2025 in Review

I will go back and add the other months

January Week 4

Happiness is a warm puppy and a good book.

Sadly the book I’m reading in that picture didn’t end up being a good bok because of the ending, but that’s another story.

I’ve got a really random collection of pictures here, and this is only through January 28. I’m scheduling this for February, but I’m finishing writing it on the 29th as I leave on the 30th to go visit Batman, so the end of January will show up in February’s pictures. Not that this matters to anyone but me.

Funny story, so in the D&D campaign I’m running I had this giant lizard they were fighting but I couldn’t find the figure for it, and so I used this stuffed dog for the fight, and everyone was greatly amused by it, and I was too if I’m honest, but it led to some confusion. Everyone thought they were fighting a giant dog. We got a lot of laughter as everyone joked about fighting a lizard named dog since we have a dog named Leezard.

Now, funny picture down in the bottom. I was sitting there waiting for the light to change. It’s super cold, well super cold for Texas. This guy just starts crossing against the light, he does not have a walk sign, but it was more or less clear and he’s just crossing with this shopping cart and what looks like a mattress. He got stuck halfway across the intersection as the cars that had the right of way came, and when my light turned green, he was still stuck there.

But, I had so many questions. Where did he get the shopping cart? Was that really a mattress? Where was he going? I started inventing all sorts of fun stories for him, none of which will ever be answered.

We talked about Jesus calling His disciples in Sunday School today, and we made dominoes for our craft, and I was amused how the kids made their sets. I was thinking they would color the people, but instead they decided to color the squares in patterns. This was interesting choice.

And the final picture, we had some new friends over for lunch and I filled up our cooler with lemonade and yesterday I noticed it was dripping every minute or so, so I put a bowl underneath it to catch the drips. It slowly filled with lemonade, which was great, until Leezard tripped over it and spilled the lemonade all over.

Books read:

• Charting Stars– This was so incredibly disappointing, I really enjoyed the book for most of it, it was an interesting story, it was fairly tropey, but in a fun way. It was slowly assembling their fun cast of characters, and then it just ended. I mean literally right in the middle of the journey. There was no satisfying end to a story arc, it just stopped. The male and female protagonist admitted their attraction to each other and then said the title of the book, I flipped the page and there was one more paragraph and THE END. That was it! I cannot begin to express how insanely mad I am at this book. Prior to that ending I had thought to buy the rest of the series as it came out, but now I won’t touch it, because I don’t trust the author to actually write a satisfying conclusion
• A Spirited Engagement– I think this is the one I technically read last week, but I didn’t figure out how to add it to GoodReads until this week. But this is a fun sequel to Haunting Miss Trentwood
• Haunting Miss Trentwood– I decided to reread this book, and reading this one without the short story that takes place between them, I rather wonder how some of the characters end up as friends the way they are in the second book. There are hints it might happen, but it definitely wasn’t there at the end of this book, but I enjoyed both books
• Wrought of Silver and Ravens– I reread this to prepare for a modified book quest over in Lorehaven, we’re changing how we’re doing book quests there so I’m trying to plan out some good questions for the book. It’s going to be interesting

Games played

• I don’t know that I specifically remember any, the week was weird

Week 4 February

Huh, I think I may have combined weeks accidentally. It looks like the college kids may have come down a week later. Oops.

Okay, so the college kids actually came down this week. So ignore all that, and we celebrated Superman’s birthday with my brother and his family. We went out to a sushi and ramen restaurant, which made my brother very happy because he loves sushi but rarely gets to eat it. We also got a key lime pie for his “cake” that we ate together.

Then we played the Stormlight Archive game I got him for Christmas, and barely won it. I really have no clue what I was doing, but that can be what happens when you are playing a game vaguely based on a book that you have never read.

I was able to advance through the different ranks and I was never quite sure how I managed to do it, but Superman is enjoying the game, so it’s all good.

