I hate those “I’m back!” posts everyone always feels inclined to write when they’ve been away from their blog for an extended period. Now I’m proceeding to write another.

I checked. I haven’t posted since last April. You know what else happened last April? Of course you don’t, how could you? I made the decision to buy my first house. 🏡

Last May I made an offer for the third time, but unlike the previous two this one was accepted! *happy dance* 🕺🏻We went through everything and I got the key to my home June 28th.

In the almost 16 months since, I’ve found myself learning and doing more than I expected. I do all of my own yard work. I’ve cut down and removed three trees from the yard. I’ve replaced every light fixture in the house. I replaced all of the door knobs. I re-seeded my backyard. But none of that is the fun part.

Last September (2019) I was lying on my sofa scrolling through vehicles for sale online. I had no intention of acting on my searches until I found this guy! Fully electric and FANCY.

I previously had two bookshelves from Walmart. No more!

Bought, built, and painted by me! I’ve since added quite a few to the read shelves (first two on the left), so I’m getting close to building more. These are my babies. After these I added a smaller one I use as my TBR shelf.

Once I had these in place I moved on to a sofa table. I had way too much room in my living room.

Hehe. This came out nicely. Most recently at the start of the pandemic I finally set up my home office.

Only about a week after my job sent everyone to work from home I added to the family. 🐕

And it’s been Fabio and I ever since. Like so many people I’m still working from home. No idea when or if I’ll go back into the office at some point. The beauty of being home ALL THE TIME is I’ve been taking advantage of the additional time to actually read. Maybe you know, probably you don’t, but my goal every year is to read 50 books. 8(!) years ago as a junior in college I came close with 44. The previous two years I read 31 twice. In the years since I’ve disappointed myself over and over again. But I’ve finally found my groove. Right before opening the app to write this post I finished my 28th book of the year. Hearing that with no context you’ll probably think to yourself that we have no time left to get to 50. Meh. I’ve read 11 since the final week of August. This. Is. The. Year.

I know 2020 has been rough for so many among us. All we can do is take things a day at a time.

What I plan on doing as I get back into the swing of things on here is telling you about the best and worst of my 2020 reads so far. I’ve got plenty of thoughts, as always.