October Reads

A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll

Source: audiobook

Summary: A young autistic girl petitions to have a memorial created in her Scottish village on behalf of women who were tried as witches. 

Content: clean and recommended for ages 8-12

Review: ***

Final statement: I enjoyed this book, but I struggled a little bit with its accusatory tone. I felt like it vilified too many characters. This might have been, in part, the way that audiobook narrator read the characters. 

I'll Be You by Janelle Brown

Source: audiobook

Summary: Identical twins, Sam and Elli, haven't spoken in over a year, but when Elli goes missing, their mom asks Sam to return home to help take care of Elli's daughter whom Sam didn't know existed.

Content: language

Review: ****

Final statement: I really liked this one. I've read one other book by Janelle Brown, Pretty Things, and liked that one as well. 

Not if I Save You First by Ally Carter

Source: audiobook

Summary: Maddie is the daughter of a secret service agent. Logan is the son of POTUS. During a kidnapping attempt on the First Lady, Maddie's dad is shot, so he takes Maddie to live in the Alaskan wilderness. A few years later, Logan is sent to stay with them, but their location is no longer safe, and someone comes after them. 

Content: clean YA novel

Review: ***

Final statement: I didn't personally love this book, but I know a lot of teen girls who adore this author and have read her other books, so I wanted to document it as something I can recommend to my own daughter someday. 

Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine

Source: paperback

Summary: Gwen Proctor is the ex-wife of a serial killer, who moves from place to place under a false identity to protect her children from people who wish them harm. Just as they are getting comfortable in Stillhouse Lake, a body is found in the water in very similar fashion to her husband's crimes.

Content: language and serial killer gore. This is a no-no for Grandma.

Review: ****

Final statement: This was October's selection for my book club. There are a few people in the group I didn't think would enjoy this type of book, but everyone liked it! It's the first in a series. I have the second book from the library but haven't read it yet. According to someone at book club, the first two books go together (same story), and then after that, it takes the main character into other stories. I'll probably just read the second book and then be done. 

A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum

Source: e-book

Summary: This book tell the stories of two Arab women - Isra and Deya - mother and daughter, living in two different timelines. Isra is sent to America in an arranged marriage where she is shamed for giving birth to girls and beaten by her husband. Years later, Deya is being raised by her grandmother believing that her parents died in a car accident. As she reaches the age of marriage, she has to decide if she will fight to choose her own path.

Content: domestic abuse, a few mild swear words, and some non-descriptive sexual content, but I would let my grandma read this. 

Review: ****

Final statement: The author of this book is an Arab-American woman who wanted to represent her culture. The author's note at the end of the book is interesting. I always love a good author's note!

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Books I read this month but didn't write reviews for:

 

Table Update

Back in 2018, I painted an old table for our kitchen. It was a nice, sturdy specimen, and I hoped the paint job would last 3-5 years.

 

I’ve been painting furniture for almost 20 years now. I was just thinking this week about how when I painted my first table, there wasn’t very good information on the internet about how to do it. People didn’t paint furniture back then! I had to go to the paint store and ask lots of questions, and to be honest, they didn’t know anything. There also weren’t very many products for such a task. Just primer, latex paint, and polyurethane, really. Now there’s almost too much information and too many products out there! 

Despite the image that DIY bloggers create, painted furniture doesn’t hold up for long. Don’t let them fool you! I always advise people that it’s a temporary fix, and it will eventually need to be done again or replaced, so you should always take that into consideration when you paint something. No matter how careful I am with my work, what kind of product or top coat I use, my painted furniture always gets dinged and scratched over time (unless it's something that no one ever touches or uses).

My kitchen table is no exception! It acquired all sorts of scratches and damage from my kids’ art projects. But that’s the great thing about having an old table. It can take a hit, and then I can do something experimental and imperfect to refresh it for the next round of battering.

Over fall break, my table suffered its final incident before needing to be redone. I made a Halloween dinner for my kids one night, and I had a fun table cloth they could draw on. 

I had Nicky put the table cloth on the table for me, and I assumed that it was plastic coated on the back side. My mistake! It was basically paper! My kids used Sharpie on it and left my table looking like this:

I tried to magic erase it, but it was stuck for good. I questioned how long I could survive with black widows and tic tac toes on my table, and I decided… not long. I was okay with nail polish spatters and glitter glue, but the Halloween artistry was my turning point.

