Month: March 2020

Following a Skinnytaste Meal Plan

Posted March 16, 2020 / Food & Drink, Personal / Information / Etc. / 2 Comments

I’ve followed Skinnytaste for a long time now because her recipes are so dang good and healthy! She was a go-to when I was doing WW because she includes the points (and calories, which helps me now) for her meals. I’ve always kept an eye on her weekly FREE meal plans and debated trying one out. There often was a meal or two that didn’t look great to me, or I didn’t want to buy all the groceries, or whatever other excuse I could come up with. I finally decided, after my grocery challenge was over, that I would follow a week of her meal plan for Chris and I to eat. I figured my house was fairly empty of food and waiting for a real grocery trip, so why not? I looked at the most recent meal plan at the time (she had it slated for 2/24-3/1 but I started it on 3/2 instead, since I was finishing my grocery challenge at the end of the month). Most of the recipes looked good to us, with only two really “out of our comfort zone” but not bad! I’ve never made a creamy soup before or cooked with tofu, but we were open to trying them out. This was the perfect meal plan to begin with. Here’s how I approached it and how it went! Prepwork I printed out the recipes, calendar, and grocery shopping list for the week and started looking it over. She has it set up so […]

Lauren Lately | March 2020

Posted March 13, 2020 / Features, Lauren Lately, Wrap-Ups / 4 Comments

You can read my monthly Bookmark Lit Bulletin wrap-ups to learn about the bookish and blog-related things I’ve accomplished. Lauren Lately was created to highlight all of the personal happenings in my life: events, activities, shows I’m addicted to, things I’m obsessing over, recipes I’ve loved, and goals. What I’ve Been Up To When I last shared some updates, I had just headed to Maine to visit my sister and watch the new TATBILB movie. We’re into mid-March, so here’s what I’ve been doing over the last month! We went to the Sugar Factory in Foxwoods Casino for Valentine’s Day and got some apps and a huuuge drink to share. We roamed the casino afterwards and played a bit of video roulette. Chris had bought me flowers a few days early too! We’ve been trying to get out of the house more, as usual, so we had our Friday date night at Mill on the River and followed it up with our favorite brewery. Chris went to the skatepark one weekend and I read my book at Starbucks nearby for a bit. We’ve been back to our other favorite brewery for a snack and a few beers, ran some errands, and followed it up with milkshakes at a local old-school diner kind of place. We went for a nice walk on the trail near our house on a nice Sunday. We’ve been watching the XFL and some movies, plus I got addicted to Love is Blind – more on those later. We had some breakfast in bed last weekend before heading to the Eric Carle Museum of […]

Simplification

Posted March 12, 2020 / Discussions, Features / 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about this word a lot lately, both in my reading life and in my personal life. I spoke a bit about it in a recent Five on Fridays post but I’m really trying to find ways to SIMPLIFY. I know I said my word of the year would be SAVE, but I’m adding this one too. (I think I mentioned in that post that saving wasn’t just about money, but also about saving time and frustration. The same thing as simplifying if you ask me!) When it comes to reading, I sometimes enjoy being incredibly organized and scheduled out. But, as my tweets say above, that only helps me when I’m in the mood to read. When I WANT to read. If I’m behind or not in the mood to read, having TBRs and reading schedules absolutely does not motivate me to read. When I’m in a reading rut due to my schedules and TBRs, the only thing that can break me out of it is reading a book I REALLY want to read. When I finished KING OF CROWS, I knew it was going to linger and ruin some other books for me. On top of that, I didn’t finish a book *before* its pub date, so I ended up being quite behind on my monthly numbers by the time I finally finished it. I slogged through a couple of reads afterwards and really struggled to find the desire to read. I started going to the […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #278: Authors on Social

Posted March 10, 2020 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 10 Comments

Authors on Social Media: The First Ones I See in My Feed Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review. The technical prompt for this one is about authors with a fun social media presence, but I really don’t know that I’ve paid attention to that? I tend to follow favorite authors or ones that are knowledgeable on other things (like current events, politics, etc.) as well. I thought I’d spin this to be a little more focused on the first authors I see in my Twitter feed when I open it.

ARC Reviews: Girls with Razor Hearts and In Five Years

Posted March 9, 2020 / Book Reviews / 3 Comments

Yup, this was just about as wild and powerful as expected, and the perfect way to kickoff my reading year. I chose it as my first book of 2020 because I love starting things off on a perfect note, or at least with a book I can safely assume will be in the 4.5-5 star range! Mena and the other girls have escaped Innovations, on the road to enacting their revenge against the evil corporation and academy that trained them to be obedient little girls like society wants. This is an incredibly feminist story, obviously, and offers dystopian-like connections to our own world. Young is masterful with this – she makes you realize immediately where she’s drawing inspiration from our world, but manages to make this near-future feel like a possibility. I think there are some elements of this that are possibly a little too on the nose and preachy but it really makes sense coming from Mena’s point of view (somewhat spoilery reasons if you haven’t read the first book – but I will say it’s primarily because Mena and the other girls haven’t been outside in the real world to know what it’s like. You’re seeing it through their inexperienced eyes.). I loved (and obviously hated because this book is not necessarily a walk in the park) the moments where they would think they could trust someone or think that a man would be helpful and then realize he may be almost as bad as the rest of […]

