Sunday Salon: The search for happiness

 Good morning all!  The Nawrot family is now officially all back in Florida.  Vacation over.  It is always good to get back to your own bed and your cats, but you know there are always things you face that aren't so great.  A yard overgrown with vines (all it takes is two weeks down here), a problematic pool, a smashed wall that still isn't fixed and an insurance company that is being uncooperative, awful neighbors that won't leave me alone, kids getting ready for school and all the drama that goes with it, a dirty house, a cat with a urinary tract infection...on and on it goes.  My eyelid is twitching again.

I'm also deeply troubled by the sudden eruption of total chaos all over the world.  Normally you hear the news and keep moving, but it is hard to ignore two passenger planes going down, gunfire between Israel and Palestine, explosions in Libya causing evacuations of all Americans, and freaking Putin with a God complex and an arsenal.  It's really scary.  If I were traveling ANYWHERE overseas right now, I would not go.

So for that reason, I thought Michele Jacobsen (Reader's Respite) had a wonderful idea on Facebook the other day.  She is paying it forward, offering to do something nice for five people sometime over the next year.  Could be an encouraging note, a ticket, a book, something homegrown, sent unannounced.  In return, those five people do the same thing to five other people.  Like a chain letter of happiness.  We can all use a little more of that.

So I don't want to be all doom and gloom.  We had book club this week and that is always nice.  We discussed "We Were Liars" this time around with mixed emotions.  Some loved it (me included) and some were not impressed.  But there was wine, food and desert and that is good.  Next month we are reading "The Three" by Sarah Lotz.

I'm back to working out at Andre's, and the hubby and I played a (very sweaty) round of golf yesterday.

Reading always brings happiness too, right?  When you have time for it.  In print I finished "The Strain" by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro (review coming sometime today on Goodreads), and I enjoyed it.  Leave it to Mr. del Toro to come up with some nasty version of a vampire...that man is DARK.  It is fun to watch the book come to life with the series on FX.  Now I am plunging into a little graphic novel fun today with "Saga" and "Snowpiercer".

On audio I finished "Sinful Folk" by Ned Hayes, complements of the author and TLC Book Tours.  I said this on Facebook, and I'll say it here...this is one awesome historical fiction book.  It takes place in Medieval England and is narrated by an ex-nun who is hiding incognito as a man.  Five boys have been burned to death and a group of the villagers (including the nun/man) take their dead children on a journey to the king for justice.  There are secrets, including who killed the boys, including the history of the nun, that are slowly revealed.  Highly recommended...Goodreads review coming soon.  I'm now four discs into "The Silkworm"!!! WOOT!

Hope your Sunday is filled with reading and happiness!