And that bottom left picture is from when Leezard decided to eat a spatula. You read that right a spatula. In case you’re wondering, silicon can show up on an x-ray. The technician took a sample x-ray just to find out, but I still ended up deciding not to give her an x-ray under the theory that she’s big enough and apparently she had chewed it up enough (she did throw up some of it after they gave her whatever they give dogs to make them throw up), and so I was told to give her an extra big meal and watch her go to the bathroom.

That means, all Leezard learned from this was: If I eat the spatula, I get to ride in the car, where I will find a paper bag that once held a kolache that I will attempt to eat while on my way to the vet. When I get home I will be fed two big cans of soft dog food, and when I’m given dinner I will be given a giant meal in an effort to make me go to the bathroom. She spent the night enacting gas warfare on me as Jeff had to work late that night. It was not pleasant. Not at all.

Books read, everything else left from the month:

• Text Me on Tuesday: All is Fair in Love and Texting– this would be the book where I learned it can be a closed door romance and have people sleeping together a fair amount. Most of the books I’ve read previously were all closed door, only kisses. This one was closed door as in fade to black, and it was very obvious what went on behind that door. But also, it just wasn’t that well written, and I finished it more so I could finish it, I did a lot of skimming. I didn’t feel like they were together because they liked each other, but because the author wanted them together, bleah
• Mishelved Magic– This was a fun book, basically the MC works in a library, and this library is also in charge of all magic in the world, and there are mysterious creatures in charge of that magic, and something is wrong there, and how do we solve that? Many mysteries and it is fascinating in a cozy sort of way
• The Duke Who Hates Christmas– ugh, this one disappointed me. It started off interesting, but here’s the problem, the concept was an enemies to lovers book, but there has to be some reason for them to go from point A to point B beyond “wow other person is really hot,” and then even more ridiculous, this is set in the Regency period, and she was raised to be a good Christian girl, so why is she suddenly hopping into this Duke’s bed? No seriously, it made no sense, this is another one that I mainly started skimming to finish because it was short, and I wanted to see just how they were going to try and finish this book. Oh, and even more ridiculous, apparently this author just thinks that Gretna Green just has people lining up to elope like in Vegas because it gets mentioned as the place to go to elope in Jane Austen books. Because that was a thing that happened in this book. I cannot emphasize how stupid this book is.
• Don’t Date the Haunted– This was a very amusing book, so the world of fiction is divided up into different worlds, and our main character is from Horror and she wants to get out of Horror, so she saves up and applies to go to college in Romance. Hijinks ensue.
• The Werewolf of Whitechapel– I’d say this is steampunk, but it’s a bit more gaslamp in feel even if it’s Victorian era, but what if all of the royalty was vampires, werewolves, and sirens? I highly recommend this series
• Anarchist on the Orient Express– book 2 in the series
• A Vampire in Bavaria– book 3 in the series, I tore through the series so fast and stayed up way too late finishing them, I’m guessing some of these books were finished last week

Week 3 March

Okay, this week is going to be really random.

Let me attempt to tell this in order of what happened.

Which is starting on the bottom.

We had, Superman’s kung fu teacher, and now friend, it’s interesting making that transition as he grows up. But he came over and we had dinner together and played games all night long.

Then our craft for the week was making a tree for Zaccheus to climb up. The kids had fun designing the outfit for Zaccheus to wear.

Okay, that bottom left picture. That is a funny story. Batman is now deployed overseas. All we knew it was somewhere in Europe. He didn’t really know, he could probably find out, but he didn’t bother, and so we kept asking him, and so he gets there and texts us he is 7 hours ahead of us, but still won’t answer where he is. Then 4 days later we just suddenly get a text with this picture, no location, no words, just a picture. Then after a couple more texts, we finally get a location. So, I now have a country, which I’m not saying, just in case that is important.

While the college kids were home for Spring Break, I went on a hike with Superman, and then played some board games with him. The Artist had friends over for a tea party. Leezard tried her best to eat Superman’s birthday cake, which is why it looks so funny, and then while everyone was outside, she ate even more cake, but that happened on Friday, let me go back to that top picture, which happened on Thursday.