It was time to give the table a facelift, but I didn’t want to work too hard. I wanted to do just the top, if possible, which meant I needed to do some sort of two-tone since my previous paint job wasn’t something I could touch up on just the top of the table and have it look uniform. I started researching ways to paint the table top to look like wood (it’s laminate), and I found a product called Retique Liquid Wood. It’s basically wood paint, so, in theory, you can slap it on something and then stain it. I figured it would cost a small fortune, but when I looked at the pricing, it was more affordable than I expected.

I ordered the liquid wood and some new paintbrushes, and then I got to work. First I sanded the table to smooth out some scratches. I was very lazy and sloppy about it and was only willing to endure fifteen minutes of sanding (I even set a timer). The result of my laziness is that my table still has tons of visible scratches and indentations in it, but ya know what? I have four kids. Give it a week, and they’ll be there anyway. Why should I endure torturous sanding for a few shorts days of smoothness? 

(I hate sanding! It’s the worst!)

After I sanded the table, I did two coats of liquid wood. I like to call this the peanut butter phase:

Table coated in liquid wood

With the liquid wood, you can’t use a penetrating stain because it’s so thin, so I did two test runs - one with a gel stain and one with Polyshades. I was a little limited on color options, so I ended up using Polyshades Mission Oak. 

After the first coat

I also did two coats of polyurethane on top just for extra endurance. 

Last time I refinished my table, I let it cure for two weeks before we started using it, but in the end, I don’t think it made it any more durable. So this time, I gave it a good 24 hours of drying time, then threw it to the wolves! My kids ate chicken noodle soup for breakfast on it this morning.

Here's how it turned out:

It's hard to get a decent photo with the bay window lighting, but you get the idea. I definitely liked the lighter color better, but this is good enough to get us through the next few years. My chairs could use refreshing, too, but I still really like the color (Krylon Pistachio with a satin finish), and I can't find it anywhere. I don't know if they make it anymore. So if I do touch up my chairs, I'll probably have to do a full color change, and I'm not to the point where I'm willing to do that level of work. 

Now we'll see how it holds up. Three to five years is all I ask! Three is enough to justify the work,* and five is an extra treat! At some point during that time frame, hopefully our house will be paid off, and by the time our table needs another refresh, maybe we can actually buy one! In the meantime, I'm grateful for this hardy beast! 

Update 10/23/22: The day after I posted this, a small piece of Polyshades flaked off the edge of the table, so the damage has already begun. I'm trying to keep it contained, but I don't know how it's going to hold up. I'm rather disappointed, but we'll see what happens in the coming weeks. 

*Actually, with as easy and quick as this renovation was, one year is enough to justify the work, but I don't want to do it again in a year, so I'm aiming for three at minimum

An Incomplete List of Awkward Situations (Part VIII)

When you’re reading a physical copy of a book and you try to scroll…

Or zoom in on the text…

Or tap the book to see what time it is.

When you eat a big, satisfying lunch, and then look at the clock, and it’s only 9:46 a.m.

When you’re constantly getting after your kid for something they do that’s incredibly annoying, and then you catch yourself doing the same thing.

Likewise, when you and your child make the exact same noise at the exact same time in the exact same pitch as if you'd rehearsed it, and then you look at each other like, “Why am I like you?”

When you’re at instacare with your child, and the medical assistant refers to amoxicillin as an allergy medication, and you’re like, “I’m no doctor, but…should you be working here?”

When you’re sitting on the examination table at the dermatologist, and your cell phone vibrates in your back pocket and sounds like a fart while the doctor is examining your armpit mole. 

Pretty much everything that happens at the dermatologist.

When you walk through a door and can’t see the person about to walk through the opposite way, and you almost make full body contact as you scare the crap out of each other.

When you think a person is going to hold a door for you, and then they don’t, and you almost end up wedged in the door frame side by side. 

When you’re at a soda fountain, and someone is filling up their cup, and there’s probably enough space for you to slide in next to them and fill your cup at the same time, but you’re not sure what that person’s boundaries are, so you linger back a bit and twitch while trying to decide if your hesitancy is holding up a line. 

When you’re waiting to turn left, and you could have gone, but you didn’t know you could have gone until it was too late, and while you’re regretting not going, you miss another opportunity to go, and you know everyone behind you hates you. 

When you’re at the temple doing baptisms for the dead, and one of the temple workers keeps disrupting the baptisms to give insights about the science of moving water and the pronunciation of vowel sounds prior to the 1600’s.

