Weekly Roundup: October 18, 2024

It’s been a couple weeks since my last roundup and it’s been BUSY. After celebrating my daughter’s birthday, I headed to Maui for a few days of heaven. This week, I’ve been catching up with regular life. #whiplash. Here’s the roundup!

Quote of the week:
“Once we’re thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it’s only here that the new and the good begins.” — Leo Tolstoy

What I’m reading:
I started Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo while I was in Hawaii and I’m about to finish. I’ve LOVED it. She has such a way with creating characters and showing the complexities of relationships.

What I’m listening to:
Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma by Mariel Buqué. Very interesting book. I think most people could benefit from it.

What I’m watching:
I finished Season 1 of Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Amazon Prime and Nobody Wants This on Netflix. Liked both of them! Watched a couple good movies while on vacation—Longlegs (creepy!) and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (great if you’re into Dracula, which I am).

Writing news:
I got copyedits on my novel that comes out in 2025. I love copyeditors. Just when I think I have a firm grasp of English language rules, a copyeditor humbles me—haha. I’m going to shift gears back to working on my 2026 novel next week.

Interesting things I learned this week:

• A group of owls is called a parliament
• Ruth Chepngetich smashed the women’s world marathon record at last weekend’s Chicago Marathon with a time of 2:09:56. Mind blown.
• The expression “blow your wad” dates back to the era of muzzle-loading guns. Shooters used wads of paper or felt to separate the powder charge from the bullet or shot. Once they shot their wad, they had done all the damage they could do without reloading
• Dolly Parton wrote the song “I Will Always Love You”
• The first ever adult man with THREE penises has been identified. Student researchers at the University of Birmingham Medical School in the UK made this discovery while dissecting the body of a 78-year-old man who had donated his body
• One in five adults reports feeling lonely on a daily basis, according to a new Gallup survey. This is the highest rate of loneliness reported in the past two years
• The last full-size Kmart in the continental U.S. will close on October 20
• A full-time minimum-wage job is no longer sufficient to rent a two-bedroom apartment in ANY city, county, or state in the United States
• An MIT report on the future of work found that 63% of the jobs in 2018 didn’t exist in 1940 and couldn’t even have been imagined (eg, solar or wind power engineer, life coach, content moderator, TikTok influencer, mental health counselor). Who knows what jobs will exist in 50 years?
• Qantas, the Australian airline, apologized after one of its flights showed an R-rated film with nudity on every screen, with no way for passengers to turn it off. Hilarious.
• A Dutch museum displayed two empty beer cans that were actually hand-painted works of art. They looked so real that a mechanic threw them away

Weirdest thing I googled this week:
“why do birds bob their heads?” I googled this while eating lunch in Maui as several birds hung around for crumbs. The answer: “Birds bob their heads to stabilize their vision while they’re moving, which helps them see their surroundings and hunt prey.”  

What I’m grateful for:

• Maui getaway! I’ve been going to Maui since I was a little kid and it never gets old. I brought my boyfriend on this trip and he hadn’t been since he was a kid. It was so relaxing and rejuvenating
• Early voting. Sign, sealed, delivered.
• My longest run in several months—13 miles this morning!

Maui snapshots:
From top to bottom: a stranger asked to take this photo of us—so sweet; a truly magical sunrise atop Haleakala; one of about 100 sunset photos; beach time; Twin Falls off of Hana Highway.