Good morning!  I hope everyone’s weekends went well.  I had a little hangout time with Chance (Kinship Partner) On Sunday afternoon.  We went and hung out at a small touristy town near us called Nisswa Minnesota.  It’s a fun little town to just explore and that’s what we did.

Here’s a few pics of what we did:

Ok…. sorry about the photo shoot, but for a couple of time wasters, we had a blast!  We ended up at Rainy Day Book Store.  They always have large basket of ARC’s that you can donate $2 a piece for.  The money goes to the Nisswa  library fund.  I dug through the box and came out with these:

I am off to work.   I have a pretty easy week coming up but there is a slight chance I may be in Texas next week for training.   Not too big of a chance, but a chance all the same and that would make my scheduling (I am at the cabin this weekend) become a bit intense.  We will see……  hate to turn down an opportunity.

Review coming up later today!  Hope your day is wonderful!  Is anything fun happening out there?

😀

Good morning everyone. I hope all your weekend plans are coming along nicely. It hasn’t been too bad here. We had a weird Saturday – gorgeous morning, storming by noon, tornado warnings by 1, then cleared, then stormed, clear, rain, cloudy then more thunder and rain. Our weather has been really odd this summer.

Anyway, a girl my son works with loaned me her copy of The Lovely Bones DVD. She knows what a book nut I am and she asked me if I had read Lovely Bones, which I had…. a long time ago (if I could find my review book I could tell you when). She wanted to know if I had went to the movie and I told her I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see the movie. I really struggled with the audio and thought maybe I would catch it sometime later. Well, she sent the movie home with my son and I did watch it last night and was actually surprised how well I did like it.

I am going to post a review later today on the book vs. audio vs. movie. Which brings me to the fact that I can not find my review book that I wrote in prior to the blog and I am frustrated by this. I know I recently had it out for something and it has to be somewhere in this house. This book contains about 8 years of reviews prior to the blog so it is important to me. I wanted to pull out some of my original thoughts on the book when I read it and hopefully I will find it and be able to do that.

Ok – enough wining about my missing review book. Today is my 23rd anniversary. I know, right? Twenty three years. I told my hubby it couldn’t possibly be that long but he did the math for me (he is a math guy) and sure enough. I have been married for over half of my life. We are not big celebration people so nothing really planned for today. We may go out to dinner. I told him we could just high-five. 😀

Today is also the last day to enter the Book Extravaganza giveaway!

I am off to take another walk through the house for my book. Have a beautiful Sunday!

Happy Saturday everyone!  Hope your weekend is off to a good start.  If you have not had a chance to sign up for the Book Extravaganza book giveaway I have here for the weekend, please do so – great reads available, not only here, but if you click over to Bookworming In The 21st Century you will find links to many more blogs that are doing giveaways this weekend….

AND…. even if you have already signed up, grab a cup of coffee and come back and read through the responses to my request on that post for people to share little known facts about themselves!  Some of them are funny, some surprising, and some amazing!  We used to ask that question as a “get to know you” ice breaker when I worked at Wal-Mart and it was fun to learn what people had experienced.

Did you know that some of the fellow book bloggers are twins?  Published?  Singers?  Related to Henry VIII?  Extra in a movie?  Cheryl Crow’s roommate?  And much more…..

I felt a little left out that I couldn’t play on my own question so I will do it here.

• When I was 14 I fell off a friends horse on the highway by her home and hit my head.  I was airlifted to Minneapolis and my mom was told I had a 10% chance of living and if I did live I would be in a hospital the rest of my life with severe brain damage.  I was in a coma for 6 days.   The night before they were going to do surgery to relieve the pressure around my brain, the swelling started going away on its own..,  I came out of it 100%, but of course my friends like to sometimes say I didn’t and ask me if I hit my head or something…LOL.
  

• I have been to Honduras 8 times since 2004 working with kids who live on the street or in the dumps.
  

• I can do a really good Smeagol (voice) impression.  Perhaps this is all due to the first fact I gave you.  😀

Anyway – I ran out and bought a book yesterday which is completely insane (and again, see fact #1), but I read an awesome review and I was just not in the mood for the book I was in so instead started Seven Year Switch and I almost have it finished.

I have a bridal shower to attend today and hope to take a bike ride this afternoon.  There is a really yummy sounding recipe in the book I am reading (actually several good recipes) and I think I am making it for dinner tonight.    Hope your Saturday is full of fun things!  😀

Good morning everyone!  Last night I pulled the survey that I have had at the top of this blog for a month and tallied the results.  As promised, here they are:

How Long Have You Been Reading Book Journey?

