JanuaryTBR: The Girl in Red by Christina Henry

For posterity, chronicling my experience with this book in its own post. What fun!

For my Goodreads Review, with a slight spoiler at the end of it, Click Here.

And now to my updated Q1 Blurb. Read below.

2021 Quarter One TBR: Updated Jan 10, 2021

Welcome to my 2021 Quarter One TBR. This list covers the months of January, February, and March 2021.

Reading Plans 2021, AKA #TBR2021

Consider the following my hub for a 2021 year-long TBR. It is obviously subject to change, and this post is specifically geared towards my general Quarterly Goals, including information regarding the specific 2021 reading challenges I intend to participate in.

I have spent a day or so selecting my reads for nearly the entire year in these challenges. These are The Uncorked Librarian 2021 (#UncorkedReading2021) as well as for 2020 (#UncorkedReading2020) which I will be attempting at the same time, and GirlXOXO's Monthly Motif challenge for 2021 (#MonthlyMotifGXO). I'm not sure how I will format my general Quarterly Goals from month to month, but my goal is definitely to make my selections prior to the quarter's start.

But first, a little explanation...

CAWPILE: Additional Adventures and Shattered Screens

My Stats Sheet Vs. G's Stats Sheet

November 15, 2020

So I was a bad girl. I got through G's explanation of how she used her rating system, downloaded the file and went to town. I didn't bother to finish watching the video where she explains how to use the Google Drive file.

Meaning, that when I downloaded it to use in Excel, I broke it. I broke the stats sheet. Bad girl.

This is why the sheet wasn't populating like others said it did, let alone how G intended it to work. Ooops! My bad. 

Reading Challenges, 2021 Reading Plans, An Updated CAWPILE Sheet

 As I've shared before, I have never completed a Goodreads reading challenge. Granted, this is only my 3rd year participating, but after the summer I spent as a teen reading 50 books every two weeks... I kept thinking I could do better. I forgot about adulting.

In 2018, I read 57 of the 100 I wanted to, and the only reason I got to 47 of the 50 I pledged in 2019 was because of audiobooks and LeVar Burton reading me short stories on his podcast... I made a pledge in 2020 using logic. I determined that I could probably read about 5 books a month, totaling 60 for the year. That was more than last year, but breaking it down by the month, like a monthly goal, it didn't seem so daunting.

Basic Planner Advice & My Planner Journey Thus Far...

So Many Planners?!?! Which do I pick?

I don't know about you, but because planners are expensive, my crafty side decided, "I can make that", and when I went to start making my planners, the first thought I had was, "what size do I make it?" Right after that, my thought was "It has to fit cute pre-mades that I might want to use later."

So then I'm searching for dimensions. And frankly, a purse that the planner will fit into. I don't eyeball things that should be standardized, things that need to be consistent. I just can't. Too much wasted product and too many wasted supplies. But there is no be-all-end-all standardization in the planner world any more than there is in the fashion industry. (I'm looking at you, pants pile! Every pair in a different size, different shape, and yet all fit various parts of my lower half.)

CAWPILE: The Biggest Book Rating Life-Saver

The Unsatisfactory EGM

I have had a very difficult time coming up with an objective way to subjectively rate books I have read for many years. I recognize that rating a book, particularly fiction, is unadulteratedly a subjective exercise. A book that I absolutely adore is going to be seen as little better than trash by someone else and vice versa. 

However, I also felt that just using the EGM (Enjoyment or Emotional Gut-based Method) right after reading it resulted in a lot of books getting ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ratings from me. Books that should have probably received ⭐️⭐️⭐️ or ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ were being unfairly lumped in up with the truly greats.

The EGM has now caused problems as my tastes aged and changed, as well as my ever deepening appreciation and understanding of what were actually just good books and what were outstanding books. That gut of mine previously  rated a book ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ but that one is no where near as good as this book I just read! They can’t both be 5s!

So for the past 2 days, I have fruitlessly scoured the Internet for guidance on how to create my own rating system. What categories are other readers using to base their ratings on? What criteria do others require for the individual stars they give? 

Everywhere I turned, people explained how they broke down their EGM into the 5-star system. I need a bit more guidance than that. I need a set of categories or checklists so I know I’m being uniform in my assessments.

October TBR & Updating the Goodreads To Read collection... 1,070 books y'all!

Working on the previously mentioned book planner, I also reconfigured my current Franken planner... Again. I found a list of 20 in 20 that I had started prior to the craziness that is this year, and saw a couple things book related on said list.

Book Journal and September Wrap-Up

I’m not a BookTuber (yet...) but as I have been working on my planner collection this year, I found that trying to include my reading habits in my daily planner was just too much. And the collection wasn’t all together in one spot, making a quick glance at the total record for the year near impossible.

Freak Rain Downpour

I posted to Facebook a very, very short video on August 14, 2020, sharing a freak rain shower in the bright August late afternoon sun. My soul sister made a comment along the lines of at least we were able to get inside quickly and get into fresh clothes. Which we didn’t do. We just air dried. HA! We’re at a stage in life where we don’t care about things like dry clothes. Lol

I started to reply and it suddenly turned into this crazy comparison thing that just didn’t belong in a comment. She has a young son and I have a teen son, so we’re naturally at different parenting stages and what we notice first about and in our lives. We are also extremely different people and always came at situations and circumstances from different viewpoints.

Blog Thoughts: Human Compassion

If you haven’t noticed, I love television and movies. I love the art that allows people to be different from who they really are in order to entertain us.

But I also recognize the reality that they are just as human as we are. They can suffer from the same insecurities and maladies that we do.

That being said, I absolutely hate waiting in grocery check out lines. You might be saying, “Lizzie? What the actual f does grocery lines have to do with actors???”

