with Lorehaven, and I finished it a week or so after everyone else because I just have a hard time reading a chapter a day, so I read it in bursts
  • Alice in the Land of CLovers– I got this because it was an Alice in Wonderland retelling, but I just really struggled with it. Alice ends up in Wonderland as she’s fleeing from a guy who wants to marry her, but she doesn’t want to marry him. It sets up several love interests, but some of them part animal. There are the kings of each of the different cards, the king of diamonds is also the White Rabbit, and he’s described as a rabbit with a human face. A distractingly handsome face, she emphasizes this a lot. Then the Cheshire Cat is also described as rather cat-like, but with again a devastatingly handsome face. It was also a bit more graphic than I prefer, and looked like it was going to set up a reverse harem. I did a lot of skimming as she ended up becoming very familiar with several of the kings, and then read summaries of how the series ended. I was vaguely curious, but I didn’t feel the writing was all that good, and it was much more explicit than I want to read.

October

This was a confusing week with lots of plans and then adapting plans and changing plans

Obviously, the really big event was the eclipse! I picked up some eclipse glasses at the last minute so we could go observe them and I had a lot of fun watching it slowly change and get pictures of the shadows for how different it looked.

Batman called us from AIT and asked for us to mail him a few things, so I put them together into a very unique box I put together and stuffed in all sorts of memes. I’m eagerly looking forward to his response to that, I haven’t heard anything yet.

Then I took off to mail the package. I came up with the brilliant idea of taking the dog with me. It was fine for the part I have pictured here, but while I was in the post office, she leaped into the front seat with all the excitement.

So, I carefully opened the door, which she tried to run out of, and crammed myself into the chair with her, at which point she excitedly turned around while on me, managing to honk the horn. Finally I convinced her to go to the next chair, because I cannot drive while she’s on my lap, and eventually we headed off home.

It was also the week leading up to Jeff’s birthday, which was on the 15th, but that day was busy with a bunch of things we couldn’t rearrange, so we celebrated Saturday night. I got him a new office chair, and a D&D setting. It was a fun low-key way to celebrate his birthday and we all enjoyed it.

Books read:

  • Little Persuased– officially the last of the Jane Austen Fairy Tale retellings, combining Persuasion and Little Mermaid, which worked better than I expected, and actually made me like Little Mermaid more than I usually do
  • The Late Mrs. Willoughby– this is the sequel to The Murder of Mr. Wickham, and I assumed like most murder mysteries you can read the books in any order, and while that is true, I didn’t need to read The Murder of Mr. Wickham, because it is the same sets of people in both books, they talked about who the murder was from the first book quite a lot, actually that’s part of the false lead, ummm spoilers if you do read the book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, so I went and bought the first book in the series
  • The Murder of Mr. Wickham– I don’t know if I would have read the second book if I read this book first. While I thoroughly enjoyed the mystery and the newly created characters, I felt she misunderstood some of the Jane Austen characters, and so their behavior did not match their behaviors in their books. All in all, I do like the series, and a third book is coming out in a few months, which I will buy, the characters I didn’t like their characterization did not appear again in the second book and are unlikely to appear in the third

November

november 2023 week 4

The 22nd kicked off with taking the cousins to the Austin Science and Nature Center, which they all had a blast with. I think Liam is actually wearing one of the boys’ old coats, so that’s amusing. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed it, and the trade counter was wildly popular.

A few days later and it was Thanksgiving. We opted to do a low-key Thanksgiving because we were going the next day down to San Antonio to see Batman. We made a ham, since we were going to have turkey for Christmas, then we headed down to San Antonio.

That was an adventure, to not turn this into a 10,000 word post, I’m going to sum up what went wrong:

  • we first went to the wrong entrance to the base
  • the first place we were going to go had an over 2 hour wait, and wouldn’t even add us to the list until we got there (and it was a 20 minute drive)
  • Leezard escaped and I had to find someone to get her back in the house and give her water
  • where we went for breakfast that turned into lunch didn’t get us seated for over an hour, despite originally claiming a 30 minute wait
  • then our food was slow coming, and they got my order wrong, so we were at Cracker Barrel for over 3 hours
  • we went to a park instead of the zoo because of the time, and shortly after getting there Superman had to go to the ER because of an allergic reaction
  • when we went to dinner, the first restaurant was closed for Thanksgiving holiday (on Friday), then the restaurant we went to had a lot of add-ons

But, it was a good visit, it’s just one of those holidays that would make a great screwball comedy ending with a happy ending.