Thursday, I went to the Chosen World Premiere with Sean. He texted me a week or so earlier asking if I wanted to go to the Red Carpet with him, and the answer was of course yes. And it was insane, I need to sit down and write out that entire story so I remember it well, because it was quite fun, actually, I’m going to print off those pictures and do that later today. Here are a couple of the highlights: I got to interview Jonathan Roumie (Jesus), Sean used several of my questions when interviewing cast members, we were in the same theater as the cast for watching it, just the entire experience, I got to interview the actor for Goliath in the House of David show. It was so much fun. We got home so late, but man that experience was a blast.

Books read:

• Night of Dance– a Cinderella retelling, I am totally putting these up not in the order I read them (I actually read this after all of the other books listed so far, but it’s the 2nd books in the series)
• Meetings and Mayhem- an author I read said she and a bunch of authors put together this short story collection of meet-cutes, and then if you sign up for their newsletters you got a slew of free novels or novellas, and that got me all sorts of things to read, which worked out well because I had a migraine a couple of days recently and all I could do was lay in bed and try not to throw up from the pain
• Songs and Spun Gold– Rumpletstiltskin and Phantom of the Opera smashed together as a story, but it’s part 1, it worked surprisingly well, but I didn’t realize it was a part 1, so I got to the end, and it was a satisfying ending, but I had to go buy the next one to get the final solution
• Spirits and Pacts– part 2 of this book and it all ends quite well, and it introduces the character who will be the main character for the next book in the series (which I had already read, because that was the characters in the meet-cute in Meetings and Mayhem, and you can read this out of order)
• Arrows and Gems– It claims to be a Robin Hood and Snow White and Rose Red retelling. I see the Robin Hood, but I don’t see the Snow White and Rose Red part. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed the series and how the characters developed through the book
• A slew of short stories related to this series that were part of the newsletter sign up that are various scenes related to these stories

Games Played:

• Commissioned- I finally played some of the other scenarios beyond the starting one and that was really fun, sadly they are out of business, so I can’t link to the game
• Doomlings– a fun game, but probably not one our family would enjoy super a lot because the play style can encourage being mean
• Smash Up– We played this with Superman’s kung fu teacher, and it was fun to see his reaction to the game
• probably another game, but I don’t remember

April Week 2

This is where things started to get crazy

The big picture is from Jeff and I going to see the final part of The Chosen Season 5, it was the only one I remembered to get a picture of.

Okay, that Christmas tree picture. Back in January, Jeff and I decided we would give away our artificial Christmas tree because we weren’t using it, and so clearly we should give it away. Jeff said, “Let’s wait and when Superman is home for Spring Break, I’ll have him help me bring it down.” Well, that didn’t happen. Then it didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen. So I decided to bring it down on my own. I shoved the tree down to the landing and it exploded out of the box, and made this giant mess. I carefully got it back up and with an obnoxiously large amount of tape, put that box back together and made sure that box would not come apart again. Then I shoved the tree down the stairs more carefully. I got almost all the way down the stairs and Leezard just stared at me. Like, “What Mom? I’m just going to stand in the middle of the stairs where it’s not a problem for you to stroll down.” It was a problem. But I eventually got the tree down the stairs.

Also, did you know some crazy person thought it would be a great idea to sell a bag of only black jelly beans, what crazy person thought that would be a good idea?

Okay, now comes the stressful part of April. So Leezard quit eating. With Leezard that is a huge warning sign. So I take her into the vet on that Friday, and they give her an x-ray, and she’s got something in her gut. We decide to do surgery. They pull out some chicken bones. It’s all dramatic. She comes home. Has large amounts of pills to take.

Then, Sunday night her wound starts seeping, so Monday I take her back into the vet, and they say, it’s not a big deal, it’s gotten infected. She spends the day at the vet, they give her IV fluids, she gets more pills to take, and a fancy blue bandage, and I get to spend every day of the week coming in for them to change her bandage and give her a special treatment.

It’s a long week. A very stressful long week. She is taking 20 pills a day.

