A Time For Everything

I'm writing again, I'm writing again! Well--revising ^ this ^ book. It's been amazing, and it's felt really good to be creative in this way. My goal is to get the book out in the world by my dad's birthday in mid-June. So that's four months to get everything done. That should be plenty of time.

* * * * *

So I got addicted to a stupid tablet game. It's one of those "merge games" where you merge items together to create a new advanced item and then you combine and combine and combine to create items that customers want. The customer buys them for coins and then you use the coins to buy things for the main point of the game. In my case, it's to decorate rooms. At this point, I could care less about decorating the rooms.

But there are a handful of things I don't like about this game and so I started musing--if I were to create my own merge-type game, what would I change? Add? Get rid of? What would be the purpose of the player merging items to sell to earn the currency? So over the course of the last week, ideas have been percolating and I've come up with something I think would be fun.

Now, will all this time and imagination ever produce something? Who knows. But it's a fun way to exercise your imagination, which is never a waste of time.

* * * * *

Victory+

So you may remember that there had been a whole kerfuffle with Diamond Sports who owned Bally Sports which provided the on-air TV programming or at least the air time. I don't understand all the details, but it was a mess and teams from all sports leagues were getting screwed or something.

So in a surprising turn of events, my beloved Dallas Stars--well the organization, not the players, who I'm usually talking about--created their own streaming platform called Victory+. Along with Stars games and related content, the Anaheim Ducks also signed on. Eventually, baseball's Texas Rangers also joined the platform. Rangers fans have to subscribe, but hockey fans can watch either team for free. :0)

But all that to say, back in 2016 / 2017 / 2018, DD and I were always scrambling to find a way to watch games. We didn't have the correct cable package to watch the aforementioned Fox Sports & Bally Sports. And any other platform required a subscription. Eventually we upgraded our cable package to include Fox Sports & Bally Sports and were happy campers.

And now we have this free-to-hockey-fans platform, but these days, DD and I watch less hockey than ever before. Life can be funny, can't it?

* * * * *

Image courtesy of www.chewy.com.

Rascal has finally been fully accepted by DD. She bought him a bed last week.The one above that looks like a slipper. :0) That is not Rascal, although it looks like him.

He loves to curl up inside and under blankets when it's super cold, as it was last week, so...another cozier bed for the Rascal-meister.

* * * * *

And that's it for me. I'll catch you--hopefully--in a couple of weeks. I've been struggling to come up with any interesting tidbits to share. :(

Take care and STAY WARM!

We ended up with two of them!

Snow is a fairly rare occurrence around these here parts--especially this much. But it was lovely to watch and enjoy while working from home. Technology has its plusses and the ability to work from home is definitely one of them.

Here are a few more pictures:

The water in the bird bath was frozen solid.

Rascal tracks in the snow. :0)

Snow on the driveway / ramp. (This was after the first wave of precip.)

* * * * *

Image courtesy of Paramount+.

I binged this and it's fabulous. Stallone is great. If you have Paramount+ and you haven't seen it -- go watch it.

From Wikipedia: Stallone portrays Dwight "the General" Manfredi, an American Mafia caporegime who has been recently released from prison in New York and is sent to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he begins to set up a criminal organization.

What they left out is that he was in prison for twenty-five years for covering for the family he worked for and they sent him to Tulsa with nothing.

Can't wait for Season Three. :0)

* * * * *

Image courtesy of Netflix.

I also watched this movie, and it, too, was awesome.

From Wikipedia: The film is based on the 2019 magazine article "Fighting a Two-Front War", by Kevin M. Hymel, on the contributions of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black and all-female battalion, in World War II.

These women have to overcome all sorts of obstacles on top of the basic indignity of being dismissed because of the color of their skin.

The battalion commander, Major Charity Adams, receives orders to Europe from the Army, but doesn't get the commensurate orders from the War Department which will officially allow her to command her troops. She ends up writing her own.

And it snowballs from there. The battalion's original housing is supposedly bombed, so the commanding general picks new housing "especially for them." Which turns out to be a filthy, vermin-infested old boarding school. So before they can even start the mission they're there to complete, they have to clean the building / facilities to make them livable.

And on and on.

I highly recommend this as well.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/six-triple-eight-true-story-real-history/

* * * * *

And that's all I have for you at the moment--this post is already a fortnight late. Yikes.

So...hope all is well with you.

Take care and catch you in a couple of weeks.

Image courtesy of IMGBIN.

It's 2025 -- can you believe it?

On the whole, aside from how quickly the year flew by, it was a pretty good year.

On the other hand, in reviewing my 2024 goals...I fell really short in three of five of the major categories.

The journey to being debt free goes on, and I'm making progress. Mom's house finally selling and the money being dispersed really helped. But I also implemented some other protocols that have been keeping things on track. I haven't kept reading financial books as I intended, but debt is reduced. I do plan to re-read four of the books that had the biggest impact though.

The path to health and wellness took a left turn at Albuquerque. Instead of losing ten pounds, I'm now twenty-ish over my preferred weight. My eating is far from healthy. I'm using the Hinge Health app once again and was doing both yoga and Pilates for a while, but they both fell by the wayside.

BUT

I'm getting back on track starting this month. I received a bike for Christmas, so riding my bike is a thing I can do as well.

Writing was the biggest fail, but I've accepted that my brain is not yet ready to be creative in that way again, so I will continue to fill my well with reading, watching, and listening.

Housekeeping and Home Improvement were also a fairly big fail. I have no housekeeping plan in place and didn't improve much of anything inside the house. The back yard is another matter--made a few improvements there and I mostly kept up with the falling leaves. The weather / temperature will be the biggest factor in how much more I can do.

