I’m sitting here in front of a fire in a cute little cottage in Ocean Shores, WA. My friend and I took a weekend trip to this cozy beach town on the coast of Washington. We were not, however, expecting a tsunami warning to greet us when we woke up on Saturday but you can’t really predict nature.
It’s hard to believe we are already 2 weeks into 2022 and that it’s already the middle of January. I don’t know what I’ve been doing these past weeks other than taking down some Christmas decorations and obsessively looking up cookie recipes online. I love cookies. You can’t go wrong with a good chocolate chip cookie (but only if the chips are milk chocolate) but I’ve enjoyed finding recipes that I hope to bake in the future.
I unearthed my new 2022 planner from beneath a stack of paper on my coffee table where I had put it when it arrived in the mail last month. I’m trying out the Plum Paper planner this year and I think it is going to work out nicely. I love that I got to personalize my planner. Plus, the paper is lovely and I love writing on it.
On the book front, I checked out a haul of books from the library earlier this week. I usually have a lot of books on hold at the library at any given time. I have a bad habit of finding books that I want to read and just adding them to my library hold list. Inevitably, they all seem to become available at exactly the same time so now I have 7 books checked out from the library. I guess I know which books I’ll be reading for the next 3 weeks!
Do you ever put a book on hold at the library and then when you finally check it out, you wonder why you put this book on hold? I definitely had that feeling when I was looking at my books. In one of the books I checked out, Falling, the synopsis seems so familiar to a book I read recently, Hostage, that now I am wondering what I was thinking when I put this book on hold. I liked Hostage so maybe I reasoned that I should like Falling as well? But do I want to read what looks like a very similar book? This almost seems like an Armageddon/Deep Impact situation. Maybe I’ll read Falling and do a side-by-side comparison between the two books.
I did pause the rest of my library holds so that I can get through these books before I check out more. I love the library but sometimes it’s just like a flurry of action and I get so flustered trying to make sure I’ve checked out all my books and making sure I’ve read the books I want to read before they are due back.
How did the tsunami warning affect your plans for the rest of the weekend? I think I might’ve been ready to hit the road for home, I dunno, yikes! They’re pretty vulnerable, there, aren’t they? Didn’t they build some evacuation shelters a few years ago, that are raised? On the subject of cookies, we are crazy about them in our family. One thing we started doing last winter is when we’d make them, using salted caramel chocolate chips in place of regular chocolate chips, or using half in half. It is soooo good, such a tasty twist on the classic chocolate chip cookie! But then again, I love caramel, sometimes I have to remind myself that not everyone does.
Lately, we haven’t been making cookies a lot, ourselves. Right now, our m.o. is to get a dozen or more cookies at the start of each weekend, from Hello Robin, a bakery on the east slope of Capitol Hill, 19the avenue east. The only only drawback is they’re pretty pricey but it’s a small business and the proprietors have had kids in the same school as ours. But the cookies are super good, I think. but then again, I’ll eat cookies out of a box, I’m not a cookie snob.
I’ve heard of Hello Robin and have been wanting to go there but I’ve haven’t made it yet. I will splurge on a good cookie. And salted caramel chocolate chips sound amazing!! I love just about anything caramel. I’ll have to find those to put in my chocolate chip cookies.
The tsunami warning was not bad. We didn’t even know about it until we went on Twitter and saw it trending. They were only predicting waves of less than 1 foot tall for our area so we weren’t really concerned. The only thing is that there is only 1 evacuation route and if we did have to evacuate, everyone would have been on it. So we’re glad that didn’t end up happening!