Voyager Notebook

I've been a little MIA here on the blog the last few weeks, but there was a very valid reason. A couple very good reasons actually. First, it's the holidays. You know how things can get away from you during that time? Well, I'm no different. 😆 Second, I started a new job, interviewed for and got a second, which I start tomorrow. I'm really glad now that I started the planner journey last year and have some semblance of a handle on it so I can keep up with everything I have to do, and schedule time for what I want to do.

The Voyager Notebook

Which brings me to the title of this post. A couple weeks back when I was shopping for Pop at Meijer, a Midwest US store similar to Walmart, I had to swing past the stationery/office section as usual. I was debating on getting another Piccadilly dot grid journal for 2020, despite my work the past six months on my collection of traveler's notebooks.

History, the Present, and the Future

Tonight I launched a very bare bones Facebook page dedicated to my blog. It is my hope that people not on my friends list who come across it will enjoy it as well as allowing people on my friends list who are not interested in my blog to avoid having to see posts about it.

Now on to some thoughts that occured as a result of my past few weeks of research and redesign.

iPhone Keyboards

Just a quick note to share...

I love all the iPhone keyboards!!!

Since I’ve been spending more time on genealogy and using my phone to help in my research, the ability to type names of people and places properly on a computer and on a mobile device has become crucial. At this point in time, I have added 4 extra languages for ease on my iPhone. As I go further in my research, I’m sure I will add more. Some are for fun, like the Greek, Icelandic, and Norwegian languages, but this morning I added French because of all the time I’m spending on my BERTHOULIER line.

With names like François BERTHOULIER and Montigney-lès-Cherlieu, quickly accessing the non-English letters is important. The letter variants are typically available on the English keyboard, but when you switch to the appropriate keyboard, spellcheck enacts and words that would have been flagged as misspelled in English are no longer flagged. I don’t know about you, but I really detest seeing all those red squiggly or dotted underlines. I still get them when a surname is all caps, but that’s the nature of the genealogical beast. Lol

TealNotes.com and New Year's Resolutions

This is a long post today, so don't say I didn't warn you!

Email Overload

If you're anything like me, you sign up for newsletters willy nilly and it soon fills your email inbox to capacity. Many people I know, and you might be like this too, very rarely check their email inboxes. We input our email addys into the form and forget about it.

I know I certainly have a difficult time keeping up with it. I thought I could sort it out a bit more, by creating mail filters and multiple email accounts, each covering a different aspect of my life. If you thought a single account was difficult to keep up with, try seven!

The Bartaway Rabbit Hole Strikes Again! (Part 2)

This evening I wanted to share a bit of methodology before jumping into the two eldest children of Adolphus BARTAWAY and Adalina HAGENBUCH. Researching genealogy and blogging about it seem to be mutually exclusive tasks for many of my genblogging contemporaries, but I use the two in conjunction. Blogging as I research and researching as I blog tends to be how I roll.

I also have started to use some emojis and unicode to add quick glance capability into my bulleted data lists. The Legend (which will develop into a reusable graphic) is as follows:

🍼  Birth (of self or children)
✒️ Census Record (pen nib)
⚭ Marriage
⚮ Divorce
💀 Death

The Bartaway Rabbit Hole has Struck Again!

The Berthoulier Confusion

My 3rd great grandfather Adolphus C. BARTAWAY (BERTHOULIER) has been a pain in my tookus. Tracking his heritage down is a big goal in my genealogy search. Pop heard stories as a child that Adolphus had attended the Chicago World's Fair and had his own booth. My father fancies himself a bit of a mechanical engineer and truth be told he's wrangled together some handy tools and projects over the years. It would be nice to find out the truth behind those stories and let him know if this branch contributes to his mechanical inclinations.

How I Organize My Genealogy Research Files

As I have mentioned in the past, I've been working on my genealogy off and on for about 16 years. The past four weeks have seen a lot of progress in organization and filling in huge gaps close to my end of the tree. In between applying for jobs and running errands for my father, I've decompressed by working on organizing the mounds of data, both digital and tactile.

(On a side note, I am quite disappointed that FamilySearch has had to change the availability of census pages. I used to be able to download and save the image that showed the page with my family member on it. The ability to download and print those images is now unavailable. I can only surmise that the US Census Bureau has renegotiated the contract and FamilySearch can no longer allow us that kind of access. Such a bummer.)

The KRAUSE Conundrum, Part 2

Conundrum

I call this family group The KRAUSE Conundrum because they have been so difficult to track down. The parents of the family are my 2nd great grandparents Ferdinand and Amelia. Their children are Gustave, Max, Charles (my great grandfather), and Catherine. Peripheral family members are documented as a way to gather additional information about Gus's movements and an attempt to find out about where Ferdinand and Amelia came from.

I focus a lot of my research on Gus because he seems to be the most interesting of the group. He didn't plunk down and settle in one place and he lived life by his own rules. There is also a lot of information on him, or at least the group of men known as Gus C. KRAUSE. When I couldn't figure out why each piece of information seemed to be at odds with the rest, I went to the world stage at the time to figure out why he would purposely disseminate false information. It has been an eye opener.

The KRAUSE Conundrum, Part 1

The German Brick Wall

One of the most frustrating parts of genealogy research are what genealogists call 'brick-wall ancestors'. I've come into contact with many such ancestors, and I'd say the prevailing nationality of those ancestors is German. What is it about the way Germans from the 1850s-1950s were raised that caused them to be so tight lipped about family matters? The majority of the issues I am dealing with lately come from my biological paternal side, but I have run into a similar problem with my maternal side as well as my adoptive paternal side. It's like they were trained from birth to keep a secret to their graves. I guess it's Gibbs' Rule 4 (NCIS); Best way to keep a secret. Keep it to yourself. Second-best, tell one other person—if you must. There is no third best.