Weekend Things

Lauren2 Comments

When it’s Friday and your dinner plans got cancelled, so you’re driving home and straight into the Freekend — that’s a word I just made up to describe a weekend without any plans, commitments or obligations — then all is right in the world.

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Joey and I seriously debated still going out to dinner, but then the idea of cooking ourselves some fettuccine, cracking open a bomber to share, renting a movie and most importantly, doing all of that IN OUR PAJAMAS sounded much much better.  Help, we’re young but we’re old.  I really wanted to love Hell or High Water but it mostly felt like we missed the first hour of the movie.  Some backstory really would’ve helped.  But let Chris Pine look like the rough and tumble Cowboy type for the rest of forever, please.

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Saturday was completely without plans so we started it with waffles, naturally.  Not gonna lie, I have a habit of taking a day without plans and ruining it by feeling like I need to be mega-productive or wasting the entire day by being indecisive about what to actually fill it with, but I’m enjoying a laid back moment in life, so I just let the day unfold at its own pace.  Which means we ended up going for a run, picking up lunch, hitting the grocery store and… finally finishing up our room project!  Joey got all the cracks patched, sanded and textured so we could paint, clean up the dust and get our wedding photo back up on the wall.  It’s probably not THAT big of a change, but every time I walk into our room, I’m delighted to see everything all fixed up!

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Sunday started with breakfast at Revelry with my parents.  I was impressed the first time we tried the place, but much less impressed this time around.  I wasn’t getting any warm and fuzzy feelings from our waitress and after talking up the chilaquiles to my mom, she was served something much different from what I’d been served back in September.  Hmph.  But they were playing a lot of Beatles and I did get to hug my mom three times, so I suppose I can’t complain too much 🙂

Afterwards, I got our lunch salads made and ran a quick lipstick errand before heading over to the Super Bowl party.  Highlights: That Bai commercial with JT, Lady Gaga singing “Telephone” AND “Bad Romance,” seeing my bestie and a ham-cheese-salami slider I ate during halftime.  Also, turns out, even when the Broncos aren’t in the Super Bowl, Coloradans have some strong feeling on who wins.  Hint: they do NOT like Tom Brady.

How was your weekend??

Recent Reads

Lauren1 Comment

I’m on my third book of the year and it’s only January!  I know that’s not groundbreaking, but for me it feels impressive, exciting and so so good.  I’ve been a regular reader most my life but I feel like it’s taken me three years to really hit this stride I’m in.  This daily reading habit feels so essential to life right now ♥

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Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra

This was our January book club read and it falls into that “not the worst, but definitely not the best” category.  It’s about a runaway who, to get out of trouble with the law, impersonates another girl who had gone missing ten years earlier.  If you’re thinking “that would never happen/work,” then I’m right there with you.  Sometimes you’re five pages into a book that’s so ridiculously implausible that you have to make a mental decision to overlook that, otherwise you’ll never get through the next 275 pages.

Redeeming factors: it wasn’t horrible writing, I steamrolled through it because I just wanted to see what happened in the end and it made for a lively discussion at our meeting.  It was also one of those books that I didn’t realize had so many plot holes and unanswered questions until 30 (we had a HUGE group this month!) other women pointed them out.  In other words, I’m not so sure I’d recommend this one.

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The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

I got this one in a book swap in December and when I put a picture up on Instagram, you all lost your shit!  Comment after comment telling me how good it was and I’d been wanting to read it for years so my excitement level was high.  And my expectation level was high too, so maybe that’s why the book didn’t blow me away.  Don’t get me wrong, I like it A LOT, but did I LOVE it?  Not exactly.

When you tell someone you’re reading a book narrated by a dog, you also have to tell them that this is an intelligent, well-spoken, soul-of-a-human type of dog.  I thought the voice Garth Stein gave Enzo was so wonderful.  He made him observant, understanding, relentlessly loyal and more sensible than a lot of actual humans are.  So while it won’t be joining the ranks of my very favorite books, it will definitely still be up there.

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84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

This little book is only 97 pages long, but oh how many words it has inspired in me.  It compiles the written correspondences between a woman in New York and the employees of a rare book store in London, beginning in 1949 and lasting 24 years.  What begins as a request for a few books, turns into a rare friendship between Helene, her main correspondent Frank Doel, his wife, his neighbor, his co-workers and eventually his daughter.  Helene’s letters are so sharp, spunky and playful, even as a reader, you can’t help but feel attached to her.  She draws you in so quickly, as if you were an immediate friend.

It is so incredible to me how these relationships develop so easily and with complete sincerity.  From across an ocean!  The Londoners frequently and earnestly invite Helene to visit them and it is both wonderful and unbelievable to me that such a trusting bond could exist at such a distance.  Ain’t no way I’d invite someone I’d only interacted with through a letter to visit me and I’m trying to decide if that’s because we live in a less trusting world or if we’re just more cautious nowadays?  By the end of this, I was left feeling so heartened and heartbroken at the same time.  Gosh, I just adored it.

P.S. If you, like me, are a fan of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, this reads like a shorter real-life version.

So tell me, what are YOU reading?