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Hue Wormhole

Hue Wormhole is a beautiful puzzle by Wenjia Wang.  This is a 1000-piece, circular puzzle from Antelope Puzzles, and it was a lot of fun to put together. I have never done a circular puzzle this big and it actually ended up being too big for the puzzle board I was doing it on.  I had to carefully transfer it to foam board to get photos of it.

The colors in this puzzle are gorgeous, and the quality is impressive! The pieces were a nice thickness and fit together well. I started with the border and then worked my way from the outer green and blue up to the purple edge. The greens and orange went pretty well, but then I got a big bogged down in the reds. I kept working it and eventually got to the purples, which were a lot easier.

All in all, this was a joy to assemble and I highly recommend it!

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Billy Straight

I have been a fan of Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series for a long time, and I recently looked through his body of work and found that he has written two books labeled as the Petra Connor series.  They are Billy Straight (1998) and Twisted (2004), and they are a spinoff of the Alex Delaware series.

In Billy Straight, the title character is a twelve year old runaway who witnesses a traumatic murder, a brutal stabbing.  He is not seen and runs away into the night. LAPD homicide detective Petra Connor is tasked with solving this murder.  The story switches between Billy’s reaction to what he has seen and Petra’s unfolding investigation, and as the plot unfolds, we learn more about Billy’s backstory as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I was able to follow everything that was happening even though the perspective is changing in each chapter and could visualize the scenes easily.  I empathized with both Billy and Petra, and I appreciated the range of minor characters as well.

Do you enjoy detective novels?  Are there any that you recommend?

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My First Puzzle Swap

On Friday afternoon, I attended my very first puzzle swap! It was held by Susquehanna Township Parks and Recreation, and it was a lot of fun.

Each person who brought puzzles set them up on a table or on chairs around the room and then walked around the room checking out all the puzzles. Once you found a puzzle you liked, you would ask the person to see if there was a puzzle of yours they would like to trade for.

I took six puzzles but several people brought quite a few more than that, and it was fun to see all the different options. I ended up trading five of mine and donating the last one to the township summer camp program. The picture above shows the puzzles I came home with after the event.

It was a great event and it sounds like they might do it again, which I would really enjoy.

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Shoe Addicts Anonymous

In Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison, we meet four women who come together to swap designer shoes and become friends in the process.  Each of them has their own problems and their Tuesday night group turns out to be a safe place to share their issues and help each other overcome them.

This is a light, humorous read, a textbook example of chick lit. The characters hover on the edge of caricatures and the problems are all tidied up at the end in a way that is entertaining although not totally realistic.

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Puzzle Chess with Jenn

Last Friday night, our good friends Bill & Jenn came over and, while they were there, Jenn and I played two rounds of puzzle chess. We used two 100-piece puzzles I had on hand. It was a lot of fun! I did manage to win both rounds, but the first one was only by ten seconds!!

Here are our results. We started with 20 minutes on each of our clocks.

The first puzzle was Beautiful Wild Animals from a generic Amazon brand, MJPHDM. It was a surprisingly good quality. The pieces were sturdy and fairly thick, and it came with a nice, big poster.


The second puzzle was Cosmos, and it came from Ceaco. The quality was decent, but the pieces were thinner and there was no poster.

In case you are wondering how to play puzzle chess, here’s how it works. You pick a small puzzle (we used 100 pieces) and you build the border together and lay out all the other pieces. Then you start a chess clock, which you can get on your phone, and take turns putting one piece into the puzzle. Once you have placed your piece, you tap your clock to end your turn and start the other person’s time. Whoever has the most time left when the puzzle is done is the winner!

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Although I must have heard of The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, I hadn’t read it before now. The coming of age novel came out in 1999, a dozen years after I graduated from high school, which explains why it wasn’t on my radar at the time. It was brought to my attention by a book I read in December of 2024 called The Book Swap.  The two main characters in that book shared a history of loving Perks during their high school years, which intrigued me enough to put it on my TBR.

I really enjoyed this book, although I’m not sure if enjoyed is the right word when it deals with so many heavy issues.  The story is told through a series of letters that Charlie, the main character, is writing to a friend.  We don’t know the identity or location of this friend, but the use of the epistolary style is very effective in allowing us to learn from Charlie’s point of view what is happening and how he feels about it.

I was leaning towards giving this four stars, but then it made me cry.  That is very rare for me and made me realize how invested I had become in Charlie’s story, which bumped it up to five stars. Now that I have read the book, I want to watch the movie, which came out in 2012 and was written and directed by Chbosky.

