Best (Mostly) Non-Book Stuff This Week

I will say -- straight up and unashamed -- that I am stealing this weekly best sort of thing from one of the best bloggers in America today, SuziQ of Whimpulsive . In my defense, I think I asked her how creepy copy-catty this would be, she muttered something that sounded like the Pacific Northwest's version of Bless Your Heart. 

*****

I hate cleaning my bathtub. 

But I am here to testify that I found something at the store a few weeks ago that promised to make scrubbing through that nasty almost-invisible soap scum a breeze. I finally used it this week, and HONEY, let me tell you it may have changed the way I feel about cleaning the bathtub from Please, just pull my tooth instead to I still hate to do this but it'll only take a minute and then I can go have a glass of wine or something. 

*****

During my practice retirement, I have begun to enjoy planning our menus a week at a time. I've used a grocery app for a long, long time, but I have found myself making much more thorough use of it these past couple months. I've tried lots of them, but for my money (and yes, I have the paid version) Anylist is the best, hands down. Not only is it easy to customize to your own grocery store, you can have separate lists for more than store. I currently have lists for the drugstore, Bed, Bath, & Beyond (for stuff that it occurs to me I need for the house) and Costco. But even better is the web extension that allows you to add recipes from most websites with one click and save them into your Anylist Recipe file. From that file, a tap on an item needed for the recipe puts it into your shopping cart. Yes, there is a time investment upfront (sorting your store aisles correctly, for instance), and there are always some items that Anylist places in an aisle that doesn't make sense, but moving it for future reference also happens with one click. 

***

I've been traveling on the road of good intentions for a long time, the one about getting around to reading classics that I somehow missed reading all these years. I've loved to read since I was a child, but even so, seemed not to have gravitated to the same things others did. I'm embarrassed to share the full list of childhood classics I never got to, but I'm resolved to start chipping away at the list. The only problem is that I didn't want to take undue time away from other, more timely books I have stacked around. When I ran across Serial Reader in this past weeks list of featured apps, I decided to give it a whirl. You select a classic and each day at a time you set yourself, you are sent one chapter to read. I picked 7:00 a.m., figuring I could knock out a chapter kind of like reading a devotional. Further, I chose Anne of Green Gables, a book I vaguely remember having checked out from the library when I was little, but of which I have no memory of ever having read. (I must hasten to add here that I do not enjoy reading via my phone or iPad, but I thought I'd give it a whirl for this project of mine.)

Serial Reader's choices are limited, but for the time-being it's fine for this little experiment of mine. All the books they have available are free to read and they are all classics; you won't find anything published in this century among its offerings.  

***

You know how it is when you get to the end of a book you really, really love and you just do not want to put it down? And you want to hug it and you go around telling people that you could have eaten it with a spoon? So does my grandson.