I’m new! 1 month or less		37	23%
2-4 months		50	30%
4 – 8 months		41	25%
over 8 months		36	22%

What Do You Like About Book Journey

What Genres Do You Enjoy?

How Did You Originally Find This Blog?

Nimbus 2000 and Firebolt are both brands of what?

103 said brooms

20 said I dont know

37 were left blank

5 answers were just fun:

• sticks Harry flies on
• wands
• search engines
• internet software (2 answered this)
• Virus blocker

*I loved the extra answers and have to say while Nimbus 2000 and Firebolts are both brooms used in the Harry Potter books, I think virus blocker could also work!  😀

What Age Group Do You Fall Into?

I will do another survey in another six months or so to see how things have changed.  This was a lot of fun and thank you to all who participated!

Have a fantastic day  – any fun weekend plans?

Book Lovers/Bloggers are just the best!  Yesterday I came home to a box in my mail from Reagan at Miss Remmer’s Reviews.  She had recently had a post up about a set of The Chronicle Of Narnia books that I was drooling a bit over.  I have my own set and they are ‘much loved” (meaning worn, and brittle) and I keep them up high – more for looking at then reading at this point in their book life.

So – guess what was in my mailbox?  Yup!  She sent me the books – delightful, beautiful, Chronicles Of Narnia books!  Totally “SQUEEEE” worthy.

Thank you Reagan – you rock!  😀

On another note, those of us who registered for BBAW (Book Blogger Appreciation Week) should have received an email with an opportunity to vote for Best Event, Feature, or Meme.  It’s Monday, What Are You Reading is on the meme list and that made me “SQUUUUEEEE” again.

Many of you know I inherited this meme when J Kaye from J Kaye’s Book Blog decided to step away from her blog to further her writing career.  It is an inheritance I was honored to be offered and hope I can be half the blogger J Kaye was. 🙂

Brainerd Minnesota survived the storm from Wednesday – we did get hit with a couple of tornado warnings, downed trees and a bit of building damage in Baxter Minnesota but nothing too serious that I am aware of.  (Makes you want to come visit me – right?)

Have a super fabulous day!

Good morning!  I love my book club!

Yesterdays Queen Event for our book club went wonderfully.  We had a nice evening – not too warm out and not too cool.  We were at Sharon’s home which is a lovely spot on the lake, ate wonderful food, talked books, and chose a new Queen for the year.

Every July we dress up, have a potluck, pick our August read, and our October Classic.  We read one classic a year as a group and choose it in July so people have time to secure a copy and read it (because seriously, some classics do not read through quickly).

After many wonderful selections brought up for our August read – we chose Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger.  Our Classic for October will be The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

I have more to share about the event – but I am saving that for my post later today.  I will have more pictures up as well as what everyone read and recommended in July.

Its dark and gloomy here this morning.  In fact it is so dark it looks like it is about midnight.  We are in for a big storm and I am just now starting to hear the rain pound the glass of the windows.  Too bad I have to get to work – this is ideal weather for a good mystery…

Morning.  😀  I had a fantastic Monday and hope you did too.  Group Power in the morning, worked, and roller bladed.  My aunt was in town from Alaska.  I went out to dinner last night with her and another aunt and uncle of mine.  We do not get together often so it was a nice time catching up.  Busy full day….

And tonight is our annual Bookies Book Club Queen event.  Time to pass the crown on to whoever takes the vote tonight.  It should be fun, potluck and hanging out at one of our members homes.  Tomorrow I should have pictures for you as well as book recommendations from the Bookies.  We do not read a book for July, this is our free month to read whatever you like and then we get together during the Queen Event and discuss the books we chose.

I cant wait to see everyone all dressed up!

Here are links to the past two years of events:  2009 Queen Event and 2008 Queen Event

So that’s the big day coming up!  I work today and then have a few things to prep for tonight.  I will wear the crown tonight for the last time – until I pass it on to our Bookies Queen of 2010-2011.  😀

Hope you have a wonderful day – I cant wait to relax tonight and sink into a good book!  I am finishing up a pretty good one that should be reviewing in the next couple of days.

Hmmmm….. what is that smell this morning?  Is that bacon and pancakes?  Couldn’t be….

