At the start of 2019, I hosted my first themed dinner party. The theme was France: French wine and cuisine. Everyone had to bring a French dish and French wine. I think it was a big hit and I can’t wait to do more of these!

To be honest, I did not come up with the idea for a themed dinner party like this. One of my good friends and her family do these kinds of dinners all the time and I had to try it out for myself.

Writing this reading list made me realize that these were good months for books! I’ve been on a roll reading books that have not disappointed me. I hope this continues! I think the trick is to just not set high expectations and read every book with an open mind.

I think I need to do a better job with realistically rating the books though. I noticed I gave a lot of 5’s on this one (on a 1 to 5 scale, 5 being the highest score). That’s not a bad thing but it may not be super helpful when I give 5’s all the time. I’ll try to improve on that next month. I think I did a better job rating books last time, or I just loved more books this time!

I was in a cooking rut last year. I didn’t want to cook anything. It was a chore. I hated grocery shopping. I was just tired of it all and I felt the same week after week. I finally decided to try Blue Apron because they would send groceries right to your door, with recipes for those groceries.

I actually really enjoyed using this service for several months! Finally, I looked forward to cooking (and eating)! I used ingredients I had never even heard of, wouldn’t know where to buy, and would never have tried on my own. It was fun and nice to actually enjoy cooking again.

I haven’t done a roundup of books I’ve read in a while, so this post is overdue. That also means it’s going to be kind of long! Here we go… my most recent book reviews.

My first trip to San Diego was this past December in 2018. I was there for three days on a work trip. Here I was thinking I was going to sunny San Diego… And it rained the first two days! And I mean RAINED, like pouring rain, streets flooding, water getting inside Uber cars. Honestly, though, I don’t even think the rain was that bad but sunny San Diego’s infrastructure is not built for rain. Thankfully I was prepared with umbrellas and rain boots!

Hey there… it’s been a while. I haven’t posted in over a month. I’m not too worried about it though. Tax season began and it took me a while to get into a whole new routine where I only have about 3 hours at home every night before having to go to bed and do it all over again the next day.

Since January is almost over, I figure I would share what’s been on my radar this month.

2019 is almost here! This month has been going by SO fast! Before 2018 gets away from me completely, I wanted to make 19 goals for 2019. Originally I was only going to do a couple goals, but 19 seemed like a fun number for 2019.

On GoodReads.com, you can participate in an annual reading challenge where you set the number of books you’d like to read during the year. As you read the books and add them to your list on GoodReads, it counts the books for you. I reached my goal of 30 books in November! This includes audiobooks, ebooks, and paper books. I’m pretty happy with myself 🙂 Now, let’s get to the book reviews for October and November.