Category Archives: Ramblings

You may remember way back when to my post in June when I announced that blogging for me may be a bit sporadic due to the discovery of one of my fur-babies having lymphoma. Her doctor gave her a high chance of of beating the cancer since it was a total fluke that we’d even caught it at such an early stage. After months of treatment, my little girl is finally in remission!

We got really lucky. Not only did the vet catch the cancer before it even fully developed into something more serious, but my little girl took the chemotherapy like a champ. I’m pretty sure I took the trips to her oncologist a lot harder than she did. Thankfully, she didn’t have any of the side-effects from the treatment that some animals experience. Sure, there were days where she just wanted to be by herself and sleep, but that was it. Her side-effects were pretty much cosmetic. She lost all but one whisker and the fur by her ears thinned out a bit.

Needless to say, I’ve kind of been in celebration mode for the last week with her. She’s been getting spoiled even more so than before now. We even got her a ball pit to play in. I’m surprised the Mr. approved that idea.

I still can’t believe it’s all finally over. Eight long months of wondering if we made the right decision and whether or not the chemotherapy would even work. This news could not have come at a better time since at this same time two years ago, I unexpectedly lost my fur-baby, Snickers, to cancer. So needless to say, I really needed this good news.

I’m just so glad that Weeble’s kicked cancer’s butt and can go back to the care-free lazy days that she’s used to. 🙂

One of the things I always look for when I see a new book is whether or not it’s part of a series. There have been a few times where I’ve picked up a book not realizing it’s part of a series or the first book in a series. Sometimes that’s a good thing because if I like it I get more of it, and sometimes that’s not a good thing because sometimes I just want a complete story.

It seems like a lot of books out there are part of a series. Sometimes it seems like a successful story gets turned into a series because it did well in sales. If you think about it, it makes sense. I mean, why write one story when you can create a world that never ends. :cue “The Song that Never Ends”: that’s how I feel sometimes about a series. Now, I’m not saying that’s the only reason why an author writes a series but you have to admit, there are some series out there that have you wondering why they haven’t just moved on.

When it comes to series versus stand-alone novels, they each have strong and weak points. With a series, you know what you’re getting into. It’s essentially the same world, same set of characters, and the same conflict. So, you know what to expect as a whole. Plus, it gives you more time with the characters you’ve started to care for. However, at the same time you can get bored after a while. With stand-alone novels, even though you may like the author, you are taking a risk every time on whether you will enjoy the setting, characters, and how it all pans out. Not to mention if you love the story, your time with it is limited. On the flip side, each book is exciting and new because it’s a story line you have not read before.

My favorite series are the ones that change between characters of the same world. That way, I get something new with following a different set of characters but I’m still in the same world as before and may periodically see the previous characters in the following books. However, there was that one series that I loved and it followed the same character around for the whole 6 books series. You may have heard of it, Vampire Academy? Yeah, that one. So, there is always an exception. 😉

In the end, I’m definitely more of a stand-alone person. I like getting a complete story. Which is why I cannot stand serials. Plus, with a stand-alone I sometimes feel like all the filler has been removed because the author only has “x” amount of words/pages that they can work with. So there is no need to draw out scenes or conflict. Also, I tend to get bored really easily and I usually find that with a series I really only end up liking the first book anyways. I can’t tell you how many series I’ve started only to never pick up the following book, or I have and I wound up not finishing it. I wish I could get into more series. It would be nice to have a reliable world that you love to visit. So, let me know if you have a series that you love.

Which do you prefer, series or stand-alone novels?

Oooweee. I don’t know about you guys but the holidays this year were insane for me and they aren’t even over. I feel like once I came home from my uncle’s wedding at the beginning of November, I hit the ground running at an insane pace and I haven’t stopped since. I mean, there was Thanksgiving where I had to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for two different days (one for the Mister’s work and one for us), and then bake pies for a Friendsgiving we were going to. Right after Thanksgiving was over I had to get my head on straight for gift-giving for Christmas because I had the fun idea to make homemade gifts for everyone this year.

At least my fingerprints look like frost, right?

