May 26, 2023: Friday Recommendations

Routine Friday and what I've been doing to entertain myself this week.

Daily Diary, Day 997:

As usual, this Friday morning was quite busy and pretty routine. I start with a more thorough dusting and sweeping of the upstairs (including cleaning the 2 bathrooms), and laundering towels and bedding. Since this takes around an hour (of being on my feet), I haven’t been walking on Fridays (or Sundays when I spend even more time giving the downstairs a thorough cleaning). However, now that I am doing my walk in two, thirty-minute intervals, I think I will try walking just before dinner. Also as part of the Friday routine, we had the border collie Rio over for an hour play date with Leeza, and I then had a regularly scheduled Friday phone call. Then working on the draft of this post, lunch, and today, the only deviation to routine is that the man came to fix our fridge as I finished gobbling down my lunch.

However, for this post, I am going to do something that may become part of my Friday routine.

After a number of you mentioned that you had been happy that I reminded you of the author Georgette Heyer in one of my earlier posts, I thought I would experiment with mentioning what I have been watching, listening to, and reading throughout the week to see if it gives anyone something to check out going into the weekend.

I confess always feel like I should apologize for my recreational endeavors in these areas, especially when I read other newsletters where everyone seems to be reading the newest literary best-sellers, inspirational and thoughtful self-help books, or weighty non-fiction tomes. But, while I do read the New Yorker, Discover, Science News, and New Sciencemagazines during the week, and of course traditional historical monographs when I am in the beginning of doing research, for me recreational reading (listening or watching) generally needs to be fun, something to turn my busy brain onto a different path.

Since I am a firm believer in the, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” school of thought, I won’t bother to mention the numerous tv shows my husband watch one episode of and decide it isn’t our cup of tea, or the audiobook or podcast or book I started and didn’t finish. So while you might not like what I mention, assume I am listing it because I did!

TV watching: My husband is watching old episodes of Columbo, which I listen to while fixing my dinner, and I will often then sit and watch the end with him. We are watching Seinfeld for the first time in our lives while we eat dinner, and it is growing on us. In the evening, we have been finishing up our nights with rewatching the sweet British series Café (Britbox?)

Otherwise, we have rewatched a couple of movies this week that I can recommend. My choice was rewatching the Accountant, /which I really think is the perfect Ben Afflect movie because it plays to his strenghts. My husband chose a very quirky movie he had seen before, and which I guess you could also call suspense, called Missing Person, which I really liked. It was sad, but ultimately sweet.

Listening: I have been listening to the new Julia Louis-Dreyfus podcast, Wiser than Me. On one hand, the people she is interviewing are highly functioning, incredibly successful women like Jane Fonda and Isabelle Allende, so I have to jettison my tendency to feel like I am a failure in comparison. On the other hand, it is interesting to learn hear all their takes on the process of aging. I have also been catching up with the podcast Shedunnit, which is about Golden Age British mystery writers.

As I mentioned earlier, this week I listened the audiobook edition of an old favorite Georgette Heyer, Federica, and I have started on the Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Unnatural Death. While I have read and re-read Sayer’s four mysteries with Harriet Vane and Lord Peter, I don’t believe I’ve read the ones with just Lord Peter but once, decades ago, and I am rather enjoying them as audiobooks.

Reading: Much of my reading during the day is in short intervals. There are the print magazines I listed above, and I skim through the New York Times and Washington Post in the morning. I am also reading the posts from a good number of substack newsletters (and maybe I need to do a separate recommendations post on these another time), often as I eat my breakfast or lunch. I always read for a short time before bed (I am lucky if I keep my eyes open for 15-30 minutes.) This week, I am reading short stories in an anthology, entitled, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022.

Whew, when you put everything down like that, sounds like I am getting a good deal of entertainment every day! I would love to hear from you what shows or books are currently entertaining you!