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Spring Tea Party

Spring Tea Party is a 500-piece puzzle from Galison, and the artist is Victoria Ball. It is such a sweet image, and it was very easy to put together. The colors are a bit muted compared to what I normally prefer, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

Here are some closeups of the bunnies:

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My Short Story Weekend

I was looking through my TBR last week and noticed that I had a bunch of short stories on it, most of which were already on my Kindle.  So last weekend, I decided to read them all.

The first three are part of a series called Once Upon a Bookshop by Alice Hoffman. The main characters are two sisters who have been estranged for years but come back together when one of their children reaches out for help.

  • The Bookstore Sisters
  • The Bookstore Wedding
  • The Bookstore Keepers

The rest are standalone stories.

  • The One That Got Away by Mike Gayle – fun story about a guy trying to get over his ex and how he spends the day of her wedding to another guy
  • The Sublet by Greer Hendricks – chilling story about the hidden cost of perfection
  • The Fall Risk by Abby Jimenez – sweet, funny story about two neighbors who get stranded together over Valentine’s Day
  • The Tomorrow Box by Curtis Sittenfeld – part of the Currency collection of Amazon original short stories, an interesting look at two men who were friends in college and meet to catch up many years later
  • Giraffe & Flamingo by Curtis Sittenfeld – an Amazon original short story about a woman reflecting on her college experience 
  • The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin – a classic science fiction story first published in 1954. This was shared with me by a good friend.
  • Sebastian and the Troll by Fredrik Backman – a story about pain that Backman has published on his blog

It was kind of fun to read all of these stories back to back.  They reflect a range of styles and topics, but each one has something to offer. 

Do you enjoy short stories? Or do you prefer to stick to full length books?

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Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark?

Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark? The Bible and Modern Science and the Trouble of Making it All Fit by Janet Kellogg Ray

Summary

Janet Kellogg Ray, a science educator who grew up a creationist, doesn’t want other Christians to have to do the exhausting mental gymnastics she did earlier in her life. Working through the findings of a range of fields including geology, paleontology, and biology, she shows how a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis simply doesn’t mesh with what we know to be reality. But as someone who remains a committed Christian, Ray also shows how an acceptance of the theory of evolution is not necessarily an acceptance of atheism, and how God can still be responsible for having created the world, even if it wasn’t in a single, momentary, miraculous event.

Topics Covered

  • The Nature of Science
  • Young Earth Creationism
  • Old Earth Creationism
  • Intelligent Design
  • Theistic Evolution/Evolutionary Creationism
  • Naturalism and Scientism
  • The Age of the Universe and the Earth
  • The Flood and the Fossil Record
  • The Missing Link
  • Human Evolution
  • Leaving Creationism without Leaving God

My Thoughts

I grew up in a conservative pentecostal church and was taught to believe in a young earth and a literal six day creation period along with a worldwide catastrophic flood.  When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I was exposed to the Institute for Creation Research and became obsessed with their materials.  I even challenged a student teacher in one of my high school science classes once.  I am embarrassed now to remember how superior I felt knowing “the truth” that most scientists didn’t understand.

Over the last several years, I have come to the realization that this belief was rooted in fear.  I was afraid that if I listened to mainstream science, I would lose my faith.  It has taken quite a while to overcome these fears, but I no longer believe in a literal reading of the Bible as it relates to science.

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Ordinary Life: Stories

Ordinary Life: Stories is a collection of fourteen stories, each of which focuses on a woman at a pivotal moment in her life.  Elizabeth Berg has long been a favorite writer of mine, and this book reminded me why I like her so much.

All of the stories show us ordinary women living ordinary lives but with a glimpse of the thoughts and feelings that are usually hidden beneath the surface and sometimes percolate up to the surface.  Berg writes about relationships and the inner lives of women in a way that is so relatable and insightful. 

For example, in the first story, “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together.  She isn’t contemplating divorce; she just needs some time to think, take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion.

Berg’s writing is beautifully descriptive as well. This quote from the story “What Stays” evokes my memories of growing up with two brothers and the way it was often two against one but with constant changing of who was on which side:

“We kids kept one another company, raised ourselves, excused the obvious problems of our mother. We had no outside friends. That didn’t seem to matter too much, though. We made allies and enemies of one another in kaleidoscopic ways. We weren’t bored.”

These stories are so compelling that I found myself wanting to take my time with each one and not rush through just to finish the whole book.

Highly recommended!