Well, another week – here we go, I guess.  It doesn’t feel like much of a change to me, because I worked basically full days on both Saturday and Sunday.  Which is good, because I needed the hours – in law firm life, staying billable is a constant and mentally exhausting struggle – but I could have really used the brain break.  Maybe next weekend.  Maybe not.  Anyway, in between all the work – even getting up at 5:15 on Sunday to sit down in front of my legal research, gahhhh – I managed to squeeze in some reading – finishing a book I needed to get done – and the first two hikes of my 52 hike challenge for 2018.  We looped Theodore Roosevelt Island, an NPS-managed site that was open, if not staffed, despite the government shutdown, then hopped in the car and drove another ten minutes up the parkway to Scott’s Run Nature Preserve, a Fairfax County park with a cool waterfall.  Pics on Instagram, if we’re friends there, and I’ll be recapping the first of the two hikes for 12 Months of Trails in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.  Other than that – not much to report about the weekend.  We’re delighted that the weather has warmed up a little bit, and we got in a good stroll down to the waterfront on Saturday afternoon in preparation for two hikes on Sunday, and let the kids run around on the grass to burn off some of that winter energy.  We all needed to burn off some energy, actually.  There’s been a lot of sitting at desks and huddling indoors recently.

Reading.  As you can see, my resolution to read fewer books in 2018 is going AWESOME.  /sarcasm.  Seriously, that was one that I made pretty loosely, just to create space for the chunkier classics that I want to read, so if I end up reading more than 52 (and let’s be realistic, I will end up reading more than 52) that’s okay.  Anyway, last week was quite the banner week for reading, and especially for diverse books.  I finished the Nafisi book and the Adichie book on Monday, then blew through Exit West on President Obama’s recommendation (of course, he was totally right, and it was wonderful).  The Witches of New York took me a bit longer – read on Rebecca’s recommendation, I liked it better than the last book she recommended to me (Beautiful Creatures, which I couldn’t stand – at one point I found myself folding laundry in order to avoid it); this one, I enjoyed but wouldn’t call a favorite.  Finally, I turned to Amina’s Voice, YA about a young Muslim girl who overcomes her shyness to speak out for her community.  I just sunk into it on Sunday night, but I’m loving it so far.

Watching.  Very little.  I’m still screened out from last weekend’s epic marathon of Cars and Star Wars (Nugget is feeling much better) and didn’t want to watch anything at all over the week.  On Saturday I requested Rock the Park, thinking we should have at least five episodes queued up in our DVR, only to discover that the DVR hasn’t been recording those episodes – even though I swear we have set it to record them about three times.  Womp womp.  So instead we watched the BBC/Smithsonian documentary The Coronation, which was fascinating (and, as British TV tends to do, made me want to book a plane ticket to London immediately).

Listening.  It was all podcasts this week.  I’ve been craving my book podcasts and I keep cleaning those out of my podcatcher, which means I have a huge pile of backlog parenting podcasts – my other favored podcast topic.  Highlight: I caught up on The Book Riot Podcast, and hearing their take on Fire and Fury was very interesting.

Moving.  Some walking this weekend, in the fresh air – yay!  We took a nice long ramble around the neighborhood on Saturday afternoon, and two hikes on Sunday.  One of the two – Scott’s Run – involved walking down and then up a huge hill, which would have been challenging even without forty-ish pounds strapped to my back and whining in my ear.  Need to get back to formal exercise, though – I miss my yoga and barre classes!

Blogging.  It’s a reading-heavy week – on Wednesday I’ll share Part II of my 2017 reading retrospective, and Friday will wrap up the look-back with Part III.  I’ve also gone over my calendar and plotted out a bunch of posts coming up over the next few months, and they’re going to be quite book-heavy.  I’m always mulling over where I want to take my blog, and I am thinking that in 2018 and onward, I’d like to veer more toward books (with liberal helpings of hiking and travel) and away from kid-focused posts.  The kids will still make appearances, naturally, and I’ll write their birthday posts and similar things, but as they’re getting older and I am looking to reclaim some of my own interests, it feels right to take a step back from parenting content and toward other (less personal) topics.  Hope that’s cool with my friends.

Loving.  I hardly ever talk about food in this spot, but I have a food item – a treat, really – to share with you today.  As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I listened to the 50th episode of my favorite podcast, Tea or Books?, which was a Q&A.  One of the listener questions was about the hosts’ tea-drinking habits, and after some rather heated banter about tea itself, they buried the hatchet and agreed that their favorite snack to enjoy with their tea was dark chocolate digestives.  Well, I love digestives, and after I heard Simon and Rachel vouch for the dark chocolate variety, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.  Thanks to the magic of Amazon (although the Wegmans international aisle sometimes has digestives, so I suppose I could have checked there) I had a four-pack of dark chocolate digestive packages on my doorstep in two days, and I have indeed been enjoying one or two with my tea.  Podcasts!  They really do make the world better!

Asking.  What are you reading this week?  Do you like digestives?