Five on Fridays [6] + March Currently

Posted March 6, 2020 / Five on Fridays, Weekly Memes / 8 Comments

Five on Friday displays the the top five things that have been on my mind this week! It could be book-related, but it may be music, movies, TV, personal life, food, etc. I’ll generally be posting these biweekly and linking up with Friday Favorites (hosted by A Little Bit of Everything, Grace and Love, and Momfessionals). Previous posts can be found here! Air Fryer Instant Pot Lid We bought a small air fryer back in the summertime and really enjoyed using it, but I always felt that it was a bit too small for us to cook more food all at once. I randomly saw online somewhere last week that Instant Pot released an air fryer lid attachment that just turns your IP into an air fryer! It also has some of the same functions the Ninja Foodi has (my dad just got one of these for Christmas). You can broil, bake, roast, reheat, and dehydrate! We tested it ASAP when it came in by making crispy eggplant parm in it and it worked SO well. We gave our small air fryer to some friends (I spent only $30 on it so I wasn’t worried about selling it or anything) and were really happy to save cabinet space with this guy. So far, $80 well spent! AirPods and Case Since I started going to the gym recently, I decided to upgrade from my fake Airpods into some real ones. I just got sick of the terrible battery life and not […]

Review Round Up | A Heart So Fierce and Broken, The Hand on the Wall, and Royce Rolls

Posted March 5, 2020 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! I saw some lower ratings for this one ahead of reading it and most stemmed from people thinking this would be about Harper/Rhen again. I knew what to expect going into it (Grey and another new character as the POVs) so that definitely helped with my enjoyment. Like the first one (and most fantasy books), it was a bit slow-going at first. I broke my reading up into sections to pace myself out for a week until book club’s meeting date. I do think I was a bit disappointed by this one though, and I think – like everyone else – it had to do with the characters being slightly less interesting to follow. Grey fascinated me in book one and he did keep me interested here, but Lia Mara was much less interesting than Harper was. The plot involved them, plus a few other characters, making their way to another country. I tend to enjoy books where a couple of characters go on a journey and there’s some fun magic and banter involved, but this one didn’t have as much going on for me. One thing, romance-wise, that I’ve enjoyed about these books is that they don’t jump right into loving each other (even if the […]

February Grocery Challenge: Weeks 3-4 & Wrap-Up

Posted March 4, 2020 / Food & Drink, Goals & Planning, Personal / Information / Etc. / 0 Comments

You saw recently how I made a February Grocery Challenge to use food up that I had on hand and stick to a $20 per week (sometimes $25 if needed) grocery budget for the entire month of February. I shared my reasons for doing it, the rules I developed for the challenge, and tracked ALL of the things we ate and bought throughout February from a food perspective. The post got quite long as a result so I thought I would split my posts up a bit and share the overall results and lessons learned in a separate post. The Results Week Three (2/17 through 2/23) Monday EATS: As I mentioned in the last post a couple weeks ago, we had leftover meatloaf with green beans and mashed potatoes for lunch. I decided to actually do a planned Meatless Monday for dinner with some of the new groceries I bought. I found a recipe for an eggplant caprese (I didn’t grill the eggplant but I did use the grill pan on the stove instead, which was fine!) and made an Italian-style quinoa (including fire-roasted tomatoes, zucchini, and sun-dried tomatoes) to get some protein and more veggies on the side. SHOPPING: Okay SO I decided to go rogue and do my final two grocery shops for the month in one fell swoop. I wanted to keep close to the budget, get everything at once, and do Walmart pickup instead of going into a store and spending too much money. Their minimum for pickup is $30 so I […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #277: Single Word Titles

Posted March 3, 2020 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 0 Comments

Books with One-Word Titles Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review. I love topics like this where I can discuss a few different types of books under the category! The topic for this week is books with one-word titles. I didn’t think this would be quite so easy and yes it was harder to track through Goodreads… I just scrolled and scrolled! On My TBR Cursed by Thomas Wheeler // Gender-bent King Arthur retelling coming to Netflix Stain by AG Howard // Fairy tale retelling inspired by Princess and the Pea Sherwood by Meagan Spooner // Retelling of Robin Hood about Maid Marian Mayhem by Estelle Laure // Book set in 1987 involving magic, mystery, and revenge Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu // Feminist zine creator starts a girl revolution Read and Enjoyed Renegades by Marissa Meyer // Superheroes get infiltrated by a villain Mooncakes by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker // Cute and diverse witchy graphic novel Caraval by Stephanie Garber // A carnival like you’ve never seen! You by Caroline Kepnes // Creepy stalker/murderer told in second-person Intercepted by Alexa Martin // “Football wives” style series-starter

Bookmark Lit Bulletin | February 2020

Posted March 2, 2020 / Bookmark Lit Bulletin, Features, Wrap-Ups / 2 Comments

The Bookmark Lit Bulletin wraps up the last month in reading and what was on the blog, as well as what’s coming up next. You can check out my book haul, books read, posts shared, challenge updates, etc. You can read past bulletins here. If you’re looking for more personal updates, you can check out my Lauren Lately feature; it highlights my life events and non-bookish fun from the previous 30 days. This reading month was ROUGH for a few reasons. I obviously spent some good time reading THE KING OF CROWS and didn’t manage to finish a book before its release, so I was kind of behind from the get-go. I wasn’t ever in the mood to read and most books didn’t grab me after finishing KoC. I finally got through a few toward the end of the month but I’m definitely behind at this point. Here’s hoping March is better! 7 books read in February 7 new books • 0 rereads • 1 DNF Pages read: 3,077 • Average rating: 3.6 stars Sources: 6 for review, 1 library book, 3 borrowed Formats: [Review] 2 egalleys and 0 physical ARCs 1 hardcover, 0 paperbacks, 0 ebook, 1 audio, 4 combos Genres: 4 contemporary, 2 mystery/thriller, 1 paranormal, 1 historical Age Target: 3 adult, 5 young adult, 0 middle grade Check out my 2020 challenge sign-up post for more details, goals, etc.! Popsugar Reading Challenge 7 read this month | 17/40 read total Prompts read: Passes the Bechdel test, bout a woman in STEM, […]