That bottom left corner picture is me at the thing, and I kinda hate it, but at the same time it’s a great sum-up of the day with all that went so crazy wrong.

Books read:

  • Fawkes– alternate history about the gunpowder plot
  • Of Snow and Roses– a very strange modern-day retelling of Snow White and Rose Red I picked up in a 99 cent sale or maybe it was free. When I started reading it, I’d forgotten the plot, and so it was odd to read. It takes place in a mental asylum as the main character is trying to figure out why she’s there and who she is, very odd book
  • Crack the Stone– fantasy retelling of Les Miserables, very much streamlined plot, but interesting idea
  • To Catch a Magic Thief– the sequel to Rose and the Wand, but oddly it takes place before it, and it’s set in the same world but different time period as several other books I’ve read. I enjoy the author, but sometimes she has more characters than I can keep track of, especially if they have aliases

And that’s our November, the years are flying by at an ever faster pace. It’s kind of crazy to think of.

December

I’m typing this up on January 1, with Batman home from the military, I have not been on the computer much. Right now, we’re kind of chilling for a bit as everyone is slowly getting going.

This past week has been a great week of many memories, most of which have no pictures. The memories I do have pictures of are not so easy to explain always. Here goes.

Oh look, I think the pictures are more or less in chronological order, by accident.

My Mom came over for the traditional Christmas Eve Eve celebrations, and we cuddled up together and watched Muppet Christmas Carol together (for the second time this Christmas season, I made the argument we didn’t watch it with Batman present, and since I was getting over being sick people let me get away with it).

Batman was not thrilled with his Christmas present decorated with the army star and coloring, but labeled as “Navy.” We all thought it hilarious.

Speaking of another present that didn’t go over well. I got Superman a potato with his face on it. I thought it was hilarious, he… did not. He’d had a bad morning with lots of his presents missing, and lots of near misses, so by that point he was done.

Then I have a hilarious picture of my boys holding toes, which they do to annoy The Artist who finds it unnerving. Which it is, but her protests make it funnier.

Jeff gave me a giant blanket for Christmas, and by giant I mean it’s bigger than a king-size blanket AND it’s super soft and fluffy. There has been much arguing over who gets to use it, and I usually trump it with, “But it’s my Christmas present and you can still use it as long as I have blanket to cover me.”

That bottom right set of pictures is the reaction to The Artist’s present to Mom, she edited a picture of her with all the grandkids, replacing the grandkid’s face with the face of Nicholas Cage. I included the picture in that corner, and it’s highly amusing.

Whatever I was sick with flared up on Christmas, or December 26, so I stayed home while everyone else went up to Dallas. I mostly slept, and discovered my new blanket works great as both blanket and pillow as I lay on the couch. Jeff got back and said, “You should go in to the doctor,” and the results of that was “It’s viral, nothing we can do.” Also, there was the usual, I finally go to the doctor and feel so much better by the time I go to the doctor.

It was just annoying because I was sick that one day, and then was more or less fine the next, but just lay down to rest and not share. I had a lingering cough and sore throat, but I think it was made worse by the fog machine from church.

The final picture is from our post-Christmas trip to Ikea on a Saturday. Meaning Ikea was insanely crowded. The kids had fun goofing off with a cart, and we found the furniture we needed.

Our annual movie marathon was superhero cartoon movies. We watched: Megamind, The Incredibles 1 and Incredibles 2, Superpets, and Big Hero 6.

Books read:

I continued reading the Timeless Tales books so I could finish the series.

  • Rumplestiltskin
  • Puss in Boots
  • To Rival a Reflection– a really interesting take on the Snow White story, one I can’t explain more without giving away the twist, but I highly recommend it
  • Swan Lake– After reading the Swan Lake retelling from Shattered Tales, I’ve discovered it’s another one that I don’t really enjoy as retellings
  • Sleeping Beauty
  • Frog Prince– Linking to these, I see the actual individual covers and am reminded how much I hate them
  • Twelve Dancing Princesses– the only cover from this series I don’t hate, and coincidentally the first book from the series I read, so you can completely read it out of order as I started with book 10

Games played:

With Batman home and everyone being off, we’ve played more games still.

And 2023 is a wrap! It’s mind-blowing to me to think we’re almost 1/4 done with this century.

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