Books read

• Billionaire Benefactor– Cinder Luna reminded me of a book in this series, that I could vaguely remember, and I needed something that was no braincells to read, so I started through this book series I had as a box set and was no brain to read
• Billionaire Baron– honestly, the books are early in this author’s writing career, and you can tell. Now if she were writing them, there would be another 50 or so pages to let the books have more breathing room and the story wouldn’t feel so rushed
• Billionaire’s Masquerade Ball– it was this book, but I hadn’t remembered which book it was until I got to this one, and again, the author was young in her writing, and needed another few scenes for the book to not feel too rushed
• Billionaire’s Secret Heir– this was an odd book, and definitely the weakest in the series for me
• Tis the Gingerbread Season– supposedly a Hansel and Gretel retelling, but it’s a rom-com, and Hansel and Gretel are siblings and there is no evil witch, the closest we have is there is a gingerbread cottage, and this book is ridiculously short, overall, the only reason I don’t feel gipped is I paid like 99 cents
• Meet Me at Midnight– vaguely kind of sort of Cinderella, this is actually book 1 in this series, and I like the concept of the series, but really the author just wants to write a magical town that is vaguely kind of sort of inspired by fairy tales, and has a family you should really beware of making deals with
• The Lucky One– so like this, this is supposedly based on Goldilocks, but it’s not really, I forget what they even claimed was the loose tie to that fairy tale, it’s a fun series, and the books are so freaking short. It’s kind of annoying.
• Once Upon a Rose– supposedly this is a Beauty and the Beast retelling. In reality, it’s just a guy who is under a curse, he’s not even cursed so that he’s transformed, he’s just cursed in some vague curse. Again, the author just had a fantasy story she wanted to tell and claimed she wanted to tell a Beauty and the Beast tale. Argh, why?

May Week 2

I spared you the half dozen pictures I took of Leezard trying to get the perfect angle of her foot long twin trails of drool the other day. It was truly majestic. I just had to share this with everyone, and turned it into a rather long and sacracastic Instagram post on my private page, which at this point, since I am no longer mentoring high school girls, I really feel no need to have two separate pages, but now I do…. Sigh.

Maybe, I’ll go back and enlighten everyone to my sarcastic thoughts on her drool. Like, how it can be insanely long and crazy able to stay cohesive.

Okay, I’ve talked too much about that.

Ironically enough my craft for Sunday School was perfect for Mother’s Day, it was a complete and total accident. I was teaching on the Parable of the Sower, and so we made pipe cleaner boquets of flowers, and we had a lot of fun making our little collection of flowers together.

That afternoon I had the experience of no kids at the house for Mother’s Day. We had our family call that afternoon and it was quite hilarious because Jeff casually mentioned how we were getting food to celebrate Mother’s Day and neither Superman nor the Artist picked upon his not at all subtle hint to wish Happy Mother’s Day. It wasn’t until Batman joined the call several minutes later and said, “By the way Mom, Happy Mother’s Day,” that they remembered it was Mother’s Day.

Every November HEB has turkey on sale, and there’s a coupon that you get a certain amount of turkey free if you buy a ham. So I always buy several of this pairing with the plan that I will alternate cooking a ham or a turkey every other month. I just cooked the turkey for this month and I now have a nice store of broth all made. It was an interesting feeling realizing just how far I’ve come in knowing how to cook from when I first married when I pretty much knew how to make spaghetti sauce and basically had a vague idea of how to cook chicken breast and throw spices at it, but there was no planning. Yesterday I was taking beef fat and rendering it to be able to use the fat for cooking later. It’s an interesting concept to realize how much I’ve learned.

The giant picture was a fun story from gaming on Friday. The scenario had the players trying to protect this cute rather harmless creature from these big monsters that if it got hit would die very quickly. Well in the first round of fighting, one of the players turned the cute harmless creature into a T-Rex. After a moment of confusion it attacked the monsters attacking it and succeeded in grappling the monster. The mini I was given was actually able to fit the monster in its mouth, so of course I had to take a picture.

When this first happened I just sat there for a good two minutes trying to think what I was going to do, because this was not at all how I had seen the scenario happening. It was quite an amusing situation, and I quite enjoyed it.

