It's been a week now since we returned from Italy, and the grief that gripped me has lessened a bit. As my husband noted, I've never been so heartbroken to return home from a trip before. It was our first big trip (first plane flight) since Covid began, the first time to see our dear…
We spent the last two weeks in Italy with our very dear friends (who used to be our neighbors). We went down to visit them in Austin, Texas in November 2019, where they were living at the time, and then in December 2019 up here for just a weekend. We made plans to meet up…
Happy official beginning of spring! It’s starting to warm up around here (the last of the frosts should be behind us now), and we’re seeing more sunshine. I’ve been out in the garden more as it’s time for planting and the perennials and overwintered crops are starting to emerge in earnest. The world might be…
Today is Regina’s birthday! Happy happy birthday to one of my very favorite people on the planet. We have maybe only met each other in person four times, but that doesn't matter. Something I've learned over my five years of blogging is that it doesn't take in person time to grow some really wonderful friendships.…
You might have noticed (or maybe not), but I skipped posting last week. With everything going on with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, my bandwidth was completely zapped and blogging just wasn't happening. I do still want to keep this "pandemic" (and now war) public journal going, which is what TLRE mostly is at this point.…
Well. Today is not going to be an "everything is normal" post in light of what has happened / is happening this week. Russia invaded, unprovoked, a sovereign nation. I do want to say, though, that while we like to throw around the word "unprecedented" a lot these days, there is a lot of precedented…
So, I wrote out all of the books I read in 2021 back in early January, and then never got back to finishing this post. I like giving at least short reviews of the books I’ve read, but it takes some time, so I kept pushing it off. Shorter reviews this year than in past,…
Somehow we're already more than halfway through the month of February, and I haven't done my deep analysis of our spending for January yet again. I said I was going to pick it back up in 2022 after trailing off at the end of 2021, but I just haven't mustered the energy of import to…
We now have a seven year old in our house! We celebrated his fifth birthday in the weeks before we shut things down due to COVID-19, so this past weekend was technically his second "pandemic birthday," even though we're heading into the third year of life at the end of this month. Even so, this…
February! We've made it! One month down in 2022. I'm not sure what we're counting down to, exactly.... but here's to hoping that February is better than January? No matter what, the days are getting longer, and having more daylight hours outside always helps me. I've yet to write down my goals for 2022, and…