For this week’s post, I asked my three nephews to tell me their favorite board games.  The conditions for selection were 1) they had to own the games, 2) they had to have played them, and 3) they had to play them with me so I could write about them.  What follows then is the top five games that they could (mostly) agree on.

I have a few surprisingly vivid memories from a time where I was about three years old.  Possibly a little younger, but I think three is about right.  One of these memories is of being left in the tender care of a grandmotherly lady from our family’s church, while my mom went off and did…mom stuff.  I don’t know.  I was three.

The Invisible Library.  Just those words send a little shiver of delight through me.  Books!  A library’s worth of books!  And “invisible?”  What does that mean?  Is that like a secret library?  Ooooo, I hope it’s a secret library.  MY secret library.

Emboldened by the rallying cry “Do it for the blog!”, I have managed to wade through another craft project that has waited in a corner of my studio for several years. Faux-stained glass.

As I have become in recent years “a woman of a certain age,” it seems more important than ever to exercise my brain and keep learning new things. To that end, I try to read interesting and possibly useful non-fiction books in amongst my steady diet of fiction.

I first saw the original store-bought C.C. Beanie hat on a co-worker, and took a bunch of pictures with the intent of reverse-engineering it myself for hand knitting. Imagine my delight to discover on Ravelry that someone else had already done that work!

Regardless of anyone’s opinion of COVID (leftist conspiracy theory, “bad cold,” world-threatening pandemic, etc), I think that no one can deny that the winter of 2020 when we were all wearing masks was a winter where fewer of us caught colds and flu…and COVID.

Read Part 1 first!

I might have mentioned this before, but I watch a lot of YouTube. A LOT. And one of the largest playlists in my personal YouTube library is for mixed media art. I am particularly fond of the steampunk aesthetic…gears and rust and pipes and valves and mechanical parts that may or may not perform any function.

I might have mentioned before how much I admire authors. I don’t want to use the word “idolize” (mostly because it doesn’t reflect well on me) but that word is probably accurate. And I am fortunate enough to personally know several published authors.

When I was a child, I loved to read. I devoured books and went searching for more. I was in a childhood friend’s closet one day digging for reading material when I found his comic book stash.

When I was a child, anytime my mother did something I particularly liked, usually involving food, I declared that a new tradition, thereby trapping my mother into having to fulfill the “tradition” every year.

In years that my mother opts to make Christmas treats to give out, she makes two items. She makes her fantastic peanut butter balls and she makes Christmas butter cookies from a recipe I’ve not encountered anywhere else.

Whoever said laughter is the best medicine was definitely on to something. I mean, is it better than antibiotics? No…but it’s definitely a way to feel better in almost any circumstance. What follows, then, is a random assortment of things that currently make me laugh, including the groaners that my brother calls “dad jokes.”

When I was young, my mother started teaching me to cook. I took to some lessons, not so much to others, but she did require that I cook one meal a week for the family.

I get as star-struck as any average citizen.  But not over celebrities...no.  Over authors.

Does this look like the face of a pumpkin pie thief? No? Well, she’s had a couple years to perfect that innocent look, but I assure you that she is in fact a little ninja when it comes to swiping unguarded pie.

The Scholomance series is comprised of three books written by Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves.

As any decent coffee house knows, you can’t really properly have coffee (or tea) without coffee cake.

The fiber artists among my readers will know that SABLE stands for Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy. For you muggles (those who don’t knit or crochet), I will further explain that I myself have achieved SABLE. It’s exactly what it sounds like. My yarn stash has grown to such proportions that even if I knit or crochet for several hours every day for the rest of my life, I will never get through it all.