I Have a New Basil Plant!

A few months ago, I went shopping for my groceries. On that day, they had new plants available to purchase. Some of those plants were herbs.

I browsed them and liked how healthy they looked. I wanted to buy another basil plant for months, but I debated if I should purchase one again. I normally buy my plants from a Walmart I normally shop at, but for the past few years my plants have died due to issues with fungus and bugs. (I think it has to do with the location of the Walmart to nearby farm fields.) Since I have issues with these plants, and the grocery store had really nice, healthy plants, I decided to buy a basil plant from the grocery store.

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I Achieved My 2025 Reading Speed Goal!

After yesterday’s depressing post, I decided to try to write today’s post about more optimistic: I achieved my 2025 reading speed goal!

Yes, I am happy to say I have officially achieved my 2025 reading goal. I didn’t want to set a number of books to read by the end of the year like many online do. Instead, I wanted to increase the speed of my reading. I used to be a fast reader in high school and college, but I’ve slowed down a lot since then. Since the popularity of reading began in 2020, I began to buy books, both new and old, to read. The problem was I was buying them with the mindset that I can read as fast as I used to.

Sadly, that isn’t true. So, now I have way too many books to read and no way to decide if I would like to keep them or not… unless I read them first. This is why I decided to focus my reading goal not on how many books I read in a year, but to work on getting my speed of reading faster.

This year, I can read much faster than I used to. Sometimes, if I have the time, I can read a 300 page book in less than 24 hours. This speed is similar to my reading speed in high school and college. I still notice I need to slow down more that I used to, but I’m not going to complain too much about it.

I have also noticed the work I did on my reading speed has also helped me in other areas of my life. Seeing this has made me feel more confident in my own abilities and gave me hope to start making a dent in my to be read pile of books.

Next year I have some reading goals, but my main goal is just to maintain my reading speed.

 

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!

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Book Review: 12 Days of Christmas, A Little Golden Book Classic

It is Christmas Eve, which is a perfect time for families with children to read Christmas themed bedtime stories. Although there are plenty of books about Santa Claus, including The Night Before Christmas, and the birth of Jesus, I wanted to review a book for Blogmas 2025 that didn’t focus on them.

Instead, I decided to focus on a book about a tradition that was honored centuries ago: The Twelve Days of Christmas. Although the celebration is still honored by many, many just know it by the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas. Last year, I found a reprinting of A Little Golden Book that tells the story of the song with illustrations. Since December 24th is the night when the Twelve Days of Christmas begins, I thought it would be a perfect time to review this book.

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Book Review: Christmas at Hogwarts by J.K. Rowling with Illustrations by Ziyi Gao

Every year, there are new Christmas themed books. Some of them are for adults while others are for children. They tell classic Christmas tales while others tell new and original stories. There are some that are inspired by popular media such as TV shows, movies, and more.

After watching and browsing these books for years, I noticed a major trend for these books. For the past few years, there has been a trend to publish Christmas books inspired by popular media for adults… but these books are meant for children.

One of the books I was curious about was Christmas at Hogwarts. I am not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I was curious about the book. The art looked really nice and the premise peaked my interest. After debating if I would actually like the book, I decided to buy myself a copy and read it myself.

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Book Review: Skipping Christmas: A Novel by John Grisham

Growing up, my relatives read a lot. One of their favorite authors was John Grisham. I grew up knowing John Grisham as an author of mystery novels, which is my relative’s favorite genre of books. When the movie Christmas with the Kranks was released, the news mentioned John Grisham wrote the book it was based off. I was really surprised by this because, like I mentioned, I only knew John Grisham for his mystery novels.

When I got older, I decided to make a list of books I wanted to own and read as a child. Skipping Christmas, the movie Christmas with the Kranks was based off, was on that list. I eventually purchased a copy of it and have read it on and off over the years. After years of reading it, I decided to write a review post about it.

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Movie Review: My Christmas Inn (2018)

In order to prepare posts for Blogmas 2025, I’ve been watching a lot of romantic Christmas movies. The Hallmark Channel has many Christmas movies to watch, but this year I wanted to try something different: I wanted to watch the romantic Christmas movies that are not from Hallmark.

The first movies I decided to watch is My Christmas Inn. It is from Lifetime and premiere in 2018. This one caught my eye because it stars Tina Mowry-Hardict. I remember watching it a long time ago, but I felt like I forgot about most of it. I found it available other than watch for free on Lifetime’s official YouTube channel in order to review it for this post.

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Movie Review: A Merry Scottish Christmas (2023)

Every Christmas season, Hallmark releases many Christmas themed romance movies. In most recent years, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of movies Hallmark releases ever holiday season. For the most part, I like them, but I don’t really love them.

In 2023, Hallmark released A Merry Scottish Christmas. When I watched it for the first time, I was really impressed by it. Since then, I’ve dwelled on the movie and how different it is from other royal Christmas romance movies I’ve watched over the past few years. This brought me to decided to write a review about it for Blogmas.

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Beauty Product Shopping, Higher Prices, and Adjusting to Accommodate for My Allergies

Sephora’s Savings Event is happening right now and, after holding back from shopping for new makeup and other beauty related things, I decided to shop at Sephora. Since November is my birthday month, it is also the time for me to collect my gifts from Sephora.

In order to prep for the sale, I decided to search for my old favorite products and to see if there was anything new I would like to buy. After my search, I’ve been feeling really frustrated by the selection of products and the prices of them.

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Book Review: A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

A few years ago, a YouTube I was following at that time recommended books to read during the fall months. One of those books was A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft.

At that time I wanted to read more books that were popular. In addition to the YouTuber recommending it, A Far Wilder Magic was one of the books that was pretty popular at that time. The plot interested me, so after a lot of thought and debate, I decided to buy the book and read it.

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Attempting to Make Brioche Bread Again

Last December, my mixer broke while making a new bread recipe. This recipe was for brioche bread.

Today, I have a new mixer that is stronger than my old one. Even though it is stronger and far more reliable than my old one, I still was worried about how well it would do making brioche. A few weeks ago, I decided to try to make the bread again.

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