How – I mean, seriously, how – is it Monday already?  I’ve got a super-busy week ahead of me, a super-packed weekend behind, and my head is just spinning.  After spending last week catching up from Thanksgiving and running from meeting to meeting, what I should have done, if I was a sane person, was collapse on the couch and spend the whole weekend mainlining herbal tea and reading my way through my library stack.  Instead, I spent the entire weekend subjecting my defenseless family to an endless agenda of Forced Family Fun, starting with Christmas tree decorating on Saturday morning (complete with matching Christmas jammies, Christmas Traditional Pandora, and the relaxing strains of a mother berating herself for not making muffins).  After naps – well, one nap; a certain someone whose name rhymes with GREAT has been on strike – we headed out to the Alexandria holiday boat parade of lights on the Potomac.  It was a lot of fun, despite being freezing cold.  Peanut surprised me by loving the train boat; Nugget, predictably, was all about the fire boat.  On Sunday we drove out to Little Washington, our new favorite outside-the-Beltway getaway, for their annual Christmas in Little Washington event.  They had an artisan market set up, a food fair with multiple stalls staffed by the world-renowned Inn at Little Washington (we got soup and cider donuts, so I can now say that we’ve eaten “at” the Inn at Little Washington! and it was delicious), and at 1:30, there was a Christmas parade through the tiny and picture-perfect historic district.  It was a very Virginia parade – opened by a platoon of Colonials playing fifes and beating drums, followed by George Washington on horseback, a line of vintage cars, lots of dogs, and local attractions like the high school marching band, two church choirs, the “Notorious Lunch Bunch” (seated around a picnic table on their float), a ranger van from Shenandoah National Park, and not one but two fire trucks – among lots of other sights.  Peanut liked the parade, but Nugget was on cloud nine.  (At one point, he blew a fuse in his little brain and just started shouting “Santa! Fire truck! Santa! Fire truck!” over and over.)

Too many books to fit on one line!  Despite that super-busy week I was complaining about above, I blew through three books and two comics.  Finished up Americanah on Wednesday, then tore through the sixth volume of Saga the same night, followed by Another Brooklyn on Thursday, A Countess Below Stairs and the seventh volume of Fables over the weekend.  I think the highlight was A Countess Below Stairs.  It was quite possibly the silliest plot EVER – Russian Countess flees the Revolution, loses everything, takes a job as a housemaid in an English great house and catches the eye of the sensitive young earl – but goshdarnit if it wasn’t satisfying.  Especially with all the dark stuff happening in the world and on my bookshelf.  Note to self: read more frothy light-hearted books in 2017.  Finally, on Sunday night, after wrestling with Shutterfly for awhile (have to get those Christmas cards made!) I settled in with a shandy and Bloodline, about which I’ve heard great things.  You know I’ll have opinions!

After I finish Bloodline, I think I’m going to pick up Angels and Demons.  The only Dan Brown I’ve read was The Da Vinci Code, eons ago, and I want to correct that.  Then who knows?  I’m finally making progress on my library stack.  I won’t get through it in time to read any Christmas books this year – boo – but I have a big stack of Persephone titles I ordered from London that just arrived, to welcome me back to my own shelves when I finally do get out from under that teetering library pile.

As for the blog, on Wednesday I have a post scheduled that answers a question I get all. the. time. – why do I refer to Virginia as “home” when I didn’t grow up here?  And on Friday, something light – my literary Christmas list!  Santa, take notice!

What’s the best thing you read last week, friends?