sunday ramblings 4.24.2022.

I’m back at a cozy little cottage in Ocean Shores and am loving my weekend. My friend and I took a road trip down here on Friday and have just been enjoying the scenery and the chance to get away from the city. The last time we were here there was a tsunami warning but luckily we avoided that this time! This morning, I sat on the porch and drank my coffee, read my book, and just took in the view.

Some things I’ve been thinking about:

1. I went on vacation in early March and realized that there’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed. Hotels are great for leaving the real world behind and relaxing but there is nothing like falling asleep in your own bed. I love my bed. My mattress is the ideal softness and I’ve perfected my sheet/blanket/comforter ratio for my optimal sleep.

2. I always clean my apartment and try to do all my laundry when I go out of town so I can come home to a spotless apartment. Do you do this? I love returning from a trip and opening the door to my apartment and seeing a clean place. I mean you’re already kind of frazzled from traveling and, if you are anything like me, bummed because you had to end your vacation and it’s just satisfying to come home to a clean and orderly space. Who wants to return home to chaos?

3. I’m so glad that coffee shops are open again where we can sit down and drink coffee and read and just enjoy the ambiance. I used to go to coffee shops all the time, pre-2020. I’ve been to a couple in the past few months and I’m loving it. It was almost what I had missed most throughout the pandemic. I get some of my best reading done in coffee shops.

4. Why are there no romance book stores in Seattle? I like to read romance books and it’s so frustrating to go to a bookstore and ask where their romance section is, only to be led to a two-shelf section. People read romance, right? I mean, I’m pretty sure that it’s the biggest selling genre of fiction. I read somewhere that it’s a $1 billion industry. But there are no romance book stores in Seattle? This article, published last year, tells us there are only 3 romance book stores in the United States. I would like to propose Seattle as the next place for one.

5. Speaking of books, I had a gift card to Barnes and Noble so I decided to go and browse around the store, seeing if there were any books I wanted to buy. I ended up spending roughly $70 on four books, probably because I bought a couple of hardbacks. I usually don’t buy hardback books but since I had a gift card I decided to splurge. I have a love/hate relationship with hardback books – I love the way they look but I feel like they are so expensive. I usually end up checking them out from the library instead and saving my money for paperbacks.

I hope you are enjoying your weekend!

sunday ramblings 1.16.2022.

I’m sitting here in front of a fire in a cute little cottage in Ocean Shores, WA. My friend and I took a weekend trip to this cozy beach town on the coast of Washington. We were not, however, expecting a tsunami warning to greet us when we woke up on Saturday but you can’t really predict nature.

It’s hard to believe we are already 2 weeks into 2022 and that it’s already the middle of January. I don’t know what I’ve been doing these past weeks other than taking down some Christmas decorations and obsessively looking up cookie recipes online. I love cookies. You can’t go wrong with a good chocolate chip cookie (but only if the chips are milk chocolate) but I’ve enjoyed finding recipes that I hope to bake in the future.

I unearthed my new 2022 planner from beneath a stack of paper on my coffee table where I had put it when it arrived in the mail last month. I’m trying out the Plum Paper planner this year and I think it is going to work out nicely. I love that I got to personalize my planner. Plus, the paper is lovely and I love writing on it.

On the book front, I checked out a haul of books from the library earlier this week. I usually have a lot of books on hold at the library at any given time. I have a bad habit of finding books that I want to read and just adding them to my library hold list. Inevitably, they all seem to become available at exactly the same time so now I have 7 books checked out from the library. I guess I know which books I’ll be reading for the next 3 weeks!

Do you ever put a book on hold at the library and then when you finally check it out, you wonder why you put this book on hold? I definitely had that feeling when I was looking at my books. In one of the books I checked out, Falling, the synopsis seems so familiar to a book I read recently, Hostage, that now I am wondering what I was thinking when I put this book on hold. I liked Hostage so maybe I reasoned that I should like Falling as well? But do I want to read what looks like a very similar book? This almost seems like an Armageddon/Deep Impact situation. Maybe I’ll read Falling and do a side-by-side comparison between the two books.

I did pause the rest of my library holds so that I can get through these books before I check out more. I love the library but sometimes it’s just like a flurry of action and I get so flustered trying to make sure I’ve checked out all my books and making sure I’ve read the books I want to read before they are due back.

my saturday morning bagel routine.

Since last summer, I have instituted a routine that I find myself looking forward to all week. On Saturday mornings, I go on a long walk and then I stop by the bagel shop and get a bagel and a latte.

I specifically plan my route on Saturdays in order to stop by this bagel shop (it is Einstein Bros. Bagels in South Lake Union if anyone is wondering). For some reason, I had forgotten that it was there until I stumbled across it one morning during my walk. I decided to go back the next week and have been going there ever since.

The bagel shop has so many types of bagels and bagel sandwiches. I think I’ve tried all of their breakfast sandwiches but I keep coming back to the classic egg, bacon, and cheddar. I usually get my sandwich on a pretzel bagel; I just feel like that savoriness from the pretzel bagel gives the sandwich some extra flavor.

I usually will get a latte if the line is not too long. In the summer I get an iced latte but now that it is cooling down, I get it hot. I don’t know if it is the syrup they use or how they make their coffee, but their lattes are sooo good. If only the bagel shop was a little closer to my apartment, I would go there all the time.

There’s something about having my Saturday routine that I find very soothing. It’s something that I look forward to and sometimes I’ll find myself thinking about it on a Thursday or Friday – the knowledge that my Saturday morning is all planned out and I don’t have to decide what am I going to get to eat and drink. It makes me smile and brings some joy to my day, knowing that there is one thing I don’t have to think about.

I also know that every Saturday I’m going for some sort of walk. I definitely enjoy my Saturday routine – going for a walk and stopping for a bagel.