Letters to my grandma went out more regularly and, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I met and exceeded my reading challenge. My pattern offerings on Etsy remained roughly the same...

So that's my report card on not just the fourth quarter, but my whole year as far as my 2024 fresh start goals are concerned. It wasn't great, but, sometimes, that's life. An you can start fresh at any time.

Speaking of starting fresh -- let's get to this year's fresh start goals!

Jen's 2025 Fresh Start Goals

1. Send Grandma a monthly letter...to be sent no later than the second Friday of the month. Yes, she's still alive, much to my delight and surprise. She was moved into hospice last spring, and turned 99 I think on her birthday in August. So if she makes it to August 23, 2025, she'll turn 100. That's very good news for me!
2. Read 60 books for the year. This includes the Bible (#5 on this list), so aiming for 59 other books. Quite a few will be be repeats from previous years because I enjoy them that much. And as mentioned above, there are four financial books to re-read, one each quarter. That brings me to 55 other books.
3. Home Improvement -- a) get the oven fixed, b) clean out and organize both hall closets, and c) clean out and rearrange my bedroom closet
4. Yard Improvement -- a) trim and maintain the holly hedge, b) plant flowers, c) finish tidying up the back yard in terms of things growing in the fence (we have a lot of random weed vines that I'm trying to eliminate) and kill/remove the random weeds in the "lawn"
5. Another read-through of the Bible. I've done two years of the "One-Year Bible" where you get some Old Testament, some New, a Psalm and a Proverb. I've also done a chronological read-through where you skip around and read the Books in the order in which they were written. This year, I'm reading the Bible beginning to end in the order in which the books appear.
6. Lose ten pounds. The ultimate goal is twenty, but I'm going to start with ten. Eating right and exercising is the only way to make this happen, so they don't get their own line items.
7. Self-Care -- gonna try this again. Mostly home pedicures because my feet are in bad shape as well as coloring my hair on a regular basis. But also things like crafting and puzzles.
8. Add Patterns to Etsy -- I've been saying this for years too, and last year I attempted setting up my own pattern website, but couldn't get any traction on customers clicking over from Etsy for the expanded pattern offerings, so I'm just going to stay with Etsy and get to adding. I'm going to stick with the goal of one non-hockey pattern per quarter still.
9. Take better care of my car -- regular car washes and vacuuming as well as cleaning the leather.

I looked back at the last four years of goals and I seem to be pretty set in my ways.

The new things added are Yard Improvement line item and Car Care. That's because I want to be more active and things need doing. I left off any writing related goals. I struggled all of last year to make any sort of progress and I decided to let things lie for now. The car care is probably self explanatory...

So HAPPY NEW YEAR to one and all.

All the best to you and yours.

Image courtesy of Goodreads.

My Year in Books via Goodreads!

At the beginning of 2024, I pledged to read fifty-five books in the Goodreads Challenge. I'd completed fifty-eight books or 105% when Goodreads decided to send my Year in Books Review & graphics to go with.

The above graphic was one of the graphics and I was curious as to what that actually meant, so I Googled it. :0) There were multiple ways to qualify, but I knew exactly how I made the cut:

"High Review Volume: You consistently review a large number of books across various genres."

Now, to be honest, I don't write reviews but I do give them all a star rating.

In addition to those fifty-nine books, I read a boat-load of hockey articles.

Now, if you go look at my Goodreads Challenge Book List, be aware that I did not actually read all of the titles listed. That's not to say I didn't read fifty-eight (or more) books. I know I've mentioned this in previous years, but I read a lot of fan fiction. So some of the titles listed, like Gone With the Wind, are placeholders for a piece of fan fiction. I try to choose place-holder books that have roughly the same amount of pages/words as a given piece of fanfic. I'm not reading a 500-word fic and then using GWTW as the place-holder.

* * * * *

The New Guy

Is working out great. He's smart and he learns quickly, which has been awesome. So a month + in and we're still very happy with our choice.

* * * * *

Pain Management

I have good news and bad news.

Good News: I finally had my appointment with the rheumatologist.

Good Bad News: I don't have rheumatoid arthritis requiring life-long medicating. What I do have is osteo-arthritis--which the rheumatologist said just means "I'm feeling my age." (boooo!)

Good News: My primary care doctor put me on some pain meds back in October for the right hip / bursitis I can't seem to heal.

Bad News: the meds didn't seem to help

Good News: according to the rheumatologist, the meds I was given are very slow acting, so they should start to work any time now (thank goodness, lol)

Good News: this pain med is also a mild anti-depressant, so I've been a little more upbeat even though the pain hasn't quite been eliminated.

I also had a bone-density scan done to check on...well...my bone density and take corrective action if needed. I'll meet with the rheumatologist again at the beginning of January to go over all the results.

* * * * *

Image courtesy of IMGBIN.

Book Binge

So I've started another book binge. I didn't mean to do it, but one thing led to another and, well, here we are. :0)

I've dipped my toe into some genres outside my usual purview of romance such as a police procedural, a cozy mystery series, some general fiction, and some self-help.

Didn't pay full price for any of it.

I suppose, as an author myself, I shouldn't be so pleased about that, but between the online library and some recent sales, and books just offered at $0, I'm set for books for at least a good month.

I'm currently reading a fictionalized version of Julia's Child's early career working for the government.

I've developed an appreciation of Mrs. Child after watching the dramedy "Julia" on HBO, which, sadly, was canceled after two seasons.

* * * * *

Well, friends--this is it until the new year. Hope your holidays are filled with family, friends, food, and fun.

See you in 2025.