When she sent me the text, she really didn’t think I’d take her up on it. My sister Teresa is the librarian at the elementary school both of my nephews attended. School started in mid-August, but the library didn’t open for the students right away. She’s been getting it ready for them to start using it this Tuesday, and one of the last tasks she had left was to prepare nearly 100 donated books for […]
You think you know someone… When we first brought our dog home in November 2014, he came with a story: “Chester is an adorable 3-year-old petite Golden mix who loves to receive cuddles and attention, and gives plenty of kisses in return. Chester’s favorite pastimes are chasing tennis balls and making a game of giving the ball back to his people, playing with his knotted rope, and getting walks – there is so much to sniff along […]
E-mail me: florinda AT 3RsBlog dot com My Profile, short form: about.me/florindapv My Profile, long form: Welcome to The 3 R’s Blog: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness! That’s not just a title–it’s a mission statement, which you’ll discover as you get to know the place. I’m your host, Florinda Pendley Vasquez. I started blogging in this space on March 16, 2007, on Blogger, and moved to self-hosted WordPress in January 2016 I work with numbers but […]
I have not dropped off the face of the earth, but after several weeks during which my work ate me alive, I did go on vacation for a week. We’ve just returned from our sorely-needed escape to Seattle and neighboring areas of the Evergreen State (with a day trip across the border to British Columbia). We’re still sorting and editing photos, but I thought y’all might want to see the bookish ones first. You might […]
I’ve seen Ti, Jen, and Bryan tackle this “20 Questions About Me” thing recently, and I thought I’d play along today. I rarely do this meme-type stuff here any more, and it was a fun change of pace. Feel free to take these questions with you and answer them for yourself—I’d love to know what you have to say about them! HOW TALL ARE YOU? My driver’s license says I’m 4’9”. This is an exaggeration, […]
Reading, ‘Riting, etc. For the first time ever, I’m using a tracking spreadsheet for my reading this year, and this week I realized a benefit of it that I hadn’t previously considered. It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I finish a book and find I have little to say about it; I’m recording those books in the tracker, but I don’t have to review them. This is a huge change in approach for me, […]
I don’t keep the kind of comprehensive reading spreadsheets that some book bloggers do, but I do maintain one for my review index, and it proved very helpful when I wanted to create some charts to summarize my reading experience in 2014. I will be singling out some of the highlights as my Books of the Year later this week. I read 53 books in 2014 versus 51 in 2013, so I’m continuing to average […]
The Art of Asking: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help Amanda Palmer (Twitter) (Facebook) Grand Central Publishing (November 2014), Hardcover (ISBN 1455581089 / 9781455581085) Nonfiction: Memoir/autobiography, 352 pages A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (December 9, 2014). Shelf Awareness provided me with a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review, and compensated me for the review they received and posted. “It is a fear […]
Today is my stepson Spencer’s 15th birthday, and his grandmother is visiting for the weekend to celebrate with us. It’s also the day we finally got the Christmas tree put up and decorated. I’m grabbing a few minutes in between events to check into the Sunday Salon. What I’m reading in print / on screen I’m about one-fourth through My Father’s Wives by Mike Greenberg, a fiction galley I’ll be reviewing for Shelf Awareness in January. […]
What’s What I’m drafting this post on Saturday afternoon and scheduling it for Sunday morning. It will be the first post here on the blog since last Tuesday, and the first thing I’ve written for public reading in nearly a week. The last few days have been mildly to moderately lazy–and thoroughly necessary. I’ve spent the last couple of hours reading through the backlog in the “must-read” folder in my Feedly, nuking any non-“must” posts […]
What I’m reading and writing I am working my way through my podcast backlog during my daily commute after finishing my audiobook read of The Magicians trilogy. I probably won’t post my thoughts on that one (those three?) until after December 1 even if I finish writing them up before that–this is still Nonfiction November, after all. After posting “revisited reviews” for that event all this past week, I have a new review scheduled for […]
I suspected that the past week wouldn’t be good for either reading or writing, and sadly, I was not wrong. I’m holding down the blogging fort by revisiting some book reviews from the archives for Nonfiction November; two have gone up already, and three more are lined up for this week. I’m not sure I’ll get an original post done for this week’s #NonFicNov “Diversity” prompt, but I did put together a short reading list of books […]