But it is!  😀

Normally life is so busy for Al and I we rarely have breakfast.  I may grab a banana on the way out the door or an instant packet of oatmeal to take to work with me but that’s about it.  Breakfasts – real breakfasts only happen when we get away for the weekends like to the cabin.  Even though we didn’t make it there this weekend, I still had purchased items to make the rare breakfasts.  (We pretty much have been eating everything I had packed in the cooler this weekend).

This morning – honestly…. we slept in.  We had a wonderful time at our friends house for dinner last night.  We sat on their deck and grilled chicken and enjoyed a lovely meal, and conversation until 10:30 at night!  This morning neither one of us were in any hurry to get up and I have to say that was kind of nice too.  So breakfast it is!  And I have to say, it does smell gooooooood!

Today I am going to catch up on a few things around the house, I may time a bike ride, spend some time with Chance and basically stay mellow before I hit the ground running tomorrow.

Couple “Blogkeeping” things:

June commenters – I adore you and have not forgotten you.  Using random.org here are my two comment winners who get to choose out of the prize box.  (And yes, this comment thank you continues each month – I just really need to make a sidebar widget for it!)

#348:  Jill Weatherholt

#541:  Esme

And my #1 commenter from June was:

Wordlily!!!

The top commenter each month wins a $20 gift card to Amazon!  Yay to Hannah!  😀

Dont forget that the survey that has been posted on top for the past month ends on July 15th.  If you had not taken a minute to fill out that form I would really appreciate it if you would…. I will post the overall results!

Ahhh…. the best laid plans.  After completing all my little errands yesterday around town, shopping for our trip to the cabin, loading the bikes on the rack, filling the cooler with all our refrigerator items, and 40 pounds of ice…. we had to cancel.

The plan was that I would get everything ready to go, Al would work in the office and prep to leave the business for the weekend, and we would meet back at the house early afternoon and hit the road.  About 4:00 pm I sent a text to my husband seeing when we were leaving.  He called me back and we had a snag in our plan.  A dump truck we had purchased and had been waiting to be delivered was coming through Duluth on Saturday and would need to be picked up by us and brought to Brainerd.  This piece of equipment is important to the current state job we are doing…so alas, we had to wave the white flag and change our plan.

I am not really too bummed…. yes for the cabin and for the relaxation but this has happened before and I have kind of learned to roll with the waves.   🙂   Instead we ate a late dinner at home, I watched a somewhat odd Lifetime movie and went to bed.

So plan B.  I am hitting the gym this morning and then probably driving with Al to Duluth to get the truck.  I have been bribed with lunch and a book store stop.  I am still in need of a copy of The Color Purple so I am all about the book store stop.  Maybe later I will take Chance to a movie or take a bike ride.

There’s a big bike ride in the area tomorrow that I have had my eye on.  Tour of Saints is a ride I do almost every year and this year because of our cabin plans I didn’t sign up.  I am watching the weather for tomorrow – chance of rain, but if it clears I may go do that ride…. maybe.  🙂

Here is the song in my head today…. it brings back memories of my best friend Traci in high school and road tripping to Cambridge Minnesota to see her family.  We would be in her old mustang that we fondly called “Rustang” because of all the rust and this may have been the song we blared out of the speakers.

Have an awesome day everyone!  😀

Morning!  Coffee Cup and I are attempting an early start to our day because it is a full one.  I feel the need to self-torture by attending Group Power at 8:25 this morning even through I am hurting all over from the class I took two days ago.  Must – get – back – on – routine…..

Then…. I am off to clean out my Durango, pack it for the weekend, go to Wal- Mart and get supplies, post office, library,  – have lunch with my son, and then Al and I are off to our cabin for the weekend.

YAY!!!  *cartwheels!*

We do not get there very often, in fact the last time was in early October of last year.  How sad is that?  So we are packing it up for the weekend and I am grabbing a few books (although I don’t know why – I have a whole other book shelf there loaded with books I have not read yet) to take along.  Lap Top is coming and I do have some posts planned so I should be active through the weekend.  I am excited to just chill and read and perhaps, chill some more.  🙂    I am bringing our bikes as well as there is a wonderful state trail just a few miles from us that is just gorgeous this time of year so I am camera ready!

When the boys were growing up and we had “cabin time”, we had a movie that was pretty much a cabin-weekend-must, and it was The Great Outdoors with John Candy.  I never got tired of this movie and we still pack it with us for the memories.  I should really just get a second copy and leave it there.

Any North Shore bloggers out there?  I am heading your way!

Have a great weekend everyone!!!!!