When you get a Ring doorbell notification on your phone, and you can't figure out who it is or what they're doing, and then you realize it was YOU taking out the garbage nine minutes ago.

When Ryan Murphy is all the rage, and you're like, "Yeah, I really love his arrangement of I Know that the Savior Loves Me."

When the employee at the DI donation drop-off is trying to reenact Guardians of the Galaxy for you as you ease your way back into your car, and you don't want to hurt his feelings, so you drive away mid-performance and yell, "Have a good day, Starlord!" 

When you give permission for your daughter and the neighbor kid to watch tv in your room, and the neighbor kid says, “But first will you go close your closet door so I don’t have to see your bras?”

When you see a van just like yours, and you look at the driver to see if it's you.

20 Things We Did Over Fall Break

1. Went to a scarecrow festival (the girls)

2. Went thrift store shopping (Nicky & me)

3. Baked bread

4. Watched A Quiet Place Part II (Nicky & me)

5. Had a Halloween dinner

6. Went to the temple (Nicky, Daisy, & me)

7. Painted Ludwig

8. Went to Book Club (me)

9. Made breadstick snakes

10. Painted pumpkins

11. Played poker (Scotty)

12. Went to church 

13. Tested for COVID and strep (Daisy - negative on both counts)

14. Played “store” (Zoe & Eva)

15. Played ping pong

16. Harvested and froze a bunch of onions from the garden (me)

17. Went to see Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile

18. Played Ticket to Ride: Europe and Splendor (Nicky won both)

19. Watched the Barney documentary (me)

20. Snuck pizza and crazy bread into the movie theater in my purse

My Scary Movies

It’s Halloween time, and that means my husband is trying to get me to watch scary movies. I’m not sure what my relationship is with scary movies. I don’t particularly love them, but I can’t make a blanket statement that I hate them, either. In truth, I don’t like very many movies at all. Scary or not, movies rarely get a good review from me. 

However, that wasn’t always the case. In my younger years, I loved movies. Scotty and I used to go see everything in the theater. Everything! It was probably childbirth that ruined me.

Anyway, as a teen, I was obsessed with Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I watched them on the regular. For some reason, I had no qualms over watching those R movies, but I never delved into Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre… and the only Michael Myers I ever knew was this one…

Anyway, like I said, Scotty wants me to watch scary movies with him every Halloween, and I never do. I think I'm becoming less and less the woman of his dreams, poor thing. So this year, I determined the three scary movies I am willing to watch. These are three I actually like:

And, for the sake of personal research, I am also willing to watch:

The Sixth Sense because it's been over 20 years since I've seen it, and when it first came out, I genuinely liked it. You guys, I seriously didn't know Bruce Willis was dead (also, I feel like that's a spoiler I don't need to be accountable for. I normally firmly believe in "no spoilers," but there are some exceptions. Like, you should just know that Romeo and Juliet die and that Bruce Willis is dead and that Darth Vader is Luke's father).

Signs I didn't like. But it's been nearly 20 years since I saw it, too, and I'm willing to watch it again... even though it has creatures. 

So, when Scotty comes begging to watch a scary movie, here's what he has to work with. That should get us through the next five years or more. 

The last time I agreed to watch a scary movie with Scotty, he picked it. 

It's been at least five years, and I'm still suffering from the memory of it. This movie is so bad. So very bad. 

Pumpkin Painting Personalities

Eva

-Has a short attention span

-Uses her fingers

-Ends up abandoning her pumpkin because she’d rather dress up in grocery bags and hop around the house acting like a bunny

Zoe

-Gets mad if anyone talks about her pumpkin while she’s painting it

-Makes a huge mess

-Yells at everyone for disrupting her artistic process

-Uses a ton of paint

Daisy

-Finds inspiration online

-Argues with Zoe for half an hour before she even gets started 

-Takes a really long time

-Doesn’t want to share her supplies with anyone

-Continues to yell at Zoe 

-Knocks a lot of supplies off the table, and when asked to pick them up, tries to blame it on someone else

-Uses glitter

Nicky

-Gets it over with as quick as possible

-Has no artistic ability and knows it

-Is more worried about the playlist we’re listening to than the pumpkin he produces

-Reverts to childhood

Brittany

-Wants everyone to take this task seriously and actually try

-Threatens to throw the pumpkins away if everyone won’t stop fighting

-Hogs the good paint brushes

-Uses a blow dryer

Scotty

-Pumpkins are meant to be carved, not painted