And that final picture, well actually screenshot. I mentioned this in my newsletter, and this is why there haven’t been new posts the last month or so really, but I’ve been working behind the scenes removing posts that pretty much only I care about. You know the ones that are like, “Hey look at this funny story that happened.” I’ve been copying it into a word document, and then finding some kind of post to redirect it to. I’ve made a [Fill in the blank year] memories post to redirect a lot of this to. Sometimes I’ll copy part of the post over there so I have a bit of my history still on the blog, but I also figure there is some of my children’s history they don’t necessarily want out on the internet forever (and since there are posts people weren’t likely to have pinned, deleting all the pictures will be my best bet of removing it from the internet).

Books read:

I finished my way through the series:

• A Groom of One’s Own– a fake marriage, it was cute,
• Absolutely not in love– sort of enemies to lovers, in that she doesn’t like hockey players because she dated one in high school, but then she ends up falling in love with him
• Romancing the Grump– This one was amusing, but I don’t remember why I was amused by it
• Runaway Bride and Prejudice–
• Rose Realm– a collection of short stories that retell fairy tales, they were fun, but tried to hard to tell some of the twists on the tales
• DOSA Files 2– I backed this on Kickstarter, so I don’t know if this is out yet, but it’s a collection of short stories in the DOSA world, it was a fun read
• Curse of Silence– I forget if this was the reread so I could come up with my questions, or if this was the first read to review it, either way it’s a fun quick read that I enjoyed

June week 2

This is a mish-mash of a week, and I’m going to talk about the pictures all out of order. This is what happens when you forget to start for a long time, and when you upload pictures all at once.

First, we’ve been playing Shadows of Brimstone every week, we decided to play some of the older character classes that we haven’t played as much, which has been a fun thing to do each week.

Then, I’ve been working on sorting out LEGOs, and I printed out labels for them, and had it all out on the floor to work on that, and Leezard decided to lay on them. Which was not so helpful.

For Christmas I had given Jeff a murder mystery in a box, and we decided to work together to figure it out. It had a lot of fun elements in it, and we enjoyed solving it, we were correct in our guess. Now, I’m going to find a friend to pass it on to because it is not really something you can do again because you’ll know the murderer after you’ve done it once.

Okay, so that night Leezard had a seizure. This is important because I had left some of the debris out of the various stuff I was sorting out to figure out where I wanted to put it later. While I was cooking dinner I hid some popcorn in a blanket to keep her busy and from the family room I hear a crunching sound that is significantly louder than I should be hearing.

So I come over and trying to pry out whatever is in her mouth. I reach my hand way back in her mouth, and pull a Nerf dart from the back of her throat that she has almost swallowed, and the whole time I’m doing this she is still actively trying to chew something else that is stuck in the roof of her mouth. This is hurting quite a lot, but I do not want another surgery, because we cannot afford that. So, I’ve got my fingers in her mouth and pop out a LEGO brick separator that is stuck in the roof of her mouth.

I pull my hand out and I’ve got two deep gouges on my left ring finger, and then a couple of smaller gouges on my right hand. I run my hand under cold water, it hurts like the dickens, and grab the first aid kit. I use the disinfectant, get some bandaids on the smaller cuts on my right hand, but the big gouges on my left hands are deep and look like they need stitches, and it’s starting to seriously swell.

So, I look around for my phone to call The Artist who is upstairs. I can’t find it. I drag the dog into her crate and climb upstairs, knock on the door and tell her she needs to drive me to the ER because I think they need to cut my wedding ring off and I need stitches.

We get to the ER and spend over an hour in the waiting room. They are in no huge hurry because I’m not crying or screaming because I think I have a decent pain tolerance. It’s also not bleeding like crazy. They bring me back, do triage and see it’s swollen, but not absolutely scary, take me back to the waiting room, and then I sit there for another hour. Finally we get a room to wait in. At this point we have been sitting there for over 2 hours. Jeff switches off with her, and waits with me while bringing up food. At this point the doctor has come in and decides I need an iodine bath (that’s the bottom left picture). So I’m sitting there soaking my hand in that while Jeff is feeding me food. It is incredibly awkward.

