After the Holidays: A Little Looking Back

This sums up my main hope for the year:

Or, wait, how about this one, too?

Yes, please. 

My five-year journal has a space at the end of the year to write anything more, and at the end of 2022, gods help me, I wrote, "Another not-the-best-year done. May next year bring better health for Mom, and no surgeries! And better coping skills for me." Ha! Ha! Oh, past me, would that that were funny. 

Our holidays were in fact peaceful and quiet; believe me, this is not a complaint. Of the 10 days before this one, I didn't have to set my alarm for eight of them*, which was bliss. The alarm going off this morning was both literally and figuratively a rude awakening. And then to find out that someone else won the Powerball! Humph.

*The holidays, weekends, and a couple of vacation days.

While I have enjoyed reading the various summaries some bloggers are doing about their year, whether it's books specifically or about their year overall (though I did not keep up with commenting), I am not pushing myself that way, not this year anyway. Maybe I should make my motto for 2024 be The Year of Not Pushing Myself. Well, that needs workshopping. I don't usually do a motto/word/whatever of the year anyway, so why start now of all times?

General life update: Mom's health continues to improve, but very slowly and not in the perfect linear way of improving every day the way we would like. She is having less constant/debilitating pain in the post-surgery hip or in the also-messed-up-by-falling shoulder, but she is frustrated by how little energy she has. She starts PT next week, and I'm hoping that will help her.

Exercise not-much-of-an-update: I basically haven't been exercising, with the slight exception of the online stretch classes that I learned about through Engie. It cracks me up that a healthcare system in Wisconsin lets me log in to this class from Florida, but they have been completely welcoming, and a few minutes of stretching a few times a week is very much better than nothing. Even with all the craziness of 2023, I still attended more than half the classes, and that honestly does feel like an accomplishment.

Reading update: I finished 113 books last year (I don't keep track of ones I don't finish). Since I don't rate them*, I don't have a definitive list of 5-star reads, but I can say, looking over my list, that I really really liked (in chronological order by when I read them) Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander, by Victoria Goddard (though you have to have read The Hands of the Emperor first**); Love & Saffron, by Kim Fay; Nora Goes Off Script, by Annabel Monaghan; the Digger comics, by Ursula Vernon; the Saints of Steel series, by T Kingfisher; Thornhedge, by T Kingfisher; and the last two that I read in 2023, in the Ladies Occult Society series, A Magical Inheritance and A Ghostly Request, by Krista Ball--it's basically Jane Austen but with magic, and so so so well done. I can't recall the last character I was rooting so strongly for, and please tell me at once if you read them because the third book comes out March 1 and I am really hoping for a scene where Elizabeth gets to tell her father, in front of others, just why she (redacted redacted spoilers argh).

*But maybe I should: it would save me from looking over the list and trying to decide in hindsight if something was a 4 or a 5.

**I don't know if anyone else reads Goddard's books, but I love this series and would be happy to discuss them, suggest reading order, etc.

Maggie update: She continues to be practically perfect. Of course.