Yeah… let’s just say that it was a lot easier looking at the photos on Pinterest than it was actually making them. There may or may not have been a moment where I superglued my hand to a wine glass while trying to turn it into a snow globe. >.<

However, given my hair-pulling tenancies over the last few weeks, I still stand behind giving homemade gifts. I think they are just cooler and mean more to the people involved. Which means I will probably be doing this again next year. 😛

Anyways, my bad for not being on much this week. I had a friend visiting from out of town for a couple of days and there was a lot of catching up going on and not a whole heck of a lot of reading/blogging happening. I promise to be back up and running at full force once the holidays are over.  I will still be around but I just may not be posting as often as I normally do.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and a happy and safe new year!

Tis’ the season for a lot of giveaway hops. Actually, the season has already started. Which is why I’m writing this post. There have been some things I’ve noticed when it comes to blog hop stops. I want everyone to have a successful giveaway stop. Not to mention, when I’m hopping, I want to have a fun time doing so. So, below are just some of my tips for blog hops.

 
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With so many bloggers out there all typing up reviews for the same books, I always find it interesting to get a look behind the scenes. How do the other bloggers operate? How did they come up with their features? And how the heck do they get so many posts in?! Well, I do not have other bloggers helping me out. I am a one woman show and I’m going to take you behind the scenes of what it’s like for me to write my reviews.

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If you follow me on Facebook you may already be aware that something happened last week with one of my fur-babies.

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Usually I just post reviews on here and don’t talk too much about myself. After all, this is a book blog, not a personal blog about my life. However, I figured it would be fun to list ten interesting facts about myself that you guys might not know. So without further ado, here we go!

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*click on picture to enlarge*

Ever take part in a cool reading program? Have you done a book bingo before? Well, I haven’t… and I suck at normal bingo. However, my friend included me in her family’s summer reading bingo challenge and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve always seen blogs do book bingo before but never really knew what it entailed and in all honesty would forget about it a few hours later. They’ve always seemed like a fun and cool idea though. So, I’m not going to lie, when my friend handed me my lime green bingo card, I [internally] squealed with excitement. I’m finally going to play a bingo game that I have a shot at winning.

I’m excited to take part in this because a lot of the boxes are out of my comfort-zone when it comes to reading. I’m primarily a romance reader from anything to contemporary to paranormal romance. If it has romance in it, I’m game. However, there are some boxes that have nothing to do with romance. I’ve managed to figure out books for some of the boxes but not all of them, and what I have written down isn’t definite. So, if you see a box that already has something written down but you have a better suggestion, I’m all ears. I tried to choose books that I already have but because a lot of them (like poetry, audio books, and humor) aren’t ones I’d typically read/listen to, I’m at a lost for what is and isn’t good. I think the scariest one for me is the audio book. I tried an audio book once, I wound up two hours in and realized that I had zoned out the entire time. Plus, one of the boxes is for an author from Indiana. Any idea who’s out there from Indiana who writes a good romance?

Can you recommend some good books that would fall under any of the boxes?

I feel like the whole purpose of this is to get out there and read books you might not have otherwise read. I’d love to try new authors that I haven’t read before. So, any recommendations are greatly appreciated.  🙂

So Bloggiesta is finally over and I must say… wow! I love that it was a week long event because there was a lot of stuff covered. Every day we had an hour long twitter chat where the feed was speeding on by. Not to mention the mini challenges that were set up to help you with your site, and accomplishing your personal goals, it was  a busy week. I will admit that I never did complete all the goals I set out but I got the major one down and that was reformatting all my older posts so that they all look the same. It was 2 1/2 years worth of posts and in the end I made 529 revisions. Gah! It took me three days to do it and on the last day I sat here for 7 straight hours working on it. Needless to say, once that was complete I was done. The last thing I wanted to do was go through my GoodReads TBR list and clear out any books that don’t interested me anymore or do the same with my e-readers. I have accumulated a lot of freebie books over the years that I know I won’t be reading. Not to mention all the electronic arc’s I’ve gotten over time that I haven’t deleted off my device.  Below were my goals for the event.

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