Sunday Post, 1/09/2022

January 2, 2022 Sunday Post 2

The Sunday Post is hosted by the wonderful Kimberly, the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week, take a look ahead, and showcase our new treasures—I mean books!

Happy New Year!

Mr. Bookwyrm and I made it home. We had a wonderful month with Robin, and enjoyed all the time we got to spend with other family members as well (my mom and stepdad; my sister, brother-in-law, niece, nephew and his fiancee; and my dad and stepmom.)

The trip home was a bit tense at times, because the snow that hit New Mexico overnight on Dec. 31 continued to track across the country with us, culminating with the major disruption caused to the Mid-Atlantic states on January 3. We paid close attention to the forecasts, and when we realized on January 2 how bad the storm would be in Virginia on the 3rd, we booked a second night in our hotel (in Tennessee) and waited it out. We finished our drive home on Jan. 4. By then, the roads through Tennessee and southwestern Virginia were fine, but once we got on I-64 toward Charlottesville, the scale of the problems began to dawn on us. There were trees and broken tree limbs down everywhere we looked, and there were still icy and snowy patches on I-64. We were also aware (thanks to portable road signs) that I-95 was closed north of Richmond, so we had to take back roads from near Charlottesville all the way to Fredericksburg, and that was really tense. There were significant areas of snow and ice on the back roads; there were downed trees blocking one lane on more than one road (I counted at least 8 or 10, on both small roads and the dual-lane highway that runs from Fredericksburg into our county); there were patches of thick, white fog that were almost impossible to see through; there were a number of cars that had run off the road and become stuck. And the power was out in large swathes of the more rural parts of each county, although it was on in Fredericksburg.

We were a bit worried about what we would find when we reached our house, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. In fact, we got off rather lightly, for which we are profoundly grateful. The trees surrounding our house did not fare well; there were multiple large limbs and the top half of trees that had come down on our lawn and driveway. One came down on the hood of my car, but fortunately the heavy limbs missed it, and the coating of snow and ice on the hood protected it; there is hardly a scratch. Our wonderful neighbor moved the large limbs — and I do mean large — out of the entrance to our driveway and cleared a space for us to park. Also fortunately, none of the big limbs hit our roof or even our deck, so our house is intact. And our power was only out briefly on the 3rd; it was back on when we got home, which put us in much better shape than some of our friends and acquaintances, who went without power for several days.

Now we’re back to “normal” life — or pandemic normal, anyway. I have a few weeks before my next indexing project arrives, but I have the author’s manuscript, so I can start setting up the main entries and the overall index structure this week. Meanwhile, I am still unpacking and trying to catch up on stuff I didn’t get to before we left. I’m also trying to catch up with all the blog- and book-related tasks that come at the end of the year and the start of a new year, like setting up spreadsheets to track my reading and book aquisitions in 2022.

Recent Posts

Looking Ahead

  • Most Anticipated Books Releasing In the First Half of 2022 – belated Top Ten Tuesday; tentative
  • Christmas Book Haul – Top Ten Tuesday; tentative
  • Sunday Post – 1/16/2022 – tentative

The Backlist Reader Challenge

It’s not too late to sign up for The Backlist Reader Challenge again this year. If you’re looking to read the backlog of books on your TBR pile or To-Read list, come check it out! This challenge is for classics you never got around to, for all those ARCs you should have read a couple of years ago, for that series your bestie has been insisting you read for the past decade or more…for any and every book you’ve been intending to read for a while, as long as it’s on your TBR list and was published before 2020.

What I’ve Been Reading/Watching

Reading: I read Hole in One by Catherine Aird, which was one of my Christmas gifts. And I read Christmas Revels, an anthology of novellas by Mary Jo Putney. Between family time, packing, three long days of cross-country driving, and now all the unpacking and clean-up, it hasn’t been a great two weeks for reading! Currently, I’m reading All the Duke I Need (Caroline Linden; ARC) and The Man in the Brown Suit (Agatha Christie); the latter is the official January book for #ReadChristie2022.

The Conductors (Nicole Glover; ARC) and Ghost Killer (Robin D. Owens) are still on temporary pause, although I definitely plan to finish them in January.

Listening to: The Road to Little Dribbling (Bill Bryson)

Watching: Not a lot, because we were driving for half a week and busy on either side of the trip. The day we holed up in the hotel, we did watch Men in Black 2 and Independence Day — some channel or other was running a Will Smith marathon. Since arriving home, we have started Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery.

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay kind… and may you find books a haven in the coming weeks.

Related Posts

2 Responses to “Sunday Post, 1/09/2022”