The Friday Five (1)

1. Let's try something new! I'm blatantly stealing this idea from Sarah Dessen, an author I have long followed and admired. Not long ago she started posting a Friday Five on Substack (via Substack?). I love getting the weekly news/reflections, especially as a person who has missed her old blogging updates. Clearly I'm still not ready to let this blog go, and a Friday Five seems like a reasonable goal for 2024 so we're just going to see where this thing goes.

2. I finished rereading This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel because that was our book club selection for this month's meeting. I love a lot of the things I read but this is the book that comes to mind when someone asks what my favorite book is. It sounds cheesy but this novel really opened my mind and my heart and it was just as beautiful/powerful upon rereading as it was the first time I encountered it. My favorite passage goes like this:

You never know. You only guess. This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what's good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don't get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child's entire future and happiness is at stake. It's impossible. It's heartbreaking. It's maddening. But there's no alternative.

Read it.

3. I've been sick, with a cold, since just after Christmas. It's not strep, it's not the flu, it's not COVID, I'm not even feverish, but MAN has it been miserable. I have had the odd bit of congestion or scratchy throat here or there, but I don't think I've had a full blown, can't breathe through my nose, sinuses so full my teeth hurt cold since pre-COVID times. Thank goodness I'm still off school this week because I haven't been sleeping well and I have no idea how I would make it through a whole work day under these conditions.

4. Matt and I visited a restaurant new to at least one of us each week in 2023. Yes, there are a TON of places to eat out in and around our town. It was great to have a designated date night every week, although it was occasionally challenging to fit it in our schedule. After independently ranking our top seven places, we came up with a top five and will revisit those the first five weeks of 2024. I highly recommend this experiment.

5.  I got a couple of new CDs for Christmas. Yes, you read that right, CDs. I still like to own music from my favorite artists. Streaming is great, but I don't always want to have to use my phone or a computer to listen to music. My two newest CDs are 1988 by Lori McKenna and A Great Wild Mercy by Carrie Newcomer. I've listened to both of these artists since the late 1990s and they are still producing incredible music.