Saturday in the Garden | Nonsense Words!

OUTSIDE

It's that time of year when EVERYTHING is happening.  The first lawn mowing (I'm about 3 weeks after everyone else on this one), the tomato and pepper planting, the columbine and horseradish blooming. It's grand! Columbine by the way is one of my favorite shade loving plants:

Lettuce and radishes are also coming up but no carrots yet.  Annny day now, Daucus carota sativus, any day.  

In other news I have a guest using my spare bedroom:

It's a three toed box turtle someone found wandering the streets of the town where I live. I got called because of my day job.  It's not a native species to Iowa so it is likely someone's "pet" that they picked up out of the wild in its natural range and then either lost or deliberately released here.  Folks, don't do this.  Leave the wild critters where you found them. They can be bought in some places as well. If you do this, don't set it "free".  Three-toeds can't survive Iowa winters. Anyhoo, I will likely try to find a nature center who could use an educational animal or she may end up staying with me if I can't find a place for her because she can't be released.  

LIFE

I think I need to start calling this section "Miscellaneous".  My "life" is pretty intensely ho-hum.  Work, stressing about work, and my dogs are pretty much the only things shaking most weeks beyond the gardening, TV watching and reading...which are covered in the other sections.  Occasionally something comes up that I think folks might find interesting but it's pretty occasional (intensely ho hum) and often not really about my "life" at all. So from here on out this section will only happen when that occasional thing happens and it will be called "gak" or some similar nonsense word.

Have I mentioned before how much I love nonsense words?  Gak is a favorite (=miscellaneous sh*!,  though it is also apparently the name of the slime Nickolodeon made famous [now that I think about it Nickolodeon is a fun word and what does that even mean - nonsense word!] ), as is Hookemafaa (= stand in for any object whose name I can't come up with at the moment). Wonky is probably my favorite word that sounds like a made up word but isn't (adj. not functioning correctly; faulty).  I'd be really interested to hear what your favorite nonsense word is!  Is it blergh (a recent favorite of mine)?  Or perhaps some word known only to you?

WATCHING, READING and BLOGGING

Watching 
I've been a little unenthusiastically meandering through the first season of The Flash this week.  Barry Allan/Grant Gustin is totally charming but he's the only real draw for me.  Oh, and the fact that the folks from Arrow occasionally pop up.


Reading
As you will see below,  I kicked some serious booty in the reading of books this week!  That is thanks to some shorter titles, a graphic novel and two books that I'd been reading for a while that I was able to finish.  They were all pretty good to boot, with The Round House being my favorite and The Wicked and the Divine and The Colonel's Lady being tied at the bottom of the list.  I thought it was going to be enough to catch me up with my goodreads challenge but alas, I am still one book behind.  I will always be one book behind! *shakes enraged fist*

Finished Last Week:

• The Wicked and the Divine, Volume 1 by Kieron Gillen, Jame McKelvie, Matt Wilson, and Clayton Cowles - The artwork was lovely and the concept interesting but the story was a little garbled, aka a lot confusing.
• Monks Hood  (Brother Cadfael #3) by Ellis Peters:  Medieval mysteries set at a monastery. Need I say more?  I didn't think so.
• The Round House by Louise Erdrich:  It took me forever to read but it is a really lovely, amazing book.  Loved it.
• No Wind of Blame (Inspector Hemingway Mystery #1) by Georgette Heyer:  Oh Georgette Heyer, you charming minx.  You even make murder seem charming.
• The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia DeLuce #6) by Alan Bradley: This is a fun historical mystery series that I thought had a planned end but I looked and there are two more books listed.  The events of this book though may signal a pretty big shift in future books however and that makes me happy.
• The Colonel's Lady by Laura Frantz: I got this one back from the library and finished finally.  It's a christian historical romance set during the American Revolution and didn't really work for me though it is well written.

Currently Reading:

• One Magic Square by Lolo Houbein: A gardening book about maximizing food production in a small space.  An ARC from Netgalley (though I think it's an older title).   
• Unnatural Death (Lord Peter Whimsey #3) by Dorothy L. Sayers: More Peter Whimsey!  Yay!
• Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson:  A non-fiction account about the sinking of the Lusitania.  I'm all about boats.  And disasters.
• The Raven King (The Raven Cycle #4) by Maggie Stiefvater:  I've been scrupulously avoiding reviews and spoilers of this one.  I have a feeling my heart's going to be broken....

Added to the TBR:

This is a list of books that I have added to my Goodreads TBR list this week.  It helps to burn the books I want to read a little more firmly into my mind, maybe get them on some other folks TBRs and gives me a chance to recognize a lot of the awesome bloggers that add stuff to my TBR!

• Nada/Zilch/Zip.

Blogging 

On the BLOG LAST WEEK:

TUESDAY: TOP TEN TUESDAY |  Fictional Character Speculations
WEDNESDAY: Review | The Last Ever After (School for Good and Evil #3) by Soman Chainani

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” - Roald Dahl