The nurse comes in, decides it has soaked long enough, and my finger has swollen even more, and at this point I CAN NOT FEEL MY FINGER and they have not addressed the continual swelling.

I bring it up with the nurse and she says she’ll ask the doctor and disappears for over 10 minutes, and it continues to swell more, and the ring is so tight now that I cannot move it on my finger, and my finger is growing more and starting to turn blue under that iodine dye. I push the nurse call, and the desk responds and I repeat that I can’t feel my finger and it is continuing to swell around my ring and can someone please cut off my ring.

Finally the doctor comes in and is still reluctant to cut off the ring, and I say, “The whole reason I came to the ER and not the Urgent Care is because I thought you would be better equipped to do this. Cut it off before I lose my finger because I am continuing to swell.”

They also only very grudgingly gave me any pain medicine, and then only a single motrin.

So she finally decided that it was not going to get better and I really did want her to do that.

That night before going to bed I took 2 Aleve hoping it would help with swelling and maybe I would be able to sleep on the recliner (because the theory was I would move around less in my sleep there, that was a lie).

The giant picture is my finger the next day. I couldn’t dress myself because of how swollen it was, and I had not realized just how much you use your ring finger. Even now, almost a week later, with the swelling mostly gone, it still hurts somewhat.

That first day, literally all I did was sit there and alternate putting ice on my finger and not having ice on it. It was amazing how little I could do, and when I couldn’t do anything, how I suddenly wanted to do those other things.

Books read:

• Ghost Talker– While sitting in the hospital I started this series I read through a bunch of short books that weekend
• Delicious Death
• Spirit Guide
• Gray Lady

Week 1

Pretty much all of my pictures from this week are of the flooding. I don’t even have the screenshots I took elsewhere for the most part. So, you just see the screenshot of the video where you can see a bridge go from drivable to over a foot of water in 2 minutes.

We spent Independence Day doing a Murder Mystery together. We’d done one earlier together and enjoyed it, but this time we got one from a different company and did not enjoy this one as much. It had way more information to go through. There were over 50 different pieces of information to go through, and at the end, I still wasn’t sure I’d read it all, and there was a cipher to break, and I just brute-force cracked it. It took me probably over an hour to break it. I just sat there, slowly decoding it as everyone else read the materials. It was an interesting thing to do, and something I enjoy, but I can’t imagine a lot of people would have the patience to do it. I’m guessing that’s why one of the hints they give is “Here’s a clue on how to crack the cipher.” Which, if I’d read that, would have saved me over an hour, but that would have been totally cheating.

But, as we were doing this murder mystery, I was starting to see the various news reports of the floods, and then Saturday, our backyard and front yard flooded.

That’s what most of these pictures are: our house flooding. It receded by the end of the day, but it was quite a lot of water. At one point, we were in the front yard, and we heard a cracking sound, and it was the neighbor’s fence breaking from the pressure of the TWO FEET OF WATER up against it. Thankfully, the entire fence didn’t go; it was just a few boards coming apart. I think we’ve all learned to build our fences to allow some amount of drainage for storms, so they don’t break all the time.

It’s been a hard week as we’ve been constantly looking for updates on the missing people. I’ve been in a boot with an injured ankle, but I’m finally out this week, so I’m planning to find the various places that have volunteer lists to sign up for volunteering.

Though last I saw, they were turning away volunteers.

The peanut butter jar is the one Leezard stole on Saturday, the same day of all the flooding. We had split up, and I had come out of my bedroom to see Leezard in her crate with that jar of peanut butter and thought it was one of the mostly empty ones we’d given her to lick the last little bits. BUT noooo, it was one that she had stolen off the counter and taken to her crate to happily lick up half a jar of peanut butter.

She was quite proud of herself.

We’re still not quite sure if she figured out how to get the lid off or if someone foolishly left the lid off (and by someone, by process of elimination, we think that was me).

Books read:

• Wrinkle in Time
• Apprentice of Magic
• Reign of Magic
• Curse of Magic
• One more in this series

Games played:

• Commissioned
• Zombiecide