A Sunday routine, window-shopping at the grocery store, book club, & the tortoise and the feline…

~Sunday~  I slept in long enough to get eight hours sleep. Yay for Sundays, and morning routines: Coffee with breakfast, country gospel music, and a gander through this week’s PostSecrets.

At around 4:00, I took about a two-mile walk, over to the Food Lion and back. I didn’t buy anything while I was there; I just made a note of things to pick up later after book club.


It’s been a long time since everyone’s made it to book club. We met at Barnes & Noble at Streets of Southpoint at 6:30 and they threw us out at 9:00.

After catching up on everybody’s lives, we actually discussed a book: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I took notes while I was reading it and these were the thoughts I shared:

p. 16 (Chapter 19) “But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers…” At the beginning, I flipped back and forth a couple of times looking for chapter one, noting that it started with chapter 2 (1 is not a prime number), with the next chapter being 3 and the one after that being 5.

pp. 21-22 (Chapter 29) Loved the entire two pages about metaphors, and then his later pointing out that something he says is a simile and not a metaphor. It made me think about trying to write a book without using an metaphors at all—first of all how challenging that would be, and then I would want someone to do an edit solely looking for metaphors to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently included one. Metaphor is so much a part of our language, that I just can’t imagine writing a whole book without using one.

p. 23 (Chapter 31) Loved, loved, loved this: “Father was standing in the corridor. He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people, so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me.”

p. 28 (End of chapter 37, beginning of chapter 41) “And this is why everything I have written here is true.” I like the conflict of this statement in the context of his character having said he was writing a novel (which by definition is fiction) and then the question of: are both the character and the author writing a novel or is it one in the same.

p. 30: I like the “show don’t tell” aspect of these sentences at the end of one chapter: “Father was sitting on the sofa watching snooker on the television and drinking whiskey. There were tears coming out of his eyes.” and the beginning of the next one (Mother died 2 years ago.) Gave the impression of, “Boy, I wish I weren’t doing this alone,” meaning raising Christopher.

I liked the fact that when the curious incident mystery was solved you were only halfway through the book. I thought, “Oh my god. What’s he going to do with the rest of this book?”

It was Janet’s turn to pick our next book and she picked The Help by Kathyrn Stockett. This is going to be a banner year in terms of reading books. If we’re not careful we’re going to have to change our name from The Mostly Social Book Club.

We also changed our December meeting from meeting out to meeting at Janet’s house, and we made it a potluck.


I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and bought the things I “window shopped” for earlier today, and then I stayed in this evening.

Here’s a bundle of cuteness with props to my friend and colleague Nick from Nick and Melody’s Blog.

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