back to the present time

1. We walked down to Pita House today for lunch, the place where I got the amazing shawarma cheese fries a couple weeks ago when Carla was out of town. We got that again to split, and even splitting between two people we were stuffed! They're so good, though.

2. Sales at the new store continue to be great. Mid week sales were lower this week than last, but yesterday's totals were higher than last Saturday, which was higher than grand opening on the previous Saturday.

3. Multiple times today I had the happy realization that even though it's Sunday I don't have work tomorrow!

4. The cutest snoot.

Recently Finished
Enola Holmes and the Clanging Coffin
I was thrilled to have a new Enola Holmes book to read. I'm not sure if this is the last one (the ending kind of felt like it could be), and if so, I will miss them. This has been such a fun series.

The Age of Miracles
I found out about this from rachelmanija's review and was immediately interested. When the MC is eleven, the earth's rotation suddenly slows and the world changes. But even as these big events are going on, she is focused on the big things in her own life: friendships changing, her parents' marriage falling apart, crushes on boys, starting middle school. I really loved the balance between the two.

Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body
Margaret, having defined herself as a tween detective in middle school, now struggles in high school with how to grow up and ends up developing an eating disorder that lands her in a treatment center.

This sounded very relevant to my interests from the blurb but it just didn't work for me. As someone who grew up around the same time (maybe five years earlier or so) and loved mysteries and series like the BSC, and struggled with weight and being queer in a time before the internet and easy access to knowledge of the fact that people like me even existed, I should be the target audience. But I am not that big a fan of the paranormal and magical realism, and while those elements are not mentioned at all in the summary, they feature heavily throughout, and more and more as the story goes on. I wanted something realistic, and this is not that. It's well written and I love the idea of it, but it's just not for me.

Middle of the Night
The MC moves back into his childhood home when his parents move out to a retirement community. Immediately strange things start happening, and he is constantly having nightmares of the night he and his best friend were camping in the yard and his friend went missing and was never found. Now his body has been found nearby, and the MC has to figure out if he's really being haunted or if someone is messing with him, and if they are, are they the murderer? I liked this all right.

The Legend of Auntie Po
Graphic novel about a Chinese American girl in the 1880s who lives in a logging camp with her father, a cook. I liked this a lot.

A Map to the Sun
Graphic novel about a struggling girls' basketball team. I liked it.

A Star Brighter Than the Sun vol. 4

Kindaichi Papa no Jikenbo vol. 3

A couple weeks ago I got an email from Knott's saying they were having their Peanuts Celebration special event in February, and there were a lot of good looking things on the menu, so I've been wanting to check it out but just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Then last week we realized we hadn't put in a reservation for Disneyland this week and there were none available (combination of Valentines Day and Presidents Day weekend, I guess), so rather than keep refreshing the site to see if we could get a reservation, we just decided to go to Knott's this weekend.

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