So I feel like a big jerk. One of my book clubs is reading The Miniaturist this month. We are meeting at my house to discuss it tomorrow night. I FORGOT TO READ THE BOOK. Oops. I don't know how but I remembered that everyone was coming over and have food planned and I just now sat down to check some email and look at Goodreads and I realized that I forgot about the book. This will just be our secret, okay? No telling.

Another vote for the UK. Any and everyplace in the UK is beautiful. 3 days in London to start with is a must though.

Speaking of work ... does this guy have a paycheck coming in? I thought he got fired from his creepy DC job.

One step out of the reading rut!

The first time I heard about all this stuff coming out and I didn't know what the real story was I thought he was probably involved in child porn. That stuff makes me so angry that I want the Feds to weasel out all those scum bags. I know, I know. Innocent until proven guilty. Josh is so scuzzy he's got to be guilty of something.

BaW problems. :sad: DH says Thank You. A few of those were on his to-read list.

I still think this guy is going to the big house before this is all over. I hope the Feds are investigating the heck out of him. Child Molester + Addicted to Internet Porn = Future jail time

Angela Lansbury as the ultimate unreliable narrator. I was hoping for a crossover episode with her and Matlock. :laugh:

I got three exactly right and did pretty bad on the others!

I've been hearing such good things about this book that we're going to pick it up for our next months book club.

They do freeze but are best heated up from the fridge. I make a pan on Monday and it will last through the week. There's nothing much to go bad in there.

Happy birthday VC! I hope you get lots of new books and none of them written in the last century!

Thank you! That's wonderful advice. We will start looking into that.

For breakfast I usually have all the makings for smoothies ready to go. We also have a tray of baked oatmeal ready to be reheated in the fridge. Our favorites are: http://www.budgetbytes.com/2015/05/apple-cherry-baked-oatmeal/ http://www.budgetbytes.com/2013/12/cinnamon-date-walnut-baked-oatmeal/ http://www.budgetbytes.com/2013/04/funky-monkey-baked-oatmeal/ http://www.budgetbytes.com/2012/10/apple-pie-baked-oatmeal/ http://www.budgetbytes.com/2012/08/blueberry-banana-baked-oatmeal/ Muffins are always in the freezer. My friend and I have made a ton of the recipes from this book and they have all been hits. We just call it The Book. :) http://www.amazon.com/Mad-About-Muffins-Cookbook-Muffin/dp/0836269942/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1440441099&sr=8-5&keywords=muffin+cookbook

I guess it gets complicated because our income would come from writing. Either novels or technical engineering papers. DH and I are both engineers. Right now we own an engineering company in the US but it's just the two of us. Likely to pull this off we wouldn't be doing straight engineering anymore since that's pretty specialized. We're willing to adapt ourselves to the situation using our current skills. Our preference would be to think of it as a partially retired .. do a bit of travel, have a UK home, and keep our US home. Hop between them throughout the year. I realize that might be something that's not possible though. His specialty is water and wastewater engineering. Mine is traffic engineering. We both have a lot of experience in our fields. Rather than doing straight engineering for a company we'd like to do something like training or research projects.

Darn near anything on www.budgetbytes.com For an easy, cheap, healthy-ish breakfasts I always have a pan of baked oatmeal in my fridge.

Put some time into finishing Rebecca. I thought it started off slow then wowza. And I don't 'wowza' lightly. The last half was exciting.

It is one of the places in the running. Based on my preliminary research I think the UK would let us in but based on what Laura said maybe not. Also we're coming to visit you in May. :laugh: I mean that in a non-creepy internet stalker type way. We love to travel, play board games, hike/walk, and eat. Our life sounds pretty boring but that's about it! We loved Stockholm when we were there and all the trip in with all the islands surrounding it were amazing. I'm passing this suggestion onto my DH to research. Any idea on how tough it would be to move there as Americans? DD is in Catholic school. We would probably do whatever local option was available for school and then afterschool.

My book club met and discussed Go Set a Watchman today. Those of us that finished it all agreed that it was awful. Happy anniversary. Hope you guys had a splendid day. Cleaned it out. I didn't realize it was even full. Oops. I hope you were PMing me to convince me to move to England. :coolgleamA: Is this series cozy? It sounds interesting ...

In about five to ten years DH and I could be in the position with our jobs to live anywhere in the world. Right now we live in Boring McBoring Boringsville. (Actually it's just a nice pleasant unexciting suburb of a medium sized midwest city.) We would plan on keeping a condo or house in our current city and not give up all ties because of family still here. We have been to Europe a number of times and love it. Our favorite places have been: London Bruges Skagen, Denmark Southern Germany Of course living in a place is different than visiting a place. As much as we adore London we know that living there will probably be cost prohibitive for us and DH would prefer not to live in that large of a city. So world wise friends ... where would you move if you were us? A few things that are important to us but wouldn't be deal breakers if a place didn't hit on all issues: We are Catholic so we'd like to live someplace with some sort of Catholic population Nothing tropical - something leaning towards cold or at least four seasons is better than hot all the time We'd love to learn another language but don't currently speak anything besides English so someplace were we could learn a language over time would be best We are apolitical but are socially conservative We do well for ourselves but aren't rich

Ditto this completely. We have a large Indian population near where we live and after talking about marriage with them in great detail I think it's an awesome way of doing the whole marriage thing. It's not like the family is just choosing a random person arbitrarily. The family usually knows the other person well and thinks that they would be a good fit for their child. I think it would also take a lot of pressure off of people to try and date a lot to find the "right" person. My family probably would have chosen DH for me. They would NOT have chosen some of the dirt bags I dated before DH.

Thanks! I missed you people! I'm not much on pep talks but I do have a surefire "pick you up" suggestion. Grab a favorite book and a little snack (I recommend an awesome cheese and cracker combo). Open the book to a random page and get lost in it for a bit. This only works with favorite much read and much loved books. Hope you get feeling better.

I adore The Secret Garden but have never read A Little Princess. It's one of those books that I'm surprised I never read as a child I have an irrational and explainable fear that it won't be as good as I'm expecting and will cause me to like TSG less. Kinda like Men in Black 2 was so bad that I liked Men in Black 1 less after having watched it. C'mon. I admitted it was irrational. :huh:

The more I think about this the angrier I get. That poor woman. I can only imagine what a line of BS he is feeding her. I think the worse is yet to come with him. People like that are so arrogant that they'll never get caught that I'm sure he's been up to all sorts of other shady things.

I would have no problem with that at all. I'm probably on the farther side of free range parenting than most Americans though. DD is 11 yo and I'd let her walk or ride her bike about anywhere. (Background - she's also 5'4" and has multiple times proved herself to be completely responsible.) I started letting her run errands into the grocery store with me when she was 8 yo and walking home from neighbor's houses about the distance your DD would have to walk home from gymnastics.