Welcome to Round 41 of this little series I started of all the things in life I’m loving and learning lately! Here you’ll find everything from the books I’m currently reading to the products I’m loving to the shows I’m watching (which, spoiler alert–won’t be very many or very exciting, since I’m not a huge t.v. or movie watcher). If you want to check out past editions of the series, click here.
Note: There are affiliate links in this post, which means I may get a small percentage of any sale made at no extra cost to you.
Loving Lately
- Okay, this is how you know you’ve officially become the boring adult that your teenage self swore you would never become — when you request cleaning products for Christmas, and you’re over-the-moon excited about them when you unwrap them. One of the random things I sometimes like to watch on YouTube are the “Clean with Me” videos, which is how I first heard about Scrub Mommy sponges. After seeing them in action so many times and after getting frustrated more times than I can count over the past year because we didn’t have any sponges in the house and I kept forgetting to buy them, I finally just asked for a 4-pack of these for Christmas. And you guys, they are amazing! The pink side is an intense scrubber that can easily get the hardest, most dried-on gunk off of surfaces (without scratching it), and the lighter side is just a typical sponge. And our kids love the fun shape, which means they’ve been even more eager to “help” lately and have even requested their own sponges, ha ha. So there you go — proof that I’m officially the most boring adult of all time.
- In case you need more proof of my boring adult status, the other thing I’ve been loving lately are these door corner seals we put on all our exterior doors to help stop the air leaks from letting cold air into the house. These were recommended by the energy consultant who came to our house last month to do an energy check, and our exterior doors and windows were major offenders. We’re getting energy efficient windows later this year, but these corner seals were a super inexpensive fix we could do now, in addition to changing our heater’s filter every month. I’ve already seen our energy usage go down from doing these simple fixes, so they’re for sure worth the tiny investment!
Learning Lately
Recent and Current Reads
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Amor Towles, you blow me away every time! As one friend put it on Goodreads, this wasn’t the book I thought I’d be reading, but rather one long string of tangents and diversions from the book I thought I’d be reading. But somehow, Towles makes it work. This book is reminiscent of many of the great classics like The Odyssey or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a cast of colorful characters popping in at random intervals mean that you never quite know where this is going to end up. I was nervous about the ending because so many people said that they didn’t care for it, but I actually thought it was a brilliant way to tie up the story. This easily made it onto my Top Reads of 2021 for sure.
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han
After enjoying Han’s well-known trilogy To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, I decided to give something else by her a try and see how it fared. Honestly, I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I found the protagonist in this book so completely unlikable and annoying that it ruined the whole book for me, though I’ll admit I didn’t love the plot anyway. I think it’s just too hard for me to read YA romance without looking at it from the view of a parent 🙂
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This was my first read of the new year, and it was a solid way to kick things off. This was a story of a house party gone terribly out of control, four famous siblings who test the strengths of their bonds with each other, and a whole lotta crazy stuff in between. This was an easy book to dive into and had me turning pages quickly until I reached the satisfying end. I know many people preferred Daisy Jones and the Six, but I actually think this is my favorite of the two, mostly because I felt like it had *slightly* more likable characters. Fair warning: there is liberal profanity and some sexual content throughout.
All right, lay it on me — what are your favorite “boring adult” things that I should know about? Drop a comment below and let me know!
